There is some rumbling (here, here) regarding the formation of another tech bubble, this time riding on the so-called “Web 2.0,” i.e. social media. To that, I’ll attest that over the past year, there has been a steady stream of stealth startups of this sort arriving seemingly out of nowhere and hiring all comers.

What to make of this? Is social media any more viable than e-commerce of the first dot-com bubble?
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In situations where the cost of common goods or utilities is shared, such as the roommate situation, usually several algorithms are used. Sometimes people take turns bearing the cost of new purchases or renewals. Sometimes people split the cost per head. These are more convenient and efficient than each person acquiring a copy of such goods for oneself. But it isn’t necessarily fair due to usage differentials, although people tend to live with it.

It just occurred to me that a perfectly fair and distributed algorithm is for the person who happens to exhaust a unit quantity of a common good to replace it with a new unit, at own cost. This shares cost proportional to actual use (probabilistically), but doesn’t require any coordination or accounting.

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… in this ad:

Here’s the quote in question at 0:37:

One of the things which I think has increased the cost of living has been this administration’s reliance on a high interest rate policy.

In fact, the issue of the day was over fiscal policy being too tight and being overly concerned about the threat of inflation.

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