Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, was recently interviewed on Moneytalk, a money talk show hosted Bob Brinker.  The interview was about Anderson’s new book, entitled “The Long Tail.”  The main idea from his book, according to the interview, is that the world economy is shifting from selling a lot of one thing, to a smaller amount of many things.  In other words, a wide variety of niche markets are developing in place of one large “mass market.”

An example that Anderson uses in his book is the iTunes music store.  We all take online music stores for granted now, but just five years ago, if you wanted to buy a CD, the easiest way to do it was to walk into a music store and buy it.  The problem with that is that you’re going to only have the most popular CDs on sale, and lesser known bands who don’t have many marketing tools available will be ignored.  Today, however, it’s just as easy to buy a CD from a not so well known artist named Ben Kweller as it is from the band Green Day, which is regularly played on radio stations.

Gasoline prices are beginning to fall, thanks to the end of the summer driving season.  This means decreased demand for gasoline, which leads to lower gasoline prices.  This is great when you go to fill up your gas tank at the pump sometime soon.  However, please don’t be stupid and think that this is a sign our energy problems are over.

So many people see prices for gasoline drop a few cents per gallon and think that it’s the beginning of a long term trend.  This happens nearly every year - people have been dealing with high gasoline prices and all of a sudden around labor day the prices fall.  Then these people say: “hey, everything’s ok, gasoline prices are going back down, it’s all good.”

No, it’s not all good.  What did you pay for gasoline one year ago?  How about two years?  Or five years?  Since you might not remember, I’ll provide that information for you, courtesy of The Energy Information Administration (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publ…)

Regular, Unleaded Gasoline Prices

• Aug 21, 2006: $2.87
• Aug 22, 2005: $2.58
• Aug 23, 2004: $1.85
• Aug 25, 2003: $1.69
• Aug 26, 2002: $1.36
• Aug 20, 2001: $1.39
• And all the way back to Aug 20, 1990: $1.19

When you watch the news on TV, or read about it in the newspaper, do you ever wonder how much bias it contains?

There’s plenty of reason for the news to be slanted.  Individuals with a particular political leaning can write an article in the newspaper that is technically factually correct, yet selectively include or omit facts to make one viewpoint look superior to another.  Take global warming, for instance.  Environmentalists have pointed out that there exists a scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by humans, and their opponents say no consensus exists at all.  Technically they are both telling the truth, the only difference is that they define “scientific consensus” in a different manner, and the definition of scientific consensus never really comes up in the debates.  But I digress…

There have been many accusations that the US media has not offered a good international perspective in today’s news.  Of course that is true: a news organization is going to reveal its own perspective simply because it is what it is.  If you ask three people from three different areas of the world to interpret what’s going on in the middle east, you’re going to get three significantly different interpretations.

The Common Sense Investor just posted a list of the Top Five Ways People Waste Money, beyond being shopoholics.  The list is actually numbered to six, and is missing number five, but I won’t hold that against the author.  I posted a few of my own financial tips on gimme-five a while back (check the comments, too), and they are very related to this list.

The list includes:

1. Buying unnecessary insurance.
2. Buying warranties that cost as much as the product.
3. Paying easily avoided fees.
4. Buying after solicitation
5. Not maximizing the power of your money

[link]

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Tesla Motors, an electric car startup company, just published a pretty cool blog post on the future of electric cars.  Granted, you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt since it is coming from an electric car company, but the facts they present are great:

[Popular Mechanics] compared the cost of a cross-country drive for each of the cars, all of similar size. The benchmark drive cost is $212 in a Honda Civic. The VW Diesel Golf came close at $230. E85 ethanol (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) came in at $425; methanol cost $619; the hydrogen fuel cell drive cost a whopping $804! Compressed Natural Gas looked pretty good at $110. And the electric car? $60. And the article wasn’t even about electric cars…

Holy cow!  Driving across the country for $60 in fuel costs!  That’s incredible!  Of course, I will have to see it to believe it, but I like what I’m hearing so far.

This article also responds to the lame criticism that so many people make about electric cars: “the energy has to come from somewhere, so they’re not saving the environment.”  Here’s what Tesla Motors had to say (and I agree, minus the advocacy for coal power plants):