Isegoria

The times, they are a-changin’. Retailers used to gear up for Black Friday. Now Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy ‘Black Monday’:

With the rapid expansion of the Internet, the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown to be the all-important kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. On that day, consumers head back to work — and their computers — ready to shop after the long holiday weekend.

Last year, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the peak day for online transactions, according to VeriSign Payment Services, a unit of eBay Inc.’s PayPal that processes electronic payments for about 150,000 online merchants. Some 77% of online retailers said their sales increased noticeably that day, according to a recent survey by e-commerce company Shopzilla Inc. and industry group Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, which is calling the day “Cyber Monday.”

Before computers, how did anyone look busy at work?

Throughout the year, Monday is typically the biggest sales day of the week for many online retailers, many of which have expanded their Web sites considerably, so they’re more like online catalogs.

Some 30% of online jewelry seller Blue Nile Inc.’s weekly sales happen on Mondays, for example, and then sales taper off as the week goes on, says CEO Mark Vadon. “Our biggest time of the day is right at lunchtime,” he says. “You can almost see the wave as it changes time zones.”

In Nutrition and crime? Sounds way too good to be true, Steven Levitt cites a fascinating article:

The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26 percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the placebo group showed no change.

Theodore Dalrymple’s The Starving Criminal makes a similar observation, noting that members of the criminal underclass rarely sit down to dinner, often go without food while on drugs, and even consider prison a good opportunity to fatten back up before hitting the streets again.

Jeff Cornwall explains why looking at external financing isn’t a good way to study Entrepreneurial Finance Around the Globe:

Almost four out of five start-ups in the US use some combination of self-financing and/or friends and family. The next largest source is debt financing. Less than one percent use equity financing.

Phillip Torrone has this to say about his Laser etched Powerbook:

I didn’t really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17′ Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also the vi book cover image, from O’Reilly), but it seemed like it had to done.

UFC 56: Full Force was held last night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Nevada. It pitted both of the coaches from this last season of The Ultimate Fighter, Rich Franklin and Matt Hughes, against lesser foes.

As you can see, Franklin knocked out — or KTFOed, as the fans say — Nate Quarry, and Hughes submitted Joe “Diesel” Riggs with a “Kimura” shoulder lock.

In Tribal Yearnings, Roger Sandall notes that Hawaiians are trying to be recognized as an Indian tribe, and he offers up Karl Popper’s thoughts on tribalism:

In his account of Heraclitus, a philosopher whose motto was “everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest”, Popper claims that the very idea of ubiquitous change was “revolutionary”. At the time, hardly anyone thought of culture in this way, especially given “the stability and rigidity of social life in a tribal aristocracy.” Where hierarchic settings of this sort prevailed, everything “is determined by social and religious taboos; everybody has his assigned place within the whole of the social structure; everyone feels that his place is the proper, the ‘natural’ place, assigned to him by the forces which rule the world; everyone ‘knows his place’”.

It might be useful to point out that this exactly fits every Polynesian culture ever known, including that of old-time Honolulu. Before the retribalization of Hawaii gets much further its advocates should perhaps take a look where they’re heading. But joking aside, the fact is that an intense conservatism regulated and controlled an entire hierarchic social order, just as Popper said it did, and because of this social change took place very slowly—and rarely as a result of rational discussion. True, change did sometimes occur, but “the comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conversions or revulsions, or of the introduction of new magical taboos.”

He thought there was something of this quasi-religious character to be seen in the rise of Nazism and Communism too. Both grew from the same socio-psychological roots as the political theorising of men like Plato over two thousand years ago—the “strain of civilization”, a generalised anxiety about the drift of events, a feeling that cultural breakdown is imminent, that familiar things are disintegrating, that everything known and valued is about to collapse and we won’t be able to stop it.

“I suppose that what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in a footnote, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.”

In ‘Data Never Tell a Story; They Must Be Interpreted’ David R. Henderson looks at socialized (and semi-socialized) medicine:

When governments run medical systems, they systematically overprovide services of general practitioners and underprovide specialists’ services. That way, they can look good to the majority of citizens, who are healthy and who judge the system by whether they can get a doctor’s appointment, not by whether they must wait 40 weeks from referral by a general practitioner to surgery by an orthopedist.

Roy Spencer explains that The Killer That Matters Most to Africans is not global warming:

What is killing Africans in greatest numbers is poverty, and international trade policies that prevent Africans from protecting themselves from diseases that are easily preventable. The Ambassador mentioned pressure from environmentalists in wealthy nations that has prevented the construction of hydroelectric dams in Africa, denying electricity to millions of people. Two billion of the Earth’s inhabitants still do not have access to electricity, leading to massive death tolls from problems such as food-borne illnesses (due to a lack of refrigeration) and pneumonia brought on by breathing air contaminated by the burning of dung or wood for heat and cooking. Anyone that has had to suffer through a loss of electricity for any length of time becomes quickly aware of how necessary electricity is for daily life.

Glenn Reynolds explains the nature of the firm in How Big Can Small Get?:

One of the things we teach law students is that a corporation isn’t really a thing, but a web of contracts. A big corporation is a bigger web of contracts than a small one, but lots of times the differences aren’t as significant as they might seem. A small corporation that contracts out its design work to another company, its manufacturing to various others, and relies on other corporations to do the actual retail selling is doing pretty much the same things as a big corporation that keeps all those activities under one roof. The shape is different, but the web of contracts is just as big either way.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no difference at all. In fact, for a variety of technological and sociological reasons, the different configurations might behave pretty differently. But it’s not really because of size, but because of the way the different components interact.

In the really old days, prior to the industrial revolution, there were no real advantages to hugeness. 1,000 blacksmiths pounding on anvils weren’t any more efficient per capita than a single blacksmith working alone. In fact, with the overhead for management, they were probably less so. Powered equipment and division of labor changed things, though, as we learned ways to make 1,000 people working together far more than 1,000 times as productive as a single individual, even allowing for the inevitable management overhead and idiocies.

Now things have changed again. In many fields, the individuals may actually be more productive on their own than they would be as part of big organizations, where time that could be spent on productive matters is instead spent in endless meetings, at diversity-training retreats, and the like. And easy communications and coordination, thanks to computers and other modern technology allow those individuals to be coordinated without nearly as much overhead.

This is where one difference between big and small organizations presents itself. In a small organization, people deal mostly with customers and suppliers. They get ahead mostly by making both (but especially the customers) happy. In big organizations, people mostly deal with other people within the organization, and they get ahead mostly by making those people happy. Pleasing customers is a way to get ahead only to the extent that it also pleases the bosses, and if you have to choose whom to please, you’re better off pleasing your boss than your customer.

In The Torturous World of Powerpoint, Brad Felt presents “a list of questions that a pitch to a VC should address”:

1. What is your vision?
2. What is your market opportunity and how big is it?
3. Describe your product/service
4. who is your customer?
5. What is your value proposition?
6. How are you selling?
7. How do you acquire customers?
8. Who is your management team?
9. What is your revenue model?
10. What stage of development are you at?
11. What are your plans for fund raising?
12. Who is your competition?
13. What partnerships do you have?
14. How do you fit with the prospective investor?
15. Other