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Think of this as Volume 15, Number 49 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
It's easy to see when poor people riot. Things get broken. People get killed.
It's not so obvious to see when rich people riot. We tend to think it never happens. Why should they riot – they're rich!
But rich people do riot. They only do it once in a while, when their positions are threatened by their own stupidity. We're in the middle of such a riot right now.
A revolt by the rich doesn't look like one by the poor, because they already have so much power. Especially economic power.
That's the first indication of a rich man's riot. Money goes on strike. Money has been on strike here for a few years, and that strike is now spreading over Europe. There are lots of excuses for money going on strike – debt owed to rich people by rich people is the proximate cause this time – but why else would so many wealthy people, banks and businesses be ignoring the huge opportunities before us, except through a conscious decision?
Another way money goes on strike is by intimating everything is about to get a lot worse. This usually happens after it's gotten a lot worse for the poor. Predictions of apocalypse are a rich man's way of, first, excusing the strike and, second, preparing for the ultimate expression of a rich man's riot.
That's the power grab. Forces representing the tiniest minority try to grab power in the interests of capital. The excuse is order. It's often done in conjunction with other powerful interests – the military, organized religion – who become convinced their interests are also threatened. In any case they say they're going to organize things, make the trains run on time.
We know, from history, what results. The dictatorship of the money-tariat.
We're blinded to all this because the only result of such a successful strike, in our complex global society, became such a byword for unspeakable horror that, while we may speak its name, we refuse to accept it for what it was.
Fascism.
A lot of “green” advocates are feeling blue right now.
Google has dropped its energy efforts. There won't be a new green treaty any time soon.
This is, in fact, good news.
It's further evidence that the market is moving toward real energy solutions. Headlines from a new IEA report on renewables are a call for more favorable policies, but renewable energy “now accounts for almost a fifth of all electricity produced worldwide.”
What's really happening is that opportunity is starting to dawn. The market is taking over from the policy advocates. If you want change, bet on the market.
It's widely assumed that next year's elections will be a conflict between people power and the money power.
How will that go? Bank of America is the canary in the coal mine.
Since the Occupy movement first began targeting Bank of America, stock symbol BAC, for its proposed debit card fee, the company has been buying ad time like mad.
The ads show happy retail customers getting “great services” from the bank, through its cards. And they show happy small businesspeople whom, it's inferred, are getting loans from the bank.
The company has backed this up with a PR campaign, resulting in headlines like this one from the LA Times.
Think of this as Volume 15, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Making money online, for myself and for publishers, has literally been my life's work.
I started in the spring of 1985, over a quarter of a century ago. In the years since I have found many business models try and fail, many compensation models try and fail. But I've also found something that works, and I want to offer it to you now.
It's a modified pay-per-view structure, very similar to what I've seen work at ZDNet and (more recently) Seeking Alpha, which I began writing for this June. Setting it up is as simple as being able to measure page views, assign a value to those page views, and link page counts to the names of authors.
Seeking Alpha's model is very simple, a penny per page view. If you get 1,000 people to read your “premium” content, that's $10. Average 150,000 page views per month, as many writers with something to say can, and it's $1,500 – not a serious salary but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Democracy won the Cold War because it could adapt more quickly to change than communism.
But it doesn't adapt as quickly as the Internet. No system of government can. (To the right, Hasbro's "Monopoly man" trademark.)
Markets can. Sort of. Markets have taken advantage of Internet technology to move very quickly in the Internet age. Too quickly. What has happened is an arms race, in which those with the best technology, the classiest algorithms, and the fastest executions skim the cream of every trend.
Back in 1971, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) was just starting to put money against what would become the Internet.
It was a good use of money. Not just because the Internet would revolutionize the world, but because the development of new technologies, accelerating change, was the best way to fight and destroy the forces of international communism.
Communism couldn't adapt to rapid change, you see. Capitalism could.
It's a pity we don't have such an enemy today, or I'm sure conservatives would be among those cheering the funding (and failure of) Solyndra and Beacon Power .
Solyndra you've heard of. Beacon Power was another government-backed start-up, this one in the area of energy storage. They had gotten 7% of the industrial power storage market when they went under, taking their government loan guarantees with them.
My larger point is this. Solyndra was a good deal for the government. So was Beacon Power. It was a good investment, even if it went up in smoke. And for the same reason the Internet was a good investment, because its aim was to accelerate change.
Think of this as Volume 15, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Here's a date to put in your calendar. 2016.
That's the year, give or take, when solar energy becomes the cheap energy. That's when efficiency on every level – panels, materials, installation, channels – reaches a point where it's cheaper to buy-and-install one than to buy electricity from the meter.
That's also the year when, I predict, you'll start seeing solar systems at places like Home Depot and Lowe's. They won't look like today's panels. They'll be Building Integrated PhotoVoltaics – things you can slap on a wall, a door, a window, plug in, and get juice from. These are the PCs of the new industry.
Fossil fuel advocates are doing everything they can to put off this day:
They're attacking the industry for its subsidies (while keeping quiet about their own).
They're selling the idea of cheap, abundant natural gas (while ignoring the dangers of fracking).
They're pushing for commitments on nuclear power and pipelines to capture oil shale.
All these efforts are, in the short run, fairly successful. The oil industry has vast wealth. It can buy government support.
But in the end it fails. Moore's Law wins, as it always has in the past.
The problem with the NBA isn't 47% or 53%. It's not the mid-cap exception. It's not the distrust of owners like Michael Jordan and players like Derek Fisher.
The problem is that revenues aren't growing. The problem is a lot of clubs aren't making a profit.
So here's a modest proposal.
Expansion. To the Far East.
Right now there are 30 teams. Add two. Sell them, maybe to Shanghai and Beijing. Now you sell six existing clubs to entrepreneurs in Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul and Osaka.
See, Michael Jordan gets out of Charlotte. The Sacramento Kings are no longer your problem. The Milwaukee Bucks become the Yuan. Every other small market team is shivering wondering if they'll be next, and three will be.
In all the hullabaloo going on about Greece and now Italy, an important point is being ignored.
Historically, birth and death can look like the same thing.
In fact they often are the same thing. If you were a royalist, the French Revolution was death. If you were a democrat it looked like birth. In fact it was the death of the 18th century and, in many ways, the birth of the modern world.
Every big event in history is the start of something new. The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't the “end of history.” It was the start of a new chapter. In many ways, a better chapter. A chapter that took 20 years to open because Americans were so wrapped up in their Cold War mentality that their first reaction was to start another war, ironically against religious extremism little different from what our own system was harboring.
Europe has done much the same thing. They created economic integration piecemeal, half-assed. Their struggle now is to finish the job.
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