Someone should sell fraud insurance

I think we should allow people to buy fraud insurance, in case they get taken in by a scam. We can base their premiums on a test for gullibility.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Really, though, I'd need some harder evidence on scam victims first.
PPS - which would probably be incomplete, since people won't want to admit it.

Haggling

To me, the idea of haggling over price assumes a kind of fundamental dishonesty of the human race. I realise that some salespeople will try to get away with something by pricing their goods high, and that sometimes they need to be called out on that. My problem is when this becomes the normal state of affairs. When you have to assume that all prices are negotiable because all items are overpriced to begin with, it starts to feel like we're wasting our time together. Just tell me what you think is a reasonable price. Don't make me work to extract this information from you with a dance of offers and counter-offers including a big show of how much it would hurt your business to give away these goods for this lowered price.

That's how it feels to me. We begin with a lie (the initial asking price), then we proceed to histrionics and performance (haggling) until we finally arrive at the accepted price, which is, if this has gone right for you, the vendor, higher than the true acceptable price.

You can't compare in that environment. Vendors can't compete on price, because all prices are fluid. You can't shop around without doing the haggling dance at every vendor, but by the time you finish with one of them, that is assumed to be a completed sale.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do know some people who love that game, though.
PPS - So maybe it's me. I find it insulting, exhausting and inefficient.

Why phone companies won't take excess data charges from unused call credit

You know what would be awesome? If my additional data charges could be taken from my unused call credit on my mobile phone plan. See, I get about $300 of call credits on my phone every month, and I use maybe $20 of it on average. I also get 300MB of data and use about 700MB which, on my provider (Vodafone) means I get a $10 charge for an additional 1GB of data credit. So, I'm just thinking, why can't that $10 charge come from my unused call credit? I'll even let you triple the charge if it makes you feel better.

Of course I know why this doesn't happen: revenue. If you start letting customers flex their charges between call credit and data, well, phone company revenues would take a hit. The only way to make it up would be if that type of plan attracted all the customers of other companies, too. Then, of course, they'd start doing the same thing and the only winners would be the customers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that sentence is board-room poison.
PPS - Still, it's nice to dream.

The full cost of cheap software

You should always count the ongoing cost of software you buy for your business. You might pay less for a particular package, but if it takes a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain to do the job you want it to do, the long-term cost is more than other software that's easier to use. Even if that other software costs more up front, the lower maintenance costs will quickly overtake the "cheaper" option.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, consider how rare and expensive are the skills needed for the software.
PPS - There are a lot of factors to consider.

Are backer rewards worth it?

Do backer perks kill or at least bog down creative projects funded through Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites? If I were attempting a project like that, I'd be surprised if I didn't spend half my time signing things and shipping them out, rather than doing the actual project. And a significant amount of the funding would have to go to those backer rewards, too, which leaves less available for the actual project. That could easily be a trap that creative people fall into when asking for crowdfunding money. If you think you'll need $100K to complete your project, and you reach that goal, but you have to spend $50K on backer rewards, you're going to fail, because you're really only half-funded. Or if you're making some new device and you promise one to every backer, then you fund your whole first production run, send them all off to backers and you're back to square one.

While I realise that backer rewards are something people can easily comprehend, I think crowdfunding should probably work more like ordinary venture capital. I invest in your project, you make it happen, I get dividends in return from your sales. If I want a copy of the movie, TV show, nifty gadget, I can buy one like anyone else. Freebies for backers work pretty well if you've got two big investors. Throw them a bone to sweeten the deal. Why not? But if you're funded by ten thousand of your biggest fans, then you give away the work to them afterwards, I think the money would all just form a complete circle and cancel itself out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Presumably, though, you learn some stuff.
PPS - And are in a good position to start a second run, if you made any profit.

The problem with prison

Before our morality fully develops, we picture prison as a place where bad people go to be punished. We don't want prison to be a comfortable or nice place, because it's for bad people. A lot of people never really grow out of that mental image.

The problem with prison, to me, is that criminals are a drain on society whether they're in prison or out. Economically, the best result of prison sentences should be rehabilitation - turning criminals into non-criminals. That doesn't happen automatically, and it doesn't work on everyone, but it should definitely be the goal. Otherwise, we're losing to criminal enterprises on the outside, or we're paying a large amount to keep criminals locked up. If we can, instead, vastly reduce the rate of reoffences, we'll start seeing some economic benefit. It will take a lot of time for society to change its collective mind about criminals, but if we can view prison as more of a hospital for criminal minds, rather than a dark pit we put people we'd rather not deal with, that will be a start.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are probably fewer criminals unable to be rehabilitated than you think.
PPS - Or I'm a naive optimist.

How to punish financial crime

The punishment for financial crime should be the surrendering of your entire net worth, right down to the bone, with a 10% "finder's fee" allocated to the auditor (or whoever) that discovers the fraud (or whatever). The beautiful part is that this becomes a self-policing system. If you, as an investigator, are tempted to look the other way for a bribe, you become the very type of person the other regulators are chasing, and you risk your entire fortune as a result. If you manage to hide your assets under some other person's name, you make them an accomplice and they forfeit everything, too.

It doesn't even have to act as a deterrent, because you'd be systematically stripping the corrupt of their hard-stolen cash and at the very least forcing them to start over while the government finally gets all the taxes they've dodged over the years and then some. Everyone wins except the people who defrauded the system. And their dependents, actually, I suppose. Still, with the government suddenly coming into these huge piles of cash, there should be plenty to allocate to welfare systems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might be hard to get at the cash if it's in offshore banks.
PPS - And this might be kind of extreme, but we're in extreme wealth disparity right now.

Snowdrift could fund free software

I really like the idea put forward by snowdrift.coop, encouraging people to set aside some money to fund beneficial open-source projects so that everyone can benefit. The more people pledge to support a given project, the more funding that project gets, growing exponentially. On the receiving end, it seems like a great way to get this kind of project funded, since the people - particularly big companies - each give a little money to build up the common goods in software.

On the other hand, it still relies on charitable giving. Yes, if you fund the development of, say, OpenSSL, which almost everyone uses, then you get active development and the benefits of a well-supported library with motivated developers and proper funding instead of a library casually (but passionately) developed by volunteers in their spare time. But if everyone else funds the project and you don't, you still get that benefit. I'm not clear how Snowdrift solves that problem, except that witholding your funding means a greater chance that the development will stall and you won't get the benefits at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which is just a statement of the snowdrift problem, I realise.
PPS - I'm not quite sure if that counts as circular.

Preventing monopolies

Monopolies are bad. We know that. Oligopolies, where a few big businesses control most of the market, are also bad. So what factors make an acceptable level of competition, or what features flag an unacceptable level of complacent non-competition? It's tricky. I think it's more complicated than realising how much of the market is controlled by how many companies. Presumably, though, there's some number of companies required to make conspiracy untenable. I'd guess it's about twelve, the number of people we put on a jury in the understanding that such a group is too hard to sway as a whole. Whatever the number is, we need at least that many companies competing in every market to prevent monopolistic practices.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Making sure that happens is going to be crazy-difficult.
PPS - Especially when someone creates a brand new product.

The lottery prediction meta-lottery

For the low price of one dollar, I will predict for you whether you will win the lottery this week. I guarantee 99.9% accuracy or your money back. Think about the money you'll save by only paying me $1 on weeks when you would have lost anyway, when it costs much more than that to enter the lottery!

Now I'm going to spoil my business plan by telling you this: I'll just always answer "no", and it still works, because all I've done is set up a cheaper lottery with almost no payout (in part because, if you pay me for my prediction and you win anyway, I'm the least of your concerns).

The only problem is if someone pays me my dollar, I tell them "no win", then they pick the winning numbers without playing and sue me for the prize money they should have won.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, the only way to prove you "would have" won is to actually register the entry.
PPS - And it's probably not going to happen anyway, because that's how lotteries work.

Capitalism is zero-sum

Is there such a thing as a capitalist economy where everyone wins? I think not. Capitalism is zero-sum. There's no such thing as making money, only taking money, so for you to "win" at capitalism, someone else loses. Those extra dollars in your pocket come from the people who lost to you. Everything you have comes from someone else's failure and your billion-dollar empire is built not on your MBA and good instincts but on the blood and bones of the enemies you didn't even know you had.

Consider it on a smaller scale. You have twenty people locked in a room for a day. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. No matter what they find in the room, what they buy or sell between themselves, no matter what they do, it's a closed system. The same amount of money is coming out of that room at the end of the day as when it began, even if it's all in the pocket of one guy. He might think the system works, and it did, but only for him.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can print more money, but it represents the same total value as before.
PPS - And all of this is why we need governments that stand up for the poor.

Measuring favours

How would you measure a favour as a unit of currency? Time would have to come into it, but then there's also skill and difficulty. It would be different getting a master tradesperson to tile your bathroom than getting your two mates to do it for their first ever attempt. And one hour of a really tricky problem is far different to one hour of mindless repetitive labour. You probably can't quantify it adequately in the end. It has to be negotiated each time between the parties involved in a trade.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might be one way to try and build a cashless economy, though.
PPS - Well, until we start printing generic favour coupons to pass around and keep track.

Creating value

Wealth is zero-sum. If I get more, then you have less. There's only so much physical property in the world that people can own and only so much money in circulation (even if we print more, inflation means it's always worth about the same in total). Moving things from place to place, as in buying and selling, doesn't increase net wealth, so the share market is just a way for rich people to get richer at the expense of poorer people.

Creating, however, has value. It adds value. Take something that was useless or raw and make it useful or beautiful. That is what it means to create value.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In the very long term, I think value might need to be measured in terms of entropy.
PPS - But that's a totally different concept.

How to respond to a DDoS attack

If someone attacks your website with a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS), demanding money to make it stop, what's the best possible response? I suspect the best idea is to do absolutely nothing, or to reinforce and update your infrastructure. My reasoning is that the criminal has a particular business model and a limited set of resources at their disposal, large though those resources may be. Their plan is to bring down your website, get you to pay up, then move on to another target. If you make no response at all, what can they do? Your website is already offline. Their worst possible response is to keep it offline for longer, but that means they're devoting more of their resources for a longer time to a target that won't pay out. It becomes worthless to them. Before too long, it becomes far more worthwhile for them to devote those resources elsewhere, since they stand to actually profit from a different target.

Like spam, if everyone, worldwide, stopped responding to any of it, it would all completely dry up overnight, except for a few weirdos who get off on the power and don't care about the money.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But, like spam, if it wasn't paying off, it wouldn't exist.
PPS - Crime doesn't pay, but it does scale well.

Pre-funding TV show rescues from cancellation

What if, instead of petitions or letter-writing campaigns to save our favourite TV shows from cancellation, we just ran our own Kickstarter funding drives? That way, assuming the audience is there, when the network calls "cancel", we can respond with "Oh, yeah? Here's your next season funded right now. UNCANCELLED!" I'd get behind this. In fact, I'd be happy for some shows to put some cash in escrow in case of cancellation - an emergency fund, if you will.

It's not without problems, of course. First, how do you trust that this cash is going to the right people in the first place? What would be to stop someone setting up a fund, slapping the name "Firefly" on it, then pocketing some cash and disappearing, before a trademark dispute can even be raised? Second, you don't want the emergency fund to be the lazy fallback position. If the studio hears that there's a few million dollars held in trust, they might be less likely to greenlight the next season with their own money. Just say its cancelled, grab the rescue fund and carry on. Zero investment, full profit. Third, you want to get the rights right. You don't want fans swooping in droves to save a cancelled show, only to have the network pick it back up and, again, pocket the profits. If the angel investors are the show's fans, they should get a cut of the profits for funding like this. Point 3 should cancel out point 2. Unless you paid in, you don't get cash out. Fourth, and perhaps the biggest problem, by the time the public hears about a show being cancelled, it's way too late to save it. By then, the props and costumes are warehoused, recycled or pillaged, the sets are torn down and the stages reassigned, plus the writers, actors and other crew are looking for their next gig. The network completely dismantles a show, then makes the press release to say it's over, and then the fans cry out in an uproar. We need to get in just at the point where the studio decides their money is better spent elsewhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If we can get in at that point, this might work.
PPS - Or we might learn that TV is way more expensive than we thought.

A hard lesson in supply and demand

When I was a young boy I tried various ways of making money, as many children often do. Since my parents were right there and we had a decent supply of fairly thick paper in the house (scrapped printouts from Dad's work) I decided I could make bookmarks and sell them. I scribbled on a page, cut it neatly into long rectangles, and my parents patiently bought one each for the wildly inflated sum of 20 cents.

This is where my tiny brain began to misunderstand the economy of the situation. "If one bookmark gets me 20 cents," I thought to myself, "then 10 bookmarks will get me $2!" I began scribbling and cutting, even designing in new features such as a line marker arrow to show where on the page you had finished reading. With my genius new bookmarks, I once again made my sales pitch to my parents, who explained to me that they simply didn't need that many bookmarks. I thought maybe I could sell them to the neighbours, if we went door to door, but again (saving us all some embarrassment) I was turned down before that plan got off the ground. I had oversupplied my market and my thriving bookmark business was done before it really got started.

At other times, my friends and I picked mulberries from a tree in our back yard, packaged them in cups and managed to sell some to the neighbours, who were probably (again) just being polite, but I believe we ran out of customers before we ran out of our small cups of over-ripe bitter berries.

I can't recall any other money-making schemes I undertook, but I do remember every time feeling either disheartened at the lack of demand or being denied the opportunity to sell my wares. I don't know if this ruined the entrepreneurial spirit in me or if I never had a good grasp of the concept in the first place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In either case, I haven't started any businesses lately.
PPS - Or created any products to sell, either.

When solar power will become viable

The point at which solar power becomes economically viable is probably driven more by the rising cost of fossil fuels rather than the slow and steady advances in efficiency and affordability in solar power itself. At some point, those graph lines - the falling cost of solar and the rising cost of oil - are going to cross over, and that's when solar will start to become far more important to the primary energy production companies of Earth.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like it if solar were important to them already.
PPS - However, I think that misses the fact that money is their motivator, not environmental concern.

Naked DSL internet is just as expensive as line rental plus ADSL

What I don't understand about naked DSL plans is that they all seem to be $20-$30 more than the equivalent regular ADSL plans, which is exactly how much you're supposed to be saving on line rental. For instance, on TPG, you have this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.99
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $49.99

That's the equivalent of a $20 line rental when Telstra charges $30. So you're not really saving all your line rental fees. Just a third. On iiNet it's this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.95
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $59.95

That's the full line rental fee you're not saving. The higher iiNet naked DSL plans are only $20 more than their equivalents, though, so that's the same $10 saving as TPG. The thing is, we were sold on these plans as a way to save your line rental fee, which makes sense as a concept, but if the fee is just built into the plan instead, that's broken. The only reason I'd do it is to avoid having a home phone, and I can do that anyway by not plugging one in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's what I'm currently doing.
PPS - It worked out cheaper for me to do it that way.

Monopolies and scope of choice

Monopolies affect the scope of choices you make, especially as they expand their interests. You can, say, choose not to register on Facebook, but at a certain point, that choice is synonymous with not keeping in touch with your friends. You can choose not to pay for the crappy service from one particular internet provider, assuming there is another competitor with better service. You can choose not to subscribe to this or that online video service, but that is also choosing to miss out on their exclusive content. You can choose, as an artist, not to list your music on iTunes or your books on Amazon, but you'll be cutting yourself off from 90% of sales. The more power an individual company has, the less free you are to choose not to do business with them, because that choice means more than boycotting one individual company. Often it means boycotting an entire line of business instead.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you can't afford not to do business with someone, that's a problem.
PPS - Whether it's a monopoly or not.

Money always seems to flow uphill

If most money is flowing from poor to rich, then most people are becoming poorer. Where does it end? My best guesses are dying in poverty, neo-slavery or revolution. Or massive financial collapse followed by economic reboot. That scenario probably ends up with the formerly-rich owning more land, goods and companies than ever before, just because they know how to take advantage of those situations. The only rich who would suffer much through the destruction of a whole currency are those with mainly virtual assets: the entire financial sector. Anyone who owns buildings, land, companies and in-demand goods would probably come out of it just fine, though they might suffer a bit in the short term.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "Suffer" is, of course, a relative term.
PPS - As are "rich" and "poor".