Free Republic

If "free" is what you want - and who doesn't? - "free" is what you're going to get. So says Chris Anderson, editor-in chief of Wired magazine and, according to Time magazine, one of the world's Top 100 influencers. Speaking to The Globe and Mail from his office in San Francisco, the author of The Long Tail, who pseudonymously curates Wikipedia entries in his spare time, explains how "free" has emerged as the new economic model. Let's start with the term "freeconomics." What is it and how do you define it? It's a little bit cheeky, I know. It's a...

ETROIT (AP) -- Cerberus Capital Management LP and leaders of the Chrysler Group will try to convince the leaders of the automaker's workers that their $7.4 billion deal will give workers better job security, restore Chrysler's health and not "strip and flip" the company by selling it off in pieces.

THE widening gap between rich and middle-class Americans is undermining political support for free trade in the US, Federal Reserve Bank of New York president Tim Geithner warns. Mr Geithner told the Council on Foreign Relations the political challenge of sustaining support for further global economic integration may be the greatest economic challenge of our time. He warned also that the inflow of surplus savings from abroad could be distorting US asset prices and keeping risk premiums artificially low across financial markets. Mr Geithner's comments came amid growing concern in US political and business circles over the risk of a...

IBM has announced it will move its global procurement headquarters to China from its present location in New York. The new base will be located in Shenzhen, where the company already has 1,850 employees involved in procurement. IBM said Thursday that no jobs will be lost in New York as a result of the move. The Big Apple office will continue to function as a global procurement unit. Chief procurement officer, John Paterson, who will head up the Shenzhen office, said global businesses must now locate their business units wherever makes the most sense, based on "the imperatives of economics,...

"What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are. ...The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix...

Indicators measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay. "That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati on Thursday. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay." San Jose, Calif.-based EBay Inc. is an Internet auction site where anyone can sell just about anything, including clothing, cell phones, jewelry, memorabilia, trinkets and automobiles. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards responded that Cheney's comments show how "out of touch" he...

MEMORANDUMFROM: BC'04 POLICY DEPARTMENTPresident George W. Bush has a bold agenda to adapt the government to our changing economy.  His broad agenda includes: overhauling our tax code with a simple, fair and pro-growth system, putting patients and doctors in charge of health care instead of government bureaucrats, strengthening and enhancing Social Security, and promoting lifelong learning to give people new skills for better jobs.  Each proposal is based on a fundamental principle that government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives.  The President's ideas build on America's inherent strengths - such as technology and our...

Thank you for the opportunity to address your commission on the future of tax policy in California. I would like to focus on two general themes - one is the natural limitations that operate upon any system of taxation, and the other is a few general principles that I believe would produce great improvements to the state's overall structure of finance.Let me begin with the natural limitations that act upon our tax system. I know that there is a great deal of pressure on this commission to raise revenues to deal with the state's budget deficit. But it is important...

For the last year or two, it has been fashionable to ridicule the idea of a "New Economy," which underlay the stock market boom of the late 1990s. However, last week's productivity report shows that the New Economy is alive and kicking. The original notion of a New Economy was that computers, the Internet, wireless phone technology and other innovations had radically altered the economy permanently. In particular, these innovations significantly raised the trend rate of productivity growth. Productivity rises when people make more with less, especially less labor, but also less capital, lower inventories and other costs of production....

(Suppressed amazon.com review) Who'll Stop the Rain? Making Ends Meet:How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Workby Kathryn Edin, Laura LeinRussell Sage Foundation, March 1997$22.00, ISBN: 087154234X 3 1/2 stars out of 5 During the early 1980s, social scientists noticed that welfare mothers were spending three to six times their official incomes. In his exquisitely written foreword, Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks argues persuasively that in a "conspiracy of silence," conservatives didn't want to admit that mothers could not survive on welfare checks alone, while "liberals" didn't want to admit that clients had unreported resources. Jencks and his colleagues asked where...

NEW YORK, Dec 1, 2002 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- A detailed reconstruction of the AOL Time Warner merger, based on interviews with dozens of key executives close to the deal, offers a clear picture of what wrong: Steve Case and Jerry Levin, and their companies, were never right for each other, reports Senior Writer Johnnie L. Roberts in the December 9 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, December 2). While the popular strategy at the time of marrying New and Old Media may have made sense in the abstract, there were trouble signs from the very start that this marriage...

Media Fueled New Economy, and Vice Versa Steven Pearlstein Tuesday, November 12, 2002 In the days before the Bubble -- before the Nasdaq displaced children and real estate in cocktail-party conversation, before young professionals began quitting their day jobs to take up day trading, before stock options became the compensation of choice for hard-to-find employees -- the stock market was an insiders' game.

Greenspan derailed the New Economy Fed chief makes up for missteps costing high-tech jobs, trillions By Paul Sperry (C) 2001 WorldNetDaily.com WASHINGTON With a recession looming, if not already here, and stocks still languishing, all eyes are on Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to come to the rescue again today with yet another interest-rate cut. Greenspan, long a media darling, has been portrayed as the white knight in the slump, saving overextended companies from their supposed orgy of greed during last decade's Internet-powered bull market. But data show that he is merely trying to return the punch bowl to a...

<p>CARO, Mich. (AP) -- A company that makes plastic parts for the auto industry plans to build an $11 million plant and create 150 jobs in this Thumb community, officials say.</p> <p>Plastech Engineered Products Inc. is seeking $5.1 million in property tax relief for the project. The company, founded here in 1988, now is based in Dearborn and has 16 plants worldwide.</p>

News broke last week that Beliefnet.com, an internet site that promoted every "religion" from Wicca to Islam to Christianity, went belly up in the stormy sea of nihilistic relativism. In words describing why the site dipped into bankruptcy, an autobiographical epitaph if you will, Belief com stated that they were the darling of the secular news media, who quoted them frequently in a world of user-friendly news. I can hardly imagine that beliefnet.com will be missed by anybody other that those adhering to the most marginal of, excuse me, beliefs. As of this morning their death experience was complete, the...

Explaining dot-cons A candid conversation with New Yorker writer John Cassidy, whose new book chronicles the intellectual and psychological currents marking the rise and fall of the New Economy. By Jonathan Skillings, March 07, 2002 At some point, all revolutions pass from the raised fists of the revolutionaries into the more sober hands of historians. The dot-com era is no exception. It wasn't so long ago that many Americans believed that the Internet was the engine behind a new world of peace and prosperity. And yet that period already seems almost ancient, says John Cassidy, author of Dot-con: The...