Tech, Agency and Corporate Cash. Adam says that he is now open to the possibility that Apple’s vast cash holdings represent a Principle-Agent problem.
Indeed, my claim is not even that thorough. My point is simply that many Principles misunderstand what’s going on here. It could be a classic Principle-Agent problem but my current thinking runs more like this: Apple’s cash hoard represents a trust fund that keeps its designers and engineers working together and creating spillover effects between themselves. These spillovers are the source of Apple’s profits. A traditional firm works like the following: You get together some workers, some machines and some raw materials. Ph.D. » Blog Archive » Review of “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,” by Marc Levinson. Transportation Research Board - Journal Article. The Global Super-Rich Stash: Now $25 Trillion. Another super-slick global financial analysis firm has just tallied how much net worth is sloshing around in the pockets of the world’s most spectacularly wealthy. So when will the time finally come to stop the counting — and start the taxing?
In today’s astoundingly unequal global economy, banks can go either of two routes — or both — to bag ever bigger returns.
César Hidalgo on personbytes and knowledge networks. Posted by Ethan on Oct 12th, 2011 in Africa | 1 comment.
Digital Technology & Software. Mexico's newest export to US: Water - US news - Environment - msnbc.com#.TpqnEmBpLKs. SAN DIEGO — Mexico ships televisions, cars, sugar and medical equipment to the United States. Soon, it may be sending water north. Western states are looking south of the border for water to fill drinking glasses, flush toilets and sprinkle lawns, as four major U.S. water districts help plan one of two huge desalination plant proposals in Playas de Rosarito, about 15 miles south of San Diego. Combined, they would produce 150 million gallons a day, enough to supply more than 300,000 homes on both sides of the border.
Spence: The Global Jobs Challenge. Michael Spence: The Global Jobs Challenge, by Michael Spence, Commentary, Project Syndicate: ...The third challenge is distributional.
As the tradable part of the global economy (goods and services that can be produced in one country and consumed in another) expands, competition for economic activity and jobs broadens. That affects the price of labor and the range of employment opportunities within all globally integrated economies. Subsets of the population gain, and others lose, certainly relative to expectations – and often absolutely. Many advanced countries – in fact, most of them – have experienced limited middle-income growth. ... What does it mean – for individuals, businesses, and governments – that structural adjustment is falling further and further behind the global forces that are causing pressure for structural change? A Movement Too Big to Fail. There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn.
The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. Poll results. DIY Biotech: BioCurious Officially Opens Its Hackerspace. Ending the Beauty Deficit Disorder of Neoclassical Economics. Summary of a talk by Indian economist Shakti Maira: “There are many reasons to be excited about India at the moment, but its extension of the ’same old resource intensive and consumption addicted’ model of growth is not one of them.
India remains wedded to the Washington Consensus and the aspirations Galbraith identified in The Affluent Society (1958) ‘more elegant cars, more exotic food, more erotic clothing, more elaborate entertainment’. That’s where India is headed. For the last decade the Indian government has been led by ‘dyed in the wool’ devotees of GDP growth: new figures seem to be published almost weekly. Yet inequality is growing at an alarming level. For a return to a humanist, peer to peer, bio-architecture and urbanism. In the first part of this article in Shareable, Nikos Salingaros and Michael Mehaffy analyze what is wrong, epistemologically and culturally, with the current urbanistic and architectural practices that often create ‘bio-pathic’ living spaces.
In the second part, which we are excerpting below, the authors examine the positive alternative. “The desires and gut reactions of the community are the very essence of a great, living city, as opposed to a banal and dysfunctional one. The dysfunction of such image-based urban places — sadly all too common in the post-war era — is what has sent many people fleeing for the suburbs, with their simplistic ideas of retreat into a private garden.
Tim Rayner on the characteristics of #OccupyWallStreet as a swarm movement. “OccupyWallStreet is not a political movement in the traditional sense.
It is a countercultural swarm. We need to see it as a swarm to understand why people are drawn to it, and what makes it the most important political force on the planet today. The traditional job of social movements is to present a collective challenge to political institutions in the name of freedom, justice, or rights. Dave Pollard on the long term prospects of the ‘metamovement’ “Where is this Metamovement going?
When there are no cohesive goals, demands, or measures of success, can the Metamovement ‘succeed’? The real purpose of the Metamovement, at least in North America and perhaps Europe, is not to get the corrupt political and economic corporatist 1% to cede power, or to reform itself, or to compel political leaders to dismantle it or tax it fairly or reform it on threat of replacing them with leaders who will. Paul Krugman: Losing Their Immunity. How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started. Imago/ZUMAPRESS.com; Radko Keleman/ZUMAPRESS.com; Maxppp/ZUMAPRESS.com; Carolina Georgatou/Flickr Months before the first occupiers descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, before the news trucks arrived and the unions endorsed, before Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore and Kanye West made appearances, a group of artists, activists, writers, students, and organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artists' space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world.
There were New Yorkers in the room, but also Egyptians, Spaniards, Japanese, Greeks. Some had played a part in the Arab Spring uprising; others had been involved in the protests catching fire across Europe. But no one at 16 Beaver knew they were about light the fuse on a protest movement that would sweep the United States and fuel similar uprisings around the world. Occupy Protests’ Seismic Effect. This past weekend, in 900 cities across the world, tens of thousands demonstrated against unregulated capitalism.
Something fascinating is growing, and by the time it ends, I suspect, politics will be different in the United States and a lot of other places as well. In a great many countries, especially in the West, the political grass is dry. Huge numbers of young people are unemployed, governments are launching harsh and unpopular austerity programs, and the financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown have almost entirely escaped justice. 15 Facts About Military Spending That Will Blow Your Mind.
Book of the Week: Towards the hyperconnective society. When I pit my $75/hour rate against someone in Pakistan asking only $30/hour, how do I survive? And if I cut my rate to $35/hour, does someone else offer the same service for $15/hour? * Book: The Next Billion Seconds. Mark Pesce. I think this new book of Mark Pesce, which will likely suffer from a strong case of technological determinism, bremains very interesting nevertheless, by alerting us on one potential direction of technology. Immanuel Wallerstein on the nature of the current bifurcation. What May be the Most Commonly Misunderstood Fact About the Job Market.
I was listening to this Diane Rehm show today when the guy from the small business lobby (NFIB) was asked whether most workers were employed by small firms. He misleadingly said they did. Let’s Admit It - Globalization Has Losers. The Terrifying Plausibility Of 9-9-9. When I first heard about Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, I assumed it was simply nonsense. But further reporting and analysis has made it clear that 9-9-9 is roughly equivalent to a flat 27 percent consumption tax. And when you run the numbers, this is actually a terrifyingly plausible vision of conservative tax policy. Here’s a chart of federal revenue as a percent of GDP if you peg it to 27 percent of personal consumption expenditures: This is actually quite close to Paul Ryan’s plan to peg federal revenue at 18 percent of GDP. A Path Toward Sustaining a 'Cultivated Planet'
Deep Thinking About the Future of Food. Solutions for a cultivated planet : Nature. The world can feed itself without ruining the planet, study says. Recent global population growth estimates (10 billion by 2100, anyone?) Plus slowing annual increases in agricultural yields have a lot of analysts worried that many of those new people will suffer from chronic hunger – and that much of the land that hasn’t been converted to agriculture will be plowed under to grow crops. On the coming synergy between food movements. Cloud May Put Operating Systems Out of Their Misery. The Internet of Things to Come: elements of a ubiquitous computing innovation ecosystem (GigaOM presentation) - Orange Cone.
I was again honored to be asked to speak at GigaOM Mobilize this year. The Rise of Content Platforms. Roubini: The Instability of Inequality. MSN.com. Publications by Googlers in Natural Language Processing. Resilient Manufacturing. Interactive. PowerPoint search engine with thumbnail results - SlideFinder. The Flight of the Pringle - Past News. Innovation Starvation. Chart of the Day: globalization's greatest victory. The long slow make. Does Globalization Lower Wages and Export Jobs? OpenProcessing - Share Your Sketches!
Limits to Keynesianism. RWER issue 57: Ted Trainer. SUBSCRIBE. Thoora. Tom-Atlee's posterous. Who Will Eclipse America? - Simon Johnson. The New Rules: U.S. Resilience Can Rise to Future Threats. Pivoting to monetize mobile hyperlocal social gamification by going viral in the cloud. Competition in the Digital Age. Living Wage Calculator - Introduction to the Living Wage Calculator. Homo laeviculus — "Clueless Man" Scenario 2030: Open Designs and Distributed Manufacturing. The creative class is a lie. iPhones Detect Radiation Levels And Reports It Via Twitter. Broken America. Martin’s Weblog. Organizing Complexity. Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA. The Wages of Destroying Labor Bargaining Power: Nearly 30% of Job Losses Due to Management Cutting Pie in Favor of Capital.
Globalization and the Law of Unintended Consequences. Building data startups: Fast, big, and focused. Science Fiction as Foresight. Wicked (1) Radi. The age of deep automation. Edge Perspectives with John Hagel. Entries Tagged elmcity - O'Reilly Radar. Learning, networks, knowledge, technology, community. Neomedievalism. Ted Howard NZ's Blog.
Drexler's next book: Radical Abundance, 2012. The Automatic Earth. Ecological Headstand. Commons beyond Growth « CommonsBlog.