theatlantic:

Facebook’s Value: What’s the Price of a Billion People Watching Each Other?

Is Facebook’s IPO the next chapter in the greatest company of our time, or are Friday’s buyers total suckers?

The only intelligent, honest, and true thing to say about this inevitable question is that nobody has any clue. In 1992, a company called America Online had a $70 million valuation after its IPO. A decade later, it was worth $150 billion. A decade after that peak, it is now worth only $1 billion. Online fortunes are built on hyper-active tectonic plates. Mountains of wealth accumulate from flat nothingness, rumble, push up toward the sky, and with alarming frequency, blow themselves up. The Internet is a super-seismic place. […]

It is freakin’ crazy. If Facebook were merely the widest social network by number of users,dayenu. If it were the deepest social network by the quality of engagement and the quantity of personal detail, dayenu. But it’s the widest and the deepest! That sort of thing has to be worth $100 billion, right?

Right?

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

newyorker:

On February 10th, 1967, around twenty-five members of an anarchist collective known as Black Mask, wearing black balaclavas and carrying giant skulls, took to the streets of the financial district. The photographer Larry Fink was there; he says that “they had nothing but their own stealth, and no support.” They hoped to stoke a revolution. “They were working from a massive historic misinterpretation,” Fink says. See some of Fink’s shots of the march, as well as some of his protest pictures from the Vietnam era, here: http://nyr.kr/ngQtWo

socialismartnature:

Nurses Call for Tax on Wall Street to Heal America

Nurses, who every day care for the casualties of the economic crisis driven by Wall Street greed, plan to hold a rally in Dewey Square at the site of the Occupy Boston Protest, to show their support for the movement and to highlight the MNA/NNU’s “Main Street Contract” campaign for a tax on Wall Street financial speculation to provide revenue for Main Street reforms, including jobs at living wages, quality education, guaranteed health care for all, and freedom from hunger, homelessness, and retirement insecurity. 

The action is part of the opening day activities of the Massachusetts Nurses Association/National Nurses United 2011 Convention (Oct. 5 – 7), being held at the Boston Marriott in Newton.  Hundreds of nurses from all corners of the Commonwealth will board buses at the event and head to the rally at 3 p.m.

What:   Nurses Rally to Support Occupy Boston

When:  Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 at 3 p.m.

Where:  Site of Protest in Dewey Square, Outside South Station