Mick Jagger is wearing a cool pink shirt, slim black trousers, and bright red socks. His hair is--well, there's a lot of it. But don't let the look fool you. Mick is all business. That's business with a capital "B," as in the stuff we write about all the time in the pages of FORTUNE.
I'm up in Jagger's suite in Boston's Four Seasons hotel just before the Stones kick off their worldwide Licks tour. Mick turns down the volume on a boom box, packs off two of his young kids with their nannies, and then holds forth on product pricing, economics, and business models. Jagger is eloquent and informed, but he has a disclaimer: "I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson," he says as he leans back on the couch. "I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?" he says with a grin.

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

While not enough people recognize it, the real purpose of copyright law is to provide an incentive for the creation of more content. The government felt that there was a market failure, where not enough "content" would be produced without a limited monopoly, and thus, copyright was born. However, that happened back in the day when creating content wasn't easy. You pretty much had to go through a professional process. These days, thanks to new technologies, creating content is exceptionally easy -- and thus, a big part of the very basis for copyright no longer makes sense. We're drowning in content -- and it's not because of the "incentive" of copyright. There are plenty of incentives for creating content these days and very few have anything to do with copyright

We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.

How many copyright violations does an average user commit in a single day? John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, calculates in a new paper that he rings up $12.45 million in liability (PDF) over the course of an average day. The gap between what the law allows and what social norms permit is so great now that "we are, technically speaking, a nation of infringers."

Since the beginning of recorded history, man has been haunted by the intimation that he lives in a world of mere appearances. In every teaching and spiritual philosophy of the past we find the idea that whatever happens to us, for good or ill, is brought about by deeper forces behind the world that seems so real to us. We are further told that this real world is not accessible to the senses or understandable by the ordinary mind.

But, and this is a point that is not usually understood, we live in a world of inner appearances as well. We are not what we perceive ourselves to be. There is another identity, our real self, hidden behind the self that we believe ourselves to be.

Then join the growing movement of academics, economists, and social activists advocating the institution of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) paid to every citizen without exception.

It would overcome the “poverty trap”. Conventional welfare schemes and unemployment benefits create perverse incentives that breed dependency. (Getting a job doesn’t sound like such a good idea if it means your welfare checks dry up!) Replace conditional welfare with a UBI and more people will want to work.

The UBI increases the real freedom and bargaining power of the worst-off, who can then afford to walk away from exploitative employers. With the security of a UBI, workers can negotiate fairer wages and working conditions. (Note that this relieves the need for minimum wage laws and labour regulations. We can free up the market and hence boost the economy, counterbalancing the taxes needed to fund the UBI.)

A collection of links to sources from Roy Davies at Exeter

The History of a Music Business Revolution by Roy Davies from Exeter

As a kid, my big brother shocked the hell out of me when I asked him for 50 cents for a soda and he ripped a dollar bill in half and laughed hysterically. My only retort was: "That's illegal!!! I'm telling Dad!"
I was right. It's a federal crime to destroy real money. But how do you know if something is real, especially if you're not the one holding it?
That's the conundrum raised by Legal Tender, a World Wide Web telerobotic installation from Eric Paulos, Ken Goldberg, Mark Pauline, John Canny, and Judith Donath. Legal Tender is an exercise not in epistemology, but telepistemology in an age of mechanical reproduction

Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry.
While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal‘s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you are a non-fiction writer who writes books, for instance, the economic setup is pretty much the same as it was, in large part because book publishers still primarily offer hard copies of books to people who pay money for them.

The goal of musicFIRST is to ensure that struggling performers, local musicians, and well-known artists are compensated for their music when it is played both today and in the future. Of all the ways we listen to music, corporate radio is the only one that receives special treatment. Big radio has a free pass to play music – refusing to pay even a fraction of a penny to the performers that brought it to life. musicFIRST (Fairness in Radio Starting Today) is committed to making sure everyone, from up-and-coming artists to our favorites from years-ago, is guaranteed Fair Pay for Air Play.

On 7 March the K Foundation screened Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid in the Northampton living room of writer and occultist Alan Moore. They were interested in his opinion of the burning within a magical context. The following is an edited transcript of his responses.

I thought it was awesome in some ways, very funny in others; quite liberating. It burned well - very clean flames. I'd like to know if it was Newton on the fifties, but he's represented anyway - he organised the Royal Mint, and that's interesting because Newton was kind of the bridge between Magic and The Age of Reason. On the one hand he was an alchemist and yet, on the other, he was the father of all contemporary science. He had the last remaining stone maypole in London made into the base of his telescope.

ABSTRACT: This article is an attempt to sketch a philosophical view of money as a social phenomenon. I show that the way to understand the substance of money is to analyze its meaning as a medium of exchange in connection with its meaning as a purpose of exchange, thereby providing an investigation of its social value. This approach has been used by many of the great philosophers and economists of the past, but not today. Modern economics is a policy oriented theoretical discipline and concentrates its efforts on solving practical tasks. I hope to contribute a philosophical approach to economic research.

To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting-point than “to go beyond time.” In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the Church’s attitude to war and sex but very little has been written about money.

WARWICK, England (CNN) -- A mathematical formula calculated by a British university professor has found that time actually is money.

According to the equation, the average British minute is worth just over 10 pence (15 cents) to men and eight pence (12 cents) to women.

The formula is: V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person's hourly wage, t is the tax rate and C is the local cost of living.

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life.

In the latest signal of this conundrum, at least six music blogs were deleted last week by Blogger due to copyright complaints. It's uncertain who made the accusations that lead to the deletions, but the most likely culprit is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a copyright-enforcement organization which had previously filed copright takedown notices against some of the targeted blogs.

alking to The Times a fortnight ago, Billy Bragg, pop’s most recognisable exponent of democratic socialism, sought to make an important distinction. “The record industry is in trouble,” he said, “but the music industry is thriving.” Had file sharing affected him? Not at all, he beamed.

saw Doug on Virtual revolution's internet rushes (from bbc2 series) - he says something very interesting about the relationship between value and capital today. He suggests that the financial crisis is as a result of the ability of the internet to offer us a free means of production; that the crisis is an adjustment to the fact that we now longer need capital to create value.

Susan Boyle, Lady Gaga and Take That helped the British music industry to grow in value for the first time in six years, according to official sales figures released today.

Record labels, which have faced a slump in CD sales and a long-running battle against internet piracy, experienced a rise in income from music sales from £916 million to £929 million in 2009, the British Phonographic Industry said.

The surprise increase marks the first time that the growth in income from digital services such as iTunes has outweighed the decline from sales of CDs. Income from digital singles and albums leapt by 53 per cent, to £154 million, while physical formats dropped 6 per cent to £740 million.

Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.
What it can and must do is radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess. But this is the good news. It means they can each be redesigned to achieve their legitimate purposes at much lower cost and, in the process, revitalize the economy.
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy. Its summary contained these bland words about U.S. fiscal policy: “Directors welcomed the authorities’ commitment to fiscal stabilization, but noted that a larger than budgeted adjustment would be required to stabilize debt-to-GDP.”

At the Midem Festival in Cannes in 2008, McGuinness made a forceful speech calling on governments to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to introduce mandatory “three strikes and you’re out”, internet service disconnections of serial file-sharers. He accused Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others of “building multibillion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it” and of being “makers of burglary kits who have made a thieves’ charter to steal music from the music industry”. Strong stuff. Since his speech, governments in France and Britain Ireland, have introduced the “three strikes” law. And the music industry has continued to decline while the ISPs continue to flourish, shrugging their shoulders in apparent indifference to the fate of an industry on which they have fed for so long.

Hypebot kindly alerts us to an unintentionally hilarious GQ column by U2 manager Paul McGuinness, supposedly on "how to save the music industry." Of course, that's not what it's actually about -- because the music industry doesn't need saving. Last we checked, it's doing great. As, by the way, are McGuinness and U2. McGuinness has been making similarly wrong arguments for quite some time, and we try to debunk them each time. It seems that we bloggers have finally gotten under McGuinness' skin, as he lashes out at internet bloggers in this piece, specifically for the criticism they gave of his Midem speech in 2008 (criticism such as mine).

In my classes in IP law and copyright, I sometimes have difficulty conveying to students the “cost” side of the copyright regime. That is, though we often make reference to implementing the right copyright “balance” in our law, I think students (and others, for that matter) are often uncertain as to exactly what is being balanced against what. The benefits of a copyright regime are pretty obvious — if you give people a property interest in their creations, they’ll be able to work out market arrangements to receive compensation for them; knowing that in advance, they’ll create more works of art than they otherwise would absent that protection, and we’re all better off as a result. That’s easy enough to see. What’s harder to see is why that principle should ever be limited — if protection yields more creative works, why won’t more protection yield more creative works (to the benefit of all)? Why not make copyright perpetual, and copyright rights as broad and as deep as possible — won’t that get us even more creative works to enjoy? [That’s a viewpoint that many in Congress apparently share, as copyright protection has indeed gotten longer and longer and deeper and broader over the past 50 years or so — helped along, I suppose, by those stacked bundles of unmarked hundred dollar bills left in Congressional anterooms by representatives of the “copyright industries” — hey, don’t sue me, that’s just a joke).

Imagine a world without war, poverty, misery or money. Imagine a world where all people work together in a spirit of cooperation and not competition. Imagine this safer saner world and you are closer to understanding what the Zeitgeist Movement is about.
A close look at our present social systems which are built upon fundamentals which produce war, poverty, murder, crime, violence, compromised healthcare, media monopoly, corporate corruption and indifference for the environment, greed, apathetic self interest and desensitisation from others suffering, obsolete and archaic political systems based on subjective opinion (guesswork) and not on scientific and empirical certainty.
Its abundantly clear that we need to adapt our thinking because it will definitely be to our collective detriment if we do not. If we carry on so carelessly and wastefully into future, our future generations will pay the price for our mistakes. The Venus Project has the solutions.

The Venus Project advocates an alternative vision for a sustainable new world civilization unlike any socio-economic system that has gone before. It calls for a straightforward redesign of a culture, in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but totally unacceptable.

excellent audio visual presentation on debt crisis

The report is called Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music. (I know – I hate titles like that too.) This time around researcher Mark Mulligan focus on music product innovation. “In 2009, the album celebrates it’s 100th birthday and yet remains the centerpiece of the recorded music product portfolio,” Mulligan writes. “The time has come for a radical overhaul of the recorded music product range.”

The Scottish star's manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn't own the copyright

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.
How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done.
For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions.
In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production.
Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.
It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution."
In some academic circles, it is positively naïve.
But it should not be.
The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.
It is structural.
It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Episode 1 of Social Media Business: What is “the experience economy” – is it the next step on from agrarian, commodity, service…? How does value – and therefore money, currency – shift when people are more willing to pay for intangible experiences than physical goods? Can we monetize something in our minds? The first episode of my new podcast, Social Media Business, looks at revenue stream associated with providing your online community or social networks with a real world experience such as a meetup, conference or party.

I’ve started a new podcast called “Social Media Business” that will be a regular feature covering where the money is, in social networks. See end of post for more information! (RSS or iTunes)

I don't know about you, but I decided that I would not watch this particular series of The X Factor, because I thought, I'll get worked up, and possibly along the way very sad, depressed and paranoid. I won't watch it, because if I do I'll end up taking it more seriously than perhaps I should, even down to closely monitoring The Xtra Factor on ITV2 directly after the live show, just to look for clues to something – I'm not sure what – in those moments when the extremely impatient professional judging panel, the obedient and dumbfounded amateur contestants and the extremely patient presenter Dermot O'Leary have to hang around after the main show has finished while the fiendishly frivolous Holly Willoughby does her job, which cannot really be described.

the idea of a social currency. its worked on the basis of the value of your social media connections. 

Each entry in the following table is the result of 1,000,000 simulated hands of hold 'em played to the showdown and represents the percentage of pots won (including partial pots in the case of splits) by the indicated hand against the indicated number of opponents holding random hands. "s" means suited; "o" means unsuited (offsuit).

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.
Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.
Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.
"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

nef (the new economics foundation) is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being.

We aim to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues. We work in partnership and put people and the planet first.

nef was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) which forced issues such as international debt onto the agenda of the G7 and G8 summits.

We are unique in combining rigorous analysis and policy debate with practical solutions on the ground, often run and designed with the help of local people. We also create new ways of measuring progress towards increased well-being and environmental sustainability.

nef works with all sections of society in the UK and internationally - civil society, government, individuals, businesses and academia - to create more understanding and strategies for change.

new music site - like sellaband & slice the pie with charity element

In today's world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network.

It’s simple, every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their friends about the product. Boom.

At The Sovereign Society, we constantly refer to our top four financial havens—Switzerland, Panama, Liechtenstein, and Hong Kong (with Austria as honorable mention for its banking secrecy).But there are several other tax and asset protection havens out there. Each of these lesser-known havens has its own specialties that may be worth considering. Take the Isle of Man—it’s a leader in annuities and life insurance as investment vehicles. Nevis is great for asset protection trusts and is one of only two nations that might arrange for immediate economic citizenship and a second passport.So here’s my “readers digest” version of somewhat unknown offshore financial centers.

Britain is not alone; almost all the world’s major economies have dabbled in QE since the financial crisis struck in 2008. This year the European Central Bank (ECB) sheepishly joined Britain, the US and Japan. In the spring, it was widely assumed that QE programmes had run their course, having pumped the targeted amount into their economies. But now policymakers in big western economies are considering “QE2”: another burst of monetary mysticism.

Yet as the world’s central bankers reach for their magic cash machines again, odd, unintended consequences of QE with social, political and even diplomatic repercussions are coming to light. For a start, the world’s leading economists seem unable to agree whether it has worked or not. The IMF’s verdict in August 2009 was that QE is “not a panacea… does not have to be a curse… and is not a non-event.” So at least we know what it is not. But what it is remains a mystery.

They spend 52% of our income, yet fail to deliver decent services. They promise prosperity, yet tax and regulate our economy into stasis. They talk up social justice, yet consign millions to welfare dependency.

Enough is enough. We the peasants demand our high-spending, high-living, conflicted politicos mend their ways.

Diane Coyle runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. Her latest book is The Economics of Enough.

The people presented in this book are generally considered villainous, and the functions they perform, harmful. Sometimes society itself is damned because itspawns such reprehensible characters. However, the thrust ofthis book will concentrate on the following propositions:1.  they are guilty of no wrongdoing of a violent nature;2.  in virtually every case, they actually benefit society;3.  if we prohibit their activities, we do so at our own loss.The impetus for this book is Libertarianism.

UBS fashions the rules for banking chicFlesh-coloured underwear, dry-cleaned shirts, no cartoon socks… the Swiss bank insists it's all common sense

Hawala,  an ancient banking  system that  originated in the Middle  East  and  South  Asia,  has  spread  around  the  world.  Secretive by nature, hawala  remains a mystery to most people outside  of the ethnic communities that  use it.  It is fast, inexpensive,  reliable,  convenient,  and, most  notably,  discreet.  These  qualities  have  earned hawala  many  legitimate  customers,  not  to  mention  money  launderers  and terrorist financiers.Since its transactions leave  little  or no trace, hawala  bedevils  financial  auditors and law  enforcement  officials.  It also  poses  considerable  challenges  to  existing  legal and regulatory  regimes  on money  laundering  and  terrorist  financing.  These  regimes  rely upon factors  that  hawala  usually  lacks,  namely  detailed  records, registration  with the government, and  connections  to  mainstream banking.  Accordingly,  some  law  enforcement  efforts  against  hawala  will  fall  short. 

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

The value of sterling may be plummeting as fears grow over the depth of a possible recession. But in the scenic East Sussex town of Lewes - famous for its bonfire night parties and bewildering number of pubs - a handy alternative is about to become available.

Next month, in the latest sign that localism is a coming force in British everyday life, Lewes will launch its own currency. In doing so, it joins a growing list of communities around the world attempting to protect regional economies and preserve the distinctive 'feel' of towns and villages.

The Lewes pound will initially be accepted in around 30 locally owned shops and a first run of 10,000-plus notes is expected. It is the largest-scale launch of a local currency in the UK since Lewes had its own pound in the 19th century and, in a coup for the organisers, the town's branch of Barclays bank has agreed to accept it.

FinanceAndEconomics.Org was established by Alasdair Macleod to educate decision-makers and other interested people in finance and economics. F&E.O's unique coverage allows clients to make informed risk assessments about current economic events and the likely outlook.The service is targeted at all levels of financial and economic literacy. By avoiding jargon, focusing on simple concepts and above all keeping clear of mathematical expressions, anyone can understand it.
In short, this is a much needed service at a time of great uncertainty.

States accounting for two-thirds of the global economy are either holding down their exchange rates by direct intervention or steering currencies lower in an attempt to shift problems on to somebody else, each with their own plausible justification. Nothing like this has been seen since the 1930s.

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee was organized in the fall of 1998 to expose, oppose, and litigate against collusion to control the price and supply of gold and related financial instruments. The committee arose from essays by Bill Murphy, a financial commentator on the Internet (LeMetropoleCafe.com), and by Chris Powell, a newspaper editor in Connecticut.
Murphy's essays reported evidence of collusion among financial institutions to suppress the price of gold. Powell, whose newspaper had been involved in antitrust litigation, replied with an essay proposing that gold mining and investor interests should act on Murphy's essays by bringing antitrust lawsuits against financial institutions involved in the collusion against gold.
The response to these essays was so favorable that the committee was formed and formally incorporated in Delaware in January 1999. Murphy became chairman and Powell secretary and treasurer.

public radio station concentrating on economics

The explicit introduction of money as a way to measure (a subset of) privacy invasions allows us to think about the erosion of privacy by the addition of technology. We know that the internet makes it easier, and perhaps money is that yardstick. What does it take to track down your property taxes? It’s gone from sending someone to the county records office to having someone with a browser. So Alice’s privacy with respect to Bob is not only lower, it’s no longer related to the cost of travel. We’ve zero’d out a term in the cost equation, and that leads to all sorts of chaos.

Organize, manage and expand your Twitter community through smart Twitter lists
Our dynamic lists help you find and focus on the right people within, and just outside, your Twitter community.

a collection of links to essays on digital cash

Information on Monetary History, Contemporary Developments, and Electronic Money From Roy Davies at Exeter

The number of fake £1 coins in circulation has doubled in the last five years and now stands at more than 30 million, the BBC has learned.
This means one in every 50 pound coins in circulation is counterfeit.
Experts believe the fakes are being produced by organised criminal gangs using specialist machinery.

Kevin Marks works at Salesforce as VP of Open Cloud Standards. From 2009 to 2010 we was ay BT as VP of Web Services. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the Quicktime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer.One of the driving forces behind microformats.org he regularly speaks at Conferences and Symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.

The autism of orthodoxy stems from its treatment of the human agent, who is mindless and
does not interact with other agents. The broad solution then is to develop a framework in
which agents carry knowledge and interact with other agents to use and create knowledge.
This is the essence of the new evolutionary economics (e.g. Loasby, Knowledge, Institutions
and Evolution in Economics, 1999). In The New Evolutionary Microeconomics, Potts (2000)
argues that all heterodox thought shares a common ontological foundation in the view that
the dynamics of evolving economic systems are in the space of connections. An economy
is a complex system of interactions, and the dynamics of an economic system involve
change in the connective structure of the system.

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability — much more so than any amount of piracy.

Germaine Greer does not think men are the funnier sex. But they are better at banter, innuendo and clowning. So what's holding women back?

It is now a truism that men never talk to each other about things that matter. Most of what takes place when men are together is phatic communication, intended to build fellowship rather than intimacy. This kind of communication is sometimes derided by women as meaningless, but it is actually functional, because it draws the group together. Men who drink, play and joke together are boon companions, who hang together for fun.

Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor since the age of five and the most pre-eminent futurist in the world.
Exploring many of the ideas and predictions in his New Times Best-seller, The Singularity is Near, the film focuses mostly on Mr. Kurzweilʼs world-wide speaking tour, as he describes a fast-approaching, radically different future
in which we have merged with our computer creations, will live radically extended lives and will be billions of times more intelligent. Heavily criticized for being too optimistic about what the future will bring and how it
will affect our lives, Ray challenges his detractors even further by publicly stating for the first time his goal of using future technologies to ultimately bring back his late father.

well written. but seems a little embedded in guilt and blame.

the fundamental difficult is associating a positive moral judgement with saving. saving provides the funds with which banks, and other financial institutions make amoral investment decisions based upon 1. the return, 2. the security, 3. the law. Saving removes our money from our control - it is a payment to 'feel' secure.

jungian psychoanalysis !
a different view of micro-blogging

Why are educated and affluent young women flocking to join a secret society that hosts anything-goes sex parties?
Killing Kittens

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the world's best-loved fairytales. As Judy Garland's famous film nears its 70th birthday, how much do its followers know about the story's use as an economic parable?

our mission:

to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public.
to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become.
to liberate oppressed knowledge.
to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint.
to facilitate information's unending quest for freedom.

Here's the Economist rocking some hardcore 20th century thinking.

So what happens when every credit card company is exploiting every cognitive bias across markets? Simple: another credit meltdown, as nonpayment correlations spike.

Sound familiar? It should: it's the same systemic flaw in organization that is causing today's crisis.

The point is this. We cannot organize tomorrow's businesses - or economy - like yesterday's. What do I mean? Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it's "creepy" but cool to trick consumers, because it's profitable.

Is it?

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

A few weeks back, as I was having dinner with a media-industry colleague at a trendy restaurant in a trendy New York neighborhood, I realized that the music coming over the sound system was transporting me to another time -- specifically, 1986. As song after song by various "it" bands of the moment, such as Black Kids and the Virgins, played, it was as if we were listening to a time-warped or parallel-universe version of the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack. Because really, the "it" sound of the moment would work seamlessly in just about any John Hughes movie circa the mid-'80s.

Recently, I was sent an analysis of Radiohead's In Rainbows pay-what-you-like venture and Nine Inch Nails' digital giveaway of their album The Slip – including an account of how they fared against Torrent websites such as Pirate Bay. It was written by Will Page, chief economist for MCPS-PRS, with the help of Eric Garland who runs BigChampagne – a company that measures legal and illegal downloading – so it was quite heavy reading.

In our search to better understand the "Love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" verse (1 Tim 6:10), this posting will take a look at the greater context of Paul's situation in writing 1 Timothy. (See previous blog post.) What we find adds another fun twist on this discourse!

Capital - it's going up in smoke, right? That's what, for example, Meredith Whitney - the analyst who predicted the banking meltdown - argued recently: that trillions in capital has been destroyed by the ongoing macro crisis.

It's more accurate to say that what's being destroyed never really existed in the first place. If my car's a Ford - but I call it a Ferrari - capital hasn't been formed, and value hasn't been created. I've simply created a fiction - like those we belatedly discovered Wall St was peddling.

The macro crisis tells us in no uncertain terms that we've got to shed the stale economic logic of the 20th century. Economies are powered by capital. Whitney, Bernanke, and the bankers of the universe are right about one thing: we've got to recapitalize a starving economy. But they're getting the bigger picture wrong: to power a wave of new industrial revolutions, we've got to seed it with newer, more valuable kinds of capital entirely.