How does your mindset affect your financial success?
Nonlinearly. First, positively with increasing marginality. Then, with decreasing marginality. And, finally, negatively.
PROMPT: Financial Success
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Tag Archives: economics
PROMPT: Best Purchase
I can’t claim I’ve ever done as well as Peter Minuit (buying Manhattan for $24) or Thomas Jefferson (picking up the Louisiana Territory at $0.04 / acre,) or the USG (acquiring Alaska for $0.02 / acre.)
I once bought a nice stick (which still have,) but it was not a tremendous bargain.
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BOOK: “The Attention Merchants” by Tim Wu
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim WuMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher Site — Penguin
This book explores the evolution of capturing attention for commercial purposes. It delves into the history of attention economics from the development of print ads to the pursuit of virality via the internet and social media. Wu outlines how different media (e.g. print, radio, television, cable tv, and the internet) learned different lessons about how to make advertising work given the unique nature of each platform. The book also offers insight into how advertising spawned a market for people’s personal consumer information as the internet era began to allow companies to target ads for maximum effect, rather than using the scattershot approach that was all that was available to radio and broadcast television.
I found this book to be informative and it’s a subject of which people should be aware. William James famously said, “…what we attend to is reality.” If James was right, our reality is being shaped by forces that often remain outside our awareness. If you are curious about the attention economy, this is a highly readable overview of the subject.
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PROMPT: 20 Years
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
I think cell phones will be replaced by cheap cyborg implants that fulfill the same myriad functions and more. Just as we were convinced that we were being given a great benefit with social media, when — in fact — we were just handing over our attention and data on the cheap. This time we’ll be signing away a great deal more — we’ll be meat puppets for the billionaires, carrying out consumption function programming as ignorantly blissful as Cypher from The Matrix. Welcome to the Cyber-Sheep economy. BAHaaaaah.
Proviso: People (me included) are shite at forecasting. We call broken clocks “genius” based on those two times a day they are right, but forecasting genius is just selection bias plus Mrs. Cleo pseudo-psychic tactics (be vague, sound specific.) Also, remember we are always one nuclear winter away from flint knapping being the prevailing mode of technology.
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PROMPT: Loyal Subscribers
I don’t know and I kind of hate the term “loyal” applied to commercial and / or attention capturing domains. There can’t be any reasonable expectation that someone who bought your product once (either in cash or attention) owes you their attention and / or dollars in the future. If the answer is anything else than do your best work EVERY. SINGLE. TIME, then I think we’ve jumped the shark as a species.
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PROMPT: Minimalism
Absolutely. The IKEA Nesting Instinct has run amok, and Consumer is a definitionally discontented state of being.
Personally, I hate that I know what a duvet is.
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PROMPT: Emojis
I use my own system of criticism that inverts the usual scale, meaning that getting a zero (turds) is quite good (and increasingly rare,) and — unlike stars — if you ever reach a five-turd rating you are truly the worst. It saves time in conveying my thoughts on all sorts of things.
Try to live your life:
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PROMPT: Don’t Understand
The substance of financial crises. Not to mention Quantum Mechanics and Calculus. Really, there’s virtually nothing that most people do understand. Have you met most people? They’re kind of dim.
But seriously, the thing that has been striking me lately is how often zero-sum thinking is applied to non-zero-sum games. Put simply, people often believe they are in a situation in which every gain by someone else corresponds to a loss for them, when that is often not the case. Manipulation to convince people otherwise is in full swing. People are being led to believe they have to worry if others are complimented or are doing well because it reflects poorly on them, when — in fact — it does not (necessarily.)
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PROMPT: Budgeting
First, use what you’ve got to put food in your face. If there’s left over, acquire suitable shelter. If there’s some left, buy a book.
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The Industrial Disease [Lyric Poem]
I heard the last gasp and wheeze
of Industry's fatal disease.
Why would we need any workers?
We don't need factories!
We'll grow it all from nanobots
in a closet where you please.
There'll be a 3-D printer, printing
printers endlessly.
You won't hear another mention
of Industrial Disease.
The question is not how or where
to make it, that'll be a breeze.
The question on economist's minds...
that strains their expertise.
Is how will slobs who have no jobs
pay for their indices?
