Invitation Marketing: Six Gmail Shills Available congratulates marketers and ridicules “otherwise respectable folk”, where the problem begins and need not be explained. Invitation marketing has become ubiquitous (“invite your friends”) and rarely takes the crude form of breathless “I have invites!” posts. Invitations help ration new services and discourage spam and other exploitation on same, encourage communication, put new services on relatively equal marketing footing, and steer new services away from sleazy, expensive, inaccurate, privacy compromising advertising and other marketing.

Markets and Election Outcomes didn’t “tell us much of anything at this point about the consequences of a (likely) Bush win”, similar in 2008 “did not provide valuable information about how the election would affect the world” and there are none in 2012. Election dependent outcomes are either obvious or complicated enough prices will be meaningless or additional fodder for cheering. As fair elections are the pinnacle of human achievement and thus the proper goal of all policy and prices dependent on election outcomes would destabilize democracy, election markets should be prohibited worldwide. Similarly, conditional markets should be prohibited within organizations for their simultaneously dehumanizing and destructive effects on structures that have been the venue for the creation of the vast majority of wealth and innovation in human history thus far.

Transnistrian voter invitation card.