Pricing anomalies

There are many positives to living in San Francisco, but parking is not one of them. It's the hardest city to find parking in that I've ever lived in. Someone wrote an entire book on the subject.

I went to Amazon to buy a copy of said book. Amazon didn't have a copy, so I checked the 3rd party seller tab for a new copy. The first seller offered it for $9.97 a copy, but the other two sellers wanted $75 and $92.20 plus shipping! This for a book that's sold off of its website for $12.95 plus shipping.

Sellers are always looking for out of print situations to try to shift the price of media up. I once sold a copy of the Criterion Collection DVD of Salo, which was out of print at the time, for $220 on Amazon.com. Someone should start a Tumblr of products which have gone into short supply and thus have exorbitant prices from Amazon's 3rd party seller community.

American modernism, Silicon Valley style

Jobs went further, however, he managed to create products that were designed like Porsches and made them available to everyone, via High Tech that transcended stylistic elements. An Apple product really was high technology and its form followed function, it went beyond the Porsche analogy by being truly fit for purpose in a way that a Porsche couldn’t, being a car designed for a speed that you weren’t allowed to drive. Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.

David Galbraith sees Steve Jobs and Donald Norman as kindred design spirirts. Norman has been commisioned to design Apple's new headquarters.

In a broader sense, Silicon Valley has minimized the value of scarcity, and in such a world, elevated the value of curation the retention of such curation. The web and services like YouTube, Spotify, and Google Books have unlocked previously rare and inaccessible content for everyone with an internet connection. It's an overwhelming mountain of content, and that's why microblogs like Twitter or Tumblr do such great business as ways to point a telescope at things we should pay attention to.

The Tudors...err, Tutors?

In many ways, it shouldn't be surrpising that in Hong Kong, where scoring well on public exams is so critical, tutors have become celebrities. The so called "Tutor Kings" can rake in a healthy living each year; when's the last time you saw your local Princeton Review math tutor tooling around in a Lamborghini?

This sounds like the basis for an Asian reality show or sitcom.