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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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but it's not really a popular one 'cause it would increase salaries considerably, and as we all know that's anathema to the powers that are.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
A negative income tax would either require higher taxes for the middle class, which would result in no impact or a minimal impact on the economy at large, as money is transferred between those who have not much to those who have nothing. Or you have to tax the rich resulting in a transfer from savings to the poor who spend it. This would have a positive effect on the economy, increasing jobs (for short), and increase inflation (a bit), however this would not find the approval of your oligarchic overlords in the US. And raising taxes for the middle class would be used in "elections" to destroy an opponent in an election. Therefore, both options will not happen.
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?
HospitalityClub has been moribund for a good six years now. The founder no longer develops the site, it is overrun with spammers and dead profiles.
Couchsurfing was run by a collective of friends that once sought non-profit status, but when they realized that meant giving up control, the founder sold the company to a venture capitalist firm who is now looking at ways to monetize it, so it might not stay free for long. One of its competitors who went the same route ultimately became an apartment rentals service. Plus, it has been a problem for years that many active hosts on CS are interested only in sharing sex -- you get a positive reply to your request only if you are an attractive young female travelling alone.
There are hospitality exchange communities that are really based on an idealism that opening one's home to travelers at no cost and intercultural exchange are good, but HC and CS are no longer good examples.
It isn't going to be pretty
Yeah, but it's not really a popular one 'cause it would increase salaries considerably, and as we all know that's anathema to the powers that are.
Two words: Land grab. Them powers have managed to take ownership of the vast majority of the country. What ain't owned by the federal government (bureau of land management, military bases, this and that other area) is owned by the banks. Individuals who are not endemically wealthy hold a minuscule slice of the territory today.
Oh noes, it's only been one minute since I last posted a comment. I couldn't possibly have anything useful to say in one minute, after speed-reading a chain of comments between the last one I replied to, and this one. Throttling comment posting rates ensures you will get two or three kinds of comments, and not all of them are good ones.
Now it's only been two minutes. Fuck, the comments I can write in two minutes.
Three minutes. THREE! HA HA HA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Just wait until you run into my usual problem. "You've said enough for today, let someone else have a chance for a change" (or something like that).
And yes, you're right. I don't know of a single "small" hotel that still belongs to its original owner. Usually it's either banks or they've been gobbled up by some chain.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a male couchsurfer who has both hosted and traveled with the service, I would argue you have some misconceptions about the system. Most recently stayed in Chur, Switzerland with a host (male, straight) who picked me up at the train station, offered a couch to sleep on in his apartment, and then proceeded to give me a tour of the town and act as a translator. All in all, he asked for nothing in return but a good story. That has been the norm for the entire time I've been on couchsurfing (around 6 years now), and from my discussion with others in the group, my experience is common. The people who seem to have a difficulty using the system are those who don't understand that couchsurfing, while free, isn't free. While you could hop into town, sleep on someone's couch and leave, that's not the spirit of the system. The system revolves around the idea of the gift, that these people are opening up their home and lives to you. Ideally, you should be there to exchange culture, stories. I found it was helpful to offer to buy my hosts drinks for the night, or offer to pay for their dinner, but this is by no means a requirement. However, for the price of a meal, I was able to share in someone's life. This was inevitably cheaper than renting a hotel room, and far more enlightening.
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/
Look, not to be rude, but as a male couchsurfer who signed up for the network in January 2006 (so well before the crash), who surfed a couple of hundred couches worldwide, who hosted a couple of hundred people, and was very involved in the debate over the site's direction, I probably have more experience than you. (Though after the ramifications of Casey selling the site out became felt, I left for another hospex community around 18 months ago.)
Of course a male who sends out many requests is likely to find at least one male host who is interested simply in sharing, but he is also likely to get refusals from hosts who are looking for something else. That has always been a problem in certain countries, but became increasingly visible across the board as the years went by. If you deny that, I can only imagine that you don't read the CS groups and have not read the experiences of female travellers in their blogs, or talked to male nomadic ambassadors.
My post had nothing to do with CS etiquette (one cannot be a polite guest to a host until one has actually received a positive request to a well-written request), so I don't understand why you are even bringing this up.
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
That should read "one cannot be a polite guest to a host until one has actually received a positive response to a well-written request", sorry.
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.
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.
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.
Gun ownership and the market are completely unregulated, and if you don't fucking work then you don't fucking eat. Outside of the government-controlled compound in the capital, the only limited form of benevolent government is the tribal leadership. Being far closer to your ideal than the oppressive western welfare states, they should at least be better off. Why aren't they?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
"If you do not work you do not eat"? Spoken as a true corporate tool. Who defines what "work" is then? Guess what: the people with money do, as they always have. Ask a rich CEO why they deserve the highest compensation multiple of workers ever today, and they'll tell you all about how their work adds value!
There's only place this road has ever led toward: rich people get so much negotiating power over poor ones they force them into inhumane working conditions, knowing they have to accept that or starve. You don't get a wonderful world--instead you'll just keep reinventing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire for modern workers. Gotta lock the doors, can't have people in the factory stealing our precious iThings to sell them for food!
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?
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.
Bank creates mortgage and records it in their asset column, and creates an entry for your loan in their liability column. Then you pay the vendor, which moves the liability from your account to theirs. If the vendor has a different bank, the two banks settle at the end of the day by borrowing overnight cash, or by repeating a very similar loan & deposit transaction with a central bank. And hey presto, the quantity and velocity of "money" in the economy has increased.
Banks don't lend from deposits or reserves. They lend the money first, which creates a matching deposit, and they borrow money later to meet their reserve and capital requirements if they have to.
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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?
Not that money multiplier myth again. Don't tell me you still believe in that old chestnut. Even the Bank of England has given up that myth.
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Sharing economy may promote compassion
Casteism
FTFY - Yeah, a real paradise.
ranma - girl?
Gaining this financial independence requires first paying your dues, and in a lot of cases, that traditionally happens in a city.