Results for “markets in everything” 1896 found
Futile (yet worthy) markets in everything
If someone doesn't like a band or artist, they would usually just ignore their music, but James Burns hates Weezer so much he's willing to raise millions to get them to hang it up for good. Seattle native Burns launched an online fundraiser to collect $10 million in hopes of sending Weezer to early retirement, The Stranger reports.
Despite only raising $12 to this point, Burns' plea to Weezer isn't so much about his own feelings for the band but rather the anguish the group causes his friends who keep waiting for the band to produce a monumental album like 'Pinkerton' and their debut, the so-called 'Blue Album.'
"This isn't about me. This is about Weezer fans," Burns wrote on the website. "This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now. I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year."
Patrick Wilson, drummer for Weezer, played along and responded on Twitter asking Burns to raise the stakes.
"If they can make it to 20, we'll do the 'deluxe breakup!'" Wilson tweeted.
The Stranger then interviewed Burns, and he says he's willing to stick out for the long haul until he raises the money. As for the angry fans attacking Burns, he doesn't mind them so much.
"I am not afraid of Weezer fans," Burns said. "I can take it. Besides, I'm doing this mostly for them."
For the pointer I thank Michael Greenspan.
Markets in everything
"The Republic of China (Taiwan)" has delivered to the municipality of Suchitoto, El Salvador two hundred packages of food, four wheelchairs, and a selection of musical instruments. The accompanying ceremony was attended both by the Chinese ambassador and the mayor of Suchitoto. Similar donations have been made to Santa Ana y Mejicanos and there are plans for visiting other locations as well.
Markets in everything
The 33 trapped Chilean miners have moved to stop any individual from profiting at the expense of the group, drawing up a legal contract to share the proceeds from the story of their ordeal.
The group have already rejected requests for interviews and have instead made plans to jointly write a book about the days spent trapped below the Atacama Desert following the mine collapse on August 5.
We'll see if that holds up. The full story is here and for the pointer I thank Eric Hartley. Is it unethical to pay an individual miner for the story of the group?
Potential markets in everything business plans to bet against
The Lithuanian company Olialia, pronounced "ooh-la-la", is planning a holiday resort in the Maldive islands.
The firm hopes to pull in the tourists by employing only blonde staff, and offering direct flights to the island crewed entirely by blondes, including the pilots.
The article is here and for the pointer I thank Leonard Monasterio.
Markets in Everything
Costco is selling "Thrive," a one year supply of dehydrated and freeze-dried food for $799.99. I find the pairing of capitalist efficiency in advertising and distribution with end of the world preparation oddly disconcerting.
Markets in Everything: Lookup Before You Hookup
Today's dating scene is tough to navigate, which is why Intelius
developed Date Check, a free mobile app that deciphers fact from
fiction in the palm of your hand. Simply enter a name, phone number or
email address and instantly get accurate and comprehensive results.
With features like Sleaze Detector, Compatibility, $$$, Interests and
Living Situation, you can be in the know on the go.
Some of you may recall the scene from Amazon Women on the Moon in which this idea was featured as a joke. I also recall but couldn't find online a scene from the great movie GATTACA in which a women on a date kisses a man and then rushes to the ladies room to have the DNA on her lipstick analyzed for suitable qualities. How long untill we have that technology?
Hat tip: Chris Rasch.
Markets in everything, and nothing
Perfume that makes you smell like you are in the library.
The pointer is from Bamber.
Meanwhile, via Christian Bok, here is markets in nothing. That's right, nothing.
Markets in Everything: Afghan Votes
The NYTimes has an excellent piece today on vote-buying in Afghanistan:
How much does it cost to buy an Afghan vote?
Saturday’s parliamentary elections offer a unique opportunity to ascertain that price – and it is in theory a market with many buyers, as 2,500 candidates scramble for only 249 seats….
Nonetheless, prices are low. In northern Kunduz Province, Afghan votes cost $15 each; in eastern Ghazni Province, a vote can be bought for $18. In Kandahar, they sell their rights for as little as $1 a ballot. More commonly, the price seems to hover in the $5 to $6 range, as quoted to New York Times reporters in places like Helmand and Khost Provinces.
You may be surprised to learn that in Afghanistan a woman's vote is regarded as especially valuable:
He wanted to know how many of the cards were for female voters; those are more valuable because, out of respect for cultural sensitivities, women’s registration cards do not bear photographs, so they are easy for anyone to use.
Here is my favorite bit. Vote buying is much more common in this election than in the last. So things have gotten worse, right? Maybe not:
The feeling, experts say, was that last year’s election was stolen wholesale by supporters of President Hamid Karzai, so there was little need for vote buying.
Zero price markets in everything, religious search engines
Shea Houdmann runs SeekFind, a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible. He says SeekFind is designed "to promote what we believe to be biblical truth" and excludes sites that don't meet that standard.
Houdmann says a search on his site would not turn up pornography. If you search “gay marriage,” you would get results that argue against gay marriage. And if you type in “Democratic Party,” your first search result is a site on Marxism.
But SeekFind isn’t the only search engine carving a niche market among religious Internet users. There is also Jewogle for Jews and I'mHalal, a Muslim search engine that started in the Netherlands.
The Muslim site is already getting ten million users (or is that site visits?) a month. The full story is here and for the pointer I thank Anastasia.
Addendum: I couldn't get the Christian search engine to work at all; the site blames heavy traffic [I tried again; googling my name gets you to Tyler Perry. If you google "economics", "Islamic economics" pops up before "Christian economics" and "postmodern economics" comes before both]. The Halal site brought up more or less normal results both for my name and for "economics," although page one for the latter had some squirrely (non-Muslim) results, such as Hunter College. I don't appear in Jewogle at all, but an economics query will bring you to a list of Nobel Laureates.
State-contingent price markets in everything
The Lucky Counter: the more tweets a product gets, the lower the price goes.
The goods include "super soft merino cashmere, Japanese denim and an ultra light parka."
For the pointer I thank Josh Premuda.
Henry on “markets in everything”
But Hayek is remarkably incurious about the actual social processes through which markets work, and in particular the forms of standardization that are necessary to make long-distance trade work. I imagine Scott’s counterblast going something like this: It is all very fine to say that markets provide a means to communicate tacit knowledge, and it is even true of many markets, especially small scale ones with participants who know each other, know the product and so on. But global markets do not rely on tacit knowledge. They rely on standardization – the homogenization of products so that they can be lumped under the appropriate heading within a set of standard codified categories. Far from communicating tacit knowledge, the price system (and the codified standards that underlie it) destroys it systematically.
Here is much more, mostly on James Scott.
I agree with the frustration about a lack of detail about markets. Nonetheless, I am more optimistic than this. Standardized products often fund a more general trade or communications infrastructure which the non-standardized products then piggyback upon. Think of funding a port with oil shipments (by the way, how many grades of crude are there?) but at the margin using it to trade strange toys as well. Alternatively, a highly standardized product can be communicating the (sometimes tacit) knowledge that liquidity and interchangeability and lots of direct competition matter more than does product diversity.
The Grossman-Stiglitz framework helps us think through the trade-off between the average and the margin. Let's say that some trades shift into the more standardized, liquid market and out of the more idiosyncratic market. Some knowledge is lost. But at the margin, there is now a stronger incentive for information-gathering, or knowledge mobilization, in the less liquid market. It will be easier to beat the rest of the market (price is not much of a sufficient statistic) and so people will try harder.
This topic is related to the current controversy over whether swaps contract will be overly customized (wider spreads and harder to monitor and higher regulatory risk?) or overly standardized (more liquid but less useful?).
Proposed markets in everything
In what Mr. DiSimone called his Free Limit Plan, he would give Nevadans and nonresidents the option to drive up to 90 miles an hour on state roads. The privilege would cost $25 a day and would conservatively generate more than $1 billion a year in new state revenue, he said.
DiSimone is an independent gubernatorial candidate, which I suppose means he is unlikely to win. The article is here and here and I thank John Thorne and Ted Craig for the pointers.
Markets in Everything, Except Greenhouse Gases
In 2002 Time named Richard Sandor a “Hero of the Planet” for founding the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX traded permits based on voluntary but binding commitments from firms to cutback on carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Without enforced limits, however, or, if you prefer, without property rights in emissions, the market is not self-sustaining and CCX is cutting workers and may be wound down.
CCX founder Richard Sandor had hoped the exchange would become the hub for a national regulated market for greenhouse gas emissions to be kick-started by a U.S. climate change bill.
But prices for the carbon credits traded on the bourse since its 2003 launch, which were based on voluntary but legally binding emissions reduction commitments by its members, have crashed to around 10 cents a tonne from all-time highs of over $7 in 2008, and trading volumes have largely dried up.
Although the U.S. has vowed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and despite the House of Representatives narrowly passing an ambitious climate bill in June 2008, several similar bills have stalled in the Senate in the past year.
“(The layoffs) seem to indicate that this market player thinks any U.S. climate action is still a way off,” said commodities house FCStone…
Markets in everything
From a Texas state fair, it seems:
Fried Beer is a beer-filled pretzel-like dough pocket that's shaped like ravioli. Take a bite and the beer pours out.
There is also a deep-fried frozen margarita.
Venezuelan markets in everything
A Venezuelan politician is offering breast implants as a prize in a raffle to raise funds for his parliamentary election campaign.
"Some people raffle TVs and we decided to offer this. It's an interesting prize and there's a lot of interest," Gustavo Rojas, an opposition candidate for a National Assembly position, told Reuters while campaigning in Caracas.
Here is his defense of the policy:
"The raffle is a financing mechanism, nothing else. It's the doctor who will do the operation, not me," he said.
The link to the story is here and for the pointer I thank MikeRosenwald and also Daniel Lippman.