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Cellphone Money
I read about an interesting technique for people to transfer money in less developed countries. Let’s say that you live in the big city, a hundred miles away from your parents. You want to send them some money but there is no bank where they live. Recently, though, somebody in your parent’s village got a…
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Capitalism => Consumerism?
The basic idea behind capitalism as an underpinning of society is that if you give people the freedom to earn a lot of money however they please, society will tend to get better. They will get better because the best way to earn a lot of money is to sell something which lots of people…
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California Weather
I grew up in Massachusetts, where the weather is unpredictable and changes regularly. I recall one March several years ago where one day I was walking around in shorts and two days later we had a huge snowfall. I’ve been conditioned to expect that sort of weather. Now I live in California, where the weather…
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Tibet
Tibet has been in the news recently, as people are using the fact that the Olympics are taking place in China to protest against Chinese control. I’ve never been to Tibet, and I don’t know very much about it. Tibetans are an ethnic group, they have a long history, they have their own religion, they…
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Digital Copyright
Control over copying of analog data is, in practice, made possible by cost: it’s a pain to transcribe a book, it’s hard to make a perfect copy of a record. The cost of copying digital data, however, is near zero. This means that control over copying of digital data is, in practice, impossible. It’s not…