intuitive ink

Crowdfunding IS too expensive The payments processing cartel everybody needs to know about  Crowdfunding is kind of a broadly-generic term.  As a recurring topic and point of discussion among hackers, startup entrepreneurs and "the biz guys", it deserves a special teasing-out.  Just what are people talking about when they talk about "crowdfunding"  ... is it like a Kickstarter campaign for a snazzy newfangled electric skateboard?  Is it a plea for funds that takes the form of a "donate now" button or post on Facebook to help that friend's doggie after it was hit by a car? Her dog needed emergency surgery - it was expensive and urgent.  Or, is crowdfunding some sort of "offering" of equity, like a stake in a potentially-profitable company that dangles future lucrative payout for some initial investment? For the purposes of this post, let's define crowdfunding specifically as: Any effort by an individual, group, or organization to...

Where did the information asymmetry in stock options come from?  "Bill Clinton in 1992, one of his campaign causes, was that no company should be able to deduct the cost of executive compensation in excess of $1,000,000. But when it came to actually implementing, the treasury department decided:  As long as CEO pay is linked to company performance, you could deduct over a million dollars. Well, that was a signal to a lot of these executives and to their boards of directors to make more and more of executive pay into stock options. That's where the whole stock option thing came from. It was a kind of a perversion of Bill Clinton's promise in the 1992 election."  -- Robert Reich,  Inequality for All   ~ :47 minutes  Executives -- especially unethical executives -- thrive on information asymmetry. In fact, many will go out of their way to create as much asymmetry as possible and to prevent employees from being able to access or get the data...