The Daily Dinar

 The Wall Street Journal has this excellent piece on the spread of outsourcing even to personal matters:
Sending work offshore has transformed the U.S. economy. Now, some families are tapping the same approach for personal tasks, getting them done for a fraction of what they’d cost at home. Taking your to-do list global.
I frequently outsource time-consuming […]

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The June issue of Business 2.0 is going to have an interesting cover story on the phenomena known as domaining. This is, essentially, the speculative purchase of domain name with the expectation that given their scarcity they will appreciate in value and make some money in the mean time from the placement of advertising […]

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We’ve posted previously about places online to find free books. Well, this is the Mother of All Free Book Lists.

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The Undercover Economist on the economics of ’switching’.
A scenario in which thousands - perhaps millions - of customers can successfully claim back money is unusual, the result of a regulator’s decree. But the basic situation is very common indeed. Customers have bought into a product line or ongoing service, in this case a bank account, […]

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The Simple Dollar, one of the best personal finance sites on the internet, reviews a new book by Keith Ferrazzi called Never Eat Alone.
The word networking has a very negative perception for most people; they imagine some guy shaking their hand, smiling, and marking them down in a Rolodex somewhere as merely another asset to […]

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Seeking Alpha list four places on the internet where one can find free books to read. One can add Scribd to that list too.

1) Wikisource - You must know by now we are big fans of Wikipedia, occasional controversies and factual problems notwithstanding. Wikisource is the virtual library portion of the Wiki-empire. Recent additions […]

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According to this fascinating research from Carnegie-Mellon, there are neurophysiological differences in the way people react to spending opportunities.
Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives “tightwads” to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. “Spendthrifts,” by contrast, experience too little […]

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Steve Pavlina offers 33 rules to boost your productivity. There are some great recommendations here including some of our personal favourites such as the Pareto Principle, batching, and timeboxing.

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Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those who lost loved ones in the Virginia Tech massacre. Each and every lost life is a tragedy.
There was, among the victims, a young Muslim graduate student named Waleed Shaalan. Muslim Matters have a tribute post for people to post their condolances and Tariq Nelson […]

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British television program The Real Deal shows how easy it is for waiters to steal your credit/charge card details using a hidden card skimmer.

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Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems can be annoying at times with their maze of options (”Press 1 for accounts, press 2 for customer service, press 3 for support, press 4 for sales..”) and time spent waiting for someone to answer. Ivrhacks is a useful user-maintained database of shortcuts for many Australian, American, Canadian and […]

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UC Berkeley’s School of Information have published an interesting study of immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States. Some of their findings include:

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The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty have released a trailer for their new documentary, The Call of the Entrepreneur. The film follows the story of three entrepreneurs — a dairy farmer, a merchant banker and a refugee from communist China. — and explores what drives them.
This looks good.

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