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I recall first browsing the web while mobile around 1998, sitting in a McDonalds in London with a Psion Series 5.

Funnily enough I was a software engineer working on EPOC32 at the time, and I was dating the head of the Web App team. She'd be first to admit that the Web browser was very primitive compared to today's mobile web browsers. And as that was well before McDonalds had WiFi, you must have been connecting via IrDA to a mobile phone at, what, 9600 baud? And paying for GSM data rates.

Now you'd have the full web, in colour, delivered at 10s or 100s of megabit rates via free wifi.

The past really isn't as rosy as you remember.

Are you slow? Concentrate on inflation of essentials, which is what all those desperate people that capitalism has saved with slavery will be wanting to buy.

Slow, no. Just fair. You want to take a particular slice of inflation that suits your argument, and compare it with a particular slice of wage rises that suit your argument. Pushing inflation up and wage rises down.
Oh, and by the way I'm not much of a fan of capitalism. But there's enough real things to attack without accepting people like you distorting the facts.

You're the one touting the rise.

Google is your friend. (Back in 1998 not so much. Google hadn't hit he big time, and most search engines were being gamed by metadata spammers. And there wasn't nearly so much financial data and news published on the web anyway.)

http://blogs.forbes.com/russellflannery/2011/03/18/china-faces-years-of-double-digit-wage-increases-currency-appreciation/
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/chinas_wage_inf.html

Letter from U.S. Federal Reserve Regarding U.S. Credit Rating
By Paul Kedrosky

Dear U.S. Investors,
The current U.S. recovery has been the most successful recovery in U.S. economic history. It has been judged by economists around the world to be the best recovery ever, and investors have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of debt problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any country's debt certificates in certain ways will reduce its rating by 1 or more letter grades. This is true of the current U.S. recovery, previous recessions, as well as many recoveries in Greece, Argentina, the U.K., and elsewhere. But some investors have reported that U.S. debt can drop 4 or 5 rating levels when tightly held in a way which covers the "Full faith and credit" strip in the lower left corner of the embossed certificate. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the current economic recovery of having a faulty economic design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from investors saying that the current economic recovery is better than the last economic recovery. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in credit rating, and it is both simple and surprising.
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how credit rating agencies display the rating is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more letter-grades than it should for a given credit issue. For example, we sometimes display AAA when we should be displaying A2. Users observing a drop of several grades when they grip their debt certificates in a certain way are most likely in a region of the country with an insolvent state, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying a AA/AAA rating. Their big drop in rating is because their high credit rating was never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting the BiS's recently recommended formula for calculating what credit grade to display for a given country's solvency. The real credit rating remains the same, but the economic recovery will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the economic strength they will get in a given area. We are also making debt certificates a a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free economic update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original economic recovery, this economic update will also be available for previous recoveries, and will adjust history accordingly.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same-- the U.S. credit rating is the best we have ever sold. For the vast majority of investors who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your credit rating more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged debt certificate to any regional Federal Reserve branch, or the online Federal Reserve website within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

We hope you love U.S. debt as much as we do.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Ben

As Techdirt stated, this story was: Vetted By Malnourished Monkeys. Apparently the same this happened here. Yay.

That's the link I was looking for. Mods take notice of parent's post please? Here is a tidbit:

NYT Runs Quack, Self-Serving Anti-Google OpEd By Paul Kedrosky Monday, December 28, 2009 ShareThis There is a quack, self-serving, and silly search-related OpEd in Monday's NY Times that would be amusing, if it weren't so indelibly dumb. In it the founder of a company, Foundem, in the search business alleges that search company Google should be investigated and forced to do a better job of highlighting firms like his. Gosh, what a shocker. Someone in search with minimal web traffic -- Compete says Foundem gets a little less web traffic than The Fortune Cookie Chronicles does, which is to say around 1,700 a month -- wants someone in search with a lot of web traffic, Google, to send his company buckets of visitors. Amazing. The OpEd goes downhill from there. We get a litany of silly complaints, like the idea that Google doesn't innovate, that it just buys stuff from others, and that Google's Maps and other products have hurt other companies. Yeesh. I'll say this really slowly: Consumers want products that work together, simplify our lives, and solve problems. For this nitwit to want to throw us back to a world where we need point products -- maps here, directions there, product search there, email over there, etc. -- as some sort of full-employment act for me-too companies that can't get web traffic on their own merits is batshit nuts. Of course, there is a second level of stupid to this piece, and that goes to the NYT itself. It took until the fourth paragraph of the piece until we find out that the OpEd author is, you know, conflicted in that he himself runs a search company (albeit one with negligible traffic). Not only that, he has an axe to grind, as he goes on in paragraph four to arm-wavingly allege that Google "disappeared" his site from its results...

It goes on from there. Excellent piece overall.

There's a good debunking of the article here

Have you seen some of the license settlements to come out of patent litigation? $900MM might not be a lot to Microsoft, but a lot of companies wouldn't think twice about hiring a hitman at $10k to avoid paying $900MM. The trick is, you have to get the job done before you get dragged into court, otherwise you'll look very suspicious indeed.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2005/04/23/largest_patent.html

Year Plaintiff Defendant Settlement ($mm)
2005 Dr. Gary K. Michelson Medtronic $1,350
1990 Polaroid Eastman Kodak 909
2004 Sun Microsystems Microsoft 900
2004 Intergraph Intel 675
2004 InterTrust Technologies Microsoft 440

copied/pasted, click the source if you want formatting.

Yeah, that's what bank regulations were supposed to be about. They were supposed to limit the amount of leverage or "margin ratio" as you call them. The government has clearly failed here.

want to read something scary? read this:
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/10/03/quote_of_the_da_6.html

In fact it is so good I'm going to post it right here:

"Here is the quote of the day:

        "...we and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital. This is the single most important factor in driving significant parts of our business offshore, so that our firms can remain competitive with our foreign competitors risk-based capital standards must become the norm. The SEC has made it clear that risk-based capital rules can be implemented only when the Commission is confident that firms employing value-at-risk models have robust credit and risk management policies in place."

Translated into English, this testimony from back in 2000 was from someone asking that major brokerage firms be permitted to increase leverage subject to oversight of their wondrous mathematical risk models. The request was agreed to four years later, in 2004, and it helped lead to the meltdown in independent brokers this year.

The speaker? Some guy named Henry Paulson, the then-CEO of Goldman Sachs. I wonder what happened to him."

Eh?

See, right now electricity is not any less expensive. If anything, when you factor in the inconvenience, it works out to be much cheaper to just use gas. I'd certainly love to drive a hybrid, but not necessarily an electric car (well, unless it's the Tesla, but hey I could get an Elise for cheaper).

Secondly, folks pay a lot more for gas in Europe than they do in the US. Agreed, some of it is higher taxes, but even factoring that in, it is still a lot lower in the US. So, while the price of gas may be quite high, it is still a lot lower than in a lot of places in the developed world.

Thirdly, I think that the current speculation on gas prices is a bubble. I'm not alone in that assessment.

>At what point would you forgo food to buy gas?

Nice hyperbole. Let's see - if the price of gas goes up, inflation goes up. As a result, cost of living goes up, and so does everything. At which point, either compensations will match the cost of living, or we'll all be living on the street. So, yeah.

One cool phenom of this boom-bubble is the number of parasite companies spawned by Google API's, especially Google Map integration. Just google (heh) for 'venture capital google maps' and you get a ton of hits. Here's one thats even self-referential.

Stealth Startups Don't Suck