Paul Kedrosky

good links. i would suggest brad delong's blog, too: http://delong.typepad.com/ and paul kedrosky's infectious greed: http://paul.kedrosky.com/ i wish this blog was more updated, the book was very fun to read: http://nudges.org/ a bigger note, though, is that to be stimulated we need to go beyond our comfort zones, both in terms of intellectual or academic comfort ("i'll never understand this stuff") or opinions and viewpoints. finding such material is easier than ever, but avoiding it is just as easy. the trick to growing and learning is to grow your experiences meaningfully.

Mine: Three-Toed Sloth: data, complexity, and so forth: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/ Paul Kedrosky: economics, insight, analysis and links: http://paul.kedrosky.com/ Mind Hacks: fantastic source for everything mind/psychology related: http://www.mindhacks.com/ Ran Prieur: a unique perspective, always thought provoking: http://www.ranprieur.com/ Kevin Kelly: various cool blogs on tech, future, society, etc.: http://www.kk.org/ Daily Meh: interesting thoughts, ideas, links and photographs: http://dailymeh.tumblr.com/ There are others I could add, but thats a good start.

Similarly interesting research modeling bee colony nest choice through individual agents: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.html The paper is rather straight-forward for anyone here, so I'd recommend just reading it directly.

> Writing a blog takes dedication and time. Yes. I've also discovered that blogging has to be done very frequently to obtain a significant audience. For example, Paul Kedrosky ( http://paul.kedrosky.com/ ) sometimes posts three times per day, seven days per week. I'd rather spend my time doing extended programming sessions. I'm also inclined to write 4000 word epics rather than 100 word stream-of-consciousness posts, so the medium isn't optimal for my style. Finally, I'm not keen on blogging's inherent chronological structure. However, the advent tagging has offset this issue.

Link above is dead. Use this, scroll halfway down: http://paul.kedrosky.com/ Blog refers to this article on MarketWatch: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kapow-technologies-secures-116-m… If you're like me and wonder what Kapow is, their website is here: http://www.kapowtech.com/

Followup - Paul Kedrosky: Microsoft calls for mommy http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/16/google_rivals_c.html

You gave a good explanation of a major point I omitted, the common situation of Main Street businesses having a strong geographical barrier to entry. And your point about "winner take all" on the Internet is simple but basically correct. Okay, but still: Joe has an idea, maybe Facebook for cat owners, optimized for mobile with a special alarm when GPS says they are near a cat owner of the opposite sex, a pivot from his semi-successful MySpace for dog owners, a pivot from his quasi-successful MeetUp for gerbil lovers. To Joe, each of these is a really new, unique, no competition idea. And "romantic angle?" "Nearly all romantic angle." And, if he gets just 2% of all the ...! Maybe Joe's ideas are terrific, and maybe they suck. If he does fail fast, then for each such pivot he will soon learn which case is true. So, all that said, just where in there does Joe need all those special personality characteristics Suster listed? I mean, Joe has a brother Sam who started a Chicago style pizza place in LA -- that was his innovative idea for a Main Street business. Like nearly all Main Street business owners, Sam is just a regular guy, just like his brother Joe. Net, I see Moore's law and the Internet as mostly just advantages except for the one issue you mentioned, the flip side of the great opportunity of serving the world is no geographical barrier to entry. So, if Joe's idea really is new and good and he is on the way to tens of millions of uniques a month just from…

There is a lot of parroting of talking points to unpack here. First, you assume that drawing down our nuclear program is a priori bad. This is clearly not so. Consider that the greatest threat of terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons comes from so-called looses nukes in ex-Soviet states. If eliminating some of our weapons will induce them to do the same, this would seem to lessen the chance that apocalyptic weapons will fall into the hands of people who would use them. We could eliminate 9000 nukes and still have more than enough to kill all life on the planet several times over. If the Russians and other ex-Soviet states eliminate a commensurate number of weapons, I think that'd be a good trade. As for $3.55 trillion for 2010 - unfortunately, I think it's probably necessary. Global manufacturing and trade are falling at rates faster than any seen during the Great Depression. Debt levels are higher now than back then. Deleveraging will take quite awhile. And while some have claimed Japan's deficit spending during its lost decade failed, since growth petered out at 1%, Richard Koo of Nomura makes a fairly convincing case that this was actually a success: they averted a full-scale depression, after all. (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/04/richard_koo_on.html) Saying that Obama has increased marginal tax rates to the highest level since Clinton is a cheap rhetorical trick. I don't think top rates going from 36% to 39.6% represents the tipping point between…

Interesting to compare this with Paul Kedrosky's take on the Twitter funding:http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/07/26/the_twitter_les.htm Another observation: if you apply this advice to a typical Web 2.0 startup, you get an employee. The "customer" of a free consumer web startup is its eventual acquirer: after all, that's who's going to pony up the cash that becomes the entrepreneur's profit. The "suppliers" are the users who donate their time, and sometimes the investors who donate the money needed to build something that makes it worth it for the users to donate their time. You have three options for how you're going to manage time, cash, and users. You can go to your customer (the big corporation), and say "Pay me now and I will build something that hopefully users want. If they don't, you're out the cash." This is an employee. You can say "I will build something that users want, then when I have shown that users want it, you can pay me. If it flops, it's my problem." This is a bootstrapped startup. Or you can go to someone else, say "Give me cash and I will find users. Then the customer (big company) will want to buy us, and we will shared in the profits. If this doesn't happen, you're out your money and I'm out my time." This is a funded startup. It also occurs to me that many of the misunderstandings behind Web 2.0 and doubts about the sustainability of free web startups come from this reversal of the roles of customer and supplier. Most people…

It's called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, a name coined by Michael Crichton: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect…

Raising taxes does work since the tax level in this country is quite low. It has a long way to go to catch up to France, Germany, etc. If raising taxes to the level of Germany would cause such a massive outflow of capital (which could be taxed at the exit point) then why does Germany have so much capital? Wouldn't the same thing happen to Germany? The current tax burden as a percent of GDP in the U.S. is low by U.S. standards of the last 50 years and quite low relative to other industrialized nations. The so called fiscal problem we have is easily fixable. Raising taxes is a viable strategy. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/tax-burdens-around-the-world…

To summarize in English: Stewart started an unnamed firm, and tried to exit mid-bubble four years later; his partners didn't want to buy his equity, so he sued them. By the time he got his shares bought three years later the firm had imploded. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the_5.html Here's a previous discussion with comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487

For a more detailed analysis, see Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re-litigating_t.html

The cost of 1 gallon of water is something like 1/100th of a cent in most areas. If you want people to conserve water increase its cost, anything else and it will just be "wasted" somewhere else. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/semiconductors.html Note: $27 per acre-foot = 0.008 cents per gallon.

The %ages for English language are all over the place in terms of errors, depending on which source is taken and whether the same words are counted on multiple occurrences.  (see comments http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/the_web_is_brou.html#IDComme… It's a cute post, but I'm not drawing many conclusions from it.

Collapsed investment bank Bear Stearns' required reading list for interns: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/09/09/bears_stearns_r.html

Paul Kedrosky picks him apart here: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/05/david_brooks_go.html

We already have (though it is a fossil fuel) - natural gas (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/08/the_grand_energ.html) - the equivalent of between 80-120 years of equivalent oil consumption (if we switched everything including consumer vehicles over). Conversion of existing vehicles while not cheap, is still viable and not difficult.

Read http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/06/insufficient_in.html for more

"Early this morning Goldman made an awfully timely call, putting out an analyst note at 3:56am PST suggesting that Microsoft should buy Yahoo -- only to freeze analyst coverage of Microsoft at 6:55 AM PST on the news that Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo and it is providing i-banking support" http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/02/01/yahoomicrosoft.html Now that's a coincidence...

Those considering using this finding as a basis for investment might also consider Kedrosky's research comparing the golf handicap of CEOs with the company returns to shareholder: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/000639.html /sarcasm

Yipes, it gets worse. Go here afterward, and it's still telling you about that search: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/06/03/shut_up_about_t.html

losers buying losers. so what. pk has good analysis on this: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/05/04/microsoft_yahoo.html

@broadstuff.com: I'll check back and delete this comment once the site is restored For those trying to get to the page here it is from Bing's cache (Google ironically hasn't cached it yet)... The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul Kedrosky found the same(http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html): Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder. The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999,…