In the last few weeks, however, I’ve been charged surge pricing almost every time I’ve left work. There’s no storm. No rain. It’s merely rush hour. Sometimes that $7 ride has ballooned to more than $30. I was OK with it once. Twice even. But it’s become a pattern. I have no insight into what’s driving it, and if it’s going to continue to happen almost everyday with no explanation. Suddenly Uber isn’t a reliable bargain over taking my car. Someone's being taken for a ride, certainly.]]>
…It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual living expenses. The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money. That's a precedent.]]>
Such a low fair share profit index may indicate that Android manufacturers are:
– Having difficulty differentiating their product;
– Sacrificing profits in order to buy market share (the “race to the bottom”);
– Unable to reach economies of scale in the manufacturing process.
Kirk's point is that people who talk about low-cost iPhones are overlooking price elasticity. Although might he be overlooking the fact that the sector of the market which is price inelastic has been almost exhausted?]]>
Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”]]>
Why is that a problem?
To understand that, you just have to read what may be the most famous column by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman: the baby-sitting co-op. Understand the co-op example, he says, and you understand monetary policy. And then you understand why Bitcoin is fatally flawed. It's not fixable for Bitcoin, but could be fixed for another cryptocurrency.]]>
An investigation by the struggling, Chinese-owned car maker uncovered thousands of fake sales booked in 2011 - but also an under-reporting of sales in 2012 to make the books balance. That meant it actually performed better last year than it had thought, according to a senior Volvo executive. Shipped v sold.]]>
“We were kicking it around,” said Quigley. “We even thought about having credit ratings. But then we figured: let’s worry about roads and bridges first off, and worry about secondary stuff later.” No fusion reactors, apparently.]]>
The Second Economy -- a term the economist Brian Arthur uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy -- is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It's growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades. The definition remains slippery, though: is EasyJet or Amazon a "second economy" company? Lots of what happens is achieved by humans; it couldn't happen without them. Instagram or Google are more like a "second economy" company, surely: far more automated.]]>
What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It's easy to see. We've until now been missing a Marxist analysis of the Instagram takeover.]]>