His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent—rather, he was the sort G-men wanted to drive off the streets, though Sally didn’t learn that until it was far too late. It took 21 months to break free of him, after a cross-country journey from Camden, New Jersey, to San Jose, California. That five-cent notebook didn’t just alter Sally Horner’s own life, though: it reverberated throughout the culture, and in the process, irrevocably changed the course of 20th-century literature.
Author: Edouard Chazal
Art: Pre-capitalist conspicuous waste?
Felix Salmon :
That’s real money, which, in a working capitalist economy, can and should be spent on productive assets. Instead, it’s being spent on utterly unproductive assets: billions and billions of dollars a year are going, in the name (at least partially) of “investment”, into paintings by long-dead artists. If rich people stopped paying billions of dollars for each others’ art, and started spending that money in the real economy, that would create jobs, growth, and even opportunities for working artists.
Most
We go visual today :
The “most” customers others are chasing are fickle and ultimately worth little to a young business just getting started. They might give you money in the short term, but then they move on to other things. They don’t sell your products to the next five customers. They just drop you as soon as another shiny object passes by.
Chasing “most” gets you a sales chart like this:
Instead of a chart like this:
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs
“In many ways, Yahoo’s decline from a $128 billion company to one worth virtually nothing is entirely natural. Yahoo grew into a colossus by solving a problem that no longer exists. And while Yahoo’s products have undeniably improved, and its culture has become more innovative, it’s unlikely that Mayer can reverse an inevitability unless she creates the next iPod. All breakthrough companies, after all, will eventually plateau and then decline. U.S. Steel was the first billion-dollar company in 1901, but it was worth about the same in 1991. Kodak, which once employed nearly 80,000 people, now has a market value below $1 billion. Packard and Hudson ruled the roads for more than 40 years before disappearing. These companies matured and receded over the course of generations, in some cases even a century. Yahoo went through the process in 20 years. In the technology industry, things move fast.”
The Magazine : So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen
I’m not gonna comment any further than I previously did, but I can only thanks Marco and Glenn for their work. They are both outstanding people.
The Magazine felt so great that you were only left with the words and some heartwarming stories.
Yep, this was definitely a success.
The experiment was a success, but it didn’t turn into a long-term business.
Abnormal Capitalist 