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thinkahol *

The Money Party - The Essence of our Political Troubles | The Economic Populist - 0 views

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    The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us. As 2008 approaches, The Money Party is working hard to maintain its perfect record. It is not about Republicans versus Democrats. Right now, the Republicans do a better job taking money than the Democrats. But The Money Party is an equal opportunity employer. They have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. Democrats are as welcome as Republicans to this party. It's all good when you're on the take and the take is legal. This is not a conspiracy theory. There are no secret societies or sinister operators. This party is up front and in your face. Just follow the money. One percent of Americans hold 33% of the nation's wealth. The top 10% hold 72% of the total wealth. The bottom 40% of Americans control only 0.3% (three tenths of one percent). And that was before "pay day loans."
thinkahol *

YouTube - 2.3 TRillion $$ of the TAXPAYER's MONEY IS MISSING - 0 views

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    This video became interesting to me simply because of the fact it was announced 1 day prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks in the U.S. Why has there been no mention of the massive amount of the taxpayers money gone missing? It is almost as though after the 9/11 tragedy it was forgotten. I don't know about the other citizens of the United States but I would like to know where 2.3 TRILLION dollars has gone. I believe when we as taxpayers give our hard earnings to the government is it not their responsibility to explain where the money is being spent? Was this case forgotten? If so, WHY? I would like to know where this money has gone. Wouldn't you?
thinkahol *

xkcd: Money - 0 views

shared by thinkahol * on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
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    XKCD produces another fantastic infographic, this time about all the money in the economy. Ridiculously awesome.
Johann Höchtl

Hacker News | Facebook is not worth $33 billion - 0 views

  • The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.
  • The bond and equity markets are based on sound regulation, transparency, and quarterly statements. Facebook has none of those things when it operates in the dark of the secondary markets.
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    Lenghty read Spolsky vs. dhh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky about the valuation of Facebook and SNS
Parycek

What Do We Want? Our Data. When Do We Want It? Now! | Epicenter | Wired.com - 0 views

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    Predictions about the appeal of cloud computing were on the money. We increasingly share, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves with software and media on remote servers rather than on our own computers. But a big catch prevents more of us from investing much time or money in ephemeral digital media or constantly-changing online services: It can be difficult, if not impossible, to grab your stuff and split.
Parycek

Texas Transparency - 0 views

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    Where the Money GoesYou pay for your government, and you deserve to know how it spends your money. Use the tools and information on this page to search the state check register, track state spending and see your tax dollars at work.
Johann Höchtl

Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency | Bitcoin - 1 views

  • Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency.
  • Bitcoin transactions are practically free
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    Money transfer the p2p way
thinkahol *

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do | Truthout - 1 views

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    You hear it again and again, varia­tion after varia­tion on a core mes­sage: if you tax rich peo­ple it kills jobs. You hear about "job-killing tax hikes," or that "tax­ing the rich hurts jobs," "taxes kill jobs," "taxes take money out of the economy, "if you tax the rich they won't be able to pro­vide jobs." ... on and on it goes. So do we rea­l­ly de­pend on "the rich" to "create" jobs? Or do jobs get created when they fill a need?
thinkahol *

We Stand With the Majority of Americans: Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed | October 2011 - 0 views

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    A large majority of the American people consistently support the following agenda: Tax the rich and corporations End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages Get money out of politics
Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
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  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
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    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Johann Höchtl

Obama's small donor base image is a myth, new study reveals | Top of the Ticket | Los A... - 0 views

  • In fact, Obama's base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as George W. Bush's in 2004 -- Obama had 26% and the great Republican satan 25%. Obviously, this is unacceptable to current popular thinking.
  • The myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama's finances
  • It comes down to which definition of "small donor" you accept
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  • But not as impressive as the $210 million he'd raised by then from bundlers and large donors
Johann Höchtl

National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App - 0 views

  • About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.
  • When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.
  • To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others.  Not to make a profit. …and today National Rail killed it.
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  • the page on London Datastore has now been locked.  “Access Denied”.  Possibly because a lot of discussion appeared on there which was critical of ATOC’s decision to extract money from users of the service
  •  If you’re a user of the application and disagree with National Rail’s greed in trying to make money out of a data source which was hitherto free, I can only suggest you email nrelicensing@atoc.org and express your concerns.
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    Open Data API von National Railway UK wurde geschlossen - die Daten können potentiell zu viel Geld bringen
thinkahol *

Organizing Help Wanted | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at-not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.
thinkahol *

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? - 0 views

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    Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?
thinkahol *

The Plutocrat's Coup d'Etat, Their Republican Allies and Their Democratic Enablers | Co... - 0 views

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    For thirty years, now, Republicans have been yammering about small government, deficits, the glories of the free market, and the incompetence and wastefulness of government. It's all been a big lie, part of a well funded and cleverly executed coup d'etat, designed to enable the ultra rich and corporations to literally take power out of the hands of government and money out of the pockets of individual citizens.
thinkahol *

YouTube - ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARD | OFFICIAL RELEASE | 2011 - 0 views

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    This is the Official Online (Youtube) Release of "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" by Peter Joseph. [30 subtitles ADDED!] On Jan. 15th, 2011, "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" was released theatrically to sold out crowds in 60 countries; 31 languages; 295 cities and 341 Venues. It has been noted as the largest non-profit independent film release in history. This is a non-commercial work and is available online for free viewing and no restrictions apply to uploading/download/posting/linking - as long as no money is exchanged. A Free DVD Torrent of the full 2 hr and 42 min film in 30 languages is also made available through the main website [below], with instructions on how one can download and burn the movie to DVD themselves. His other films are also freely available in this format.
thinkahol *

Technology: Necessary but Insufficient for Human Survival | Thinkahol's Blog - 0 views

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    In the context of technology the only way out is through. Global society is dependent on artificially inflated energy resources-i.e. oil-that are directly leading us toward total collapse. Technology is being used to most efficiently maximize wealth of the largest corporate conglomerates at the expense of the social fabric and a living environment. The biosphere is in fact collapsing. The technology exists to solve our technical problems but the solutions do not seem like they will be effectively put to use. The power structures concentrating money off the status quo are too entrenched. Each human is called on to become more aware.
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