41–50 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone, somewhere created the first fidget spinner, named it, and marketed it. The fact that you do t know their name maybe just means they did a better job of staying out of the limelight while still profiting from the craze.
She couldn't afford the patent. I don't think she made much money from it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14271914
I'm confused... she sold tens of thousands of dollars of fidget spinners, getting on that craze immediately that she heard about it (she had product within 5 days) and knowing that it was a fad that was destined to die out (hardly the first... I remember Tamagotchi's pretty well, and the apparently New Zealand-only Chatter Ring). I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, an…
> I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away. If you feel it would be beneficial to try it, why wait until the fad dies before trying one? This seems like it might be an optimal time to have the maximum breadth of choices to find the one(s) you find most helpful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously. Furbies, tamogatchis, pogs. There was that season where suburban moms were practically dueling to the death over Tickle Me Elmos.
Can't you see the difference here? Nobody is lining up outside stores to get a fidget spinner because you can't go two feet without seeing one for sale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't you see the difference here? Nobody is lining up outside stores to get a fidget spinner because you can't go two feet without seeing one for sale.
It was the same with pogs, and knockoff tamogatchis.
If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs. But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs. Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.
It's not 100% fallacy if there's slack in the labour market. If you have 10 chaps hanging around, all of whom have broken windows, there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. To the degree that the novelty is good, keeping otherwise unemployed people active producing novelties is neither a loss nor a waste of time. Of course it doesn't make sense to go a…
This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more net wealth without breaking the window in the first place, leaving the guy free to spend that money on someone else's goods/services, who would cause the exact same amount of growth but you'd still have a window.
Spending that money that would have been spent replacing broken windows elsewhere may even generate jobs for the guys who are slack.
You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth. If you're saying the window is already broken, that's not the broken window fallacy.
If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs. But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs. Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.
Fidget junk is just an allegory for a much more pervasive trend.
So the NYT is saying that beanie babies were a sustainable business that creates the ever elusive "jobs". It was sustainable in that it lasted longer, but beanie babies are not still a sustainable business. If the metric of success is ~7 years of business then Maddoff was running a sustainable business.
seriously, where is the problem?
If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs. But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs. Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.
I'm confused... she sold tens of thousands of dollars of fidget spinners, getting on that craze immediately that she heard about it (she had product within 5 days) and knowing that it was a fad that was destined to die out (hardly the first... I remember Tamagotchi's pretty well, and the apparently New Zealand-only Chatter Ring). I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, an…
Do you remember what it was like using a travel agent? That's not what travel agents did. They didn't "maybe hear about a place", they actually went there. Resorts & cruises spent a ton of their marketing dollars to bring travel agents to the resort and get them to experience it first hand.