robertparker
One prerequisite for a healthy city neighborhood, writes Jane Jacobs, is the presence of public spaces and commerce where people can congregate on different schedules, and for multiple uses (ie a well-designed park or bustling sidewalk). In contrast, Wall Street is "miserable...its eating places and clothing shops are pitifully inadequate for the demands on them." 50 years later, Amazon's same-day delivery and Seamless' delivery for corporate accounts seemed to have solved those problems.
But is Wall Street a better neighborhood for it? Jacobs' lament of Wall Street is as apt now as then. Software is getting good at solving easy problems. One can only hope this makes the harder problems easier, too.
At some point in the 1990s, entrepreneurs realized that entire businesses could be built online. Servers could be hosted on Amazon Web Services. Websites could be built with open-source software. Distribution costs could be tracked on Google AdWords. In other words, the costs of entrepreneurship dwindled to zero.
Fledgling companies were buoyed by a pervasive assumption among VCs - that in this initial land grab, we are looking for the company that will "win" the Inter
Over Labor Day Weekend, Twitter user @VXDS flew off his handle (so sorry) and made history. British Airways had lost his bag amd had been negligent in responding. Without the following to start a viral outcry over poor customer service, @XVDS did what any rational person would: he bought a promoted tweet and lamabasted the company for customer services.
The incident brings to mind a famous study in behavioral economics. In an experiment published in the Journal of Psychology, researchers gave people the chance to penalize teammates in a game for ruining the chance for the team to make money. Invariably, they did. The research flies in the face of classical economic assumption about Homo Economicus, ie the purely self-interested man. People are willing to spend their own capital in order to enforce social norms.
One prerequisite for a healthy city neighborhood, writes Jane Jacobs, is the presence of public spaces and commerce where people ca
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