EconTech

Tyler writes:

Bargaining with your roommates
Joseph, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I recently leased my first apartment…with a friend who just graduated from college with me. It’s a nice apartment, and spacious, but it has one bedroom that is larger and nicer (better views, bigger closet, more windows) than the other.
We’re looking for the most equitable way [...]

This is the type of software that should be implemented for the library, especially with books being increasingly locked away. Recreating the browsing experience is something that has been (somewhat) done with some music apps and the flipping interface with album art. That is the kind of thing I was looking for with books. It [...]

I always knew the prices were much higher than I was willing to pay (luckily, there is always a Walgreens, grocery, or liquor store nearby). I never suspected the larges were so large small though (Felix Salmon via Cowen):
Popcorn fact of the day
[Richard] McKenzie did a fair amount of real-world research on the popcorn front, [...]

The roots of sticky prices
Apparently the beasts are back in charge:
Now we’re beginning to find out that eBay’s seemingly revolutionary core - the online auction - may have been a fad all along. As Business Week reports, eBay’s auctions are “a dying breed.” Buyers and sellers are reverting to the traditional retailing model of fixed [...]

Pharmaceutical Facts
Time to develop and market a new drug: 10-15 years
Average Cost to develop a new drug (2006): $1.318 billion
Total R&D spending on drugs in 2007: $58.8 billion

Generic share of market in 2007: 67%
Percent of marketed drugs that cover R&D costs: Only 20%
Total number of drugs approved in 2007: 23
R&D as a percent of [...]

Slow in suburbia

There’s a new report out from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on broadband. It confirms the fact that the United States is lagging in broadband adoption, both in overall penetration and in other aspects including speed and price. Part, but only part, of this may be due to bad policy — basically, [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

I grew up in a state where things like milk were labeled with a “Use by” date. This was a great system. The dates were quite accurate, usually within about 36 hours of the label the product would sour. Now I live someplace that has a “Sell by” label. This is worthless. I have seen [...]

Anyone who keeps up with how these things get done know that purchasers of HD content from cable and satellite companies are getting screwed by the insane compression of HD quality. Nevertheless, I was surprised when someone pointed out that MSM has finally gotten around to reporting on it. Of course, this is just yet [...]

Jason over at Healthcare Economist seems to think this is a good idea. I have to disagree with the specific instantiation described here (going solely on Jason’s description). Besides the obvious problem, pointed out by Jason, that most people have way too little expertise in medicine to properly document their health history, making that history [...]

Full of terrible javascript links which do not respond properly to ‘open in new tab’ and CPU crunching scrolling shit. Your site looks like it was designed in the 90s, and behaves as if tabbed browsing has not yet been invented. It is painful to use. All of these things can be implemented in a [...]

It is unfortunate, too. There may be e-voting Luddites, but most of the objections I am aware of come from e-geeks who are generally excited about technological developments. However, these are also the people who are very aware of how badly companies can muck up software and hardware products. Not only that, some of us [...]

I love RSS. So should you. It makes keeping up with things dramatically easier. The reduction in ‘tracking costs’ dramatically improves my ability to read the things I want to. Do step in with ease, though, besides the wealth effect, the reduced costs to tend to produce significant substitution effects. But I pose the question, [...]

Anyone who has talked to me knows that I am not a fan of the MacBook Air. But these reviews from the WSJ, Newsweek, and USA Today are rather terrible. Not that any major news outlet has been able to cover technology (or science, or math, or politics, or..), but if this roundup of reviews [...]

First, it is discovered that Apple is crippling its software to prevent discovery of how its programs work, the precise purpose of the tool in the first place. This is likely to prevent discovery of ways to circumvent DRM, whether it be audio or video related.
Then, even Microsoft has relented on the use of Vista [...]