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. The organizer of all of this gets a return for taking on the risk of coordinating all of this activity and that is profit. Now, for princple-agent reasons the organizer often buys the capital outright instead of renting it, so mixed in with the profit is a return on capital. That organizer is the residual claimant. That is a traditional firm. Like this: 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.
They can squeeze the 99 percent with nuisance fees and penalties. Or they can cater to the richest of the rich. But both routes have bumps. That can be difficult. Last week, a new global firm — the Singapore-based Wealth-X — entered the global wealth survey fray, joining a crowded field that already includes Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, the Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Deloitte LLP. Each of these firms has tried to carve out a unique market niche. For the entire world — and major nations — Wealth-X teases out subsets of the super rich, from the $30-to-$50 million set to the $1 billion and up.
César Hidalgo on personbytes and knowledge networks. Posted by Ethan on Oct 12th, 2011 in Africa | 1 comment It’s sponsor week at the Media Lab, the semi-annual “open house” where Media Lab students and researchers share their work with the foundation and corporate folks who pay for it. It’s Joi Ito’s first sponsor week as director of the lab, and there’s an emphasis on making this week more open and visible to the outside world. Our sponsors are now “members”, and our hope is to be sharing the new research happening here at the Lab with the members and with the wider world.
Most of the meeting is being streamed online, if you want to follow along. César Hidalgo, a year into his teaching career at the Lab, is the program chair for the conference, and has brought us together around the idea of knowledge networks. We can think of physical objects as containers for insights. How do you get knowledge into a knowledge vehicle? To function in the modern world, we need an enormous amount of knowledge. This is an unfamiliar situation for humans.
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. The plants are one strategy by both countries to wean themselves from the drought-prone Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez.
The proposed plants have also sparked concerns that American water interests looking to Mexico are simply trying to dodge U.S. environmental reviews and legal challenges. Desalination plants can blight coastal landscapes, sucking in and killing fish eggs and larvae. "It's expensive enough to desalinate. 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. ... In the United States, income inequality has risen as the upper end of the income and education spectrum benefits from globalization, while the rest experience declining employment opportunities in the tradable sector. ...
Above all, it means that expectations are broadly inconsistent with reality, and need to adjust, in some cases downward. 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. So do the array of "liberal" groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.
Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. Poll results -- urban food. 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.
As a result Shakti explained that he has become increasingly irritated by ‘modern economics, shoddy governance, atrociously poor implementation of public spending and endemic corruption’ in his homeland. He explained that in his view, beauty is less a property of objects and more an experience and a state of being. We would not know that from the present obsession with GDP. 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. (Generations of developers have made fortunes by encouraging this suburban flight through the opposite misleading images: of mansions sitting in vast lawns).
This too has turned into a dysfunctional failure of traffic congestion, blighted strip development, and isolated, car-dependent homes. 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.
The most powerful movements of the 20th century were identity-based movements, which created huge mobile blocks of power by gathering the oppressed and disenfranchised of the earth under the flag of united identities: workers, women, blacks, the colonized, and so on. ‘We, the oppressed X, gather together to challenge the forces amassed against us’. It is not my intention to demean or diminish the achievements of the new social movements. “Swarm movements shape identity in a completely different way. The intrinsic nature of swarm movements makes them hard to understand from an external perspective. 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. Only the hapless Tea Party faction of the Metamovement is naive enough to believe that can or will happen. The real purpose of the Metamovement, I would argue, is to re-engage the 99%, from the bottom up, community by community around the world, first to learn how things really work and what is really going on, and then to decide what actions need to be taken in response.
In every nation and community the situation is different and the response that is needed will inevitably be different. This is and always has been the dream of revolutionaries. 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. Around 30 people showed up for those first gatherings at 16 Beaver earlier this summer, recall several people who attended.
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.
Millions of articulate, educated, tech-savvy people are enraged and desperate. And they have time on their hands. To understand this movement’s potential, it’s worth comparing it with the other spasms of global leftist activism in the past half-century. The protests of the late 1960s helped end the Vietnam War and usher in the era of reduced superpower tension known as détente. Barack Obama. 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. It answers the question: what happens if neoliberal technologisation runs amok, without social replies and human solidarity. Excerpted from the introduction, from Mark Pesce: “What happens after we’re all connected? The hyperconnectivity created by the mobile dramatically improves an individual’s ability to earn a living.
Key thesis: Hyperconnectivity, and the frictionless free fall of markets Mark Pesce: “The law of supply and demand amplifies under the influence of hyperconnectivity. Let’s use Kogan as an example. 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. This is widely misunderstood, but the fact is that most businesses are small, but most employees work in large firms (the figure below focuses on “establishments” rather than firms—the former is a single physical place of business; firms can incorporate numerous establishments; the main result is insensitive to this difference). The figure shows that most businesses employ few workers. Just about 50% employ four or fewer workers, and 80% of businesses employ fewer than 100 workers.
Source: Census, Table 2a, data are for 2008 But as the second bar in each group—number of employees—shows, about half of all employees work in firms of 500 or more workers and two-thirds work in firms of at least 100 workers. Nor is it the case that small businesses, per se, are the engine of job growth their advocates claim. 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. It’s not a nonsense number dreamed up by some pizza guy. It hits the target. 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. 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. 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. Economic Issues 11--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. Digitopoly | 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 | Ron Hera. 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. Money | Ted Howard NZ's Blog. Drexler's next book: Radical Abundance, 2012. The Automatic Earth. Ecological Headstand. Commons beyond Growth « CommonsBlog.