A View From Under the Long Tail

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a funny article by James Boyle in the Financial Times on what it really feels like to be part of the long tail economy." From the article: "Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system. The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth."

Comments

Re:Economics ... setting the record straight

[taradfong]

Make sure your conclusions are based on how the world works more than personal aversions to debt and a modern monetary system.

The economy won't grow without debt.

The US economy is not perfect but it is not teetering toward disaster. Read the Economist if you want to see the world the way it really is.

And while housing prices might drop substantially, the term 'bubble' doesn't make much sense. Houses will never be worth zero. Having lots of people overextended on something is bad, but a house is a good thing to be chained to. Owning a house is not going out of style - renting sucks. There isn't enough land near where people want to live - the coasts. Owning a house is the only real way for most people to keep up with inflation. In a sense owning a house is about as close as most people can get to owning the gold you wish we all traded with.