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Rather than dwell on each of them independently, let's just mention the last one.
September 9, 2012
Cassidy: Facebook kills the post office no matter its stock price
The U.S. Postal Service lost $5.2 billion last quarter and is on pace to plunge $15 billion into the red for the year. First class mail volumes were down to 74 billion pieces in 2011, a drop of nearly 30 percent since 2000.
And Facebook? Eight-year-old Facebook's trouble has more to do with its stock price than its revenue, though the two aren't completely unrelated no matter how irrational stock traders can be. When the company went public in May, it was supposed to make a whole lot of people very rich. Instead, it made plenty of Facebook employees and insiders rich, but those who bought stock after the IPO got shellacked with the stock losing more than half its initial value.
Shocking. Shocking I tell you.
There is a solution to the employment rut we find ourselves in though. If we can create more sick people to use our growing health services industry while simultaneously hiring more people to loan them the money to pay for it, then all our problems will be solved.
Gallows sarcasm! Sigh.
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2 comments:
beauty of the new virtual economy is the unlimited wealth creation we now have -- albeit virtual wealth, but, surprising, virtual wealth is just as good as real wealth.
Funny how something as elemental as "wealth" people don't really understand.
what we all need is a Philosophy of Reality class.
short of that, one must get that tuition in other ways.
Anyhoo, "wealth" is that which satisfies our needs and wants -- that provides the "Marginal Utility" we need to become or remain happy campers.
And computers can certainly entertain us, which is a primary human need apparently.
Back in the 1970s I of course was too young to understand all that economics mumbo jumbo, but I did see how those first TV games -- Pong, Break Out, that crappy driving-like game -- were pretty entertaining.
Back in 1991-92 I had the opportunity to work very closely with what became Blizzard, when they were REALLY starting out -- I got to see their first office in Irvine, which was just two rooms, the smallest office suite in the complex.
Seeing them so colossally monetize their ability to create virtual wealth for their customers so successfully has been educational at the intellectual level, and yet frustrational at the monkey level.
There's Big Money in providing people small amounts of marginal utility. That's how Hollywood got rich in the last century, and how Apple has earned a market cap $200B greater than XOM.
Dunno if the indie scene is going to pan out or crap out, but it certainly has been a paradigm shift thus far.
Troy,
beauty of the new virtual economy is the unlimited wealth creation we now have -- albeit virtual wealth, but, surprising, virtual wealth is just as good as real wealth.
March 8, 2006
Chinese Gold Farmers Preview
The documentary investigates gaming workshops in China that hire people to play online games like World of Warcraft and lineage. The gaming workers play at least 12 hours a day to produce in-game currency, equipments and whole characters, which are sold to American players.
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