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Charging Extra For 3D Is A Mistake

We all know that the music and movie industries have been crippled by the digital revolution of the last 10 years. Some blame piracy and filesharing, others (including me) blame the economics. Regardless of the cause, we can all still agree that these are two giant industries brought to their knees by the internet… right? [...]

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My Two Wallets

Reducing The Social Cost Of Blood Donations

In my professional life I often spend time thinking about how much people value a product or service in an effort to estimate the prices they might be willing to pay. One of the biggest mistakes I always make in these evaluations is that I put too much emphasis on money. Lately I’ve been seeing [...]

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The Tragedy Of Haiti and Crippling Debt

To quote Dan Bordeaux in a letter to the Washington Times: The ultimate tragedy in Haiti isn’t the earthquake; it’s that country’s lack of economic freedom.  The earthquake simply but catastrophically revealed the inhuman consequences of this fact. Since the disaster many people have been urging world governments to “drop the debt” that Haiti owes. [...]

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Economics and Ecology

I’m a big fan of the VlogBrothers, two brothers who make daily youtube videos addressed to each other (but also to a wider audience). In today’s video one of the brothers, Hank, attempts to give the other brother – and the rest of the viewers – a quick overview of “Ecosystem Services“. To quote Hank [...]

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Murdoch’s Paywall

There has been a lot debate online recently surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s change of mind about paywalls for his online newspapers. I’ve been reading a huge number of arguments on both sides (including a 40min video interview with Rupert himself) and am sad to say that most of them seem to be missing the point. Earlier [...]

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