Arach Tchoupani

Short of opening a casino in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are illegal. That is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is plain mad.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.

When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave. With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.

True. True.

Potentially great tool. If anything, very interesting to see the implementation.

Something that recently occurred to me is that the only operating system that doesn’t come with Python pre-installed on it is Windows.

While Linux and OS X both view Python as essentially a first-class development platform–i.e., as something that shrink-wrap applications can be built on–Windows does not. Instead,

How does it help the U.S. to have high housing prices?  Isn’t it better for housing to be affordable?  If we give a lot of money to people to prevent foreclosures in March, how is that fair people who were foreclosed on in January?

Good points! I would say that fairness isn't really part of the equation here. It's about limiting shocks. It's about breaking the spiral.

The markets are working fine, but they’re giving people answers that they don’t like, so people cry market failure.

A little risky to say, but not entirely false. The thing is though, the market is supposed to be good at allocating assets and resources and therefore the market failure people are referring to is the irrational allocation followed by a disorderly crash. Come to think of it, it baffles me that this logic comes from people who manage billions of $. It's such faulty logic it's almost dishonest.

I'm thinking about this and how I can apply this in my thought process. Very simple, but so powerful.

Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended integration with arbitrary web services. 

Interesting! Very interesting!