Say no to eccentric headline capitalization. It blights the Reg front page and makes our RSS feeds ugly.
'Theoretical' Nobel economics explain WHY the tech industry's such a damned mess
Jean Tirole was this year's Nobel Laureate in Economics* and what the prize was awarded (in part) for should interest people around here. Tirole's work has often been about how this tech industry of ours works and what the hell anyone should be doing to try and regulate it – if, indeed, it should be regulated at all. This is …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 22:03 GMT Jim 59
Becuase capitalization MAKES TEXT harder to read, something EVERY El REG HACK learned in THEIR first week ON THE job. It ALSO "sounds" like THE AUTHOR shouting RANDOMLY. And IT makes me WANT to SURF AWAY to the ENQUIRER, Slashdot, Reddit or ANOTHER news site that FOLLOWS a less annoying STYLE guide.
And! compare! the! way! The! Register! actually! takes! the! mickey! out! of! Yahoo! LIKE! this! just! for! having! an! exclamation! point! At! least! Yahoo! can! write! a! sane! headline!
And stop trolling Steven Fry FFS.
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Thursday 16th October 2014 08:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Becuase capitalization MAKES TEXT harder to read, something EVERY El REG HACK learned in THEIR first week ON THE job. It ALSO "sounds" like THE AUTHOR shouting RANDOMLY. And IT makes me WANT to SURF AWAY to the ENQUIRER, Slashdot, Reddit or ANOTHER news site that FOLLOWS a less annoying STYLE guide.
And! compare! the! way! The! Register! actually! takes! the! mickey! out! of! Yahoo! LIKE! this! just! for! having! an! exclamation! point! At! least! Yahoo! can! write! a! sane! headline!
And stop trolling Steven Fry FFS."
There, there.
Feel better now? :)
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 12:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Sometimes I can't tell whether something in a headline is about "US" the country, or "US" the emphasised collective of El Reg readership."
Bloody Yanks eh? If they'd give their country a proper name, rather than a vague and arguably inaccurate description we wouldn't have this problem.
Suggestions on a postcard please.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 09:13 GMT Pete 2
Looking back
> This year the prize goes to something useful in the real world,
Well, useful in that it explains some of our past and current tech-company phenomena. But since it's scope does not include a model or any predictive powers, it is not very helpful in charting the future. Regulating past excesses and abuses is still a wise move, but the technology world is (in)famous for coming up with workarounds for inconvenient consumer protections.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 09:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
The biggest case for not regulating
Is not necessarily that regulation is bad, but that regulators invariably end up doing in badly. Take the regulation of pay, for example. The British governmen's procliviy to subsidising bad businesses*, is a long standing case in point.
* By subsidising pay, through working tax credits, for example.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 11:48 GMT Steve Knox
And yes, the answer is always informed by our interest in consumers: to go back to the Google example, whatever we do about that search dominance is going to depend on how well consumers do out of it. What the people at Foundem think about it all is irrelevant.
It's amazing how few of your fellow Reg journalists appear to get that last point.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 13:36 GMT A Twig
Re: Economists
The IMF has apologised over the last couple of years...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/03/an-amazing-mea-culpa-from-the-imfs-chief-economist-on-austerity/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-08/lagarde-says-imf-got-it-wrong-on-rallying-u-k-economy.html
Sorry, not allowed HTML it seems :(
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 13:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Economist stupidity and ingrown "development"
"The IMF has apologised over the last couple of years..."
Amazing. Simply...amazing.
The IMF and World Bank have, what are considered, complete and utter failures in regards to Argentina and most of South America, plus Africa, to the point that countries are refusing IMF assistance, and NOW they apologize...for the SAME policy stupidity that Naomi Klein called them out for in The Shock Doctrine all the way back in 2007??
"Give a business person a college degree, remove their brain for a lifetime" may be the new truism for economists and MBA's in the new millennium.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 14:28 GMT ElectricRook
Re: Economist stupidity and ingrown "development"
"The IMF and World Bank have, what are considered, complete and utter failures in regards to . . . "
In regards to whom? The poor of those irresponsible countries, or a handful of wealthy people who have profited from irresponsible economic behavior of the people/leaders.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 14:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Economist stupidity and ingrown "development"
"In regards to whom?"
Do you know ANYTHING of what you talk about?
How about the IMF ITSELF
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3566699.stm
as well as scholarly economist analysis
https://www.google.com/search?q=argentina+imf+failure
Please read up more on economic policy and IMF actions prior to commenting, especially when said commenting is an attempt to sound knowledgeable yet lay blame on the victims of poor policy.
Thank you.
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 23:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Economists
Yes, quite often but usually in the graduate context, not in public. It is happening more often these days with the rapid dissemination of damaging information. Much harder to keep it swept under the rug now. About time.
On a personal note, I've found it requires a Hell of a lot more effort than to simply admit a mistake early on, correct course, and move on. In either engineering and economics, it keeps the body count lower. (I've seen enough of those having done both.)
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Wednesday 15th October 2014 23:16 GMT bep
Unfortunately
"Tirole's biggest finding is that the correct answer is, as the correct answer so often is in economics, “it depends”. We need to look at the details of that specific market and see how changing regulation and oversight would actually impact upon current behaviour, before we can decide what, if anything, should be done."
Since economics isn't a real empirical science no one can do that. You can estimate, predict or just guess, but you won't know until you try. You might then adjust the regulations if they aren't working as expected, but again you won't know the actual result of doing that until you actually do it. I'm not suggesting that all regulation is pointless, just that the basic premise of this particular argument is faulty.
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Thursday 16th October 2014 07:28 GMT John Smith 19
so he's actually built a model you can make predictions on?
Which raises the question if one wanted to compete with Google or Facebook what would work?
Sounds quite intriguing actually as I've often wondered if there was theory behind these 2 sided markets (I didn't even know what they were called).
Keep in mind any software IDE is also one of these. Delphi, Eclipse, MS Developer Studio (in alphabetical order) etc.
So yes, quite clever stuff.