I guess there are two groups of Facebook users, those who don’t care about privacy so much, and those who are confused and fed up with all the changes. The first group is probably bigger, but still there must be a reasonable number of disgruntled users.

The basic problem is that Facebook has quite large costs (can you imagine how many servers are needed for 500m users?) and it has to cover these somehow, so it keeps coming up with fancy-pants advertising schemes, all of which leverage users’ data to some extent, and so come the privacy concerns and the outrage and the angst, etc.

Instead, why don’t they just charge a frigging fee. I’d happily pay $10 a year or so for a Facebook-like service with only two privacy settings: PRIVATE, where only my friends can see my stuff, and PUBLIC, where everyone can see my stuff.

Sure they might not get 500m users and they couldn’t monetise their social graph (whatever that means), but even 5m x $10 = $50m, not a tiny sum of money.

For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.

Socially and systematically our digital birth is not acknowledged. It only becomes valid when our physical and proven existence is linked to it. Will this change? Will we – digitally or physically – be freed from our permanent residence when so many of us are no longer in a position to claim a permanent residence?

Interesting that the value of imports per tonne are about twice those of exports. A lot of air-freighted imports are probably pharmaceuticals. Also interesting that the real value of exports per tonne has increased about 5x over the past 20 years while the value of imports has fluctuated but not really increased.

“I’m sorry sir, but you have reached your lifetime limit of iPad purchases and will not be allowed to buy any more.”

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

there has never been a better toilet computer

When the alternatives are “fly” vs. “no fly,” however, enough days of “no fly” mean the end of the firm. That causes the airline to favor flight resumption before it is socially optimal to do so. The safer outcome — not flying — doesn’t involve higher revenue, as it often does, such as when the roller coaster manufacturer puts in seat belts to assuage nervous parents and thus boost demand.

On the other side of the ledger, I suspect the regulators won’t let the airlines charge market-clearing prices for the first week of resumed flights

There is some kind of discontinuity here — normal marginal improvements to safety should allow airlines to charge a bit more.