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Cellphone producers worked with a Taiwan company that stands outside of Chinese governance, MediaTek, to quickly produce affordable and customizable cellphones that could flood markets within and outside of China. Essentially, cellphone producers dreamed of a way to operate outside of market regulations for cellphones and in the end shanzai phones now are estimated to makeup 20% of all cellphone sales within China.

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Education has become a substitute for thinking about your future.

Peter Thiel, from Pando Monthly earlier this evening. Although I don’t agree on everything he said it was thoroughly refreshing to hear someone that _actually had clear opinions about things, and not just the default cliché startup ramblings that are so common. He made me think, which I always appreciate.

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A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 ( $3.99 shipping).

Interesting side effect of algorithm based pricing.

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies