Results for “markets in everything” 1895 found
Insurance markets in everything
Afghan shopkeeper Nasratullah Niazai has developed a brisk new business over the past year. For about $2 a pop, he uploads into customers’ cellphones a collection of Taliban songs and ringtones.
A skinny 22-year-old who operates a one-room computer store on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Mr. Niazai is no Taliban. Neither are most of his customers.
Instead, the songs and ringtones romanticizing the insurgents’ jihad against the infidel invaders serve as potentially lifesaving travel insurance for Kabulis who brave increasingly perilous countryside roads.
Sentries at improvised Taliban checkpoints, some only an hour’s drive away from central Kabul, routinely check travelers’ cellphones. As a result, government officials, police, soldiers, security guards, university students, translators for Western companies, construction workers and scores of others go to extraordinary lengths to scrub their phones of any evidence of links to the coalition and the Afghan government—and to masquerade as Taliban sympathizers.
Business has boomed in the past year, Mr. Niazai said. The songs that buyers like best, he said, are “the emotional ones sung by children with beautiful voices.”
The story is here and the pointer is from @nickschifrin.
Markets in everything
Esther Dyson reports, the link is added by me:
Specifically, Insidr brings together consumers who have practical questions about how to deal with a specific company and (mostly) former employees of that company. For example, you want to know whether you can still get the unlimited-data-roaming plan that your friend has, but the company refuses to give you a straight answer. Somewhere, a former employee (or perhaps a knowledgeable phone-store saleswoman) knows the answer.
Brainy bibs for baby, markets in everything
Los Angeles black markets in everything
LAUSD students hate the new lunch menu.
The district has received awards for improving lunches from the U.S.D.A and from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but the students literally aren’t having it. Participation in the lunch program is down, lots of food is being thrown away, kids are coming to class hungry and L.A. Unified’s food services director, Dennis Barrett, acknowledged the rollout of the new menu was a “disaster,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
When the district tested out the menu, it found that 75 percent of students liked the food, but the food at the taste-test did not have translate well to mass production. One student the Times spoke with Andre Jahchan, a 16-year-old at Esteban Torres High School, said the food was “super good” at the tasting but it was super gross on campus: the chicken pozole was watery, the vegetable tamale was burned and the noodles were soggy.
Adults have been selling “black market” candy, chips and instant noodles to hungry students, who have been ditching lunch and suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia, the Times reports.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Todd Myers. Here is Todd’s new book Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism is Harming the Environment.
Modigliani-Miller markets in everything the culture that is China
They only look like baby pandas.
These little bundles of joy are actually chow chow dogs that have been dyed black-and-white to look like pandas.
Dyeing pets has been a trend in pet pampering for quite some time. At last summer’s Pets Show Taipei, there was a fierce dog-dyeing competition. Check out photos.
But dyeing your pets to look like other wild animals is a more recent development.
The full story is here and for the pointer I thank this guy. Don’t miss the other photos at the link, for instance:
And:
Markets in everything but is there a core?
Ireland would need to get a significant reduction in its debt burden in order to get any referendum on new European budgetary rules passed, Minister of State for Finance Brian Hayes has said.
“The idea that we could have a referendum without that agreement, on a substantial re-arranging of our debt, wouldn’t fly,” Mr Hayes said in an interview with the Sunday Business Post .
“We would have to have that in place before we put the question (to the people) and that’s beginning to be understood at an EU level, which puts us in a stronger position,” he said.
Story here, via Economistmeg.
Markets in everything, Coase vs. Tullock, the culture that is Canada
A suburban Chicago high school fundraising to save a popular arts center is motivating students to donate with an earsplitting incentive: pay up and they’ll stop blasting Justin Bieber’s “Baby” during passing periods.
Evanston Township High School seniors Charlotte Runzel and Jesse Chatz convinced school administrators to let them play the popstar’s biggest hit over the loudspeakers for one week, or until they’d raised $1,000, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Within three days, students had coughed up enough cash to silence the Canadian singer’s repetitive single.
The article is here, and for the pointer I thank the excellent Lawrence Rothfield.
Markets in everything: the market for magic tricks
Allen’s new new crop are the Internet magicians. “They’ve got a different approach and different goals. I’m not sure they even want to develop an act that they can perform live; they’re interested in making videos that go viral. From my viewpoint, it’s not a problem so much as it’s an interesting evolution.”
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Markets in everything
$1 / 15ft² – need roommate for my occupy tent (financial district)
My step father gave me his old tent to use so I can occupy the financial district. I set up a few nights ago but the cops were able to kick me out by using a big german sheapard to scare me. I want a roommate to help set up a new camp and watch my back in case the NAzis with the GERMAN dog come back to kick me out. I also have a video camera we can share in case they harrass us.
I am clean and keep a neat tent. I shave and shower every other week, we can alternate so some one is always in the tent. My girlfriend will bring food so we don’t have to leave. $1.00 rent is due upon our agreement and is due on the first of every month. It is not refundable as your dollar symbolizes your dedication to the tent and our cause.
Cats are OK, but you are not free to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests. For the pointer I thank David Gonzalez.
Markets in Everything: 3 Player Chess
Rules and ordering information can be found here.
Betting markets in everything
A new website is assembling what it calls “the world’s best economics department” in a bid to give prominent academic economists a louder and unfiltered voice in key public-policy debates.
The site, run by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, plans to pose one question a week and post answers from 40 senior professors at elite U.S. universities. The site went live Sunday, though the panel has been responding to questions for the past few weeks.
Alas, I cannot check the “weblogs” category for this post. The David Wessel article is here, the website itself is here. Let’s bet: pick your metric, how many site visits (or whatever) will they be pulling in six months from now? I bet Scott Sumner beats them with one hand tied behind his back.
Markets in everything separating equilibrium edition
Consider the innovative employment policy of the Internet shoe seller Zappos. At the end of a four-week training course, Zappos offers new employees a one-time offer of $3,000 to quit. In part, the company uses the offer as a screening device. If you’re the type who prefers a quick three grand to the opportunity to work at a great company, then Zappos isn’t the place for you.
Markets in everything
A new technique of cybercrime is the taking hostage of data. “I think it’s going to become a more common tactic for attackers,” says Karen Schuler, Senior Managing Director of Kroll.
Here is more.
Labor markets in everything
What does it take to be a Victoria’s Angel?:
She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely.
“No liquids at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that,” she says.
The pointer is from Mocost on Twitter.
Alleged Moscow markets in everything
Yet even they have nothing on the Moscow chef who killed his father-in-law and then allegedly served him to customers at his restaurant. According to police, the 54-year-old chef at the unnamed restaurant, well-known for its chebureki, or big meat-filled pastries, killed his 82-year-old father-in-law during a drunken brawl. Police refused to confirm or deny a report by tabloid Life News that the chef then ran his father-in-law’s body through a meat grinder in order to fill his chebureki – and serve them to customers for three days before being caught and sent to a psychiatric institution.
Here is more, oddly the article is on a different topic altogether, namely dealing with the snow in Moscow. For the pointer I thank Chug Roberts.