Think about this every day:
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. ~ Ayn Rand
If you aren’t comfortable with this attitude, it’s hard to be awesome. Sorry. You can be good enough without being assertive, but to a large extent, being awesome requires that you initiate, take action, and chart your own course through the norms of mediocrity.
I'm overdosing on Ayn Rand quotes (two per week is a bit much) but this is a great blog post by Chris Guillebeau.
I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated -- and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, "Why don't you have him killed?
When we started Auctomatic in mid-2007, eBay was dominant but faltering, PayPal was lumbering along without any innovation, Facebook was amazing everyone (and scaring Google) with their growth, the iPhone was reshaping the cell phone industry, and everyone was talking about Twitter. Two and a half years on, that still sounds like a reasonable assessment of things.
Take a breath!
Dorsey’s new venture is called the Square iPhone Payment System, his new company is Self Edge NYC, and the service’s site will likely be located at SquareUp.com. The service provides a white dongle for your iPhone or iPod Touch that lets you pay without a credit card.
As CoolHunting wrote in July (without knowing about Dorsey’s involvement):
The innovation is in a small, plastic card reader that fits in to the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. After the employee enters the amount to charge, the customer confirms by scrawling their signature with their finger and then either one enters the customer’s email address to send the receipt to. The payment is processed by Square for a small percentage plus a fixed fee; the funds are transferred directly to the store’s bank account, cutting both time and complexity on the processing side. The customer’s receipt includes a map showing the location of the transaction which is handy for those who record, sort and file such things.
I think its a great idea.
Harold Hoteling analyzed a model of spatial competition; i.e. the location of different sellers in a market respect to one another. Anthony Downs saw that this model could explain some aspects of political competition of candidates with respect to ideological position.
Hoteling investigated how sellers would choose locations along a a linear market, say ice cream stands along a beach. He assumed that the product was uniform so customers would buy from the nearest seller. Suppose as is shown in the diagram below that there are only two sellers and they are located at the quarter points of the beach. The two sellers would then each capture one half of the beach ice cream market.
If the customers were evenly distributed along the beach then the arrangement shown would have the advantage that it would reduce the amount of walking by the customers to a minimum. But that arrangement is not stable. Seller M would have a profit incentive to move toward Seller N, in fact to move just to the west of Seller N and thereby capture three quarters of the ice cream market. Likewise Seller N would have an incentive to move toward Seller M. They might jocky around for a locational advantage but the only place they could settle down is at the midpoint of the beach. Again each gets one half of the market, but now the average distance customers have to walk is double what it was when the sellers were located at the quarter points.If the customers were not evenly distributed along the beach the tendency of the ice cream sellers under competition would be to locate at the median point, the point where half of the customers are to the west of that point and half are to the east of it.
Hoteling also considered what the effect of having more than two sellers would be on the location of the sellers.
Anthony Downs noted that Hoteling's model could explain political competition. Instead of a beach the linear market is the political spectrum. The assumption is that each voter will vote for the candidate or party that is closest to his or her political position. Thus when a candidate takes a position to the right of the other candidate he or she will get the votes of all to the right of that position. As with the ice cream sellers on the beach the political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent's. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter.
