And my personal favorite :
Author: Edouard Chazal
Seven Reasons Volkswagen Is Worse Than Enron
The comparison is fair, Europe signed a blank cheque to an industry they rely on so heavily.
Though, I diverge from what is a rather alarming picture : VW will never be allowed to go down, at any cost for the German government.
The real issue may be that other car manufacturers are part of this scheme — among them the Daimler Group, which would add up quite a bit to the bill as it is another major German champion.
Second, led by Volkswagen, Europe’s car manufacturers lobbied hard for governments to promote the adoption of diesel engines as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Whereas diesel engines power fewer than 5 per cent of passenger cars in the US, where regulators uncovered the fraud, they constitute more than 50 per cent of the market in Europe thanks in large part to generous government incentives.
It was bad enough that Enron’s chief executive urged employees to buy the company’s stock. This, however, is the equivalent of the US government offering tax breaks at Enron’s behest to get half of US households to buy stock propped up by fraudulent accounting.
The End Of The Free Web
The rise of ad-blocking will force us to confront the fact that the free lunch provided by advertising is not long for this world. The good news is that the ensuing crisis will compel us finally to look for what we should have invented decades ago, namely sustainable business models for the web. For example, it’s possible that cryptocurrencies might enable the “micro-payments” that would make users to pay a tiny amount for any article they read. We need more ideas like that, and I’m sure we’ll get them. Necessity is the mother of invention.
What about a monthly subscription ?
Let’s say that for 10 bucks a month you’d get access to several websites without having to deal with specific subscriptions, just a single one : the service. The service would gets a cut for its own profitability, then split variable revenues accros the differents publishers affiliated based on the pageviews of the reader/subscriber.
If the reader only opens a link per month, the 10 bucks minus the service‘s cut goes to that single publisher, and so on.
This idea has already been put in place in a rather confidential way by Elinea, a Dutch company, and more recently by another one — though I can’t remember its name. Both are based on the all-you-can-read model.
This could possibly gain momentum if indie publications with strong names jump onboard. But as of now, I bet they’re reluctant to get rid of The Deck and native ads, which they seem fine with.
Last week, the content-blocker Crystal announced a partnership with Eyeo, a service that whitelist website using ads considered as acceptable. The promise is that Crystal will indeed show ads that have been approved by the members of the organization, based on several criterias.
From now on, I think this is a good trade of between cleaning big websites, which are imposing a shitload of ads (but also rely on subscriptions) and supporting indies (who don’t offer subscription for the most part). I encourage you to read more about Crystal’s initiative.
All Credit To Them
On consumer lending :
The most creditworthy customers, it turns out, are the least keen to splurge when extra credit is offered. For every dollar their credit limits increase, they boost their borrowing by $0.23. Even that is an exaggeration: by further digging through the data, the researchers establish that the borrowers with the best credit records are only shifting their borrowing from card to card to take advantage of improved terms—not borrowing any more in aggregate. At the other end of the scale, those with the muckiest credit histories borrow an extra $0.58 for every $1 hike in their credit limit.
But that is not the whole story. The researchers then take a bank’s perspective, and ask to whom it makes most sense to lend. Boosting credit limits draws in extra interest payments and charges, but there are costs too. If it is mainly the highest-risk borrowers who take advantage of higher limits, or if the higher limits encourage more reckless borrowing in general, then default rates will climb, eating away at profit margins.
Is It Time To Get Serious About Electric Cars ?
Following VW’ scandal, here is Jean-Louis Gassée on a necessary transition :
Filling up the cars as described represents 1.3 terawatts pulsing through the grid to the electric filling stations. The Syracuse University page pegs the entire US electric supply at about 1 terawatt. Again, I’m not vouching for exact numbers, just the orders of magnitude. Now, add an uncomfortable twist to those numbers: Transmission loss in the electric grid is more than 7%; compare this to the less than .1% for the transportation and evaporation of gasoline.
The result is that we have more than just the science problem of replacing gasoline with electric energy storage. We also face an infrastructure challenge to, first, generate the electricity and, second, transport it to the filling stations at home or on roadsides. It will take a very long time, huge amounts of money, and interesting politics to solve these two problems. And, while I’m not a diehard GM fan, it should (but won’t) kill the “General Motors killed the electric car” myth.
