-Caveat Lector-
SCIO-LTD wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> This piece alone deserves posting:
>
> nurev wrote to SCIO-LTD:
> [The internet has promise in several areas, none of
> which are necessary for sustaining life.]
>
> Think again.
I read the piece. I see no reason to change my statement.
Both the internet, and modern economics are synthetic man
made creations. In the world of synthetic creations they
interact in important ways.
In real life. Biological life, modern economics are dooming
us to extinction. As for the Net, it too will come under control
of capitalists and turn into just another tool of destruction
instead of a mechanism for human advancement.
For all of evolutionary history they did not exist and we managed
to evolve to a highly developed state.
The internet does not grow food, or fetch water, or keep you warm.
It could diappear today and be irrelevant to human survival.
Joshua2
>
> Digital Society
>
> Internet Whacks $2 Billion Off Merrill Lynch
>
> by Clay Shirky
>
> THE INTERNET HAPPENED to Merrill Lynch last week, and it cost them a
> couple billion dollars -- when Merrill announced its plans to open an
> online brokerage after years of deriding the idea, its stock price
> promptly fell by a tenth, wiping out $2 billion in its market
> capitalization. The internet's been happening like that to a lot of
> companies lately -- Barnes and Noble's internet stock is well below its
> recent launch price, Barry Diller's company had to drop its Lycos
> acquisition because of damage to the stock prices of both companies, and
> both Borders and Compaq dumped their CEOs after it became clear that
> they were losing internet market share. In all of these cases, those
> involved learned the hard way that the internet is a destroyer of net
> value for traditional businesses because the internet economy is
> fundamentally at odds with the market for internet stocks.
> The internet that the stock market has been so in love with (call it the
> "Pretend Internet" for short) is all upside -- it enables companies to
> cut costs and compete without respect to geography. The internet that
> affects the way existing goods and services are sold, on the other hand
> (call it the "Real Internet"), forces companies to cut profit margins,
> and exposes them to competitors without respect to geography. On the
> Pretend Internet, new products will pave the way for enormous
> profitability arising from unspecified revenue streams. Meanwhile, on
> the Real Internet, prices have fallen and they can't get up. There is a
> rift here, and its fault line appears wherever offline companies like
> Merrill tie their stock to their internet offerings. Merrill currently
> pockets a hundred bucks every time it executes a trade, and when
> investors see that Merrill online is only charging $30 a trade, they see
> a serious loss of revenue. When they go on to notice that $30 is
> something like three times the going rate for an internet stock trade,
> they see more than loss of revenue, they see loss of value. When a
> company can cut its prices 70% and still be three times as expensive as
> its competitors, something has to give. Usually that is the company's
> stock price.
>
> The internet is the locus of the future economy, and its effect is the
> wholesale transfer of information and choice (read: power and leverage)
> from producer to consumer. Producers (and the stock market) prefer
> one-of-a-kind businesses who can force their customers to accept
> continual price increases for the same products. Consumers, on the other
> hand, prefer commodity businesses where prices start low and keep
> falling. On the internet, consumers have the upper hand, and as a
> result, anybody who profited from offline inefficiencies -- it used to
> be hard work to distribute new information to thousands of people every
> day, for example -- are going to see much of their revenue destroyed
> with no immediate replacement in sight.
>
> This is not to say that the internet produces no new value -- on the
> contrary, it produces enormous value every day. Its just that most of
> the value is concentrated in the hands of the consumer. Every time
> someone uses the net to shop on price (cars, plane tickets, computers,
> stock trades) the money they didn't spend is now available for other
> things. The economy grows even as profit margins shrink. In the end,
> this is what Merrill's missing market cap tells us -- the internet is
> now a necessity, but there's no way to use the internet without
> embracing consumer power, and any business which profits from
> inefficiency is going to find this embrace more constricting than
> comforting. The effects of easy price comparison and global reach are
> going to wring inefficiency (read: profits) out of the economy like a
> damp dishrag, and as the market comes to terms with this equation
> between consumer power and lower profit margins, $2 billion of missing
> value is going to seem like a drop in the bucket.
>
> Clay Shirky is Professor of New Media at Hunter College.
>
> Feed Magazine, June 8, 1999
>
> ============================
> Jeffrey C Hearon
> Founder & CEO
> SCIO-LTD
> http://www.scio-ltd.net
> http://www.scio-ltd.com
> http://www.scio-ltd.org
> +1.917.553.7217
> ============================
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Kris Millegan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 1999 10:52 AM
> Subject: [CTRL] OEN 6/10/99
>
> > -Caveat Lector-
> >
> > from:
> > http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
> > <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin
> Grabbe</A>
> > -----
> > Today's Lesson From The Outsider
> >
> > by Colin Wilson
> >
> >
> > They are all asleep. This is the point to which Gurdjieff returns again
> > and again. They must be made to feel the urgency of the need to wake up.
> > And after the legend of the magician, to call the mass of contented
> > bourgeois "sheep" has a new and terrible significance. At the end of All
> > and Everything, the grandson of the "all-wise Beelzebub" (Gurdjieff's
> > mouthpiece) asks whether it is still possible to save mankind and
> > "direct them to the becoming path". Beelzebub answers: "The sole means
> > of saving the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into
> > their presences a new organ . . . of such properties that everyone
> > should sense . . . the inevitability of his own death, as well as the
> > death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rest."
> > ============================================================================
There are many good lessons in the works of Gurdjieff and his
offshoots.
I respect the psychology.
But this guy claimed to be able to bi-locate.
Bi bi Gurdji.
J2
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