When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.</p><p>

The Second Economy -- a term the economist Brian Arthur uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy -- is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It's growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.

The definition remains slippery, though: is EasyJet or Amazon a "second economy" company? Lots of what happens is achieved by humans; it couldn't happen without them. Instagram or Google are more like a "second economy" company, surely: far more automated.

Matt Webb of Berg:

The other day I picked some choice quotes from 'Marx at 193' (an article by John Lanchester). Here's one: This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world.</p><p>

What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It's easy to see.

We've until now been missing a Marxist analysis of the Instagram takeover.

Note that this isn't contemporary. In fact, see if you can guess when Michael Malone wrote it before clicking through:

But with falling profits and plummeting stock, and having hastened the end of the desktop PC era, Steve Jobs has put Apple again in a precarious position. When the end does come, the big companies will have the necessary capital to transition into the multitude of new industries that will evolve out of the PC. The products of these new markets will be, thanks to Apple, stylish and beautiful. What an irony it will be if Apple, cranking out ever-less profitable commodity iMacs, its stock depressed, cannot afford to follow.

"Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn't seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?"<br /><br />We seem to remember Stelios trying to use his "book early" system for cinemas and being completely frozen out a couple of years ago.

Tom Worstall: "My favorite fact of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple‘s iPads and iPhones. It’s a favorite because it speaks so directly to one of the great political arguments going on in both the US and the UK. I refer, of course, to this very strange idea that both countries would get (even) richer if only they would do more manufacturing."

Then again, is it "manufacturing" or "assembly" that China does?

Things are bad, in short. Benford's Law is like fingerprinting for financial fraud, given enough digits.

Google App Engine has changed its pricing model. "Pay for what you use has changed. From an abstract resource driven model, where pricing is pegged to actual CPU usage, GAE is moving to an instance driven model, in the Amazon style, where pricing is pegged to the fully burdened cost of real physical assets (see the FAQ for details). Estimates range from between 2x to 10+x cost increases for running on GAE with the new pricing scheme.<br />
"Dead easy has changed. Pricing is just part of the story. GAE still delivers on its zero platform maintenance pledge, but much more pressure is being put on programmers to navigate the new pricing model and recode to a complex moving target in order to minimize costs. It's no longer that simple to use. Work has shifted to clever programming."