OK, now add a third hot dog stand. What's the nash equilibrium now?
With 3 hot dog stands, they have an incentive to spread out - if you're in the middle of the other two, then you move to the outer side of one of the other two to capture everyone on that side of the beach. This repeats - there is no stable equilibrium.
Right, but this is a trivial idea that's trivial to implement. Facebook would have created this feature with or without the patent system's existence, so the patent is a net loss for society.
Agreed. This post smacks of hubris too - it's fantastic that your social media investments have a viral loop built in, but good luck selling enterprise software without a customer acquisition cost. Maybe your enterprise software is so awesome that customers are beating down your door, but you still need salespeople to close.
A big part of a marketer's job is projecting oneself into the role of a consumer. Jargon can become a distraction from understanding your audience, and this site is a healthy reminder of that.
No, if everyone acted that way then there would be HUGE arbitrage opportunities. In the process of people arbitraging those inefficiencies, the prices would be corrected.
TIPS currently have negative real yields - you pay for the privilege of hedging against inflation. When inflation is expected, TIPS do not necessarily guarantee positive real returns.
Since their core product is an API, they've done a really good job building in all the levels of REST discussed in the article, including discoverability.
As a side note, one interesting difference between owning equities from a company that you started versus that you purchased from savings is that your work invested into the company is NOT taxed.
If you can create $100k of value a year in your own company or earn a salary of $100k (which after taxes nets you only $60k that you can contribute to purchasing assets), it will take you a lot longer to build up the value of your assets. Of course, capital gains distributions from either asset are taxed the same.
If "help" came to mean applying tenets from Positive Psychology, then I'm all for it. If "help" means drugs as so often is the case, then I hope not.
You can spend a lifetime "fixing" all your problems, or you can get on with your life and focus on your positive strengths and learn to manage the negative.
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/
They are allowed to do statistical analysis using such factors as credit score and amount of debt. The difference is that now they can't increase your rate on existing balances. They can still raise your rates, but only if you want to borrow more from them and don't opt to pay off the balance at the previous rate.
This seems much more transparent to me - you are selling a fixed-rate bond, rather than borrowing at a rate subject to their whim.
Rather than abolish software patents, I'd like to see better precedents be set. A software patent should be held to the same fundamental tests (non-obvious, novel, unique) but the bar should be much higher for software because the domain is so fast changing. Many software patents seem very obviously superseded by prior art to anyone in the domain.
I would also love a fourth fundamental test to be added - cost of development. The fundamental purpose of patents is to encourage innovation by allowing investments in developing new technology to be recouped. Devising and implementing a one click shopping system is not a substantial investment.
Unfortunately measuring the "cost" of development gets very complicated and subjective very quickly - accounting for money spent on failed attempts, human capital invested, opportunity cost, etc. Amazon could claim their whole development team was trying to think of innovations and one click shopping was the culmination of all of their efforts.
I disagree with portman. Investment is a function of one input - risk OR return. If you follow the diversification strategy of portfolio theory, then you will generally be choosing a multiple of the market beta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance)
Your risk tolerance dictates an expected rate of return OR your desired rate of return dictates a variance of return. Of course these are averages and YMMV, but over a 30 year period there IS something approaching "steady".
I think your question is perfectly stated, and gives an investment advisor all the information they need to choose an asset allocation.
Some contracts, though, fall under what's called the "statute of frauds" - that means they must be written to become contracts.
From the link you provide, it explains that the statue of frauds makes a contract voidable (either party can break it) but it's still a contract.
Also: 'Sometimes, a party to a contract that would otherwise be invalid under a "statute of frauds" will nonetheless be able to enforce it, on the basis of "partial performance" or "promissory estoppel".'
Seems TechCrunch can reasonably claim partial performance.
Designers resort to snobbery because they operate in a realm where everyone has an opinion, and thus they need to distinguish their opinions from those of the untrained in order to reinforce their value. It's a rational, albeit unfortunate, response.
I disagree with the notion that asking for advice somehow shows he "doesn't have what it takes" to do either. If he's looking for someone else to tell him what to do then that's a problem, but if he's seeking information and perspective from people who have experienced what he is embarking on, that's common sense.
I'm pretty sure a hash, in the ruby context biz2hack has come across it, is best explained as a dictionary. It's an object that maps a set of keys to corresponding values. So you could have a hash that maps fruits to colors {:banana => 'yellow', :strawberry => 'red'} or people to occupations {'Steve Jobs' => 'CEO', 'Barack Obama' => 'President'}
With 3 hot dog stands, they have an incentive to spread out - if you're in the middle of the other two, then you move to the outer side of one of the other two to capture everyone on that side of the beach. This repeats - there is no stable equilibrium.