pez dispenser

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The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing

But then along came Pierre Omidyar, a computer programmer whose fiancee couldn't find anyplace to buy her favorite collectible, Pez dispensers. Like Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, Omidyar took matters into his own hands, never realizing the massive force he was about to unleash. The service, originally called "AuctionWeb" but soon renamed "eBay," at first glance appeared similar to Onsale. But eBay had what seemed like a radical idea at the time. It allowed users to sell items directly to THE COMBO SPECIAL: THE HYBRID ORGANIZATION each other. It never took control of inventory and never served as an intermediary. After all, there was really no need to have a moneyback guarantee for Pez dispensers. In true catalyst fashion, Omidyar created a network based on trust.

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From the get-go, eBay declared, "We believe people are basically good. We believe everyone has something to contribute. We believe that an honest and open environment can bring out the best in people." Because eBay opened the doors wide and allowed anyone to sell any item as long as it was legal, the site quickly became home to a huge number of listings—from Pez dispensers to laptop computers to rare antiques. Users began flocking to the site, and eBay became the market leader. Trust wasn't just a promotional scheme eBay cooked up to make users feel better about the site. From the beginning, trust permeated the entire company. Even today, when eBay employees consider a strategic decision, they are required to begin with the assumption that people are basically good and trustworthy.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

We buy much more than books (both new and used), diapers, and pet food online now. There are thriving online markets for collectibles, Chinese antiquities, and high-end automobiles. (One of the founding legends of eBay, unfortunately apocryphal, is that Omidyar created AuctionWeb to help his then girlfriend find trading partners for her Pez dispenser collection.) At the time of writing, eBay Motors has listings for hundreds of Porsches, including several with registered bids above $100,000. Dozens of Chinese vases on eBay attracted bids in excess of $10,000 apiece. And early doubters notwithstanding, we get heaps of advice—much of it personalized—via the web on what to buy and why, if not in precisely the form that Future Shop’s authors anticipated.

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And as far as we know, none were coined by economists.2 Despite its dubious value, cheap talk is everywhere. Some might argue that most advertising is comprised exclusively of it; there’s certainly no shortage in online commerce: “authentic” and “genuine” are near-ubiquitous descriptors among purveyors of Tiffany jewelry on eBay and in the descriptions of plenty of other items (baseball cards, Pez dispensers, antiquities) where one might have concerns of honest representation (calling yvonne9903!). Why bother to make claims of honesty, love, or authenticity if they’ll be heavily discounted by a skeptical counterpart in business or romance? It’s because that while the upside is limited, the cost isn’t just cheap, it’s nil—so why not give it a try and hope there’s a sucker out there who believes you.

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The market maker faces a delicate balancing act in satisfying the needs and wants of each side. And indeed a platform isn’t much good unless all sides agree to participate. Just as no one would visit a supermarket that stocked only a limited supply of cornflakes, eBay wouldn’t get many visitors if the only items for bid were a couple of old Pez dispensers. Nor would anyone bother to post their surplus Beanie Babies if they didn’t expect it to be seen by a reasonable volume of potential customers. The participants on each side of the market are of the chicken-and-egg variety. This is less of a problem for a one-sided market like a grocery store, which often buys its inventory from manufacturers before putting it up for sale.

Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

I’m going to go make myself some throat-soothing tea now! Mmm . . . tea: nature’s coffee! Girls, if you have any boys to set me up with, I’d really appreciate you passing along this cover letter. Maybe you have a cute brother? A single gardener who speaks English? A PEZ dispenser in the shape of a human that I can wiggle so that it looks like a boyfriend? Lady tip: there’s not that much of a difference between a rare PEZ dispenser and a boyfriend! They’re both handsome, worth a lot of money, and spit PEZ at you! FIG. 6.7 Girlfriend Cover Letter To Whom It May Concern: My name is Megan Amram, and this letter is to express my interest in the position of “Girlfriend.”

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Although the number of e-businesses has been reduced from thousands to a smaller number of larger enterprises, eBay, the most successful electronic marketplace, combined e-commerce, online affinity groups, and reputation management. Restoring the Shadow of the Future In 1995, Pierre Omidyar created eBay so that his wife could trade Pez dispensers— a form of packaging for candy now valued by collectors. The Omidyars are billionaires now—from creating an electronic marketplace, not from trading Pez dispensers. In 2000, eBay users transacted more than $5 billion in gross merchandise sales. By 2002, eBay had more than 42 million registered users and was the most popular shopping site on the Internet.24 Millions of items are listed for sale on any given day in thousands of categories. eBay offers no warranty for its auctions; it merely puts buyers and sellers together, gives them a place to display pictures of their wares, automatically manages auctions, provides a reputation management system, and takes a small listing fee.

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By 2002, eBay had more than 42 million registered users and was the most popular shopping site on the Internet.24 Millions of items are listed for sale on any given day in thousands of categories. eBay offers no warranty for its auctions; it merely puts buyers and sellers together, gives them a place to display pictures of their wares, automatically manages auctions, provides a reputation management system, and takes a small listing fee. Omidyar benefited from the power of Reed’s Law (Chapter 2). eBay is a “group-forming network” that self-organizes around shared obsessions; all the collectors of Turkish railway tickets, Dickens first editions, Pez dispensers, velvet paintings, and Ming vases find each other at their appropriate auctions and form their own communities. Surprisingly, eBay reported in 1997 that only 27 out of 2 million auctions over a four-month period were considered to involve possible criminal fraud and that 99.99 percent of the auctions attracting bids were successfully completed.25 “It’s almost impossible to believe that random strangers can trade like this without more problems.

How to Retire the Cheapskate Way by Jeff Yeager

asset allocation, car-free, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, FedEx blackjack story, financial independence, fixed income, Pepto Bismol, pez dispenser, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Zipcar

Some of the more valuable finds as Marv dug deeper into his barn-size time capsule: a massive collection of Matchbox cars (many in mint condition); dozens of highly collectible metal lunch boxes; vinyl record albums that had never been opened; dolls and other toys still in their original packaging; boxes filled with classic comic books, metal signs, and other vintage advertising memorabilia for everything from Tabasco sauce to Pepto-Bismol; and an entire box filled with nothing but PEZ dispensers. The other thing Marv realized as he stood in the barn one evening staring at boxes still stacked all the way up as high as the hayloft, was that even at the rapid pace he was working, he might not live long enough to see the last box unpacked. So he enlisted the help of one of his daughters who lived nearby—“she knows all about selling stuff on eBay, is that what it’s called?”

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Plus Marv has two other new little income producers: he leases space in the now empty barn to people looking to store their boats and RVs, and he “saved back a few (dozen) boxes of the most special stuff” he and Joan bought over the years, so that Marv himself can now spend some enjoyable summer afternoons manning a sales table of his own at the Shipshewana flea market, making some other young couple’s secondhand treasure hunting dreams come true. LOSE IT IF YOU DON’T USE IT “Not everybody has a barn full of stuff they can sell off,” Marv Johnson openly admits, “but most people my age have a lot more things than they probably realize, and a lot of things they’d be better-off getting rid of.” With Marv and his army of PEZ dispensers as your inspiration, it pays in more ways than one to undertake a thorough decluttering exercise prior to retiring. Experts in decluttering and home organization generally give a thumbs-up to Marv’s “five crates” approach, or some similar system of sorting items into categories, including: “Trash,” “Save,” “Sell,” and “Giveaway.”

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

In no place is this more visible than on eBay—where, despite the opportunity for buyers and sellers to transact directly, most of the trading flows through trusted middlemen, those sellers who have built up the best reputations over thousands of transactions. We see in eBay’s early days, for example, the rise of brick-and-mortar services like AuctionDrop and iSoldIt; people trying to make a buck through eBay’s virtual garage sale didn’t list their old Beatles albums and Pez dispensers on eBay themselves but paid these intermediaries a commission of as much as 45 percent to do it for them. Now that eBay has been around for years, thousands of people make their living by buying specialty products and reselling them on the site, the preeminent among them enjoying over $150,000 in sales per month.

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But although anybody can make a sale on eBay, not everyone can turn a profit, let alone the kind of profit Wood makes. The site started out as a consumer-to-consumer marketplace: like a global garage sale where anybody could sell just about anything to anyone directly. In eBay’s early days, when most sales were through auctions, the prototypical eBay item was a Pez dispenser that one collector might sell to another. Very quickly, though, the site evolved into a place where more and more sales would go through professional middlemen. Some were owners of brick-and-mortar stores wishing to expand their market or people like Mike Wolfe who found eBay so helpful (and time-consuming) that he hired a full-time person to run sales through the site.15 Some were “trading assistants”—companies like AuctionDrop and iSoldIt, that made it easy for occasional sellers to off-load their castoffs without the hassle of going on eBay themselves.

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco by Matthew Richard Poole

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, game design, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, old-boy network, pez dispenser, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, upwardly mobile

Lyle Tuttle, undisputed king of the San Francisco tattoo empire, moved his minimuseum from a seedy location at Seventh and Market streets long after he had already engraved Janis Joplin’s flesh, but you can still see his 109 Outlandish out-of-town archives... Heading south from the city, US 101 is dotted with weird little wayside collections. The first stop is the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia, not far from the airport. Remember those little candies spit from the mouths of plastic cartoon characters? Since the first Pez dispenser hit the shelves in 1952, hundreds, if not thousands, of models have been issued, and the museum’s collection is exhaustive. Moving right along to the Silicon Valley, you’ll find the perfect antidote to Apple, Intel, and the rest of the area’s high-tech cathedrals: the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

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Tues–Wed and Fri–Sun 10am–5pm; Thurs 10am–9pm. Admission $10 adults, $7 seniors 65 and over, $6 youths 12–17, free for children under 12, $5 flat rate for all after 5pm Thurs. See Map 7 on p. 94. See Map 7 on p. 94. Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia (p. 109) BURLINGAME One of the world’s most exhaustive collections of Pez dispensers.... Tel 650/347-2301. www.burlingamepezmuseum. com. 214 California Dr., Burlingame. Tues–Sat 10am–6pm. Free admission. Cable Car Museum (p. 106) RUSSIAN HILL San Francisco’s cablecar system is still run out of this museum, which also houses the original prototype cable car.... Tel 415/474-1887. www. cablecarmuseum.org. 1201 Mason St.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The beautiful thing about owning an Internet platform is that other people pay for all the expensive parts of your business. The hardware and software are developed by Apple, Intel, Apache, Samsung, and Microsoft. The telecommunications networks are maintained by Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. Pez makes the Pez dispensers, Pixar makes the cute cartoons, Penguin Random House publishes the books, and the nation’s aunts make the cat videos. You sit in the middle and take a small percentage of every sale, or charge advertisers for the privilege of marketing their low-profit commodity products to your customers. The key is getting there first, because a platform’s value increases exponentially as the number of buyers and sellers grows.

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., 90 NLS/Augment, 125 Nobel Prize, 3, 45, 59, 78, 80, 176 Northeastern University, 64 Northern Arizona University, 229–30 Health and Learning Center, 230 Northern Iowa, University of, 55 Norvig, Peter, 149, 170, 227–28, 232 Notre Dame (Paris), cathedral school at, 18 Nurkiewicz, Tomasz, 218 Obama, Barack, 2 Oberlin College, 46 O’Brien, Conan, 166 Oklahoma, University of, 90 Omdurman Islamic University, 88 oNLine system, 125–26 Open Badges, 207 Open source materials and software, 177, 205–6, 215, 223, 232 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 9, 224 Overeducated American, The (Freeman), 56 Oxford University, 19, 21, 23, 24, 92, 135 Packard, David, 123 Parkinson’s disease, 70 Paris, University of, 18–19, 21, 137 Pauli, Wolfgang, 176 Pauling, Linus, 70 Pausch, Randy, 71–72 Peace Corps, 125 Pellar, Ronald (“Doctor Dante”), 208 Pell Grant Program, 56 Penguin Random House, 146 Pennsylvania, University of, 23, 24, 31 Wharton Business School, 155 Pennsylvania State University, 53 People magazine, 57 Pez dispensers, 146 Phaedrus (Socrates), 20, 98 PhDs, 7, 55, 117, 141, 193, 237, 250, 254 adjunct faculty replacing, 252 college rankings based on number of scholars with, 59 regional universities and community colleges and, 60, 64, 253 as requirement for teaching in hybrid universities, 31–33, 35, 50, 60, 224 Silicon Valley attitude toward, 66 Philadelphia, College of, 23 Philip of Macedon, 92 Phoenix, University of, 114 Piaget, Jean, 84, 227 Piazza, 132 Pittsburgh, University of, 73–76 Pixar, 146 Planck, Max, 45 Plato, 16, 17, 21, 31, 44, 250–51 Portman, Natalie, 165 Powell, Walter, 50, 117 Princeton University, 1–2, 23, 112, 134, 161, 245 Principia (Newton), 190 Protestantism, 24 Public universities, 7, 55, 177, 224, 253 Purdue University, 96, 208 Puritans, 22–24 Queens College, 23 Quizlet, 133 Rafter, 131–32 Raphael, 16, 17 Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 87 Reagan, Ronald, 56 Regional universities, 55, 60, 64 Reid, Harry, 42 Renaissance, 19 Rhode Island, College of, 23 Rhodes Scholarships, 2 Rice University, 204 RNA, 3 Rockstar Games, 230 Roksa, Josipa, 9, 36, 85, 244 Romans, ancient, 16 Roosevelt, Theodore, 165 Ruby on Rails Web development framework, 144 Rutgers University, 23 Sample, Steven, 64 Samsung, 146 San Jose State University, 177 Sandel, Michael, 177 SAT scores, 63, 136–37, 171, 195, 213 Saylor, Michael, 186–93, 199, 201 Saylor.org, 191, 223, 231 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 45 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 16 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 45 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 51 Scientific American, 92, 155 Scientific Research and Development, U.S.

Android Developer Tools Essentials: Android Studio to Zipalign by Mike Wolfson, Donn Felker

business logic, Debian, performance metric, pez dispenser

He currently runs the local Google Developer Group, and has been a lifelong supporter of a variety of other group learning activities. He has spoken about Android and mobile development at a variety of conferences and user groups. When he is not geeking out about phones, he enjoys the outdoors (snowboarding, hiking, scuba diving), collecting PEZ dispensers, and chasing his young (but quick) daughter. Colophon The animal on the cover of Android Developer Tools Essentials is a cassowary (genus Casuarius), a large, flightless bird that is native to the rainforests of New Guinea and Australia. This genus consists of three species: one is extinct and the rest are living but endangered.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

A dozen years after its founding, Facebook stood as one of the ten most valuable companies in the world. eBay. eBay has one of the best origin stories of the past few decades, although, like many origin stories, the popular version isn’t quite true. The story goes that founder Pierre Omidyar was looking to help his wife sell her Pez dispensers (a collectible plastic device that dishes out not particularly good candy), so he founded eBay. Although Omidyar has since admitted that the story was created largely for marketing purposes, there is no doubt that eBay’s disruptive model of the online matching of buyers and sellers of all types of goods played a major role in disrupting the classifieds industry, creating a booming business that went from first-year revenues of $232,000 (everything big starts small) to $1 billion in only four years.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

If oil is money in nature’s savings vault, the Bank of the North Sea is about to go bust. 12 THE LORD OF HAPPINESS A common way economists determine how much something is worth is by applying what is known as the willingness to pay principle. How much would someone be willing to pay for a tangible thing, such as a plastic Pez dispenser, or an intangible one, say an unpolluted bay or more time off work? How much, for example, is the head of Jeremy Bentham, the great English philosopher who died in 1832, worth? This book is chock-full of skepticism about the value we attach to certain things and about the difficulty of pricing things we really should be measuring, like pollution, housework, and nature.

My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

We all kept talking about having an ‘abs challenge’, the idea being that knowing we’d have to display ourselves to the office meant we’d get rid of our bellies. We all secretly knew that our devotion to Nando’s would have made any such contest a blasphemous obscenity. I think Jimmy would win that nowadays as he has lost quite a lot of weight. Sadly none of it off his head, so he looks like a fucking Pez dispenser. Recently, I was doing a guest appearance on a show and ran into one of the guys I’d worked with on Cats. He told me about a joke they’d written about the Special Olympics that hadn’t got in. ‘At the Special Olympics this week, somebody was injured during the hammer throwing. But nobody could work out who it was.’

Lethal Passage by Erik Larson

independent contractor, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, The Great Moderation

Each clip was long, slender, and gray, with a powerful spring that forced the stacked cartridges upward after the topmost round was fired and stripped away. The clips, also known as magazines or, in gunspeak, simply “mags,” were designed to inject bullets into the Cobray’s receiver much the way a kid’s Pez dispenser keeps presenting new blocks of candy. To a cynic, God may have seemed suspiciously absent from Atlantic Shores that morning. The faithful, however, believe that God did indeed intercede, at the point where Nicholas chose that first clip. Forensic investigators later test-fired Nicholas’s gun repeatedly, inserting each of the six magazines.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

He did not look like he had the moxie of even a typical PayPal junior engineer. But Thompson wasn’t going to say no to this meeting, not when Benchmark Capital had requested it. Benchmark had made a seed investment in eBay, back when it was being run out of the founders’ apartment as a quirky exchange site for collectible Pez dispensers. Today, eBay is an $18 billion public company with sixteen thousand employees around the world. It’s also PayPal’s parent company. Benchmark was considering an investment in Shaked’s company, Israel-based Fraud Sciences. To help with due diligence, the Benchmark partners asked Thompson, who knew a thing or two about e-fraud, to check Shaked out.

The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life by Francine Jay

big-box store, book scanning, carbon footprint, dumpster diving, Ford Model T, indoor plumbing, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, pez dispenser, place-making, young professional

We find it hard to declutter these items because of the memories and emotions attached to them—as if parting with them means giving up part of our lives. But we all know that’s not true! Getting rid of your old football jersey won’t make you any less of an athlete, and tossing the leftover favors from your wedding won’t invalidate your marriage. Likewise, selling your collection of Pez dispensers won’t erase the fun you had hunting for them at flea markets. We just have to understand that the events and experiences of our lives are not embodied in these objects. While things can be broken, tarnished, or taken away, the memories they represent persist—with or without them. With that in mind, let’s consider a few categories of sentimental items that can trip us up while we’re decluttering.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

The top auctions, the highly rated buyers-and-sellers lists, the user feedback, the communities formed around specific categories like Stamp Collecting or Consumer Electronics, the regional filters, the lists of new offerings from people you’ve bought from before—all of these are attempts to make patterns of group behavior transparent to individual users, the way a city neighborhood makes comparable patterns visible to its residents. EBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, originally created the site to enable his wife to trade Pez Dispensers with other Pez fanatics worldwide; six years later the site harbors thousands of similar microcommunities, united by shared interests. If eBay had restricted itself to showcasing the collector’s items that happened to be in vogue that month—Beanie Babies or PlayStation 2—the results wouldn’t have looked all that different from your traditional shopping mall.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Stick your neck out for issues that you think are controversial, but you know you are on the right side of them, for example, "Why do we trust fiat currency now?" or "Who needs a teacher when you have VR?" Be a continued source of stories. "I bought it on eBay" was the best example of this. The press kept writing stories every time someone sold something interesting on eBay. Stories went out about everything from Pez dispensers to nuclear power plants to houses to cars and eBay kept the stories coming. I remember when I was running the school voucher initiative, an education writer pulled me aside and said, “We can’t really write you a balanced piece because we need the stream of stories that we get from teachers’ unions, and they are clearly opposed to what you are doing.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

Here it is: Ronald was attending his one-billionth birthday party in a suburban basement, handing out little cups of orange drink to churlish brats. He looked up the stairs briefly and saw the kids' mothers in the kitchen, drinking martinis and making jokes at his expense. He abandoned the kids to confront them. "If you've got something to say, then say it to my face." The mothers giggled. I mean, this was a living Pez dispenser suddenly in their faces. "Relax. We were just having fun." "Fun is my business, lady. I know fun. Those cracks you were making aren't fun. There's a sensitive soul beneath this greasepaint." "Were you born with all of that shit on?" Another mother asked, "What do you do when you get home—leave your makeup on and eat TV dinners and make prank phone calls?"

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

Ian Huntley had his throat slashed by another con. Looking on the bright side, he can now wear his tongue as a tie to parole hearings. Prison staff and surgeons did everything they could, but Huntley still survived the attack. Doctors weren’t sure whether to stitch his throat up or fill him with sweets and use him as a Pez dispenser. To prevent Huntley from using his neck to smuggle contraband, surgeons have made it easier to search him. If a warden steps on his foot, then his head flips open like a pedal bin. The man who attacked him was very angry. You know how these environmentalists get with people who choose to fill their baths instead of using a shower.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

At the internet auction site eBay, for example, bidders feverishly compete for everything from junk to high art. It all began in 1995, when Pierre Omidyar set up a web site called AuctionWeb for people wanting to exchange information about collectibles and to make trades. Legend has it that his initial goal was to sell his girl-friend’s collection of Pez dispensers. The site’s services were initially offered free of charge, as a service to the public. After six months’ explosive growth in usage, based on word-of-mouth recommendations, Omidyar began charging a fee, a small percentage of the sale price, to cover his costs of running the web site. Payment was left up to the honesty of the seller, but the checks rolled in.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The agency is headquartered on two floors of an 1870s town house blocks away from the White House that was once briefly the residence of Theodore Roosevelt. It doesn’t look like a typical government office. It is adorned with crab-themed decorations of the agency’s unofficial mascot, Mollie the Crab, presidential Pez dispensers, and cleverly hidden White House Easter eggs. The “Oval Office” where they have meetings is a storage room in the basement that doubles as a server farm. The USDS members wear jeans and T-shirts, with a button-down qualifying as being dressed up. “We have a much faster hiring process than most federal agencies.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

He worried about damaged military equipment, and, seeing a photo of a flooded New York City subway, said there was saltwater in all kinds of undiscovered places—that we’d find out about it years hence. “I just hope they consult us, include us in the contracts,” he said. He carried his things into his Ford Excursion—the V10 behemoth, he called it—and loaded them in the trunk. On his way to Florida, his trunk had been full of Star Trek paraphernalia: a McCoy model, a set of Star Trek Pez dispensers, a door chime à la Starship Enterprise, a big blue foam “live long and prosper” hand, and ten more figurines and scenes and toys from the show. He’d given them all to Stacey Cook for Christmas. Now he had a large 3-D television, for corrosion education purposes, in their place. Dunmire dropped me off at the Orlando airport.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

When every other customer complains about meeting a man with a stomach pump, you’re better off packing your own lunch. Markets themselves are a form of collective intelligence (CI), and since transactions occur, they clearly arrive at prices seen as fair by buyers and sellers alike for everything from stocks to Pez dispensers (the first eBay merchandise). A recent book by James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Random House, 2004) has nearly 300 pages of examples of group wisdom. One such example is the television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

As the code did the work and the space on the Web server came with his account, it cost him nothing out-of-pocket to provide. He conceived of it as a public service, offered free to whoever wished to use it. Omidyar would later tell feature-story reporters that eBay’s origins were the chance result of a conversation with his girlfriend, a collector of Pez dispensers, who asked him one evening at dinner if there was a way he could set up a website for collectors like her. There is a more interesting story that reveals, in microcosm, the combined elements of business and technology that defined that historical moment. Omidyar’s apartment, with its dial-up connection to the Internet, theoretically could have been anywhere in the world, but in fact, it indeed mattered that it was situated in Silicon Valley.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Only if investors generate top-quartile, or even top-decile results do returns suffice to compensate for the risks incurred. The Glamorous Appeal of Venture Capital In September 1995, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian immigrant, started an online auction site, ostensibly to help his girlfriend sell her collection of Pez dispensers. Even though by late 1996 the business expanded nicely and produced solid profits, the company’s founder decided to seek outside assistance. Two years after the humble beginnings of the company now named eBay, Omidyar invited venture capital provider Benchmark Capital to make an investment and join the board.

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

I was trying not to scream. “The kids’ movie?!” “My grandson and I loved it!” Dr. C. chuckled. “Please,” I begged. “Tranquilizers!” Dr. C. prescribed Seroquel, an antipsychotic, and Xanax bars—those are two milligrams each. I took so many of the latter that I might as well have put them in a Pez dispenser. Combining the two medications knocked me out like a punch to the head and kept me blacked out for hours with my boots on, all the lights burning, and the Dustbuster tucked under my arm. But suddenly getting up in the morning was so hard. My bed felt like a wad of gum. I don’t want to go to work, I’d think as my alarms went off . . . and off . . . and off.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Blowing the Death Star to bits (step five) effectively eliminated any chance of retaliation, at least until the sequel. After that, getting away was easy. Our heroes get medals from a rebel alliance whose cash balance was high enough to afford new uniforms, and the universe is saved for a new series of themed PEZ dispensers. Roll credits. It’s not much different to attack a company’s computers via the Internet. Step 1 is to identify the target and gather information. This is surprisingly easy. The target’s Web site will contain all sorts of information, as do various Internet databases like the one run by Network Solutions.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Millay points to white elephants that sucked up cash, including the Breakers, the Vanderbilts’ Newport summer home, which was sold to the Preservation Society of Newport County in 1973, and the magnificent Biltmore mansion, originally built on 125,000 acres in North Carolina by George Washington Vanderbilt, which survives today as a tourist attraction (albeit a lucrative one) for his heirs. In contrast, Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York, is a mere 3,400 acres—but it remains in the family. * * * 2001 from the pages of Forbes Pierre Omidyar allegedly created eBay in 1995 so his girlfriend could trade Pez dispensers—a story subsequently revealed as a publicity ploy. (2001 net worth: $4.6 billion) Joseph Ricketts of discount brokerage Ameritrade makes annual pilgrimages to the famed Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle rally. (2001 net worth: $850 million) Jerral Wayne Jones, Texas oilman and owner of the Dallas Cowboys, claims to have lost fifty-five pounds just by giving up cheeseburgers and beer. (2001 net worth: $850 million) William Morean, whose fortune comes from computer outsourcing, was briefly a bush pilot in Alaska and also swept floors for his dad. (1999 net worth: $1 billion) * * * * * * The Eyrie “Folly” Every summer for decades, the Rockefeller family would gather at the Eyrie, their hundred-room mansion on Mount Desert Island, Maine, less than ten miles from New England’s fashionable Bar Harbor resort and the stunningly gorgeous Acadia National Park, which an ancestor helped create.

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

Louis almost never happened, because when Ross learned his panel was to include the Roman physician Angelo Celli, he immediately canceled his trip, to be coaxed back only after being assured by telegram that Celli had been persuaded to withdraw. Ross was knighted, he was given the directorship of a scientific institute named after him, he collected scientific honors like they were vintage Pez dispensers, but the hole was never filled. He spent years, though under no financial strain, publicly campaigning for Parliament to award him a monetary prize for his contribution to public health. Edward Jenner had gotten one in 1807 for developing the smallpox vaccine, and Ross felt he deserved no less.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

She’s going through all her stuff that she’s just bought and realizes that she forgot one. She missed one, so she insisted that he turn the car around… Michael Malone: And Pierre said, “Let’s figure out a way to find these things,” blah blah blah blah, “and buy and sell them.” It wasn’t quite a myth—I mean I’m sure there was a Pez dispenser or two in there. Pierre Omidyar: That was part of the inspiration, but frankly it was a small part of it for me… The birth of the idea is definitely a media-enhanced story. Michael Malone: Basically they were just looking at “How do we build a place where you can do auctions?” And once again they weren’t the first.

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

The father of rock-and-roll Chuck Berry himself performed his famous duck walk on the stage at monthly concerts in the 1990s, and these days, several nights a week, the venue still hosts top performers on multiple stages. Grab a bite to eat and enjoy all the pop culture memorabilia in every corner, including PEZ dispensers, jukeboxes, and historical photos. The Muny (1 Theatre Dr., 314/361-1900, www.muny.org, mid-June-mid-Aug., $15-105) is an outdoor theater that puts on a roster of concerts in Forest Park during the summer. Tickets are available online, but if you don’t grab one ahead of time, keep in mind that the last nine rows of the amphitheater are held on a first-come, first-served basis.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

. *-- 3 (& 1" -B)POEB 4"/ +04& #65"/0 45"5&1"3, 1JHFPO1PJOU -JHIUIPVTF "º0/6&70 3&4&37& -PT"OHFMFT(JMSPZ 1FTDBEFSP 1"$*'*$ 0$&"/ | South along the Bay 4BO(SFHPSJP #FBDI %6 5 "3 The Pe n i ns ul a .POUBSB -JHIUIPVTF 5)&1&/*/46-" 4BOUB$SV[ 4BOUB$SV[ 10am–6pm; $3; t 650/347-2301, w www.burlingamepezmuseum.com), 214 California Drive, home to all 600 or so Pez dispensers in existence, as well as other rare toys and games. The educational Coyote Point Museum (Tues–Sat 10am–5pm, Sun noon–5pm; $6; t 650/342-7755, w www.coyoteptmuseum.org) is located in the large bayside Coyote Point Park ($5 per vehicle) several miles further south, off Poplar Avenue, San Mateo.