I just came across this picture and figured I had to blog it… After Incompetent Miers, Bush has now bent over to lick the shoes of creepy conservative christian fundamentalists by nominating Alito. The Supreme Court is on the brink of overthrowing Roe v. Wade and making it illegal to be anything but a rich white American male with several Uzis… The presidential elections happened just a year ago today. One down, three to go.
I’m blogging using now. It offers really sweet web 2.0 service integration and I hope that the ease with which I can now blog will boost my throughput, since I certainly haven’t been writing copious entries lately.
I’ve started to feel the tech buzz over the last few months… All kinds of delicious new technologies have emerged over the last couple of years, most of them revolving around concepts like tagging and folksonomy, peer production, and better GUIs using Ajax. We’re already into iteration 2.1, apparently, with tools like flock surfacing, which allow me to do all of the above using one well integrated client application.
I had this weird thought the other day and it seems like there’s a potential for it, but I haven’t completely refined the idea: Why hasn’t anyone come up with an eBay derivatives market? Obviously such a thing wouldn’t make much sense for magazines and books, but I think there could be an opportunity when dealing with big ticket items, appliances, cars, etc. Standard amortization practices of accounting would lead one to believe that this makes no sense at all…. Yet, that’s not quite true. I think that some principles of the long tail actually apply here. I was looking for an old vintage Donkey Kong game console a while back (I don’t mean the Xbox or Nintendo game… I want the standalone machine). Well, you’ll be surprised to find out how much they’re fetching… Clearly most of these collectibles are niche markets. It seems logical that one could spawn a derivative market on top of that… “I don’t have the money right now but I’d like to buy a 1979 VW Beetle convertible. Instead, I’ll buy an $4000 6-month call option on one for, say, $250.00.” I don’t know… maybe it makes no sense at all, but I’m dealing day-in and day-out with currency options, credit derivatives, and there are now even compound options which are options on Currency options… With all these abstractions, you’d think that a derivative market for niche markets could make sense, no? I don’t fully grok it myself… Seems like a fun idea to explore though. 😉
Peace,
David