Stigma

The forever recession: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/the-forever-recession.html

"The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one."

USA falls to 4th place behind Sweden & Singapore.
Greece falls 12 places since 2009, ranked 88.

Excellent article. Also good point from Paul Graham's Y-Combinator talk on trends for the future (circa 2009): "Business school is the West Point for industrial capitalism. It trains generals, not foot soldiers. Market now rewards people who can do stuff."

"Much of the discussion about tech entrepreneurship focuses on the courting rituals of venture capital -- effectively pitching VCs for funding. The Silicon Valley startup model depends on VC money, and one might argue that entrepreneurs are judged more by their ability to raise money than to succeed in the business the money was raised for. I wonder if the Silicon Valley startup fits a narrow set of Facebook-sized opportunities -- high-growth businesses that demand a lot of capital in a short period of time. The big-bet model seems to work on occasion in Silicon Valley but it seldom works elsewhere. Yet a lot of energy goes into trying to figure out how to get the right conditions for a Silicon Valley model to emerge outside of Silicon Valley. Startups outside Silicon Valley wonder if there's any way for them to succeed. So I got to wondering about opportunities for VC-free startups.

How can you start a business that a) has low capital requirements; b) begins producing revenue quickly and c) becomes self-sustaining? Such businesses won't necessarily grow into great big, scalable businesses. However, they could provide the opportunity for small teams to work independently and for the founders to do something they care about. Such startups would be mission-driven, organizing around a core set of values. They don't need an exit strategy because the goal is to keep doing the work you want to do."

Excellent Debate between Tim O’Reilly & Chris Anderson in Wired.

"From a data, network and business perspective, today’s closing of the digital frontier makes perfect sense (indeed, we’re steering that way ourselves with magazine iPad apps. It’s simply the better market). But from a social, innovative, and macroeconomic perspective, open is almost always better. As Michael Wolff points out in his companion piece, it’s no surprise that media moguls (old and new) are pushing to regain control. What’s a surprise to many is that they’re getting it."

"Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

"A vivid debate is currently going between two groups of economists, politicians and financial analysts. One camp argues that government deficits have to be kept within reasonable limits or avoided altogether, because fast-increasing public debt will become unmanageable in the foreseeable future. We wholeheartedly agree.

The other group advocates a continuation of stimulus spending and credit driven investment by governments. In a New York Times op-ed piece published on June 17, 2010, Paul Krugman explained why slamming the breaks on government spending would throw us back into recession. On June 28, he doubled up, now arguing that with reduced government stimulus, we're headed straight towards a new Depression. We fully agree with his assessment.

How come IIER is simultaneously able to agree with two camps which are ready to turn to fists when making their argument? It's quite simple: both have a point. But equally, both have no real answer."

"In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].

How has this tiny 2-3% sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing” share of the scientific community?
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In simpler words, too many of us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live.

In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally."

"That economic opportunity should be as widely distributed and as equal as possible; that economic outcomes need not be equal but should be linked to the contributions each person makes to the economy; and that people should receive some insurance against the most adverse economic outcomes, especially those arising from events largely outside the person’s control.
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Yet, for example, the point of private schools and tutors is to assure that your children get into good schools and have good jobs to give them a big leg up in the game of life. This behavior demonstrates that people in the upper echelons are making considerable investments of time and money to make sure that economic opportunity is not equally distributed, but is skewed in favor of their progeny. They wouldn’t be spending this kind of money if they didn’t think it worked."

"The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

While politicians gloat about our "recovery," our poor are getting poorer, our average wages are still falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

But, yes, if you're in that top 1%, life in America is grand."