So, these NBA players were bereft of good legal counsel about work product?

I don't get this. If game makers had consent from the players to appear, surely that includes their tattoos?

Steve, was there discussion about the mean and median averages of the projects funded? I don't see crowd sourcing displacing the traditional SBA loans for small businesses any time soon.

Peter, could your approach be called: Micromotives & Macrobehavior, (despite being a title of Tom Schelling's book.)?

Allison writes: "Lawyers are busy enough as it is, but to compete in today's market, they'll have to start producing content - quality content - on top of everything else they already have to do to attract and serve clients." I agree with the observation about being busy. But, it is not helpful to get lawyers to write blog articles with primary goal to "attract and serve" clients. You begin your apprenticeship as a writer by putting down on paper your ideas about an issue, so that you know what you think about the problem. Later other people may be interested in your solutions. It is most important for you to get clear, however, first. (People, even lawyers, will write a lot if the purpose is to entertain themselves, first.)

Lawyers need to understand what a back link strategy is. Most of their posts are evergreen, not tied to current events. When they see an current event that could be better understood by reference to their blog post, they need to link back and track the analytics.

Alice, guilty as charged and will be sending you an email.

Sorry, I don't get Romer's remarks. Social contract theorists have been studying rules that humans would follow as an scientific project for some time: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/ Brian Skyrms is probably the most well known philosopher who uses extended game theory to explore social contract formation. Romer owes us a little more here, even though the skyhook metaphor is cute.

Alice, the other view is that lawyers are not any more unhappy than any other group, but being very competitive they like to whine about being "unhappy" more than anyone else.

From today's Wall Street Journal: "Hundreds of small-business owners have been hit with similar penalties in connection with pension or benefit plans, says Alex Brucker of the Small Business Council of America, an association representing small firms on pension, tax and health-care issues. Hundreds more are likely to get hit with these penalties in the near future, he says." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125331489168624343.html

Is that an affiliate link, Joel? Your reader should also know the other side of the story. http://www.bluemaumau.org/6941/irs_expert_give_warning_rollover_industry

I agree with much of this, and would add the following. 1. Google quality score affects your ad placement, and quality score is fairly opaque. 2. On the content network, ad placement is much more opaque. 3. Ads can have high quality score, but Google decides that only the first 10 run on the first page, and nothing runs on the second search page. 4. Google's attitude to trademarks changes constantly. Now limited use of trademarks in adwords is allowed. This is an excellent anti-trust problem, and I look forward to you following up with a paper called "Auction Design - The Anti Trust Issues."

That the usual VM calculation of cardinal utility is unique up to an affine or linear transformation is only a function of the axioms needed to be satisfied. There is no place for large numbers.

I am an attorney, and generally support Seth Godin's view. But, it does depends on how much is being quoted to qualify as fair use. My solution would be to: simply notify the author that you believe that your quote constitutes fair use, and that unless you hear back from them within 30 days, you will assume that they agree, is a useful compromise. Will it work all the time? No, but it probably cuts out a lot of silly time wasting.

I wrote about Kindle displacing the second hand text market here: http://www.bizop.ca/blog2/due-diligence/can-kindle-replace-text-books.html

I vote for Asim Jalis's interpretation as an equally valid view. What I don't know is how to break the tie.

I liked this, except for the reference to harmonic dynamics. There is no need to muck up your good explanation that if everyone is using a similar risk model, then the agents are likely to move in tandem. So when you need diversification of risk the very most, you cannot get it; you are getting unseen, unheard of, and unthought of massive correlation in one action: selling.

I found the paper disappointing in that Levine did not discuss at all invariance. Tversky's great challenge was a thoughtful attack on the principal of invariance. Invariance is the principle which allows the mathematization of decisions. Levine simply ignores this challenge and potters on about prospect theory.

I have now read the entire paper, and I am disappointed. The FTC has already stated the scope of the new biz op rules will not encompass mlm companies.

This looks to be a very interesting article. In my experience,the biggest problem in this area is with the victim's image. After the con, it is impossible for the person to relate objectively how they were taken in by nonsense. As such, they treated by the regulators as mere marks who deserved what they got.

In fact, some have argued that this free for all with employees has actually made Silicon Valley far more competitive.

I think that none of these participants showed any understanding of permission marketing, the examples largely seem to be interruption marketing, even the use of twitter. These big brands are missing the general idea: by using social media, you can scale a 1-1 sales relationship and sell more things to less clients. Not one of these speakers talked about using the trust gained by a brand to a) get more information from the consumer, b) using that information wisely, and c) selling affiliate products.

And the rule for deciding when Monty Hall shows door 2 or door 3, when you have correctly chosen door 1 was? Random choice between 2 or 3 right? What would happen if the rule was only show door 2?