Acrobat

It still surprises me that authors, creators, musicians, you-name-it … all those people who are responsible for the existence of the final product in the first place, all of them get the short end of the stick when technology eliminates friction from any market. Does it always happen like this? Does anybody have examples of a market where more money ended up going to the authors proportionately than to all the other middle-man?

The particular visual is cute and all, displaying a stacked bar chart inside a Kindle.

But a pie-chart tells so much more of the story, like who’s slice got bigger? (Hint: not the author’s, theirs went from 16% to 15%)

Wasn’t the Internet going to democratize publishing? Wasn’t it going to become the “new printing press”? How long until we don’t need a group of people telling us what to read while charging us a hefty size of the proceeds at the same time for it?

… is that you have to affect the communities it travels through.

Image credit: San Jose Mercury News.

My question is: doesn’t a train already travel through those communities? Wouldn’t a “cleanup” of those tracks benefit those that live around them?

Update: have you ever asked yourself what the maximum rate to optimally tax a Nation should be? Some people have, so don’t worry …

Having perspective proves invaluable when formulating any sort of opinion. What do you think about the recent outcry regarding tax rates? Do you have an opinion of what the “right” level of taxation should be? Is 25% too much? Is 5% too little? How much should be taxed and how (directly/indirectly)?

Here is some hard data to jump-start any conversation:

From Greg Mankiw's blog

Originally posted here: average federal tax rates by income quintile (PNG Image, 600×480 pixels).

Cities need diversity, this makes is feel like SF is the least diverse at least in terms of levels of education. Then again, you can never have too much education, can you?

Regardless, an interesting stat!

Somebody mentioned Spain’s high-speed rail in this thread over at Socketsite, so I’ll chime in with my own personal experience here since it got to be too long a rant for a reply over at the forums there.
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