Why it is important to let computer algorithms set your prices for you ...
Lana, The Lady, The Legend, The Truth
What? The prices only differ by a factor of 10 billion.
Hint: If they fixed it by the time you find this, the lowest price was $0.01. The factor between prices should tell you approximately what the highest was. Maybe one of the booksellers is trying to find the money to help balance the US Federal budget.
An interesting article on why current gaming EULAs are a dead end for virtual worlds and what needs to be done to make virtual world a place where real work can be done.
From
massively.comAfter the gold digger, comes the gold farmer. A new career for the 21st century.
One thing the article does fail to address is that the companies that manage these MMORPGs consider gold farming to be a criminal (or at least less than honorable) act, because a. ) it may cause them to be liable for taxes on in-game monetary transactions under various national tax laws, and b.) most probably because they don't get a cut.
Though certainly there are many people trying to make a go of making a living off of Second Life.
I confess to being torn between condemning those who obsessively turn something meant for pleasure into a tool for profiting from others and applauding their initiative and pluck.
Although, in World of Warcraft, the problem is lazy players who want the fastest route to power and thus will pay others to play for them, so they can just run-around with a powerful character and whomp things. I have at least one friend who sold their account for about as much as I make in a month to someone who couldn't be bothered to level up their own characters. If this is the attitude they take with them to the workplace, they are in for disappointment. Or perhaps I am just jealous because I refuse to stoop to that kind of laziness. Easier to just write "I pwned this game!" on the cover and never even bother to install it. Cheaper too.
While in Second Life the problem is those who go beyond industriousness to plain greed. For instance, thinking they can sell small plots of land for more than it costs to by an entire in-game region directly form linden Labs. It is one thing to make something wonderful (or even something mediocre) and sell it, it is another to think you can corner the real estate market in hypothetically infinitely expandable game world. (By the way, for those who haven't figured this out yet, when real estate prices go to high from speculators trying to corner the market, Linden Labs builds more land, until the speculators go broke paying rent on the land they are trying to hoard and sell for prices nobody is willing to pay.)
So I suppose the two really are worlds apart in terms of their relations to people trying to profit of them in real life. Though in both cases, I guess I laud those who earn money or succeed through effort and don't have much respect for those who think they can get money or power easily with some seed capital and no real effort on their part.
An excellent video putting the current credit crisis into plain English.
The Crisis of Credit via Baekdal
There are times when the New York Times makes me wonder ... especially when there seems to be no hint of satire.
Of course, there is a solution!
In related news, the Onion is less safe for work than ever.
Lesson One: Negative Chicago from Pruned.
All in all we seem to be having an inauspicious start to what the Chinese have decided is an inauspicious alignment of the zodiac sign of the year.
Err ... Ummm ...
Didn't we already do this bit? Something about Robert Moses being upset with Hank Aaron or something? Probably for wanting to hang out on his pristine Long Island beaches. I forget.
Jesus people pray that false idol will save Gods economy via boingboing.
The trumpets of leadership are so uncertain, they sound like kazoos.
-- Daniel Gross
From Slate: Fear Factor: How anxiety and terror are making the financial catastrophe worse than it needs to be.
One of the online news sources I tend to follow is the German magazine Spiegel. In part because their English language edition does a wonderful job of covering American news from a position of relative safety, where they can comfortably say things American news services would shy away from. It is sort of their equivalent of Time of Newsweek, but with the occasional page 3 girl.
Anyway, for those really interested in a big picture view of the current state of the American economic crisis, unclouded by election politics: America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role and America: Where It Pays to Fail.
They are worth the read. Perhaps a little depressing and dark, and may insult some, but still worth the read.
Capital is as terrified of the absence of profit or a very small profit as nature is of a vacuum. With suitable profits, capital is awakened; with 10 percent, it can be used anywhere; with 20 percent, it becomes lively; with 50 percent, positively daring; with 100 percent, it will crush all human laws under its feet; and with 300 percent, there is no crime it is not willing to dare, even at the risk of the gallows.
- Karl Marx
An argument for preserving slums when they clearly serve more good in maintaining them then the benefits of anything that could replace them.
Or to put it another way, just because a region is dirt poor doesn't mean it isn't a thriving, self-sufficient community that is making a positive contribution to the urban landscape.
This is in fact the kind of self-sufficient, self-sustaining 'village' community that Mahatma Gandhi -- the Father of the Nation -- dreamt of and wrote about in his books on India’s path to development.
An interesting bit of discourse on the nature of the current economy courtesy of boingboing.
To summarize:
Our current economic system is based on borrowing to pay off debts. Since you have to borrow more than the previous debt to pay it off, eventually the system has no choice but to collapse.
Only more nuanced and well argued than that.
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