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Some entertainers don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them. They just go, “Oh, cool, I’m playing this place.” They just do it, and they take the money. But if you pay attention, you find out that the economics are very simple. If you want more money, the fans pay for it. They just pay. And so I decided, “Okay, I’m making enough. Let’s drive the ticket prices down a bit.” I decided to do that a couple years ago, especially because the economy was shitty.
Louis C.K. So fucking punk he doesn’t even know it.
Posted on July 22, 2012 with 2 notes
Source: The A.V. Club
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The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets. According to this history of the sandwich, Chef Arend created the McRib because McDonald’s simply could not find enough chickens to turn into the McNuggets for which their franchises were clamoring. Chef Arend invented something so popular that his employer could not even find the raw materials to produce it, because it was so popular. “There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken,” he told Maxim. Well, Chef Arend had recently been to the Carolinas, and was so inspired by the pulled pork barbecue in the Low Country that he decided to create a pork sandwich for McDonald’s to placate the frustrated franchisees.
But the McRib might not have existed were it not for McDonald’s stunning efficiency at turning animals into products you want to buy.
A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage | The Awl
A singularly brilliant analysis of the McRib as a way McDonald’s exploits commodity market price fluctuations. McRib appears when pork prices go down. Due to the volume handled by McD (and consumed by the world), a few cents fluctuation in price could mean millions of dollars in lost or gained.
Who knew that McRib was the thinking economist or broker’s fastfood sandwich.
Posted on April 11, 2012 with 2 notes
Source: The Awl
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Bar-Yam’s findings, released Feb. 13 on arXiv, are part of an emerging research field known as econophysics. It applies to economics insights from the physical world, especially from systems in which networks of interacting units produce radical collective behaviors.
Heated water turning to gas is one such behavior, known technically as a phase transition. Another is snow gathering into an avalanche. Seen through an econophysicist’s eyes, a stock market panic is an avalanche, too.
Using a phase transition model, Bar-Yam’s group analyzed patterns of movement in the stock market. At the beginning of the 2000s, co-movement was low. On any given day, about half the stocks were moving up or down. By 2008, shortly before the crash, co-movement was absolute. People were no longer making independent decisions, but copying others.
Possible Early Warning Sign for Market Crashes | Wired Science | Wired.com
This new field of econophysics is interesting, but it seems like the magic bullet that we’ve been grasping for, trying to explain the deepest cause of the 2008 economic collapse. Laws of physics, at least before we get to relativity or subatomic particles, are absolute. Science requires all experimental results be repeatable and all theories proven before they become law. This is why scientists can calculate the exact route to the moon as well as how and where to land on it, barring any unexpected variables.
The problem with econophysics is that nothing is absolute or absolutely proven in economics or human behavior. Even steadfast economic laws like supply and demand can be usurped—this is what happened with digital music files and Napster, where suddenly electronic files could be replicated and downloaded to meet infinite demand for no cost. While the surprising behavior of quarks is governed by its own counterintuitive set of rules we’ve yet to uncover, the surprising behavior of humans are not. If economies and humans were as fundamental and predictable as mass and gravitational force, more people would be consistently making a fortune.
From astrology to phrenology, pseudo science tried to tame and explain the unpredictability of fate and human behavior. Econophysics might be rooted in science, but we’re fooling ourselves if we could corral money with a set of laws borrowed from physics. Though, let’s see if the Large Hadron Collider will advance particle and theoretical physics. The quirky, slippery nature of subatomic particles seems more apt as models of how money behaves in human hands.
Posted on April 6, 2011 with 2 notes
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I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
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