Friday, January 30, 2004
One of the things about the internet that we must worry about is personal spending. Think of how market forces in this country alone is being shaped by paypal.com and its new parent company Ebay.com when for instance you have the state of West Virginia up for sale. The internet itself is growing at a rapid rate that are in and of itself shaping market institutions.
Consider among other things Blockbuster recent decisions to shut down its stores in Hong Kong because more people prefer to purchase pirated Cds than just going to the store and renting a movie. The paradox here is that market structures are being changed in a country where freedom of speech is often stifled.
On the other side of the Pacific this happened only a few months ago. Kazaa.com and its parent company Sharman Networks requested such search engine giants like Google.com to remove kazaalite.com and kazaa.tk from the search engine index under the Digital Millenium Act (1999). Here is a major company the object of RIAA lawsuit copyright infringements asserting its rights within the US.
Then again companies like Playboy settled an undisclosed lawsuit with some of the major search engines over the use of "Playboy" and "Playmate" that inadvertedly generates association of XXX and hardcore porn with these terms. If anything the internet itself is becoming a more powerful force to be reckoned with.
Another matter to look is Bill Gates announcing his plans to eliminate email spam by the year 2006 by making those who sends a recipient spam to pay them for that 'spammed' email. This concept of forcing those who spam paying victims of spamming money on an individual level is known as a form of micropayments. Critics would argue that this is a bad idea and amounts to begging. They can even use my former arguement that even though something is a good idea might not be marketable. Yet this wouldn't prevent somebody from introducing an idea but might help to realize that the internet can quite possible be beneificial and grow with government intervention somewhere down along the lines. Think in the case of Hungary where students can use their debit cards to recieve their student loans. Micropayments not to get off the mark allows users to make smallers purchases online such as selling individual CDs and essays each under a $1 without incurring interest rates and fees from traditional companies that makes such transactions futile.
Among the benfits of micropayments is that allows nuance in market transactions. One of the problems with the recent dot com burst was as some critics state was there was a lack of marketing offline as well as online. Of course ny that assertion one could have only guess where these critics were at that time but nonetheless if anyone lived in a major urban area where the recent dot com took place like here in Boston or out west in Northern California would realize that you saw dot commers competing with each other over the issue of loft(to use their residency as a business establishments to avoid paying commercial taxes); or you heard radio and TV boradcasting that says silly stuff such as 'greed is good' and other forms of catharticism of people writing their websites like graffiti on sidewalks and on buildings. There is nothing to say that the dot com demise because that it didn't focused on offline avenues but rather there was no nuance, it came off as simply being blunt! The reaction to the dot com boom didn't focus on anything as it should be as an economical revolution. Not only poor people being screwed and left behind but it was overthrowing whatever left of the baby boomer middle class with their white collar 9 to 5 jobs. It may explain that with this economic recovery no one can disagree that no jobs are being lost and that such net job loss is worse than the days of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Or this should be looked at it a little differently that if as understood that jobs are being lose to machines and computers we shouldn't stopped that these job losses are being accelerated by the advent of nannotechnology and the software that goes with computers. It is not just the technology but the technology to hold and dispense information in any fashion those who has the means to dominate and manuever it to their fashion. That is hard to chew either way because the internet itself is a market institution that is kind of sending everything out of control. If there is another dot com revolution the cultural and political shift will be more pronounced from the lessons not learned.
Micropayments from this perspective takes among other things the ability of computers to pinpoint in large numbers of small exchanges that would otherwise seems moot. This seems borish but it isn't. Think of philosophy of Joseph Raz(whom I picked up from studying other philosophers). Ten years ago it would have made little sense(at least economically and politically) if I had purchased a soda or a cookie for 35 cents somewhere in Virginia that it would have at any rate any impact of what somebody thought about me doing that living somewhere in California or in Tibet. Now the only impact there is is that those huge companies who are selling these goods for 35 cents requires people like me to purchase a cookie or a soda every now and then to sell their products. It also requires a lot of people like me to purchase a lot of cookies and sodas to make it work. This is simple macro economics. In micropayments, if I were to sell something for 35 cents and were able to make 35 or 32 cents regardless of the fees, then this is a worthwhile purchase. At hand is useful info of what I like or don't like. It also adds up if using the internet I can sale easily a 100,000 units for 35 cents and make $35,000.
So an advantage of micropayments is that extends further the inclsuion of potential people who can be better off making money than otherwise not. Secondly, this gives large instituitons ideas of people habits and likes. Thirdly, it isn't inconsistent with what is already going in with pre-paid Visas that gives the consumer other options than placing their credit cards online if they feel unsure or using their debit cards which is tied into their checking account. You can check out stuff like this at Four Oaks Bank and Trust Visa® Card
and Wired PlasticTM +Rewards Card
. It also reduces fraud or what I should say allow government able to counter fraud. Remeber one of the recent viruses in the past six months occured as a result of someone using a stolen credit card to access a newsgroup I think EasyNews to post a virus.
Consider among other things Blockbuster recent decisions to shut down its stores in Hong Kong because more people prefer to purchase pirated Cds than just going to the store and renting a movie. The paradox here is that market structures are being changed in a country where freedom of speech is often stifled.
On the other side of the Pacific this happened only a few months ago. Kazaa.com and its parent company Sharman Networks requested such search engine giants like Google.com to remove kazaalite.com and kazaa.tk from the search engine index under the Digital Millenium Act (1999). Here is a major company the object of RIAA lawsuit copyright infringements asserting its rights within the US.
Then again companies like Playboy settled an undisclosed lawsuit with some of the major search engines over the use of "Playboy" and "Playmate" that inadvertedly generates association of XXX and hardcore porn with these terms. If anything the internet itself is becoming a more powerful force to be reckoned with.
Another matter to look is Bill Gates announcing his plans to eliminate email spam by the year 2006 by making those who sends a recipient spam to pay them for that 'spammed' email. This concept of forcing those who spam paying victims of spamming money on an individual level is known as a form of micropayments. Critics would argue that this is a bad idea and amounts to begging. They can even use my former arguement that even though something is a good idea might not be marketable. Yet this wouldn't prevent somebody from introducing an idea but might help to realize that the internet can quite possible be beneificial and grow with government intervention somewhere down along the lines. Think in the case of Hungary where students can use their debit cards to recieve their student loans. Micropayments not to get off the mark allows users to make smallers purchases online such as selling individual CDs and essays each under a $1 without incurring interest rates and fees from traditional companies that makes such transactions futile.
Among the benfits of micropayments is that allows nuance in market transactions. One of the problems with the recent dot com burst was as some critics state was there was a lack of marketing offline as well as online. Of course ny that assertion one could have only guess where these critics were at that time but nonetheless if anyone lived in a major urban area where the recent dot com took place like here in Boston or out west in Northern California would realize that you saw dot commers competing with each other over the issue of loft(to use their residency as a business establishments to avoid paying commercial taxes); or you heard radio and TV boradcasting that says silly stuff such as 'greed is good' and other forms of catharticism of people writing their websites like graffiti on sidewalks and on buildings. There is nothing to say that the dot com demise because that it didn't focused on offline avenues but rather there was no nuance, it came off as simply being blunt! The reaction to the dot com boom didn't focus on anything as it should be as an economical revolution. Not only poor people being screwed and left behind but it was overthrowing whatever left of the baby boomer middle class with their white collar 9 to 5 jobs. It may explain that with this economic recovery no one can disagree that no jobs are being lost and that such net job loss is worse than the days of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Or this should be looked at it a little differently that if as understood that jobs are being lose to machines and computers we shouldn't stopped that these job losses are being accelerated by the advent of nannotechnology and the software that goes with computers. It is not just the technology but the technology to hold and dispense information in any fashion those who has the means to dominate and manuever it to their fashion. That is hard to chew either way because the internet itself is a market institution that is kind of sending everything out of control. If there is another dot com revolution the cultural and political shift will be more pronounced from the lessons not learned.
Micropayments from this perspective takes among other things the ability of computers to pinpoint in large numbers of small exchanges that would otherwise seems moot. This seems borish but it isn't. Think of philosophy of Joseph Raz(whom I picked up from studying other philosophers). Ten years ago it would have made little sense(at least economically and politically) if I had purchased a soda or a cookie for 35 cents somewhere in Virginia that it would have at any rate any impact of what somebody thought about me doing that living somewhere in California or in Tibet. Now the only impact there is is that those huge companies who are selling these goods for 35 cents requires people like me to purchase a cookie or a soda every now and then to sell their products. It also requires a lot of people like me to purchase a lot of cookies and sodas to make it work. This is simple macro economics. In micropayments, if I were to sell something for 35 cents and were able to make 35 or 32 cents regardless of the fees, then this is a worthwhile purchase. At hand is useful info of what I like or don't like. It also adds up if using the internet I can sale easily a 100,000 units for 35 cents and make $35,000.
So an advantage of micropayments is that extends further the inclsuion of potential people who can be better off making money than otherwise not. Secondly, this gives large instituitons ideas of people habits and likes. Thirdly, it isn't inconsistent with what is already going in with pre-paid Visas that gives the consumer other options than placing their credit cards online if they feel unsure or using their debit cards which is tied into their checking account. You can check out stuff like this at Four Oaks Bank and Trust Visa® Card
# posted by Jamie @ 6:45 PM 
