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The 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.

The economy of Monaco is reliant on tourism and banking. Monaco, situated on the French coast of the Mediterranean Sea, is a popular resort, attracting tourists to its casino and pleasant climate.

The Principality has successfully sought to diversify into services and small, high-value-added, nonpolluting industries. The state has no income tax and low business taxes and thrives as a tax haven both for individuals who have established residence and for foreign companies that have set up businesses and offices. The state retains monopolies in a number of sectors, including gambling, tobacco, the telephone network, and the postal service. (Full article...)

"Sloan grabbed hold of this important modification in the marketplace and began to offer more and more different models. This "full-line" policy was General Motor's unique strategy to answer public demands. How did the automobile industry as a whole respond to this diversification?

In the transition from mass-produced Model T's to the full-line policy of General Motors, production processes became complicated. To reduce costs while making various types of cars, standard parts had to be developed for use in different models. The Ford system, however, was not modified to any great extent.

At about this time, pricing policies were actively studied and employed in response to the wide variations resulting from diversification in the marketplace. I think that in production, however, the unfinished Ford system changed little and became deeply rooted.

When building up the Toyota production system, I always kept in mind the Japanese market and its demands for many types of cars in small quantities - different from American demands for a few types in large quantities.

The Toyota production system helps production meet market demands. We now know that producing many types of cars in large quantities is economically desirable, even though the Toyota system was built on the premise of many types in small quantities for the Japanese environment. Thus, the system is proving its effectiveness in the mature Japanese market. At the same time, I think the Toyota production system can be applied in America where the market for many types in large quantities has existed since Sloan's time."

—Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System, English edition of 1988

• ... that food was left to rot outside after the supermarket Supie went out of business?
• ... that the day employees of Boston television station WLVI received new business cards, they learned the station would be sold and they would lose their jobs?
• ... that the economy of Tolkien's Middle-earth has been described as a mix of feudalism and capitalism, with one scholar even suggesting it had communist elements?
• ... that the economy of Reineh, now in northern Israel, was so strong in the Mamluk era that they could afford imported pottery from Syria and Italy?
• ... that Stan Lee modeled Tony Stark after 20th-century business magnate Howard Hughes?
• ... that "gig" in "gig economy" comes from the slang term for individual appearances by performing artists?

May 14:

• 1984 - Mark Zuckerberg, American computer programmer and businessman, co-founder of Facebook, was born on this day.

• ...that William McChesney Martin, Jr. (pictured) was the longest-serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve serving from April 2, 1951 to January 31, 1970?

• ...that eleven of the twenty-nine winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, a biannual award given out by the American Economic Association, have gone on to later win the Nobel Prize in Economics?

• ...that Ingvar Kamprad, founder of the home furnishing retail chain store IKEA, drew some controversy in 1994 when it was revealed that Kamprad had joined Swedish fascist activist Per Engdahl's pro-Nazi group in 1942?

• ...that, according to historical legend, Laissez-faire stems from a meeting in about 1681 between the powerful French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen led by a certain M. Le Gendre?

• ...that Ransom E. Olds used the assembly line system to produce automobiles in 1901 before Henry Ford?

• ...that Antoine Augustin Cournot derived the first formula for the rule of supply and demand as a function of price and in fact was the first to draw supply and demand curves on a graph in his Researches on the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth?

• ...that the Toyota Production System (TPS) developed by Toyota, that comprises its management philosophy and practices, organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers?

Wikinews Economy and business portal

• July 21: Technological University Dublin senior lecturer Dr Lorcan Sirr speaks to Wikinews on housing market in Ireland
• July 15: California governor signs new state budget, eligible Californians to get stimulus payments
• July 4: 130 OECD countries agree to back global corporate tax rate
• June 30: 'Each makes the other more difficult to recover from': University of Sussex professor L. Alan Winters speaks to Wikinews on trade, COVID-19, Brexit
• June 16: Wikinews interviews Victor Kline, leader of newly registered The New Liberals party in Australia
• April 23: Irish Finance Minister Donohoe criticises OECD's global minimum corporate tax rate
• April 17: People protest in Berlin against German Court overturning five-year rent cap
• March 5: Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces UK budget 2021
• February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
• January 24: World Trade Organization declares US tariff hike illegal, rules in South Korea's favour