Portal:Business
The Business PortalBusiness is the activity of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services).[need quotation to verify] Simply put, it is "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." Having a business name does not separate the business entity from the owner, which means that the owner of the business is responsible and liable for debts incurred by the business. If the business acquires debts, the creditors can go after the owner's personal possessions. A business structure does not allow for corporate tax rates. The proprietor is personally taxed on all income from the business. The term is also often used colloquially (but not by lawyers or by public officials) to refer to a company. A company, on the other hand, is a separate legal entity and provides for limited liability, as well as corporate tax rates. A company structure is more complicated and expensive to set up, but offers more protection and benefits for the owner. (Full article...) Selected articleThe Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by 21-year-old student Alex Tew from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 9 May 2009, it is 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt. Selected image
Selected quoteHeroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy. It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds-to facilitate the development of expertise. Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)-yet he gets little or no credit for it. He is a central part of the process with incentives going to others and, what is worse, gets no respect. I am an ingrate toward the man whose overconfidence caused him to open a restaurant and fail, enjoying my nice meal while he is probably eating canned tuna. In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, thought perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized, particularly if he lives in Japan.) For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)-likewise, there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher, any more than there is a successful babbler, philosophaster, commentator, consultant, lobbyist, or business school professor who does not take personals risks. (Sorry.) Psychologists label "overconfidence" a disease, blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures. But there is a difference between benign, heroic type of risk taking that is beneficial to others, in the antifragile case and the nastier modern type related to negative Black Swans, such as the overconfidence of "scientists" computing the risks of harm from the Fukushima reactor. In the case of the former, what they call overconfidence is a good thing, not something to medicate.
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