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kliuless (2)

The Locust Economy

I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in nomadic deal hunters from a vast surrounding region who are unlikely to ever return; that most deal-hunters carefully ensure that they spend just the deal amount or slightly more; that a badly designed offer can bankrupt a small business. He added one little factoid I did not know: offering a Groupon deal is by now so strongly associated with a desperate, dying restaurant that professional food critics tend to write off any restaurant that offers one without even trying it.

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posted by the man of twists and turns on Apr 11, 2013 - 73 comments

Why Are People Hoarding Coins?
posted by telstar on Dec 18, 2012 - 85 comments

Minecraft by itself may represent a post-scarcity world, but one poster at the official Minecraft forums conducted a test of what would happen if you took 30 players and constrained their available resources. The Closed Map Experiment. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla on Aug 21, 2012 - 34 comments

In Praise of Leisure - "Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called 'Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.' Its thesis was simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all... He thought this condition might be reached in about 100 years — that is, by 2030." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jun 22, 2012 - 117 comments

Artificial scarcities imprison the modern human. End artificial scarcities to increase productivity.
posted by jjray on Dec 27, 2011 - 87 comments

Life after Capitalism - Beyond capitalism, it seems, stretches a vista of... capitalism: [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jan 25, 2011 - 33 comments

Permission to Innovate? How the Record Industry Is Like 17th-Century French Buttonmakers A corporate consultant blog makes a weird but compelling argument that the RIAA and MPAA are forcibly imposing a draconian 17th-century business model on the 21st century.
posted by jonp72 on Jan 13, 2007 - 45 comments