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Living Off The (How Much?) Land
Real mixed use How much land does a typical, four-person family need to grow all their own food? Everything included — vegetables, wheat, dairy, meat — the answer is not that much: about two acres....
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Halloween Costume – Work In Process
Halloween, my favorite holiday, is only one week away, and we’ve barely begun the costumes! Our daughter is working on her own. Our son had a very specific request. I won’t say what he wants to be...
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Facebook Breaks Itself To Make More Money
“Facebook sucks” gets 349,000,000 hits on Google Lots of authors love Facebook. Maybe I would too … if I had set up my page properly in the beginning. But I didn’t, and now I’m stuck with an...
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Amazing Cardboard Sculpture
Hard to believe it’s not real As some of you know, we do a fair amount of work with cardboard around here — spaceships for the kids, that kind of thing (click for an example). But this guy’s...
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Facebook Isn’t The Next MySpace, It’s The Next Microsoft
Where are the animated GIFs? Another day, another long complaint about Facebook. Everyone’s favorite go-to metaphor is deployed again, although this guy actually knows what he’s talking about: Is...
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My Favorite Holiday Is Today
The most deadly snake on the planet Pedants will insist that black mambas actually earned the name from the inside of their mouths — the snake itself is a rather unprepossessing gray. But on...
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Dynamic Pricing = Price Gouging
How the algorithms work Post-superstorm, price gouging is back in the news. Gasoline, food, water — a few opportunistic merchants are braving general condemnation to raise prices on things people...
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How Facebook Hurts Authors
Zeroing in on the problem I’ve written recently about Facebook’s painfully obvious strategy to make more money by suppressing posts unless you pay. Ars Technica has a nicely balanced summary of the...
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Out-Of-The-Box Self Promotion
Delete! Delete! Criminal hackers are now remarkably well organized. Although reporters still call them “gangs,” the groups are more like boot-strapped startups, with franchises, different shops,...
View ArticleA Better Way To Go Viral
Better than actually creating great, compelling content, that is — who wants to spend the time? No need to bother when you can pay your way to viral success with Buyral: Anyone considering...
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In-Your-Face Displays of Wealth
But it’s tasteful! China’s uber-wealthy are apparently still insecure. It’s not enough to have more money than god; everyone else must know you do. Hence a recent online spat, with elites posting...
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It’s Where The Diamonds Are
How secure? Two months ago a precision raid at the Brussels Airport netted a gang of thieves $50 million in uncut diamonds. Six other high-value robberies in the last five years — and who knows how...
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Investors Really Like Oligopolistic Market-Cornering
Waiting for the right price point Today’s Wall Street Journal, page C1: Two major commodities-trading firms [Glencore and Trafigura] have amassed much of the world’s copper supplies in their...
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Drilling For Oil Delta-Style
Sod off, Shell Western oil companies, in cahoots with Nigeria’s corrupt kleptocracy, extract oil from the Delta. Local residents, whose country has been ravaged by spills and environmental...
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Bicycles And Guns: More In Common Than You’d Think
Cut me off at your peril Owning weapons is apparently all about freedom. Riding bicycles is also about freedom — open roads, wind in your hair, no gasoline required. Politically and ideologically,...
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Our Brains Still Read Books More Easily Than Screens — But That Will Change
See? It’s a CAT. Now you have to link to this post We’re making it a quiet day around here. The radio’s off. No obsessive news-checking. My wife can’t go to work because her office is inside the...
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Why Isn’t EVERYONE Tested?
Cocaine and bankers seem always to be in the spotlight. Last year Business Insider compiled a summary of recent headlines: A former Lloyds banker was caught with $15 million worth of cocaine on his...
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No, I Do Not Be Balling Wi’ My Homies
He got it right Why do otherwise good writers put really, really bad slang into the dialogue of their characters? There’s an obvious answer, which is that the writer has no idea...
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Average E-Book Earned Just $297 Last Year
The long tail In 2012, the average e-book earned its author less than 300 dollars. And that’s the average, pushed higher by a small number of very, very successful books. The median result is likely...
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Each Person In The US Does $48,000 Of Black Market Transactions Every Year
We don’t take Visa James Surowiecki and Ezra Klein have columns up discussing the US shadow economy, and the fact that it seems to have been growing lately: to two trillion dollars annually. Yipes!...
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