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Why the Sharing Economy Is About Desperation, Not Trust
An anonymous reader writes "Wired recently ran a cover story about the sharing economy — shorthand for the rise of peer-to-peer rental services like Lyft and Airbnb — which they call a cultural and economic breakthrough. They say it has ushered in a 'new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.' An article at New York Magazine has another theory: that it arose because of the weakness in the real economy. Quoting: 'A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they've recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it's because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust.'"
tl;dr Marx was right that an over-production would leave the majority in poverty, and the only economically sustainable solution is sharing. It's not "desperation", but an inevitable and rational necessity.
In many countries in the world it's quite common for people to share stuff like taxi services and rooms and has been for decades. In many of these places the crime rate is far higher than in the United States. The huge contrast between the amount of distrust people seem to have for each other in America and the actual rate of crime (which is quite low and has been decreasing for decades) is pretty astounding.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
This sort of thing just screams insecurity. That is, if people are resorting to these things out of desperation for money, we should be focusing more on a better safety net.
Personally, I'd advocate a negative income tax. I'd even settle for some sort of citizen's basic income. But, I'd prefer a negative income tax that slides as one's income nears the poverty level thereby creating an incentive to work still.
Anyone else have any solutions or ideas?
It may well be that 'sharing economy' is just a manifestation of a deeper problem, the inability of the drivers of development in the past century -- capitalism and democracy -- to cope with the problems the modern world is facing.
The world needs a new political and economic systems that can tackle the problems we're facing, and tackle them efficiently and in a way that makes sense both locally and globally. It is most likely that these will evolve out of what we already have with the experience and frustrations we gain from trial-and-error experiments like the sharing economy, free online education and whatnot.
.....as long as it works. Yes, its only after a big frekkin financial crisis and the recession in its wake that people start looking desperately for alternative models, but that doesn't mean the model is not valid beyond that. It is a well known fact of historical process that the origin of a cultural tradition and its maintenance may occur for different reasons; one may begin the sharing economy experiment out of sheer financial desperation and later find it to have other benefits. Most of all, I find this artificial boundary between 'sharing economy' and 'real economy' to be utter BS.
This article smells like another trite argument for Homo Economicus from someone whose economic opinions have been mass produced from a mold during the industrial revolution.
Do you mean to say people do things for money? And even that cheaper comparable services supplant more expensive ones, oh crap it's almost like capitalism! Better break out the beatin sticks, can't have none of that.
There are services which focus on actual sharing, not short-term renting. For example Couchsurfing or HospitalityClub.
Sure, there is obviously a supply and demand effect when the economy no longer supports six figure college loan repayments. But to say that is the "cause" ignores that it was impossible to do 20 years ago. Advertising was at one point a huge barrier to entry for bed and breakfast type industries, people had to be aware of your product and had to trust someone with no brand awareness. Now it's simply easy to advertise your couch, ability, etc., and easy to set up a rating system.
As evidence, look at the growth of ebay when the economy was incredibly strong. The reasoning in the article is that "the economy is weak, therefore people sell used items on ebay." May or may not be true but does not explain growth of peer to peer economies.
Gently reply
True, its about desperation, not necessarily an extra layer of 'internet trust'.
The US is unique in developed economies - luxuries are cheap...big screen TV, a car and so on. But necessities are expensive...healthcare, decent education, and to an extent housing.
Tat Tvam Asi
...but I don't think that the only necessities are economic (...as both dyed-thru Marxists and Neocons seem to? I get that this is not you). While it's true the trigger for my involvement with "sharing"--from free-as-in-beer file-sharing to using Airbnb to potlucks to etc. etc.--may sometimes be economic, "because I can't afford to otherwise" doesn't actually make it in the top three of my reasons, now very much engaged with "sharing," for continuing in it.
The New Intimacy is new not because humans are different, but because more are more available than ever before. #internet
Economic "realists" are the children who built the world variously self-destructing.
It couldn't possibly be due from a massive market failure to meet reasonable expectations of service and cost, aided and abetted by regulation could it? Naaw.
The sharing economy could more broadly be defined as everything from bit torrent ("how could these people be giving away their data and bandwidth away for free? Don't they know how much more they could make restricting access like the RIAA does by simply providing counterfeit goods?") to open source software to ride sharing (heaven forbid people carpool and share the costs) to renting out rooms.
What New York Magazine should really be addressing is how is it possible in a time of such abundance there are so many left in need. It isn't even a call to communism exactly in as much as saying the current system is fucking a lot of people over.
And what's worse is how much effort is being put towards disallowing people from sharing rides or subletting a room simply because it threatens established businesses that have paid a lot of bribes to get to their current positions of regulatory capture.
Would people really be doing this if housing and transportation where far cheaper? Why haven’t those benefited from the invisible hand?
Can be seen in those who defend the taxi system on the grounds of "consumer protection." People might get overcharged? Not a justifiction for a system so blatantly anti-consumer as the taxi regulations across the country that turned what should be a low barrier to entry job with modest pay into a very lucrative position that blatantly uses the power of the state to shaft customers out of competition. I mean FFS, the car has an odometer. All you need is a law requiring the driver to provide the start and end mileage to the customer and to have them agree verbally to a rate per mile.
People have limited amounts of money and time. When time and effort are low people are more likely to make efforts to save or extract value through things like 'sharing'. The internet has made it cheaper to share, and sell goods and services. Additionally inflation and high joblessness have made money more scarce and less valuable. So, people now sell and share more because they have more time and less money (on average). And they share more because it's easier and cheaper than ever to do.
Things are going to have to get very bad for change though. The forces for the status quo are way too strong and powerful.
Even I, a peon getting screwed over by the system, is a bit scared of it - eliminate democracy? Whoah!
Anyway, when things change too radically, extrememly bad things happen - like Hitler, Stalin, Castro, ...
Capitalism works fine within the norrow confines of economic activity and with plenty government checks. Nineteenth century USA business history is a great example of Laissez-Faire capitalism and what a disaster it was environmentally, economically, politically and socially. Even the US Right's patron saint, Adam Smith, warned about the dangers Capitalism - something that's been forgotten or ignored.
But as the World becomes ever more populated and natural resources become even more stretchly thinned, something is gonna break.
The Free Markets are thrown around as a pancea for the World's woes, but tell a couple of billion cold, starving, thirsty people that they just need to cough the money and work harder and they too can have what they need. I don't know, I just think Roman Empire and barbarians invading.
But like I said above, unless there is a catastrophy we won't change. The status quo - the economic bullies - have got theirs and they are not going to let it go. Their primitive and shallow desires are dragging us all down. Their desire to leave legacies to their offspring has them getting their bitches in legisaltures to allow for generational accumulation of wealth - aristocracies - and we all know what happens with that: revolution and mass death.
My fellow peons who stick up for the economic bullies will stand behind them - out of aspiration, fear of change or because of human nature to identify with one's abuser (I think that's why so many Right Wingers stand up for the Koch's and other businessmen who harm their economic interests.)
has been the domain of the rich. This is because sharing was moderated by expensive middle men. If you own a castle in Britain, you are likely to regularly share some of the rooms (short-term renting them out through an expensive agency). But it wasn't easy to rent out that extra room or your basement in your three bedroom suburban house, because there was no affordable way to efficiently access that market (the market structure was very thin for short term renting).
Now the rest of us can partake in the sharing economy, agency costs have dropped dramatically for the stuff that the rest of us own.
Wired is shite, always has been and will be.
I'm surprised it doesn't have plain white cover with rounded corners, that's the kind of people who read it (or rather, look at the pictures in it).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then started a new cycle where the skill those workers had were incorporated into robotics, again forcing us to develop a new set of meta-skills because it can crank out parts with near perfect precision 24x7 and it was back to huge production lines.
That plant the laid off its workers only needs a handful of folks to maintain the robots. It's NOT a one to one transition. It's at least a 10 to 1 DOWNSIZING.
Now those skills are being incorporated into electronics, and we're again looking for new meta skills. It all comes full circle again and again.
Everytime the "circle" goes around LESS labor is needed.
Just where are those workers going to go because other industries are not absorbing them - the employment numbers proves it.
Look at today's big comanies - like Amazon. They have about 30,000 employees.
A couple of decades ago, a company that size would have had a million people of ALL skill levels working there. But automation has made things much more efficient. Cheaper for the rest of us, sure. But what to do with all the displaced workers? Retrain? For what?
All the new big companies only need a fraction of employees needed before.
EVERY industry is doing this. There is no indsutry that is increasing their workforce - none. Even medical is becoming more efficient and (ever so slowly) automating on the lower levels. And there's other changes too.
And that is what get's me about the fetish of policy makers who want manufacturing to come back to the US: it'll be done by robots.
In the 19th century, Western society went from on labor intensive economy (Agriculture) to another (Manufacturing). So, there was opportunity for transistion.
But today, new industries are going straight to automation (or off-shoring), old industries are doing the same, and there's a ever decreasing pool of jobs for people - and as a result, wages are declining in real terms.
Just making straight comparisons with the past and today and strugging off social and economic changes that is hurting the average guy is the wrong analysis and the numbers prove it.
The Shares choose capitalism.
Land of the free home of the brave. God Bless the USA.
The Wired article gives a few anecdotes but no facts. The New York Magazine article has some pretty graphs showing unemployment rates. But neither provides any insight into the scope of the "sharing economy". It appears to me more like a couple of internet start-ups hyping themselves so they'll be the next acquisitions by Facebook.
A market works best if all sides have the same access to knowledge. Prior to the Internet there was no big market for "i have a room which is dont use" because exchanging information was too expensive.
However, it was not at all unusual on the countryside to just put up a sign if you had a room to rent. I remember bicycle trips where we just stopped at some farm and asked and got a room there.
What is new is that you can plan this.
In previous decades people shared stuff a lot. They shared tools, e.g., when they build houses. They shared land. They shared knowledge. Farmers, share their equipment for a long time, as it was expensive all the time. For example, harvesters are shared even today through farmers cooperatives. The "new" share economy is, therefore, not new. The only new thing is that the sharing platform is now a company and not a joint organisation making profit out of sharing. Furthermore, consumers are now able to share their goods with people over a larger area. And true, people would have led their car in the past only to people they know of. Now they share it with people who pay for it.
In the past sharing was a social act. Now it is a business. However, traditional sharing is also increasing. And traditional sharing requires people to like each other. Therefore, they have to build working relationships, which is definitively a step in the right direction.
Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but wasn't taking in boarders common at one point in the not-that-distant past? Maybe the adult male of a middle class household living in a larger house died and the family consolidated their use of rooms and let out rooms and maybe provided a meal, known now as "room and board"? Perhaps if there wasn't much left of the family it was nearly all a boarding house?
has been the domain of the rich. This is because sharing was moderated by expensive middle men. If you own a castle in Britain, you are likely to regularly share some of the rooms perfecthacks/a> (short-term renting them out through an expensive agency). But it wasn't easy to rent out that extra room or your basement in your three bedroom suburban house, because there was no affordable way to efficiently access that market (the market structure was very thin for short term renting).
Now the rest of us can partake in the sharing economy, agency costs have dropped dramatically for the stuff that the rest of us own.
It isn't going to be pretty
What they are trying the hardest not to mention, is that it is a failure in the transportation economy. Medallions and regulations have opened up the market to competition and now there is an ability to compete.
Stop with the overbearing government regulation. Hell stop with all the government regulation.
When you are desperate enough, you trust. Everyone has a tipping point.
When the game is rigged against the individual in favor of corporations, the wealthy, and banks the only sane and sensible solution is not to play.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why is an growth necessary? To sustain our current economic models perhaps, but they are themselves a very recent anomaly dating back to somewhere around the beginning of the industrial revolution and the liberation of productivity from the number of laborers available. As you point out, all sustained growth is exponential, and that is unsustainable in a finite environment. And we're already bumping up against the limits of our global ecosystem so it must end relatively soon.
No matter what the economists want to believe, sustainable growth is an oxymoron and we're going to be forced to return to an economic model which presumes the entirety of production remains relatively stable. Individual businesses may still grow, but only at the expense of other businesses (competitors and/or those rendered obsolete) But there's no particular reason they need to grow at all. Even today there are plenty of small businesses that don't subscribe to the "grow or die" philosophy, and have instead simply grown until they reach a comfortable, sustainable size and then remain there indefinitely. And that's absolutely normal. In days gone past a master blacksmith could only grow his business to the limits of his own productivity - he might take on an apprentice or two to help out with the easier stuff, but it was his own skill at the forge that drove business.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust."
... and ...
That's interesting. Could the exact same thing be said about the banking industry? And the insurance industry? And stock brokerages?
The fact that New York magazine smears the sharing economy with the word "desperation" just speaks of editoralizing that tries to use controversial words to grab attention. Without the prestige of slick magazine paper, we would just call that activity "trolling".
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Trust can never be the primary motivator; there is no intrinsic value to trust. Trust reduces the perceived risk; decisions influence by trust can result in better or worse outcome--depending on who we trust.
The inhibitor is emotionally fear, or rationally an expectation that doing something gives another person an opportunity to take action against me. Emotionaly, trust removes that inhibitor--or, again in a rational sense I know another person (or community, or machine) well enough that I can predict the behavior--and predict the person/people/machine or whatever will NOT take some action which will hurt me.
In order to replace a sensor I need to climb inside of a machine which can easily crush me. Where do I hang my lock? Do I trust that mechanical blocking device? Do I trust that software-based safety lockout system? The fact that I have a heavy steel blocking device that very reliably protects me from injury doesn't motivate me to go inside the machine.
I have very high trust I will not be injured if I go in the machine, but if I don't need to replace the sensor (or have some other business in there); I'm not going to do it.
The bleak tone of the headline suggests that not finding trust as a primary motivator implies that trust isn't present in the commons. If you look for trust as a primary motive, you wont' find it because that's not where trust lives. The conclusion that trust is not present or not important is an artifact of the observer's method--not a property of the commons.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Deflation is no poison, you are a tool of government propaganda, brainwashed to the core, completely without any sense or understanding. Deflation was the reality of 19th century USA economy, the period of time, when the standard of living of an average American has gone up by orders of magnitude faster than at any point in time. In fact during the 'scary deflationary' period the standard of living for Americans has gone up, but during the government induced inflation the standard of living was and is falling.
You are absolutely correct, but your opinion seems very unpopular here on /.
Deflation is only bad for those with money, and especially for entities like the Federal Reserve and the stock markets, that rely on ever-decreasing value of the dollar to demonstrate an ever-increasing value of assets by comparison. It's bad for the US Federal government, too, that relies on the sale of bonds to finance its deficit spending, and of course inflation produces increasing tax revenue, necessary for the increasing budgets and unchecked increases in demand for promised entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
Inflation, in fact, is a massive and unfair tax that falls disproportionately on the poor. That's because inflation least affects the people that get to use the inflated money first, the poor that are at the bottom of food chain don't see money until inflation has devalued it the most. It's the way new money enters the economy: Federal Reserve -> Large Banks -> smaller banks and businesses -> small businesses -> home owners and middle class -> Check cashers and payday lenders. The interest payments required go up at each level.
tl;dr: Inflation helps the rich, deflation helps the poor.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Qualitative Easing is successfully resolving the debt burdens of the countries that have indulged in it, though noone is admitting the fact. The real issue is whether, as Keynes argues, the savings of those who don't want to spend them, can be successfully recycled to the poor, who do want to spend them, but aren't being paid enough to keep demand up. This is brought to a crisis in China where the poor's saving rates are very high because they need to protect themselves in the absence of a meaningful welfare net and their dependence therefore on their ONE child for their future prosperity. If China can break out of this pattern, there is hope for at least one more iteration. But overall don't forget that the poorest in the world ARE getting richer - it's only the Westerners who are getting squeezed.
and there's still a lot of that. Farming, plumbing, construction, machine work, etc.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem is Marxist Socialist and Communist MOONBEAMS in the California will soon make it illegal...
Right now, the big scare is that we're running into a deflation. No, really. DEflation. Not INflation. Now, considering how bad inflation is (allegedly), deflation must be good, right? Wrong! It's even more feared than inflation.
Inflation and deflation are orthogonal to each other. Inflation is a devaluation/flat tax on money while deflation is a devaluation of goods & services that can be bought with money. You can have both at the same time, they are not opposites, but two entirely seperate matrixes which are, at most and only under certain circumstances and certain moments, indirectly linked to each other. Right now we're observing a bit of a mixture of both.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
For those that haven't read the Communist Manifesto, Marx marveled at aspects of capitalism to create wonders, he mostly objected to the workers being treated like cogs and the bourgeoisie taking all of the benefits from the proletariat. It's definitely possible to have capitalism where the workers own the means of production, it just turns out that that's bad for the people in power.
Even with guards the ammunition, food and other supplies have to reach the compound and even armed guards aren't always enough to stop an angry mob.
There's already rich folks that are building their own compounds because they know damn well that at some point things are going to turn ugly, but rather than do something productive like stop stealing from the workers, they're hoping that a secured compound will save them. The workers in the US ask so very little, providing a living wage is hardly unreasonable.
Most of those jobs are hiring because they don't pay a living wage. They might pay enough that you can have an apartment and some food, but they won't ensure that you have anything like a retirement account or funds set aside for emergencies.
The problem isn't that people might need to take these jobs in the short term, the problem is that there's a decreasing number of jobs to move up to. It used to be that companies would give out raises to at least keep up with the cost of living, but these days, the only way you get a raise is by taking your skills elsewhere and hopefully there is someplace else to take them. Otherwise, you wind up working a job for 30 years and still be making the same amount of money you were when you started due to inflation eating up the meager raises you might have been getting along the way.
In the past, the logistics of renting your car out or your apartment out was not practical. How and where to list? The mechanism simply didn't exist unless you were offering it to a friend of a friend and then actually getting paid might be an issue.
Now people have the option. that is what changed.
if the economy improves radically tomorrow you'll still see this stuff.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It depends on whether you agree with Malthus that population growth is inevitable or with Condorcet, who believed that birth control could prevent the consequences of exponential population growth.
If the population continues to grow, so too must the economy, or the share of resources available to each person will shrink. There's really no room for argument on that point.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Legislation can cancel debts, and taxes can prevent people from hoarding cash. Those certainly wouldn't be ideal circumstances, but it seems that would counter deflationary pressures.
You're describing one half of communism. The other half is that people are assigned jobs that they are good at doing in exchange for receiving all those "needs" from a distribution source.
The article seems to read, "Website services that are designed to make money attract people who want to make money." They're no more part of a "sharing economy" than Amazon or eBay or any similar enterprise. If anything, they're more about bringing down oversight, regulation, and stability.
Genuine sharing economies are small enough in scale so that people know each other personally and know their reputations/personalities (or at least can ask around among the people they already know and trust). They're co-operative, non-profit enterprises; everyone shares in the gains and everyone benfits from helping each other. Instead of going through corporate banking systems, they use barter, cash, and/or local credit unions. The concept is as old as civilisation itself and it just doesn't "scale" or operate in the way that for profit, venture captial backed startups would like.
The problems we are facing are the same we've been facing forever - humans are greedy, violent assholes when given the opportunity. The only thing that's changed are the methods we use.
This article brought to you by the taxi cab and hotel industries.
Remember, competing with established business interests is for losers.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It just means that you then need to decide how to invest that dividend instead of just holding on to the stock.
Which isn't difficult: use the dividend to buy more shares in the same company or in some ETF like SPY or DIA.
Only if there is a demand for more production and only if the workers have the correct skill to produce that production. When labour is off-shored, demand for products actually drops, since workers will have less money to spend; it's a downward spiral that can only be broken if there is free travel for people across nation states.
Corporations don't have the artifical boundary not being able to operate outside their inital borders, but are capable to set up shop anywhere. Real people, on the other hand, are bound by artificial impediments like work visas and are unable to do the same.
Nihil in publicum sputa.
this is a site for geeks - are you out of your mind?
Marxism teeters upon a deeply false assumption that human nature can somehow be coerced into submission and tamed.... mostly by pointing a gun at the persons head or the threat of being sent to a prison... Any rationality of any government or economic system can be measured by the amount of coercion required to maintain that system. More coercion, less legitimate.
There are parts of the US that have VERY cheap real estate and they're not terrible places to live either.
They're terrible for people who are trained for an industry that's next to nonexistent in such places. For example, one Slashdot user keeps telling me that anybody in the U.S. who wants to get into the video game industry is going to need to move to one of a handful of cities, most of which have a fairly high cost of living. Is Austin, Texas, really the only U.S. city with both reasonable COL and a video game industry?
Self-employed people often have to take special low-documentation (or "low-doc") loans. The article you linked states that in at least one jurisdiction, "Mortgage insurance is payable if the loan-to-value ratio [...] is above 80%, or above 60% for low document loans." This means low-doc borrowers need to pay 40% down to avoid having to pay for extra mortgage insurance, unlike W-2 employees who can borrow up to 80% of principal (that is, 20% down). If you think the article you linked lacks citations, feel free to edit it and sprinkle {{cn}}.
is only being promoted in the U.S. today because of our monetary policies (Federal Reserve).
Why would companies feel pressure to keep growing exponentially, if it weren't for the value of the dollar dropping year after year, as we put more into circulation to pay down government debts?
When you look at charts showing the buying power for a typical American worker from, say, 1900 to the present? It's clear that at best, folks are simply treading water with the raises they've received over the last 20 or 30 years. Business who want to show continuous increases in stock value have to expand at exponential rates to keep that going -- and heck yeah, it's not sustainable.
To the point of the original topic here? No, I think "desperation" isn't the right word to describe the situation (but it sure does command more attention and therefore readers of the editorial). I *do* think money is what compels people to open up their cars, homes, etc. to complete strangers -- but that's as old as money itself! Services like Uber may have come about because people aspired to do more than receive some relatively crummy paycheck working full-time for an employer. But they're only successful because they address real needs that the "status quo" wasn't addressing adequately. Everyone I know in the D.C. area prefers Uber to calling a traditional cab. Why? Because it's just a better experience. If I call a cab, I don't have a way to track the cab in real time on a map, to see how long it will take to arrive. I don't get a convenient emailed statement as soon as my ride is over, detailing how far I went, where I started and stopped, etc. And like the last time I used Uber, I was able to call an SUV specifically, so we could load up a bunch of boxes in the back without any issues. Uber also regularly offers discount promotions. When's the last time you got a discounted cab fare promotion in your email?
I'm having issues with "Deflation is relatively easy to deal with...".
Deflation was a very destructive problem during the Great Depression. Money became increasingly valuable and goods ever less valuable. Now combine that with the psychology of a depression (roughly, 'keep a tight grip on your wallet!') and the widespread reality of unemployment and low paying jobs. There was nothing "easy" about it.
Large-scale government spending on infrastructure helped a lot. The gradual easing of the drought and better farming practices helped a lot. Ultimately however, it took a world war and huge spending on war programs to really break the hold of the Depression and deflation.
That's not my idea of "easy". More like "painful" and "not to be voluntarily repeated."
there are a lot of indi games coming out that are launched by ONE guy. [...] They're published by steam
For mouse-and-keyboard genres, that's fine. And for games in genres that use multiple gamepads and one monitor, that will become practical once Steam Machines become widely available. Until then, does Valve publish stats on how many Steam users use the Big Picture mode? Last time I checked (18 months ago) it was about 1%. So games in multiple-gamepad genres, such as fighting games, party games, and cooperative platformers, tend to be developed for consoles. And to release a game on a console, I would need to become a licensed developer with SCEA or NOA. Or are there statistics showing that a substantial number of people connect a PC to a TV?
For mobile devices, if a game is point-and-click like Bejeweled or Fruit Ninja or one-button like Canabalt or Flappy Bird, anyone with a computer can get started on Google Play for about $300 to buy a device and a lifetime developer certificate. But for games in genres that heavily use directional control, a touch screen alone isn't going to do very well. I tried playing the trial version of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7, and I kept missing the jumps because my thumb kept drifting to the side of the on-screen jump button. I tried again with a keyboard and it was fine, but I imagine that few Android gamers are going to want to buy and carry a keyboard around to get the same experience that they already get with a major dedicated handheld game system. I haven't been able to find sales figures for the Bluetooth gamepads that clip onto Android phones. It appears that in order to release a game in a genre associated with directional controls, I would need to become a licensed developer with SCEA or NOA.
As such, you could do that anywhere in the world.
I mention cities like Austin, Boston, and Seattle because the U.S. video game industry appears to be concentrated in those cities, and I've been told that the best way to demonstrate "relevant video game industry experience" to console makers in an application to become a licensed developer is to have worked for an established video game studio for several years. It's like acting: you'll eventually have to move to New York for stage or Los Angeles for screen.
> About the wealth gap, he turned out to be more right than he could have ever foreseen. ... the more I come to realise that his thinking was bloody brilliant, his writing utterly awful and his followers mostly dogmatic knuckleheads with memorized phrases they use to bang each others (mostly) heads with, as well as anyone else within striking distance of them.
But as I said at the top; Brilliant thinking.
You are treating national debt in a country that has a currency like personal debt and it just doesn't work like that. People make this same mistake when talking about Japan's "debts" and it REALLY doesn't work there.
Design some money and send it to your printer. Put it in your pocket and the nation of "complete looney" accounting would issue debt. Are you going to get tough on yourself and demand payment for the debt generated?? It's just numbers on a page.
I don't agree with this and I doubt that there is any truly scientific analysis to prove this out.
My own opinion is that this is nothing more than the same behavior and motives behind sharing MP3s, downloading and/or collecting downloaded movies, software, or what ever you collect from the web. It is a social one. It is the same 'need' that gamers build into their games, the beginning with nothing and 'grinding' to acquire as much as you can.
Why do we play games like WOW and Diablo or even Farmville that make us 'work' to acquire more and better 'items'? What is the difference that searching and hunting for videos, music, software, 'the coolest whatever' to add to your collection and acquire more and a bigger, better collection? Very little.
For many it is not the desire to collect as much as it is to share and/or show off their collection. The mental rewards of sharing their 'finds' and 'collections' make them feel better. Have you ever bought a DVD and never watched it, yet when the same show is on the TV you will watch it, including commercials? Why? Because you have a social need to interact with others and even though TV is not a truly interactive event it is temporal event that if not viewed at the moment is lost. While most people don't feel this way with DVRs there are many who do and cannot use DVRs for that reason. Have you ever recorded a sporting event? No? Why not? Is it because the game is already over and you don't want to watch something that is already history?
It is more social and the lack of social interaction in people's lives in these times that people fall back to having to share and communicate and this bleeds over to even non-interaction events such as tv.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
What is notable is how quickly demand shifts from legacy vendors to "share" vendors.
I don't think it is just about price. Airbnb and Uber are well run and always come through. More than I can say for my roomnight/taxi experiences all over the world.
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At least for the two services I use constantly... (Airbnb/Uber)... they improved the system. Not just took it over. BTW... Uber hates the moniker "share". Because Uber is not trying to be the fad that most of the "share economy" will end up being.
I take a different tact on investment and how it shapes change. I think that digital technology has not only eliminated jobs and not replaced opportunity for more people than it has helped, but that human nature, greed, really has used digital technology to drive investment into unproductive behavior and that has caused the imbalances and lopsided income distribution. That effect will lead to greater social and political instability the world over and tech workers, engineers, and programmers may eventually bear the burden of blame. I am not talking Luddism, but I am talking political economy.
Although the points about growth, integration, and the reduction of quality are well taken, they don't go far enough to describe how computers have driven business into shorter and shorter term management and demands from investors for quicker ROI without regard for rendering anything of value. I am particularly concerned about how programmed trading and the large servers management by investment firms has encouraged speclative investment practices and about the large amounts of capital tied up in arbritage transactions. Classical theorists did not have to deal with this level of unproductive investment because the technology to enable it did not exist and markets had a sanity that reflected judgments of humans making "rational" choices. The use of computers in investment has changed all of that. It was a major factor in the crash of 2008 and the systemic problems has not been addressed by regulators. It needs to be. At least there needs to be latency introduced into equities transactions, 30 seconds a trade would probably repair much of the damage being done.
If the 800 pound ape in the room is a large institutional investment house who financializes all its decisions, how can small businesses and small investors have a chance to make decisions based on producing quality services or products?
Computers have caused more crashes. There was the crash in 1987 (Black Monday) that was partially caused by program trading (if price goes under a threshold, sell.)
What would be good is either a latency, or a small cost (a cent per share) for each transaction. That will allow people to trade... but it will make it not worth it for the whole economy to shoulder the burden of HFT and the fact that a business has to be profitable -now-... which means charging off earnings for a more profitable future grounds for shareholder lawsuits.
And that is one reason we can't have good things here in the US.
$SHAREHOLDER== "PARASITE"
Not always true, but a good first approximation. I think it likely legitimate business financing needs would be better served by corporate bonds than stocks.
Stock "ownership" has in some respects a negative aspect similar to certain limited-duration copyrights ( the ones that last longer than the habitable life of the universe) : Pay once; profit forever"; I thought that having a "Sense of entitlement" was for Poor People!
Taxes are often bewailed as 'distorting the market' how is the idea of 'maximization of stockholder value' as a primary goal any less so?
see Bruce Sterling's "Cryptonomicon" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I may be 100% wrong, if so, educate me!
I'm for stakeholders... not shareholders.
With a companystakeholder relationship, things go both ways. With a company->shareholder relationship, there isn't any loyalty that a shareholder has to care about... if the stock drops, sell.
Having a market is one thing, but a lot of our woes are coming from the fact that shareholders tend not to be stakeholders.
Sharing economy may promote compassion
Casteism
My wife became "unemployed" when she moved to become my wife. They paid her to attend a job training school. (with strict attendance and grade requirements). More strictly speaking, I think it was a requirement imposed on extending the length of unemployment insurance payments. The local employment assistance office (actually called "Hello Work!" in Japan... that's the official name.) sent her to school and taught her MS Office, business etiquette, and some Korean. Then they placed the students as trainees in local businesses for some on-the-job exposure. My wife already worked at a big company before the move, so she only did it all just to get paid. However, it does seem like the right way to go about it (compared to the throw you in the streets mentality of the US) for the typical low-skill displaced worker. If this gets some fraction of people off of public assistance, I think the program would pay for itself. (I haven't seen hard numbers one way or another, though.) It makes too much sense to try in the US, though.
Gaining this financial independence requires first paying your dues, and in a lot of cases, that traditionally happens in a city.