Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

Conglomerate Yourself

(originally posted here on 9 Dec 2005)

Yahoo! buys delicious.

Yey, now my personal linkfarm will be analysed in order to make money with social network engineering. And I can’t even export my bookmarks to avoid an google/yahoo/generic-other-global-we-track-all-of-your-community-steps-actor service. shit!

Yahoo! makes the Flickr signup page look more Yahoo!ish.

I’m sure Yahoo told our Flickr buddies: “We love Flickr as it is and promise not to change it … much.” The Flickr folk were probably too busy counting the zeros on the check in front of them, and missed that little disclaimer. Sellouts.

Economies of scale. Is there any room in the future for small businesses in any industry? Chain stores are clearly outcompeting other businesses, reformating Manhattan into a copy of everywhere else. It’s a more advanced ecosystem, crowding out and dooming the others to obsolescence.

Is the condition for this bloom (its eutrophication) natural or artificial? In other words, is it a natural evolution of advanced economies, or are the game rules being skewed by Big Business to favor Big Business? Murray Rothbard observed

In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

What is the fewest number of entities the Earth can contain? If everyone decided to throw all the planet’s capital into the pot of a single corporation, would that be a stable state? I can hear the argument now: democracies may or may not war against each other, but corporations certainly don’t war against themselves.

Aggregating Divergent content?

(originally posted here on 18 Jul 2005)

Sunstein is looking for an analogy between the information aggregation of free market prices, and Wikipedia. But prices take the form of numbers; content in a convergent language. Wikipedia entries are written in divergent natural languages.

We could say that the Wikipedia article converges upon the average, mainstream narrative, but in some cases, that doesn’t even exist.

Real-time prices for South African peasants

(originally posted here on 15 Jul 2005)

Textually writes:

Farmers in the rural community have become the first in South Africa to test a project giving them instant access to produce prices over their cellphones.

Real time prices are hot. So is cutting out the middleman. Those middlemen were not parasites, however. They were providing a useful service as information brokers, but no career in Information is safe from the disruptive effects of the silicon chip.

Good prices are more important than they seem. The failure of socialism is due less to its cliched neglect of human nature, and more to its inability to provide accurate prices! The most egregious example of a parasitic-seeming  information broker might be the Arbitrageur who makes millions simply trading dollars for yen, earning a profit on the differences in value, but also eliminating them and stabilizing the currency markets. And finally, here is a fascinating piece about the scuttled terrorism futures market and the fallacy that orange juice prices are a spookily effective predictor of crop weather. Prices are good, but they’re not quite that good!