I heard a behavioural economist on the radio this morning, he was talking about rising house prices in Dublin and the tricks the industry uses to get you to overpay. Turns out you can mitigate these tricks with a bit of knowledge, as this proves:
But now, with some simple math, you can fight back!
First, let’s see how the MTA tricks you out of your money earlier than you might want to release it to them.
Fresh from the “interesting but pointless facts” desk comes this little kernel (I apologise!) of truth:
In 2002, the British Film Institute depicted popcorn as “the most profitable substance on the planet, more than heroin, more than plutonium”. Typically, the popcorn we eat costs less to produce than the very container it comes in. - Foodie World
Further research indicates that isn’t quite true - antimatter is the most
expensive substance in the world. But for a common, everyday item, it’s very
expensive indeed. There’s a lot less risk in production then Heroin and a lot
bigger market the Plutonium, for instance.
This is an old box which contained a Nokia phone from a now defunct Esat Digifone. Irish Businessman Denis O’Brien started it and sold it to BT and made a fortune (and after got embroiled in a tribunal on accusations of impropriety). It is now called O2.I thought we got ripped off now with call charges now, how nostalgia can prove one wrong:
I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while, probably since 2006. (Almost) everyone that I know of donates to charity on a regular enough basis. I’m a college student so I don’t donate as much as I should. But it really annoys me how the “main” charities run a campaign of guilt and spend millions on it. I’ve donated money to all of these charities, the third world aid charities. All of them spend far too much on paying people commission and advertising. One that I can think of off hand is asking people who donated more than €250 to sign a form and send it back.
I usually get both of Ireland’s daily national papers to my email inbox every morning. I think it’s very important to catch up on the latest news; as I think you are more informed and have conversation pieces to talk to people (for those awkward silences where “Ye the weather is terrible” just won’t do). So I was highly informed when I read this piece: DCU head hits out at ‘out-of-date’ O’Keeffe.
I had a trip in to the faire capital city of Ireland today: Dublin. Okay I’ll get this out of the way: I had a Frappacino in Starbucks and I’m a student; so not too poor of a student ;)
But I saw the inside of Brown Thomas for the first time. I don’t shop for fashion at all: but what I found was the kind of vulgarity and fake-ness I’d expect of London or New York; not Dublin. To paraphrase Bono: “In America if you have your mansion on a hill people look up to you and think ‘I want to be like him and afford a house like that one day’; if you have the same mansion in Ireland people say ’look at the fucken eejit on the hill with that house; thinks he’s god or sumthen’” and that to me was always an endearing part of Irish culture; people around you being the great leveller if you thought you were the bomb. Inside BT (Brown Thomas) was all the names you’d expect; all the major names more at home in Paris, London or New York. I confronted my friend who was showing me round about my opinions (in my usual polite manner: just say it). To my surprise he agreed 110%. Yes he said: for the people who buy this stuff can tell who else is wearing it; and I think he meant that by this logic movers and shakers also wore all the brands to look the part. Soon after he told me he was also learning Golf because he knew it would be a great benefit for his future career: “All important people also play golf” he assured me.
It’s been all over the tech news world lately; apparently
Google is muling over taking Skype off of Ebay’s hands.
Ebay has already written down the value of
Skype as a large loss on their purchase
price of $2.6 billion in stock and cash. But
w
ould
Skype’s G-branded future be any better?
I think it would be. Skype is a strong international brand for voice calls, instant messaging and video calls; but of course it competes directly with Google Talk. Skype as a company has made a lot of mistakes; but they actually produces some of the best technology for p2p VOIP out there in the marketplace. Skype is particularly strong in redundancy, cost of network operation (since it’s p2p every user carries’ each others traffic; most people have no idea of this fact) and routing around the most draconian network admins out their through their routers.
Dell Computers has started selling Ubuntu Linux 7.04 on consumer machines in the United States. This can only be good news, as a supporter of Linux since late 2004/early 2005 I am fully behind this initiative to put Linux as a choice in front of people who buy computers. They are testing the market at the moment which explains why they are shipping stock drivers with the hardware, and no multimedia codecs (which is unfortunate, but understandable that this deal was done in 60 days). I think this is quite an achievement for Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu Founder), as they get to do the traditional Linux business model: you pay for support, and if you don’t need it, you don’t buy it. This could confuse some people in the shorter term, but long term its a winner: Dell does what it does best (Hardware) and Software is left to Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical. This is opposed to Microsoft getting Dell to provide support for both hardware and software, sometimes a messy business in which the consumer does not know which to turn to and can often be left out in the cold. I hope Dell extends this to Europe and 6the rest of the world soon, and makes a decent stab at promoting a free software desktop. Dell list advantages in one of their videos:
Just like software. it can be really useful to open source other things in life, collaboration is nearly always a good thing. John Buckman, CEO of Magnatune Records knows this principle all too well. He gave a speech at a Red Hat conference a while back, and he talked about the importance of music artists sharing the “source”, i.e. basically sharing the method of how the produced the music in the first place. This allows easier mixing, and a higher chamnce your work could be featured on TV or in a film, and you get paid
BBC
are putting together a Mac, Windows and Linux user, to
debate the pros and cons of being a users for each operating system.
While this in itself is good news (more airtime for alternatives), most of the
comments are highly in favour of Linux, then Mac and lastly Windows. This is
part of the BBC’s coverage of Windows Vista. My hope for the future is that Mac
and Linux gain at least 10% each (20% total) over the next 5 years of the home
desktop market, as this will push innovation forward, like AMD and Intel
competition.
Well apparently I am a new kid on the block, according to the Irish Blog awards blog). Irish Blog Awards from what I can gather is a new event, hoping to happen in March 2007. They have an impressive list of backers, so I expect significant (although maybe minor) coverage in the media. Unfortunately they called it Duey Fensters, but I thank them for the link nonetheless! These are the categories that will be adjudicated on:
Only now is it truly becoming clear, their is [serious money in Open Source][]/ With Mozilla reported to have made tens of millions of dollars. One blogger reported 70m was made by the corporation, with a Mozilla insider confirming thats a reasonable ballpark figure. Christopher Blizzard, board member of Mozilla, had this to say on his blog:
Blizzard added that an earnings figure of $72m (£41m) quoted on some blogs was incorrect. “I won’t comment on the dollar amount except to say that it’s [$72m] not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude. I also won’t comment on sources of that money, except to say that some of the assertions that I’ve seen in the comments are pretty far off, both in terms of numbers and sources,
A student in England has almost reached his target of one million dollars, and he is only 21! He came up with the idea after jotting down ideas before he went to bed on how to become a millionaire before he went to university. Then he came up with the million-dollar idea, sell pixels at USD $1 a piece on his homepage, MillionDollarHomepage.com . This man is Alex Tew, hailed as an advertising genius by the many companies who are using his site to make Internet history.