Our economy is almost entirely based on a Darwinian competition–many products and services fighting for shelf space and market share and profits. It's a wasteful process, because success is unpredictable and unevenly distributed.
The internet has largely mirrored (and amplified) this competition. eBay, for example, not only pits sellers against one another, it also pits buyers. Craigslist makes it easy for buyers to see the range of products and services on offer, making the marketplace more competitive. Google, most of all, encourages an ecosystem where producers can evolve, improve and compete.
I think the next frontier of the net is going to use the datastream to do precisely the opposite–to create value by making coordination easier.
Businesses are being sold incredibly expensive advertising campaigns that are disguised as “no risk” ways to acquire new customers. In reality, there’s a lot of risk. With a newspaper ad, the maximum you can lose is the amount you paid for the ad. With Groupon, your potential losses can increase with every Groupon customer who walks through the door and put the existence of your business at risk.
Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business. The $21,000 that the business in this example gets for running a Groupon is essentially a very, very expensive loan. They get the cash up front, but pay for it with deep discounts over time. (This post applies to Groupon operations in the United States and Canada; it’s different in other parts of the world.)
In many cases, running a Groupon can be a terrible financial decision for merchants. Groupon’s financials also raise questions about its ongoing viability. Buying Groupon stock could be as bad a deal for investors as running a Groupon offer is for merchants.
I defer to NightWatch but it is the naivete of the IC that cannot
comprehend that the rest of the world does not look like the US……….This is territory that is NOT administered by the Government of Pakistan but rather by the Tribal Elders. The permission is required by Pakistani Law, something that the US continues to fail to understand. I guess, in the vain of old movies, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”……
Being binary is bad for business, so when will politics cure its bipolar disorder? Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on the lessons Washington should learn from the real world.
Nothing in American life today seems as archaic, ubiquitous and immovable as the Republican and Democratic parties.
The two 19th-century political groupings divide up the spoils of a combined $6.4 trillion that is extracted each year from taxpayers at the federal, state, county and municipal levels. Though rhetorically and theoretically at odds with one another, the two parties have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of policies and governance structures that benefit well-connected groups at the expense of the individual.
Democrats and Republicans are at risk of becoming irrelevant, says Reason.com's Nick Gillespie, as more voters identify as Independents or with other groups like the Tea Party. He talks with WSJDN's Kelsey Hubbard about the shortcomings of the longstanding duopoly in American politics.
Americans have watched, with a growing sense of alarm and alienation, as first a Republican administration and then its Democratic successor have flouted public opinion by bailing out banks, nationalizing the auto industry, expanding war in Central Asia, throwing yet more good money after bad to keep housing prices artificially high, and prosecuting a drug war that no one outside the federal government pretends is comprehensible, let alone winnable. It is easy to look upon this well-worn rut of political affairs and despair.
Phi Beta Iota: A Wall Street Journal informal poll shows 83% of respondents now ready to vote for a third party, with some excluding the Tea Party as flaky. Ralph Nader led this fight, others are finishing it. We are honored to be in that number.
UPDATED 26 October 2011 (Vatican focus on global financial reform / authority, need for ethics – avoids addressing secular corruption as we suggested in below letter sent January 2011)
Everybody’s head is a strange universe filled with echos of voices they’ve heard over and over again. Against this, we try to manifest our intentions, to persuade with more voice, more conversation. Sometimes we get through, but even when we get through, we’re often filtered, just as we’re filtering. Is it any wonder that it’s so difficult to build and sustain an effective collaboration?
I’m looking at the ways that we strive to aggregate our attentions, find common ground, and work together. Over the years I’ve approached this through the lens of democracy, or what I’ve referred to as the “democratic intention” to create a participatory process that works. The older I get and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this intention, though we so often profess it, is actually rare. Most of us would really like to assert our self interest, our own preferences, but society is a collision of interests and preferences, we have to give in order to take. In a recent discussion of the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, I was struck by the hardwired assumption that self-interest inherently rules, and cooperation is reached most effectively with an understanding of that point, thus the prisoner’s dilemma. In fact, I find that real people are fuzzy on that point, they’re not necessarily or inherently all about self-interest. We’re far more complex than that.
The Narrative Battle & Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century
By John Marke
Warfare in the 21st century is about the battle for the mind – it is about ideas and perceptions. Understanding how people make sense of what’s happening around them, i.e., socially constructed reality is a key element of this dynamic.
Military strategists, at least the ones I favor, i.e. Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart, and John Boyd, would all agree that ideas have consequences and are perhaps more consequential than bullets, especially in today’s environment of limited war. What we think, what we say, and how we act need to be congruent – that is the essence of integrity. Clearly articulating our ideas and demonstrating the integrity between ideas and actions – are vital components of war and peace in the 21st century….and they must authenticate basic human values of justice and truth. There is a moral dimension to war; and without a firm commitment to justice and truth, no narrative will be sustainable.
I choose to look at Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield as the context for exploring the importance of the narrative in war because it is timely but has also passed into history, as contrasted to Iraq or Afghanistan which are battles still in play as of this writing.
Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse
