Says Doc Searls: "Tracking and “personalizing”—the current frontier of online advertising—probe the limits of tolerance. While harvesting mountains of data about individuals and signaling nothing obvious about their methods, tracking and personalizing together ditch one of the few noble virtues to which advertising at its best aspires: respect for the prospect’s privacy and integrity, which has long included a default assumption of anonymity."

1 out of 6 #stl homeowners is underwater on their mortgage! Incredible. #usury #bubble

The Facebook IPO has reinforced the new calculus for investors. In the past, if you were a great VC, you could make $100 million on an investment in 5-7 years. Today, social media startups can return 100’s of millions or even billions in less than 3 years. Software is truly eating the world.

If investors have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay them nothing for fifteen years or a social media application that can go big in a few years, which do you think they’re going to pick? If you’re a VC firm, you’re phasing out your life science division.

Facebook shares fall again as flotation concerns emerge

Ray Dalio: "Europe now is essentially the same, almost totally analogous, to what happened in the U.S. in 1789."

As a result, we missed out on doing other worthwhile things. All those smart and talented heads, and all those benjamins, didn’t progress the economic base in a way we’re going to care about tomorrow. And that’s a damn shame.

Nice visualisation of money.

'Where is this business model? Google provides a service – a search algorithm. Microsoft provides computer software. Apple provides innovative and beautiful software.What exactly is the bottom line for Facebook? Essentially, the company is worth whatever information it can pilfer from its client base. And that information may be worth more to the American intelligence companies that apparently crowd around Facebook than to the private sector itself. This is a company, then, that is fundamentally at war with its users. It provides the "thinnest" of services – social connectivity. Go online and it is hard to find a kind word for Facebook. Feedback to articles (not the articles themselves) is crammed with comments on Facebook's various problems from a business standpoint. Many deplore Facebook's lack of real privacy and manipulation of data and are skeptical about the company's prospects going forward. We share the same sentiments. We cannot account for the US$ 104 billion that the company is putatively worth now. Google, with ten times the earnings, is worth the same amount, capitalization-wise. The money being tossed around this Facebook deal is phenomenal. Central banks, in fact, have printed so much money over the past four years that some of it has got to go somewhere. Some of it has gone toward Facebook.'