If Project Wonderful is like the stock market, then it ought to have indexes, right? Even if it isn't, it seems like an index of the overall level of prices on Project Wonderful would be useful. I've observed that the bid prices on my own ad boxes seem to all go up and down more or less in synch with each other, and also in synch with the prices on others' boxes. There are also theoretical reasons to expect that. It seems like a lot of the money being bid on ad boxes in general is recycled ad revenue from other boxes, so when some boxes go up there's more money to spend on others. There's also stuff going on like campaign bids (which make up almost all the incoming bids I see) all resetting at midnight and then running out of funds over the course of the day, so we'd expect overall prices to rise and fall on a daily cycle. How do we know the current status of overall prices? How do we verify things like what I said a year ago about large sites being more expensive than small sites? [2233 words...] (9 March 2008)
I've been thinking some more about the issues I raised in my earlier How to run a conspiracy posting. Here are some ideas that build on that. [2396 words...] (27 February 2008)
With the new year I'm introducing a new top-level category on my Web site for "economics"; some past postings that fit in there have been moved into the new category, which will probably break links. Anyway, today's new item is from an article in Science News on the place of highly influential individuals (called "influentials") in viral propagation of ideas. New research by Watts and Dodds (PDF preprint) suggests that such individuals aren't so important after all; if you want lots of people to adopt something, you're actually better off concentrating on the most easily influenced people in the population, so as to get as many of those as possible. Sheer numbers are the important factor, not having the adopters be the more influential members of the population. [1665 words...] (6 January 2008)
It seems like the holy grail of social networking is the "only Cool people" security level. Whoever figures out how to do that and have it really work properly will make a huge amount of money; but since it's probably not actually possible, that's going to be difficult. [3009 words...] (12 August 2007)
Yo, PimpMaster C here, to tell you all about the pump and dump. I know you ladies in the audience probably have a thing or two to say about that shit too, but this is not a romance advice column; I'm talking about the financial concept. It's a way to make serious bling by basically just convincing other foos to give it to you. UPDATE: Check it, my academic homies Frieder and Zittrain have wrote a paper about those pump'n'dump stock spams you get. Go read it (you gots to have Javascript to download the PDF), and don't be falling for that shit, yo. [1707 words...] (22 January 2007)
This morning I had an idea that I think is pretty cool. I think I may have figured out why governments (especially the US government) behave the way they do with respect to intellectual property (especially copyrights). It's not because of bribes or stupidity: it's actually because copyright extension is their way of temporarily averting financial ruin for themselves and their citizens. UPDATE: My video presentation on this topic, from OpenCity 2005, is now available through Lulu. [5270 words...] (29 December 2006)
Today I received a notice in a big important-looking envelope from the Canada Revenue Agency/Agence du revenu du Canada, notifying me that last November the Minister of finance had announced certain changes to the income tax system, too late for them to be included in package of forms I've already received, and so here are some replacement forms and a helpful summary of what has changed. [1335 words...] (17 January 2006)
Yo, this is PimpMaster C again. Today I'm gonna tell you about call options, which are kind of like a financial version of the coupons yo momma might clip from the supermarket flyer. A call option is something you can buy that lets you buy something else later at a guaranteed price, if you want to. [1423 words...] (23 September 2005)
Yo, I gots a way of understanding the price of shit without seeing the short-term fluctuations that could confuse you. This is PimpMaster C telling you about the simple moving average. [944 words...] (1 September 2005)
Yo, it's PimpMaster C again. I sent my homies around the hood to round up a bunch of pimps, and I lined them up here to give you a really clear type of description of how isoutility curves work. Check it, that term sounds a lot like "isoelastic utility", which I told you about before, and the two concepts are indeed related, but it's important to keep straight that they are two different things. Anyway, here are the pimps, arranged on a chart according to how happy they are with their investment portfolios. [1637 words...] (18 August 2005)
Yo, this is PimpMaster C, with a little help from my homies in the graphics department of the PimpMaster C enterprise. We managed to solve our Etch-a-Sketch problems and get the images into the computer. I don't wanna go into too much detail on that because it was boring as Hell, but let me just say that only a real foo buys a low-riding parallel port scanner without checking the hydraulics first. Anyway, it's time to tell you all about domination. That's a way of saying when one investment is better than another, and it leads to a thing called the efficiency frontier. [1419 words...] (12 August 2005)
Yo, PimpMaster C here. Sorry about the long time since my last posting; business has been pretty good and I kinda forgot. Also, I was writing up a lengthy article on domination for the portfolio theory series, and I put Letitia to work making some bitching graphics of risk versus return, and everything was going pretty well until the Etch-a-Sketch broke. Check it, all the grey powder fell out on the floor, and that shit is difficult to replace. We been trying all kinds of grey powders down here and so far none of them have worked properly. While Tish continues with the research, let me tell you about stop orders. [1177 words...] (9 August 2005)
I've been feeling pretty unmotivated for most of the Summer, and so there's a fair bit of stuff I'd like to write comments on for this site and haven't yet. I'll probably get to all the most important items eventually, but bear with me. On the plus side, I have actually been getting some real work done at school. So they'll probably keep paying me. I also spent an embarassingly large amount of time on the weekend playing with the eLouai doll maker; my excuse is that I made a new and nicer set of unit graphics for one of my back-burner Xconq game projects, which may never see the light of day anyway, but I was having fun. Anyway, in a spoken-word segment on an album I recently downloaded, Steve Earle says, "Well, things have been really fucking weird down South. And they're gonna get even weirder." It's a couple years since that was recorded and it keeps getting truer. I was trying to pretend that the proposed Daylight Saving Time rescheduling was just a bad joke, but no, it appears that they're really serious about it. [1047 words...] (8 August 2005)
Mainland China has announced that it will relax its currency peg, allowing the exchange rate between the Chinese yuan and the US dollar to fluctuate. They aren't going to a full float, which was what the USA had been calling for, but nobody really expected they would; instead, they say they'll be pegging the yuan fairly tightly (though not with the absolute rigidity of the old dollar peg) to a basket of foreign currencies, the makeup of the basket not yet disclosed. The immediate effect will be to raise the yuan to 8.11 per US dollar from its former 8.28; that's a 2.1 percent increase in its dollar value. Not so many people care, but Malaysia is doing the same thing with its currency, the ringgit. US dollars are down and other currencies (the Japanese yen and Indian rupee are getting a lot of mention, but our Canadian dollar is in there too) are up. News stories in lots of places, my favourites being TheStreet.com, MoneyControl.com, and TheEdgeDaily, that last one covering the Malaysian side in particular. [699 words...] (21 July 2005)
Yo, this is PimpMaster C. I know you all want to hear more of that portfolio theory shit, but that is some pretty difficult shit and so while I work on perfecting the next installment, here's a note on something much simpler, namely market orders and limit orders. These things come up when someone is acting as your agent or broker to buy or sell shit on your behalf. You and the dealer can make whatever deal you want, but there are certain kinds of deals that are pretty common and that have special names. [1904 words...] (19 July 2005)
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