Craigslist Exec To Soon Catch Bullet With His Forehead

[Brassmask]

Lord, son.

Craigslist charges money for job listings, but only in seven of the cities it serves ($75 in San Francisco; $25 in the others). And it charges for apartment listings in New York ($10 a pop). But that is just to pay expenses.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the-capitalists/

In the very damned article I posted about.  Do you just assume I come up with stuff out of my head?

Here's from an article a year ago.

Craigslist's revenues are estimated at around $10 million a year, exclusively from job ads. As use skyrockets, the company has been mulling a minimal charge — probably $10 — for real-estate listings in New York, but has not made a final decision on imposing the fee. "We're still considering this," says Best.

Contrast those numbers with 2005 revenue forecasts from the New York Times, at $3.4 billion; Tribune, at $5.7 billion; and Gannett, which is expected to rack up $7.6 billion in sales, according to earnings tracker Thomson First Call. These figures represent a much wider array of business activities than classified ad sales alone, but it's clear that Craigslist's pricing structure isn't geared to compete with the media behemoths.

"Craig [Newmark] is the most important person in the newspaper business who is not in the newspaper business," says Sreenath Sreenivasan, dean of students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York. "He's certainly somebody everyone on the business side is talking about, and anyone on the news side of the business who's not is sticking his head in the sand."

It all sounds dire, and perhaps it is in the long run. But in the short term, newspaper companies have plenty of life left in them.

"The buzzword lately has been Internet, Internet, and that newspapers are dead," says James Walden, a publishing analyst with mutual fund tracker Morningstar. "Media pundits have claimed the sky was falling and been wrong before — they were wrong about radio and about television. [The newspaper industry] is a mature — and declining — business, but there's still value to be added. Organic growth will continue to be challenging, but these companies are still extremely profitable from both a bottom line sense and in their ability to generate cash."

"I think it's really too early to say that Craigslist is the model to be emulated, or that it's really the clear winner," says Rick Summers, a technology analyst at Morningstar. "On the other hand, they're amazingly successful, depending on how you determine their measure of success."

Craigslist's mushrooming traffic numbers reflect another Internet phenomenon — which is the same reason many local papers enjoy dominant traffic numbers in their own market. A site's stickiness, as the industry calls it, demonstrates that site users are creatures of habit, which both keeps viewers checking high-school football scores at the local Times-Review-Herald-Picayune-Gazette and buying and selling on Craigslist.

"When things are free, it's hard to provide someone with an incentive to switch," Summers says.

And your quote here exemplifies your ignorance.

Craiglist is a growing company, which means they make a profit. If Craiglist didn't make a profit, if they just took in enough to cover what they do now, they couldn't grow. 

It's a growing online community, not a company in the way you think of it.  It's a social endeavour.  Craig and them surely receive a salary but who can blame them for that?  They gotta eat!

They don't care about going corporate or raping people for all the money that they possibly can.  That is clearly not the point of capitalism.  CAPITALISM means CAPITALIZING. 

[BT]

I happen to like Craigslist. The city has saved a bundle by advertising local job openings on there vs the local rags and have gotten much more qualified applicants. That's the good news. The existence of organs like Craigslist also legitimizes public perception of online advertisements and allows us to lower the cost of such public notices like variance requests from around $400 to less than $50 if we allow notices to be placed in the city website vs the dead tree papers.

The bad news is Craigslist is a category killer much like Wal-mart or Home Depot. Their volume, their results and their pricing make it extremely hard for independent and or alternative papers to fund decent journalism when the bedrock of their revenue stream is under strain from the online ease and convenience of Craigslist.

Personally i don't care whether Craig and company make billions or continue to do their work as a labor of love. That is their choice.

[Universe Prince]

Lord, son.

You're not a Lord, and I'm not your son.

Craigslist charges money for job listings, but only in seven of the cities it serves ($75 in San Francisco; $25 in the others). And it charges for apartment listings in New York ($10 a pop). But that is just to pay expenses.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the-capitalists/

In the very damned article I posted about.

Okay. Fair enough. Though I notice the person saying this is the author of the DealBook blog article, not Buckmaster himself. I haven't seen any other article make that claim. And I have to say, 10 million dollars seems like a lot of expenses.

Do you just assume I come up with stuff out of my head?

Sometimes you seem to do so. For example, your talk about capitalism has little relation to reality.

And your quote here exemplifies your ignorance.

Craiglist is a growing company, which means they make a profit. If Craiglist didn't make a profit, if they just took in enough to cover what they do now, they couldn't grow. 

It's a growing online community, not a company in the way you think of it.  It's a social endeavour.  Craig and them surely receive a salary but who can blame them for that?  They gotta eat!

Would you please stop assuming that you know how I think about this? Because clearly you haven't got even a foggy notion. Yes, I know Craigslist is not a company like Sears or Google. But I also know they have expanded operations from merely San Fransisco to hundreds of cities worldwide, from a few computers to hundreds of computers, from one guy operating the business to employing 22 people. Craigslist is a growing company, an expanding company, which means they made enough profit to expand. Duh. The company didn't get where it is now on goodwill, smiles and happy, happy RBE thoughts. What Craigslist has achieved it achieved by making and spending money. The ignorance exemplified here is yours and yours alone.

They don't care about going corporate or raping people for all the money that they possibly can.  That is clearly not the point of capitalism.  CAPITALISM means CAPITALIZING.

Case in point, the quote above. Capitalism does not mean capitalizing. Capitalism, to put this crudely, means the use of privately owned capital in business endeavors. Your use of the word "raping" clearly shows your ignorance of the matter. To rape is to plunder or abuse by force. Capitalism functions by voluntary exchange. (That the folks who want the government to take money by force are so frequently the ones who compare capitalism to rape or theft has always seemed ironic to me. But I'm not sure if it is ironic in a humorous way or in a sad way.) The point, and the beauty, of capitalism is voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. I give you something you want in exchange for something I want. There is no raping and no coercion. It doesn't require us to agree on politics or religion or music. It doesn't require us to agree about why we want what we are making an exchange for. All it requires is us to be willing to make the exchange. We are free to make it or not. If I force you to make the exchange against your will, that isn't capitalism. That is stealing. Or, if government forces you to make the exchange against your will, that is taxation.

Oh, and by the way, that whole voluntary exchange thing is one reason why focusing on providing what the customer wants is a good and sound business practice in capitalism.

Apparently you want to think capitalism is only about greed and sticking it to the next guy, while communism/RBE is about love and helping one's fellow humans, but that is a false dichotomy. Greed and sticking it to the next guy are problems that exist in any society, regardless of its economic basis. This has been true throughout history, even in supposedly communist/socialist countries. To place the blame at the feet of capitalism is ignorant. Greedy and self-serving people will take advantage of whatever social structure they live in, and eliminating money to create a RBE won't change that one iota.

Capitalism is not the end-all-be-all of human existence, nor the answer to all of society's problems. It is an answer to some problems. No, it will not result in a utopia where everyone is happy all the time. It does, however, serve liberty and human rights by allowing individuals to choose for themselves rather than having choices forced upon them. Yes, our capitalistic society has flaws. It will continue to have flaws so long as people are involved. I can support capitalism without supporting those flaws. I can oppose those flaws without opposing capitalism.

If you don't like capitalism, fine. I'm not saying you have to like it. But don't try to sell me horse hockey and tell me it's chocolate because I'm not buying it.

[Plane]

This is true in coutrys where it is forbidden , not in contries where it is harnessed,

Greed is never eliminated , but it can be made usefull.

Can you name one country where it is harnessed?

Lets Check out China , where it was forbidden for several starveing decades to grow wealthy, their change of policy has produced a bunch of millionaires and millions of new jobs.

Check out the standard of liveing typical of China about the time that Nixon visited , where the Government attitude twards greed was one of supression.
Check out the standard of liveing in China after they put Greed in the traces to pull alongside Altrusim.

I bet a wagon with two horses will travel faster than a wagon with one , and harnessing Altrusim alone will produce half or less the economic power of harnissing Greed and Altrusim together to pull in the same direction.

If you were to think of Altrusim as a more powerfull horse you can still see how a lot of horsepower is wasted by tieing up another horse and carrying it in the back of the wagon.

[Brassmask]

How anyone can look at the way pharmaceuticals operate and not call  that rape is beyond me.

What you fail to take into account of your oh, so cheery view of capitalist operations is that there are billions more people who have NOTHING to offer in exchange for the most basic needs of life that are held by a small proportion of the populace of this planet.  That is not so much rape as hostage taking.

Capitalism engenders that state of helplessness.  And the major capitalist endeavours in the form of "corporations" will eventually take on the task of engendering that state of helplessness rather than making the need irrelevant.  An Exxon is not going to look for a way for humanity to do without oil no matter what the effect of the use of such oil has on humans, the environment, etc as long as people will put up with those effects.  And, in fact, to protect its power status and that state of helplessness, the corporation will make the cost of its activities to engender those part of the cost to purchase its "product" thus the victim of its assault pays for the assault.

This is not a happy-go-lucky tool that is abused by "bad apples".  This is the natural progression of an un-natural process created by power-loving madmen.

If it was simply a matter of you have some carrots and I have a watemelon, let's swap, then that would be cool with me.  It would be in the interest of all the parties involved.  But that is not the way capitalism works.

As we move into a world where people more and more use less cash, actual money in their hands given in exchange for goods and services, we will see more and more people willing to ignore payment altogether.  More and more, I'm seeing stories of people not caring for personal gain but relative comfort in favor of more people being relatively comfortable.

More people will be willing to have less in favor of a greater number of the populace having some.  Capitalism will give way to an RBE-styled form of operating.

[Amianthus]

If it was simply a matter of you have some carrots and I have a watemelon, let's swap, then that would be cool with me.  It would be in the interest of all the parties involved.  But that is not the way capitalism works.

Actually, that is exactly how capitalism works.

[Brassmask]

If it was simply a matter of you have some carrots and I have a watemelon, let's swap, then that would be cool with me.  It would be in the interest of all the parties involved.  But that is not the way capitalism works.

Actually, that is exactly how capitalism works.

You tradin'  a lot of carrots for watermelons, are ya?

[Amianthus]

You tradin'  a lot of carrots for watermelons, are ya?

Sometimes.

Other times I trade my time for money, then I trade my money for items and services I need.

Either way, it's a mutually agreed upon trade.

[Brassmask]

Either way, it's a mutually agreed upon trade.

Really?  Did you mutually agree with the way gas prices went down before the election and then went back up afterwards?

I don't remember getting to mutually agree on that.  I can't mutually agree on what my kid's antibiotic for his ear infection costs.  I have to pay whatever they say, regardless of what it might actually cost to make.  Of course, I could just agree to stay out of the trade altogether.  I DO have that choice, I just have to be willing to accept the consequences, right?  What might that be?  Deafness?  What's it worth to keep my kid for going deaf?  That's how they set the price.  Not what did  it cost to make this and what's a decent profit on that?

Sure, it's all watermelons and carrots.

[_JS]

Actually, that is exactly how capitalism works.

Not really. What Brass discussed was a system of bartering goods. Capitalism is a complex economic system that includes ownership of the means of production, profit incentives, capital investment, and market determination of prices.

What Brass illustrated could happen in a number of different economic systems, including communism, different strains of socialism, anarchism, and honestly nearly every economic system designed by man.

[Brassmask]

Actually, that is exactly how capitalism works.

Not really. What Brass discussed was a system of bartering goods. Capitalism is a complex economic system that includes ownership of the means of production, profit incentives, capital investment, and market determination of prices.

What Brass illustrated could happen in a number of different economic systems, including communism, different strains of socialism, anarchism, and honestly nearly every economic system designed by man.

Thank you.

[Amianthus]

Really?  Did you mutually agree with the way gas prices went down before the election and then went back up afterwards?

Don't know about there, but the gas prices are continuing to fall here. They're about 20 cents a gallon cheaper now than they were before the election.

Went down 3 cents over the weekend.

Besides, it is a mutually agreed upon transaction. If I don't want to pay the going gas prices, I'm free to stop buying gasoline, or reduce my consumption.

[Amianthus]

Capitalism is a complex economic system that includes ownership of the means of production, profit incentives, capital investment, and market determination of prices.

That's your definition. I prefer the easier one to implement - a free exchange of goods, services, or money for the advantage of the people involved in the trade.

The "complex economic system" that you're describing evolved because of government meddling in the free market system. But that complex system is not the foundation of capitalism. The complexity was imposed later.

"Complex systems" don't spring up overnight.

[_JS]

That's your definition. I prefer the easier one to implement - a free exchange of goods, services, or money for the advantage of the people involved in the trade.

That's overly simplistic. Such a transaction may easily occur in any economic system, including communism.

The "complex economic system" that you're describing evolved because of government meddling in the free market system. But that complex system is not the foundation of capitalism. The complexity was imposed later.

Bull. The complexity comes from the fact that we no longer live in the 18th century when Adam Smith wrote about Classical Liberal Economics. We live in an age where cash money is a fraction of actual cash management and global economics, currency and commodity exchange, and foreign holdings are far too complex for such a simplistic definition.

You want such a meaningless definition because it leaves "capitalism" less open to criticism. The problem is that it also makes the definition useless.

"Complex systems" don't spring up overnight.

I don't recall anyone suggesting that it did.

[Brassmask]

Really?  Did you mutually agree with the way gas prices went down before the election and then went back up afterwards?

Don't know about there, but the gas prices are continuing to fall here. They're about 20 cents a gallon cheaper now than they were before the election.

Went down 3 cents over the weekend.

Besides, it is a mutually agreed upon transaction. If I don't want to pay the going gas prices, I'm free to stop buying gasoline, or reduce my consumption.

Sorry to be a stickler but a mutually agreed upon transaction seems to imply actually going ahead and participating in the transaction, doesn't it?  Not buying gasoline would not be considered entering into a mutually agreed upon transaction.  And if that is the case, then how does a farmer who onlyowns a tractor supposed to opt out of this mutually agreed upon transaction?  Totally re-define his farming process?  I would imagine it would THEN, in light of the other options available to him, that it might behoove him to go ahead and pay whatever price they set for the gas thus making the transaction not so much mutually agreed upon.

Sounds more like "Pay us $X for your daughter whom we have hostage."  The gasman having all the pull here and the farmer being completely at their mercy.  The need would then arise for him to raise his prices in order to recoop the expense paid for the gas.  And then the woman at the grocery store looking to buy fresh vegetables must then make the choice of healthy, fresh foods for her family at a higher premium, or the lower cost of canned goods with lesser health impact.  Of course, she could just grow her own vegetables but that would entail her becoming a part time farmer in addition to her job as an accountant for a small tractor dealership.

And so, what we see is that the price of gas then impacts millions in a negative way because when the gas is a need and not a want there is no option other than to pay or STOP doing something.  Sure, the price could vary from dealer to dealer by a few cents but if one raises they all raise and we're never going to see a dollar buy a gallon of gas again so pay it or STOP doing whatever it is you need the gas for.  That sounds like "Pay us $X for your daughter whom we have hostage or we will kill her and you will then stop seeing her."

So, if you see all this as a mutually agreed upon transaction, you're kind of crazy.

All across America, citizens are trying to figure out simple matters like "How am I going to get to work?" because gas is so outrageously priced.  Many are already making the jump to a Hybrid vehicle but that is not a viable option for people living on $7 an hour.  The conundrum remains, "I have to get to work, so I can make enough money to pay for gas to get to work".  Of course, they could always just STOP doing something.