The Raw Prawn

Welcome to the Presidents' Day edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, the weekly round-up of business and economics blogs.

While you're here, please take a look at a few of the other posts. The Raw Prawn primarily deals with business, economics, and international politics, so if you're here for the Carnival of the Capitalists, you'll probably find a few things to interest you :)

Update: A number of people have asked about the meaning of "The Raw Prawn". For those who don't own a Strine-English Dictionary, here's how my co-blogger Reena explained it in the comments at Slacker Manager:

The Raw Prawn is named after an Australian phrase "to come the raw prawn". The idiom is usually heard in negative constructions, such as the catchphrase, "Don't come the raw prawn with me!". It basically means "don't try to deceive me/ misrepresent the situation".

Business

Ankesh Kothari at Marketing eYe (one of my favorite business blogs) writes about how to use props and cardboard sculptures to attract people to your store, with some funny examples from Belgium.

Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture points out that Napster's subscription-based unlimited music download service allows one to quantify exactly how much free downloads cost the music industry.

Frank Scavo at the Enterprise System Spectator thinks that
IT is often a source of competitive advantage.

Adam Crouch at The Raw Prawn analyzes the top 10 Superbowl ads, and discusses what made them successful.

Arnold Kling at EconLog looks at how the internet is changing newspapers' business model, and the commenters discuss how papers will have to adjust.

Yvonne DiVita at Lip-sticking gives five nuggets of information on how to get more women to shop at your website.

David Foster at Photon Courier thinks that customer service operations are being simultaneously overmanaged and undermanaged.

Martin Lindeskog at EGO discusses whether gold is still a good investment or not.

Roger Nusbaum at Random Roger's Big Picture says that while economic growth may continue to surge in emerging markets, investment returns in these areas may not.

Jay Solo at Accidental Verbosity pokes fun at a company for not only using spam for marketing, but for also getting its own slogan wrong in the email.

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends writes about the connection between religion and entrepreneurship.

Joshua Sharf at View From a Height covers the further adventures of Richard Notebaert, as he continues his Qwest to acquire MCI.

Matt Fisher at Financial Planning 101 points out how sales incentives at brokerage houses can create a big conflict of interest.

Ironman at Political Calculations writes that the string of recent journalism scandals is a result of problems with the internal culture of these organizations.


Goverment

Patri Friedman at Catallarchy wonders if the Broken Window Fallacy is a reflection of human nature's tendency to look at the bright side of things in the wake of a destructive event.

Steve Conover at The Skeptical Optimist has an interesting chart explaining that the budget surplus in the 1990s was due to the "peace dividend".

Tim Worstall takes issue with the EU's attempt to increase regulation in the airline sector

David Tufte at voluntaryXchange looks at the Utah Article Delivery service, and uses it to explain what happens when you have a 3rd party payer system.

Jim Glass at Scrivener.net takes a look at Paul Samuelson's views on social security in 1967, when he said, "the beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound."

Nicole Robbins at Law & Entrepreneurship News discusses a new workers' compensation program in China that "will allocate up to twenty years salary in the event of death of injury from work related accidents that are determined to be the fault of the employer."


History

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has a fascinating post celebrating the contributions of John D Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. He covers how Vanderbilt did more to fight monopoly in the US than anyone else in history, and how Rockefeller should get much of the credit for saving the whales.

Brian Gongol at Gongol.com shows that slavery in the United States could have been ended at less expense by a full-scale slave buyout than by the Civil War. Very interesting!

Gus Van Horn has a review of the documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life


Taxes

Doing your taxes? Then you may be interested in what David Gross has to say at The Picket Line. Even though US Federal Income Tax officially kicks in at an income of $15k, he points out various adjustments you can take to allow you to earn up to $29k without the IRS taking a bite out of it.

Joe Kristan at the Roth & Company Tax Update blog writes about a bill in the Iowa senate that would give artists a tax credit for donating their work.


Trade

Andrew at Anyletter writes about the value of trade, using sugar as an example.

M. Simon at Power and Control has a post explaining that the choice isn't between more immigration or less immigration, but between more immigration or more outsourcing.


Blogging

Wayne Hurlbert at Blog Business World writes about how to avoid Google filters that lower a page's position in search engine result pages.

David St. Lawrence at Ripples writes that blogging is not a zero-sum game, and that the medium gets more interesting as more people blog.