Standards of Proof in the Internet Age
The Dark Ages
1960?-1970?: Published Work
Birth of the Internet
1970-1979: Electronic Article by a University Professor
ca 1980: a posting on Usenet
The Web
late 1980s - early 1990s: some grad student's personal website
ca 1992: AOL encyclopedia article
ca 1996: a page on GeoCities
late 1990s: corporate sponsored web pages
Social Networking
early 2000s: some guys Blog
ca 2006: a video on YouTube
2007: a Wikipedia article
2009: some celebrity's Twitter feed
2010: a poll of your Facebook followers
Source: My Personal Thoughts, April 2011.
(Some of the above mentioned sources were consulted for historical accuracy... the rest was fabricated.)
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
20110419
20110227
Copyright and Eminent Domain
Can Congress legally restrict the copyright terms if it wanted to? Or, having granted a property right, are they restricted to claiming eminent domain, and issuing compensation for seizure of private property as required by the Constitution? They certainly seem capable of extending copyright (having previously done so).
Perhaps one could argue that a copyright is essentially a state-granted monopoly rather than a property right, and is thus subject to various restrictions, that Congress has the right to change and regulate at any time. Of course, those with vested (and yet unvested, if Congress extends it again) interests in promoting the term "Intellectual Property" would no doubt disagree. Perhaps we should start calling it "Intellectual Monopoly Rights" and see if it remains as popular.
Dunno. Food for thought.
Perhaps one could argue that a copyright is essentially a state-granted monopoly rather than a property right, and is thus subject to various restrictions, that Congress has the right to change and regulate at any time. Of course, those with vested (and yet unvested, if Congress extends it again) interests in promoting the term "Intellectual Property" would no doubt disagree. Perhaps we should start calling it "Intellectual Monopoly Rights" and see if it remains as popular.
Dunno. Food for thought.
Ungrammatical Constructions?
I would like to take a moment to lament the construction of the word "do-gooder."
My postulated etymology for the construction of the word is as follows:
First, we take the transitive use of the verb "to do," meaning "to bring about or accomplish." So far, so good (no pun intended).
Next, we need to give it an object. Take the noun "good." Well, it's not really a noun... it's more of an adjective. WordNet defines it as "having desirable or positive qualities." To turn an adjective into a noun, we (of the English language persuasion), typically add the suffix "-ness." But in English, the term "goodness" has more of a moral connotation, and loosely means "the quality of being good," just like "redness" and "coldness" denote abstractly the quality of being red or cold respectively. What we really want is a way to refer to the set of things having goodness, at least to the degree at which the adjective "good" can be applied. So really, we want the object of our verb to be the compound noun "good things," where the word "things" is implicitly restricted by the context to mean "things one can do," or more commonly, tasks or deeds. So our basic particle of meaning here, is "to do good deeds," but in the interest of brevity, we're going to neologize the noun "good" to mean "good deeds." It's perhaps a tiny stretch of meaning, but I don't want begrudge a man the lack of an obviously implied word.
Now, we're going to conjugate our phrase, yielding "do good." Which, if you are willing to accept in parlance my derivation for the noun form of "good" above, becomes a perfectly acceptable action. One can say "I do good," and "he does good" with impunity. But for the purposes of our future construction, we really need to consolidate the phrase "do good," into a single word. So, we create an intransitive form "do-good" by binding the word "good" as the object of the action "to do." This is not entirely well-formed English, as one cannot reasonably say "I do-good" or "he is do-gooding" without the obvious problem of conjugating what used to be a noun. But nevertheless we will operate! (Cardano ca 1545).
To finish our construction, we will add the common suffix "-er" as in "woodcutter" or "farmer" to add the role distinction of "one who performs a task" (or at least "that which performs a task" if you want to include such inanimate persons as "staplers" in it's ranks). Thus, we finally have "do-gooder," meaning "one who performs the task of doing good deeds," or more succinctly "one who does good" (by performing redundancy elimination, and dropping the implied "deeds" and "task"). But, if one is willing to admit it acceptable to restrict the category of "good things" to "good deeds," and drop the qualifier to accept the neologism "good" to mean "good deeds" in context, then I call to question, why we needed to include the operative verb "good" in this at all? A "potter" is not "one who pots," but "one who effects pots," so to speak. Why then, can't we simply refer to a "gooder" as "one who performs good things" and call it a day? This seems to me, both more succinct, and avoids the grammatical awkwardness of the "do-good" construction. But alas, 'tis not so.
To summarize then, we have:
"to do" + ("good" + "deeds") => "to do good deeds" => "to do good" => "do good" => to "do-good" => "do-good" + -er => "do-gooder"
QED?
My postulated etymology for the construction of the word is as follows:
First, we take the transitive use of the verb "to do," meaning "to bring about or accomplish." So far, so good (no pun intended).
Next, we need to give it an object. Take the noun "good." Well, it's not really a noun... it's more of an adjective. WordNet defines it as "having desirable or positive qualities." To turn an adjective into a noun, we (of the English language persuasion), typically add the suffix "-ness." But in English, the term "goodness" has more of a moral connotation, and loosely means "the quality of being good," just like "redness" and "coldness" denote abstractly the quality of being red or cold respectively. What we really want is a way to refer to the set of things having goodness, at least to the degree at which the adjective "good" can be applied. So really, we want the object of our verb to be the compound noun "good things," where the word "things" is implicitly restricted by the context to mean "things one can do," or more commonly, tasks or deeds. So our basic particle of meaning here, is "to do good deeds," but in the interest of brevity, we're going to neologize the noun "good" to mean "good deeds." It's perhaps a tiny stretch of meaning, but I don't want begrudge a man the lack of an obviously implied word.
Now, we're going to conjugate our phrase, yielding "do good." Which, if you are willing to accept in parlance my derivation for the noun form of "good" above, becomes a perfectly acceptable action. One can say "I do good," and "he does good" with impunity. But for the purposes of our future construction, we really need to consolidate the phrase "do good," into a single word. So, we create an intransitive form "do-good" by binding the word "good" as the object of the action "to do." This is not entirely well-formed English, as one cannot reasonably say "I do-good" or "he is do-gooding" without the obvious problem of conjugating what used to be a noun. But nevertheless we will operate! (Cardano ca 1545).
To finish our construction, we will add the common suffix "-er" as in "woodcutter" or "farmer" to add the role distinction of "one who performs a task" (or at least "that which performs a task" if you want to include such inanimate persons as "staplers" in it's ranks). Thus, we finally have "do-gooder," meaning "one who performs the task of doing good deeds," or more succinctly "one who does good" (by performing redundancy elimination, and dropping the implied "deeds" and "task"). But, if one is willing to admit it acceptable to restrict the category of "good things" to "good deeds," and drop the qualifier to accept the neologism "good" to mean "good deeds" in context, then I call to question, why we needed to include the operative verb "good" in this at all? A "potter" is not "one who pots," but "one who effects pots," so to speak. Why then, can't we simply refer to a "gooder" as "one who performs good things" and call it a day? This seems to me, both more succinct, and avoids the grammatical awkwardness of the "do-good" construction. But alas, 'tis not so.
To summarize then, we have:
"to do" + ("good" + "deeds") => "to do good deeds" => "to do good" => "do good" => to "do-good" => "do-good" + -er => "do-gooder"
QED?
20101125
Politics and Budgets
(I had a lot of time to think this week while sitting in airports, hence the posting blitz.)
While watching the recent economic turmoils such as the collapse (so to speak) of Greece, and the pending collapse of the state of California, I've come to the conclusion that Democracy is failing. Now, I'm not much of a political science guy, so I really don't have a better system on the whole. The really nice thing about Democracies is that they tend to be stable governments (in the sense that they resist violent-revolution) since malcontents and prospective revolutionaries find it easier to work within the system than to overthrow it. But they seem to be failing the "rational self-interest" test for short-sightedness across the board (ie, "Will I later regret the costs of getting what I want now?").
There is a trade-off here between short-sightedness, and the length of time you are willing to tolerate bad leaders. Giving elected leaders longer terms will force them to plan farther ahead, since they will suffer more consequences when they are held responsible for the results. So, to some extent, short-sightedness is the price you pay for avoiding being unhappily misgoverned by a leader you cannot dispose for a while. But I think there are more basic problems with the control systems that might be fixable without such a trade-off. (Yeah, I'm a computer engineer, so ideal governments are just fancy control systems with lots of inputs.)
The most basic problem I see, is that there is the lamentable lack of an educated, and self-disciplined populace. This seems to be indirectly asserted by the prevalence of political advertising. Everyone who puts up a political sign with "Yes on Blah" and "Vote for Me," seems to be implicitly admitting that they expect a large enough portion of the voting population to be swayed merely by repeated exposure to their signs that it is worth the expense and effort of placing them. This to me, is the antithesis of a well-educated and self-disciplined populace. But short of disenfranchising such folk (which severely reduces the stability benefits mentioned above), or pumping lots of money into education (which has been shown to increase both education and discipline, but takes a good 20-40 years to kick in), I have no real solution, so I will limit my whining.
The solvable part of what I think is behind the economic troubles, is that legislatures experience what Frederick Brooks calls the "committee effect." When you get a group of people together with varying interests, there is a strong incentive to pass anything you do not strongly object to. To use a game theory explanation, if each committee member has an item he or she personally wants passed, and fighting against another's item will cause them to retaliate by trying to block yours, it is in your best interest to make friends and support everyone's agenda, so that they will support yours. In engineering, this results in "design by committee," where the feature list is so bloated as to be unrealizable. The problem here is that while each individual item may be doable, there is an inherent trade-off in constrained resources. However, the game-theory dynamics of each individual actor in the standard committee promote neither the conservation of those resource, nor any consideration of the trade-offs. The result is that while each actor succeeds at the committee game by getting their feature on the list, they ultimately lose the real-world game, when the project fails (or random features get cut, if you have a particularly aggressive engineering department). For legislative committees, the items are often government programs, and the constrained resource is budget dollars for their implementation. When everyone's programs pass, the government overspends their revenue, and eventually the bottom falls out and someone loses the reality game (usually the voters).
The underlying economic problem seems to be requiring a balanced budget (or at least requiring the budget to fit some fixed figure, determined by the financial policy gurus who may calculate the optimal level of overspending). There are a few ways to do this, and I think the best solution is a hybrid approach that uses all of them. First, you could require the legislatures to balance the budget. This effectively moves the resource constraint problem inside the committee. Unfortunately, it also destabilizes the equilibrium of the game theory, which quickly results in deadlocks. The California legislatures inability to pass a budget every year is a prime example of this. So while I ultimately think that the solution is to move the resource constraints inside the control system, you have to be slightly more clever.
Another way to get around this is to add a second, post-committee control system that intelligently handles the over-spending problem. If you can excuse the Computer Science reference, this would be a second-pass on the output. This is akin to the engineering department that intelligently drops what they consider to be the less important features in order to make it fit into the schedule and budget. You've now separated the decision making from the people who should rightly be making the decisions, and lost some subtleties about the true priorities and rankings in the process, but at least you have the problem solved somewhat intelligently by an interested party. The improvement here is that otherwise, the real-world could impose constraints randomly, as whatever features fail to be finished on-time are cut, or when the project fails and everyone loses. In the legislature, the place to vest this power seems to be with the governor. Any budget which passes the legislature that over-spends the expected revenue, will be trimmed down to size by the governor however he sees fit.
While I think this is an improvement, I see it as falling into one of two possible traps. If the legislature is consistently unable to pass a controlled budget, then you have just given the governor basically arbitrary control over the budget and program funding (up to the amount the legislature goes over). To me this seems like a lot of power to stick in one place, even if it's only there as a check when the legislature has "failed". Alternatively, the legislature could realize that it's in their rational self-interest to balance the budget themselves, and the dynamics reduce to the previous case where the legislature deadlocks. So this system seems to oscillate between misrepresenting the true priorities (by concentrating the power in one man), or deadlocking. But at least now we're only deadlocking sometimes.
The third approach is to change the game, so that the priorities of the actors promote balancing the budget more than (or at least appropriately with) their own personal (or constituent if you are less cynical) agendas. This is kind of tricky, especially given the term-length/responsibility trade-off I've mentioned above. But, I think that one way to improve this, is to give voters an incentive to care about the state budget, by raising taxes across the board to fund any budget overages. Especially if this is done on a yearly basis, so when the taxes shoot up, or a new unpopular program gets started, it's fairly easy for an individual voter (or their favorite political media) to figure out why, and calculate their expected return for canceling the program. Once this is well-understood enough that political candidates can use a rivals spending preferences against him, it should help coalesce the legislative agendas with the true cost to society, while avoiding the long-term overspending trap. It might even produce better-educated, engaged and disciplined voters, but that's just a pipe-dream of mine... I don't see a particular downside to this (besides the difficulties of getting it implemented), but it's unclear to me how much of an effect this would have by itself on the voters. If nothing else, it would reduce the debt-incurring costs of overspending, even if the government itself is not made more efficient with respect to societies' true wishes.
But, I think that you can combine the strengths of all of these into a hybrid system. First, require tax increases to cover any spending deficits, putting an overall constraint on the system. Then, allow the governor the power to cut funding at will from any program if an over-spending budget passes the legislature. To avoid the power issues, give the legislature the power to override the "budget veto" with a super-majority. Together, this would establish hard-cap on the over-spending from the tax increases (with whatever accompanying changes in voter priorities that come out of it as a secondary benefit), allow intelligent decisions to be made about where to cut over-committed resources during legislative failure, move the constraining problem inside the committee deliberations (with the "out" of passing an over-spending budget to avoid deadlocks), and not concentrate too much power in the governor by allowing to a legislative override.
I realize, the current economic situation is much more complicated than government overspending, but this seems to be a recurring theme in modern democracies. But, I'm approaching this from a control systems angle with a little bit of game theory thrown in for politics. Anyone have a better idea?
While watching the recent economic turmoils such as the collapse (so to speak) of Greece, and the pending collapse of the state of California, I've come to the conclusion that Democracy is failing. Now, I'm not much of a political science guy, so I really don't have a better system on the whole. The really nice thing about Democracies is that they tend to be stable governments (in the sense that they resist violent-revolution) since malcontents and prospective revolutionaries find it easier to work within the system than to overthrow it. But they seem to be failing the "rational self-interest" test for short-sightedness across the board (ie, "Will I later regret the costs of getting what I want now?").
There is a trade-off here between short-sightedness, and the length of time you are willing to tolerate bad leaders. Giving elected leaders longer terms will force them to plan farther ahead, since they will suffer more consequences when they are held responsible for the results. So, to some extent, short-sightedness is the price you pay for avoiding being unhappily misgoverned by a leader you cannot dispose for a while. But I think there are more basic problems with the control systems that might be fixable without such a trade-off. (Yeah, I'm a computer engineer, so ideal governments are just fancy control systems with lots of inputs.)
The most basic problem I see, is that there is the lamentable lack of an educated, and self-disciplined populace. This seems to be indirectly asserted by the prevalence of political advertising. Everyone who puts up a political sign with "Yes on Blah" and "Vote for Me," seems to be implicitly admitting that they expect a large enough portion of the voting population to be swayed merely by repeated exposure to their signs that it is worth the expense and effort of placing them. This to me, is the antithesis of a well-educated and self-disciplined populace. But short of disenfranchising such folk (which severely reduces the stability benefits mentioned above), or pumping lots of money into education (which has been shown to increase both education and discipline, but takes a good 20-40 years to kick in), I have no real solution, so I will limit my whining.
The solvable part of what I think is behind the economic troubles, is that legislatures experience what Frederick Brooks calls the "committee effect." When you get a group of people together with varying interests, there is a strong incentive to pass anything you do not strongly object to. To use a game theory explanation, if each committee member has an item he or she personally wants passed, and fighting against another's item will cause them to retaliate by trying to block yours, it is in your best interest to make friends and support everyone's agenda, so that they will support yours. In engineering, this results in "design by committee," where the feature list is so bloated as to be unrealizable. The problem here is that while each individual item may be doable, there is an inherent trade-off in constrained resources. However, the game-theory dynamics of each individual actor in the standard committee promote neither the conservation of those resource, nor any consideration of the trade-offs. The result is that while each actor succeeds at the committee game by getting their feature on the list, they ultimately lose the real-world game, when the project fails (or random features get cut, if you have a particularly aggressive engineering department). For legislative committees, the items are often government programs, and the constrained resource is budget dollars for their implementation. When everyone's programs pass, the government overspends their revenue, and eventually the bottom falls out and someone loses the reality game (usually the voters).
The underlying economic problem seems to be requiring a balanced budget (or at least requiring the budget to fit some fixed figure, determined by the financial policy gurus who may calculate the optimal level of overspending). There are a few ways to do this, and I think the best solution is a hybrid approach that uses all of them. First, you could require the legislatures to balance the budget. This effectively moves the resource constraint problem inside the committee. Unfortunately, it also destabilizes the equilibrium of the game theory, which quickly results in deadlocks. The California legislatures inability to pass a budget every year is a prime example of this. So while I ultimately think that the solution is to move the resource constraints inside the control system, you have to be slightly more clever.
Another way to get around this is to add a second, post-committee control system that intelligently handles the over-spending problem. If you can excuse the Computer Science reference, this would be a second-pass on the output. This is akin to the engineering department that intelligently drops what they consider to be the less important features in order to make it fit into the schedule and budget. You've now separated the decision making from the people who should rightly be making the decisions, and lost some subtleties about the true priorities and rankings in the process, but at least you have the problem solved somewhat intelligently by an interested party. The improvement here is that otherwise, the real-world could impose constraints randomly, as whatever features fail to be finished on-time are cut, or when the project fails and everyone loses. In the legislature, the place to vest this power seems to be with the governor. Any budget which passes the legislature that over-spends the expected revenue, will be trimmed down to size by the governor however he sees fit.
While I think this is an improvement, I see it as falling into one of two possible traps. If the legislature is consistently unable to pass a controlled budget, then you have just given the governor basically arbitrary control over the budget and program funding (up to the amount the legislature goes over). To me this seems like a lot of power to stick in one place, even if it's only there as a check when the legislature has "failed". Alternatively, the legislature could realize that it's in their rational self-interest to balance the budget themselves, and the dynamics reduce to the previous case where the legislature deadlocks. So this system seems to oscillate between misrepresenting the true priorities (by concentrating the power in one man), or deadlocking. But at least now we're only deadlocking sometimes.
The third approach is to change the game, so that the priorities of the actors promote balancing the budget more than (or at least appropriately with) their own personal (or constituent if you are less cynical) agendas. This is kind of tricky, especially given the term-length/responsibility trade-off I've mentioned above. But, I think that one way to improve this, is to give voters an incentive to care about the state budget, by raising taxes across the board to fund any budget overages. Especially if this is done on a yearly basis, so when the taxes shoot up, or a new unpopular program gets started, it's fairly easy for an individual voter (or their favorite political media) to figure out why, and calculate their expected return for canceling the program. Once this is well-understood enough that political candidates can use a rivals spending preferences against him, it should help coalesce the legislative agendas with the true cost to society, while avoiding the long-term overspending trap. It might even produce better-educated, engaged and disciplined voters, but that's just a pipe-dream of mine... I don't see a particular downside to this (besides the difficulties of getting it implemented), but it's unclear to me how much of an effect this would have by itself on the voters. If nothing else, it would reduce the debt-incurring costs of overspending, even if the government itself is not made more efficient with respect to societies' true wishes.
But, I think that you can combine the strengths of all of these into a hybrid system. First, require tax increases to cover any spending deficits, putting an overall constraint on the system. Then, allow the governor the power to cut funding at will from any program if an over-spending budget passes the legislature. To avoid the power issues, give the legislature the power to override the "budget veto" with a super-majority. Together, this would establish hard-cap on the over-spending from the tax increases (with whatever accompanying changes in voter priorities that come out of it as a secondary benefit), allow intelligent decisions to be made about where to cut over-committed resources during legislative failure, move the constraining problem inside the committee deliberations (with the "out" of passing an over-spending budget to avoid deadlocks), and not concentrate too much power in the governor by allowing to a legislative override.
I realize, the current economic situation is much more complicated than government overspending, but this seems to be a recurring theme in modern democracies. But, I'm approaching this from a control systems angle with a little bit of game theory thrown in for politics. Anyone have a better idea?
20100622
The future of mico-pricing schemes...
I just read The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic on Wired, about one man's attempt to model New York city's traffic system and find ways to improve it. He's released a giant spreadsheet outlining his findings, along with a plan to improve the efficiency by introducing a toll system to charge drivers entering high congestion areas. The article itself was a fun read, but what really got my attention was the stuff at the end on micro-pricing schemes. The idea is, you can put GPS technology in everyone's cars, and then charge people on a per-street basis for where and how much they drive or park. From a theoretical modeling stand-point, this level of control always looks amazingly efficient, because you can optimize prices to more accurately reflect the cost of maintaining that stretch of road, and the cost to society of the delays you cause on other drivers during congestion. You get to decide, at 4pm rush hour, whether or not it's worth $5 for you to drive home the quick way, and in return, society has a quick way, for the people who are willing to pay $5.
Another industry that could benefit from a serious micro-payment system is online newspapers. Newspaper "pay-walls" repeatedly fail, and the newspapers blame the publics' unwillingness to pay for anything on the Internet because they feel entitled to it. That's probably at least part of the problem, but I don't think that's the whole story. I pay for things on the Internet all the time, but I'm not willing to shell out $50, or even $20/year for a subscription to some random newspaper. I get most of my news from links on aggregator sites, things like Google News, Slashdot, and the few dozen blogs and RSS feeds I subscribe to on Google Reader. Now partly that's increased competition driving the prices down, but mostly I just don't read enough articles from a particular source. Now, over the course of a year, I probably read a few hundred New York Times articles, and they're usually very good. I could even assign a value to the amount they enrich my life, and would easily be willing to pay $10-$50 (depending on my mood) for the privilege of doing so. But each individual article contributes relatively little to the total, perhaps 10 cents for a good article. So when facing a pay-wall to read any particular article, there's no way I'm going to shell out $10 in order to read it. While it might rationally be in my best interest, I don't have enough information on-hand to feel justified making a commitment to read $10 worth of articles over the next year. This changes when you're going to a particular site frequently enough that you know you'll get your money's worth. I actually bought a one-year online subscription to Scientific American for $50, because I'm signed up for their RSS feed, and I read at least 20-30 articles a week off of their website, so I felt fairly confident that I could read $50 worth (in value to my life) of articles in a year.
As a small aside, I ended up canceling my subscription, because it didn't end up doing my any good. What I ended up buying was a PDF version of their magazine (complete with the usual ads) every month. I don't sit down and spend a few hours reading a magazine, I spend 10-30 minutes in a stretch reading a smattering of individual articles off of my RSS feeds. The subscription wasn't at all integrated with their website, and when I would click an article off of my feed and hit a pay-wall, it would redirect me to a page letting me know how I could buy the PDF and read the article. But I already had the PDF, it was just too much work for me to go dig it up, and figure out what page the article was on, and dodge the advertisements in order to read it. So I would move on with my life to the next thing on my feed. I ended up not doing anything with the PDFs, and still reading the same articles I was reading for free off of their website. One day I finally found an article that looked cool enough for me to track down in the PDF, only to find that I had moved or deleted it (realizing that I never used it) and thought I could download it again. But, alas, your download link is only valid for a week or two, so they wanted me to pay them another $15. That was the last straw for me. I canceled my subscription and they were nice enough to refund me $30 of it. Kudos for that at least.
Personally, I don't think that the business-end of the publishing companies and news agencies have completely caught up with the change in people's reading habits due to technology. They're still thinking in yearly subscriptions, when people are now thinking in individual articles. The conundrum they always face with these pay-walls, is that to make people realize how much value they are getting from The New York Times, you need to let them see enough content for free that they feel justified in making the commitment of a subscription, but not so much that they can just get it all for free. What they really need is a micro-payment system that works on an article level. If faced with a pay-wall that could take 5 cents out of my Paypal account (so that it's site independent), then buying the article becomes a legitimate decision that I feel qualified to make on the spot. They tried to do this with online advertising, where the advertisers essentially pay my 5 cents for me, but between the bottom falling out on the online ad markets, and the increased competition from every paper in the world (as opposed to the smaller local papers you can actually buy physically at the store), they still seem to be failing. I think moving to an article-based model would actually help them, but it requires a good micro-payment system to be in place. Of course, it also requires the news agencies to step up their game, and compete with each other on the quality of their articles. When you can just buy the headline articles, they don't get to force you to bundle all their filler with it. I mean, honestly, have you ever read the "Cooking Tips" articles in the back, and if so, would you pay for them? So while the news agencies might be making less money selling you "Pet Diet Tips", the actual efficiency of the system increases, because they stop writing articles nobody cares about.
But practically, (in my opinion), the problem with all of these micro-pricing schemes is that people have a hard time managing that many micro-decisions. First, they have a hard time making that many decisions optimally. It's one thing to decide on a given day whether or not you want to pay $5 to take the toll-road on your way to work and save an hour of commuting time. It's another thing entirely to make block-by-block decisions while driving, about whether it's cheaper to turn left now, or go an extra block and then turn left, and to do so at every turn. It's just too many decisions for a person to make to be worth the hassle of them caring. Granted, the granularity of the pricing scheme can be adjusted, but the coarser you make the controls, the less efficiency gains you get compared to the theoretical ultra-fluid model. Even if the number of decisions is reduced to a manageable level, the associated costs of each option have to be large enough that people can realistically assess them. For instance, if taking a particular one-block detour from my normal route will save me 5 cents, but cost me a minute of time, it's kind of a toss-up to me whether it's worth the 5 cents and the mental strain of taking a detour, or the extra minute I save going that way. If I were particularly motivated, and I travel the route every day, with predictable prices, I might justify a permanent detour in the name of saving myself $10/year or so and costing myself an hour of my time. But I'd have to really care. But if you increase the granularity a step further, and the trade-off was between 5 tenths of a cent, versus a few seconds of my time, I'm really unable to make the call, and for stakes that small, I really don't even care. Again, on a larger scale, making a consistent decision for every trip I take over a year might add up to something meaningful, but it's really hard to tell from the collection of micro-decisions. Let alone adjusting these fluidly to account for the fact that if I'm late for an important meeting, as opposed to on my way home from the park, my priorities may be drastically different. At some point, the fine-grained types of theoretical control that these super-efficiency gains need break down when you require people to be making these sorts of decisions continually, and rationally.
But even counting the number of times people make irrational decisions, either because they can't tell, or they don't care, let's suppose that they can make rational decisions enough of the time, that you can get efficiency gains. The next problem with a practical implementation of this is the perennial customer-service favorite: the Bill. The cellphone companies are starting to get a taste of this with the consumer back-lash to what is essentially, a flat-rate micro-payment system for your voice and data traffic. Discrete, simple choices lend themselves to customer satisfaction. Assuming I get what I think I paid for, when I spend $50 and buy a chair, I did so because I knew the chair would be worth more to me than $50 and whatever else I could exchange for it. At the end of the day, I'm happy with my chair, or at very least, I feel responsible for having made the decision. I'm not surprised when the bill comes at the end of the month, because I remember making the call. If I eat out at a fast food restaurant a few times a month, I may not remember the exact number of visits, or how much each trip cost when I get my credit card bill. But, I at least feel confident that each time I went there, I made the decision that at the time, it was worth $5 to get my taco. But if I visit 2,000 websites on my cellphone, and get a bill at the end of the month for $30, I may not feel so confident that I visited each of those websites will a full understanding of the consequences. Partly this is due to lack of transparency. If I could see the cost of a page before I went there, or at least track my progress (debt?) over time, I could get enough feedback to self-regulate my usage. That would help me keep my overall use and overall cost in the same ballpark, but I'd still have a hard time looking at my bill at the end of the month, and deciding whether or not the 2,000 micro-decisions I made were each justified. Now take out the flat-rate, like in the case of the road networks or newspaper articles. Imagine that your data-usage fees varied by time of day, day of the week, and which websites you visit. Instead of the one-shot decision of 3 cents per google search, now you're faced with scheduling issues where waiting an hour to do your google search might only cost you a penny, or you can do it in 15 minutes for 2 cents. As the complexity of these decisions moves beyond the ability and motivation for people to make, your satisfaction and confidence in your bill decreases. This is why the cellphone companies use block-subscriptions to sell their service. People buy more than enough minutes or bandwidth to cover their needs, and can then make one decision that $30/month is worth their overall usage. (It doesn't help that the cellphone companies are predatory, and quite happy to charge you obscene rates for going over your plan.) But the efficiency of these networks suffers as a result. With a subscription plan, everyone calls during peak hours, because they have no incentive not to, and the services get overloaded. Things like free "night and weekend minutes" are a halfway measure to increase efficiency (and act as a great marketing ploy) by encouraging people to move nonessential calls to times when the network is free by offering monetary rewards (free minutes and therefore a reduced bill). The trade-off then is between the unpopularity and the efficiency gains that are lost, or only partially achieved. And that's assuming that there really were efficiency gain on average with an unpopular pricing scheme. Otherwise, if people end up not caring or acting irrationally because it's beyond their abilities, you simply end up with capricious and opaque pricing schemes, on top of the normal inefficient usage patterns. So now the micro-management system is useless, and unpopular.
That's why I think micro-payment systems imposed on people are doomed to fail. But, they have a shot if people can express their preferences, and let a computer make the hundreds and thousands of micro-decisions for them while protecting their interests. The most talked-about example of this is probably the so-called "Smart Grid". Power companies are faced with incredibly volatile and complex markets. Every time you flip on an appliance, a huge amount of power starts suddenly starts flowing into it, creating what's essentially an electrical shock wave that flows all the way back to the power plant. If they don't compensate for all these jolts to the grid, the system collapses, and everybody loses power, and/or fries their toasters (both literally, and figuratively). A number of years ago, someone documented that relatively large spikes would occur during television commercial breaks, as everyone left their televisions to go turn something on or off. (I can't find a source for this right now, but if I do I'll put it in. I'm fairly confident in the assertion however.) The power companies also have to match total power output with the amount people are using, to avoid either wasting power, or causing black/brown outs. So, as demand spikes during the day, they turn on increasingly expensive generators to make sure it all works. But if everyone washed their clothes at 3 AM, when all the lights were off and the businesses were closed, it would be much cheaper for the power companies because the total load on the grid is greatly reduced. But currently there's no way to communicate such a complex set of power pricing to consumers, and even if there were, there's no way to measure it so that the bills could be computed. And after you solve those, you still have my earlier points on the failure of micro-pricing schemes. What the designers of smart grids hope to do, is to put electronics into every appliance and home on the grid, to report and coordinate power usage and pricing schemes. The dream is that your computer or heater could enter "low power mode" during peak usage times, or short bursts of strain on the grid, and your dishwashers and laundry machines could wait to turn on until rates were cheaper. The power company would then return some of the savings to you in the form of cheaper power when you're using it at the non-peak times. Assuming you could get all the electronics in place, I think there's hope for regulating continuous things like air conditioners. Almost everyone I know regulates their thermostats and air conditioner usage to save money on the power. If they could either get a read-out of the current, actual costs, or be able to set preferences on their computer, they could only do so more efficiently. Imagine if you could tell your air-conditioner to not only turn off when you're not home, but try to keep your monthly bill under $20. Perhaps while keeping the house under 85 degrees at all costs. At that point its just a question of user-interface, to specify what you're willing to spend and tolerate. I have less hope for sporadic things like dishwashers and laundry machines. I guess I wouldn't mind my dishes being done by morning, but if I have to go switch my clothes into the dryer I want to know before hand when it'll be done. But at any rate there's hope. I would do my laundry at 3 AM if you paid me enough.
The salvation for micro-pricing systems of road-usage is the advent of trip-planning GPS navigators. Whether you're planning your trip on Google Maps which advises you that you can save time and money if you wait an hour to leave, or informing your portable GPS device that you value your time at $15/hour, the computer can process all of the possible route information and optimize it for you. Saving 5 tenths of a cent for a 3 second delay may not matter much to you at any given time, but saving $20 for an hour of time spent driving over the course of a year might be worth it. At any rate, now you have the capabilities to make that call. Run one of these in conjunction with the ability to look up your current account status, and you've got a shot at having a workable system. Particularly if you can see options and prices you can choose between before each trip, or the pricing and timing differences on your bill at the end of the month had you have selected one of the "economy" or "speed" modes. Granted this all really only matters in big cities and other high-congestion areas, but those are also probably the only areas where you would want to implement some kind of variable toll or taxing system.
Newspapers are harder. I'm not sure about the per-article production costs a newspaper had, so it's hard for me to say whether or not they could get enough to compensate for the loss of subscriptions with mandated filler purchase, or how much they actually make off of the in-page advertising. I honestly think a micro-payment system through Paypal could work if the prices are small enough. But sometimes it's hard to tell if an article is worth $0.15 cents before you read it, and you still have the problem of getting your bill at the end of the month and not quite being able to account for where it all came from. Computer technology is less able to help us here, because even with access to the full text, computers aren't yet good enough to tell us how good an article is (on average), and predict whether or not we'd like it. I think there is hope down the road if AI technology continues to improve however. I don't think it would take much to integrate a payment system into Google Reader. Individual articles could have some kind of "paid content" icon, with a listed price next to it. AI technology could process what kinds of articles I read, and allow me to rate them, and set price levels that I would be willing to pay for them to train it. All the "Web 2.0" is doing this already so that they can data-mine peoples preferences for advertising. Just take some of that technology and pump it into predicting price levels I am willing to pay for it. Then, let me set maximum price thresholds or monthly bills, and view their progress, and let the AI automatically filter content that is either outside my price range, or costs more than expected interest in it. Perhaps have a "premium" category of things I'd like to look at the headlines for, but be warned about the price before I click them. Add a button to let me flag "this article was stupid/over-priced" and you've got a shot at a workable system. Cable companies and Newspaper companies have always gone with subscription services to "networks" of content (be it channel selections or a series of newspapers), but I really think with the Internet proliferating the number of content/article providers, there's too many with too little control to make subscribing to a giant "news and content network" plausible. The only way I think it could work is with a micro-payment model, perhaps coupled with an AI to help keep my bill within reasonable bounds. The big problem is that it's so hard to quantify the trade-offs involved. In my car, I can choose to spend the extra hour on the road, or pay $5, and time and money are both quantities that aggregate across multiple trips. The amount of "life-enrichment" I get from reading an article is hard to compare to another article, let alone calculating the amount of money I saved by missing out on a few dozen "liferichment points". But if you read a lot of articles and the prices involved are too small or large, I'm not sure a human could keep up with the necessary decisions. So put me down for a "maybe" on the future of online news articles with micro-payments.
Finally, cellphones are a lost cause. Choosing to delay a call from "prime-time" daylight, to "free night and weekend minutes" is about as complicated a choice as I think people are prepared to make. For web surfing its even worse, because there's often no way to tell how much data is required for a given visit to a site, or surfing session. The best I can offer here is lots of tracking and transparency (which so far the cellphone companies have resisted providing, whether out of avarice or laziness). I think there's some hope for AI programs to track your usage patterns, and offer suggestions, but I have a hard time seeing large enough price incentives for people to care. A trip to Youtube might pop up a message saying something to the effect of "Normally you download 5 MB on a visit to Youtube, which will cost you $2 right now. If you wait an hour, it would only cost you $1." Perhaps more useful would be "You usually talk to your sister for 3 hours, but if you call her after 6pm, it would be free." But I suspect that most phone web-usage is too time sensitive enough to delay, and setting truly variable rates would be too chaotic to make meaningful future predictions. The best I can offer if the networks get really desperate is a message when you start your browser saying "Current rates are 0.10 cents/ KB", and maybe someone doing causal browsing would decide it's not worth it right now, but I'm not sure that's really much of an improvement over the flat-rates they offer now.
So uh, I'm not sure if I had a point in all this, but the next time you see someone talking about micro-pricing schemes, be skeptical, and look for the computers!
Another industry that could benefit from a serious micro-payment system is online newspapers. Newspaper "pay-walls" repeatedly fail, and the newspapers blame the publics' unwillingness to pay for anything on the Internet because they feel entitled to it. That's probably at least part of the problem, but I don't think that's the whole story. I pay for things on the Internet all the time, but I'm not willing to shell out $50, or even $20/year for a subscription to some random newspaper. I get most of my news from links on aggregator sites, things like Google News, Slashdot, and the few dozen blogs and RSS feeds I subscribe to on Google Reader. Now partly that's increased competition driving the prices down, but mostly I just don't read enough articles from a particular source. Now, over the course of a year, I probably read a few hundred New York Times articles, and they're usually very good. I could even assign a value to the amount they enrich my life, and would easily be willing to pay $10-$50 (depending on my mood) for the privilege of doing so. But each individual article contributes relatively little to the total, perhaps 10 cents for a good article. So when facing a pay-wall to read any particular article, there's no way I'm going to shell out $10 in order to read it. While it might rationally be in my best interest, I don't have enough information on-hand to feel justified making a commitment to read $10 worth of articles over the next year. This changes when you're going to a particular site frequently enough that you know you'll get your money's worth. I actually bought a one-year online subscription to Scientific American for $50, because I'm signed up for their RSS feed, and I read at least 20-30 articles a week off of their website, so I felt fairly confident that I could read $50 worth (in value to my life) of articles in a year.
As a small aside, I ended up canceling my subscription, because it didn't end up doing my any good. What I ended up buying was a PDF version of their magazine (complete with the usual ads) every month. I don't sit down and spend a few hours reading a magazine, I spend 10-30 minutes in a stretch reading a smattering of individual articles off of my RSS feeds. The subscription wasn't at all integrated with their website, and when I would click an article off of my feed and hit a pay-wall, it would redirect me to a page letting me know how I could buy the PDF and read the article. But I already had the PDF, it was just too much work for me to go dig it up, and figure out what page the article was on, and dodge the advertisements in order to read it. So I would move on with my life to the next thing on my feed. I ended up not doing anything with the PDFs, and still reading the same articles I was reading for free off of their website. One day I finally found an article that looked cool enough for me to track down in the PDF, only to find that I had moved or deleted it (realizing that I never used it) and thought I could download it again. But, alas, your download link is only valid for a week or two, so they wanted me to pay them another $15. That was the last straw for me. I canceled my subscription and they were nice enough to refund me $30 of it. Kudos for that at least.
Personally, I don't think that the business-end of the publishing companies and news agencies have completely caught up with the change in people's reading habits due to technology. They're still thinking in yearly subscriptions, when people are now thinking in individual articles. The conundrum they always face with these pay-walls, is that to make people realize how much value they are getting from The New York Times, you need to let them see enough content for free that they feel justified in making the commitment of a subscription, but not so much that they can just get it all for free. What they really need is a micro-payment system that works on an article level. If faced with a pay-wall that could take 5 cents out of my Paypal account (so that it's site independent), then buying the article becomes a legitimate decision that I feel qualified to make on the spot. They tried to do this with online advertising, where the advertisers essentially pay my 5 cents for me, but between the bottom falling out on the online ad markets, and the increased competition from every paper in the world (as opposed to the smaller local papers you can actually buy physically at the store), they still seem to be failing. I think moving to an article-based model would actually help them, but it requires a good micro-payment system to be in place. Of course, it also requires the news agencies to step up their game, and compete with each other on the quality of their articles. When you can just buy the headline articles, they don't get to force you to bundle all their filler with it. I mean, honestly, have you ever read the "Cooking Tips" articles in the back, and if so, would you pay for them? So while the news agencies might be making less money selling you "Pet Diet Tips", the actual efficiency of the system increases, because they stop writing articles nobody cares about.
But practically, (in my opinion), the problem with all of these micro-pricing schemes is that people have a hard time managing that many micro-decisions. First, they have a hard time making that many decisions optimally. It's one thing to decide on a given day whether or not you want to pay $5 to take the toll-road on your way to work and save an hour of commuting time. It's another thing entirely to make block-by-block decisions while driving, about whether it's cheaper to turn left now, or go an extra block and then turn left, and to do so at every turn. It's just too many decisions for a person to make to be worth the hassle of them caring. Granted, the granularity of the pricing scheme can be adjusted, but the coarser you make the controls, the less efficiency gains you get compared to the theoretical ultra-fluid model. Even if the number of decisions is reduced to a manageable level, the associated costs of each option have to be large enough that people can realistically assess them. For instance, if taking a particular one-block detour from my normal route will save me 5 cents, but cost me a minute of time, it's kind of a toss-up to me whether it's worth the 5 cents and the mental strain of taking a detour, or the extra minute I save going that way. If I were particularly motivated, and I travel the route every day, with predictable prices, I might justify a permanent detour in the name of saving myself $10/year or so and costing myself an hour of my time. But I'd have to really care. But if you increase the granularity a step further, and the trade-off was between 5 tenths of a cent, versus a few seconds of my time, I'm really unable to make the call, and for stakes that small, I really don't even care. Again, on a larger scale, making a consistent decision for every trip I take over a year might add up to something meaningful, but it's really hard to tell from the collection of micro-decisions. Let alone adjusting these fluidly to account for the fact that if I'm late for an important meeting, as opposed to on my way home from the park, my priorities may be drastically different. At some point, the fine-grained types of theoretical control that these super-efficiency gains need break down when you require people to be making these sorts of decisions continually, and rationally.
But even counting the number of times people make irrational decisions, either because they can't tell, or they don't care, let's suppose that they can make rational decisions enough of the time, that you can get efficiency gains. The next problem with a practical implementation of this is the perennial customer-service favorite: the Bill. The cellphone companies are starting to get a taste of this with the consumer back-lash to what is essentially, a flat-rate micro-payment system for your voice and data traffic. Discrete, simple choices lend themselves to customer satisfaction. Assuming I get what I think I paid for, when I spend $50 and buy a chair, I did so because I knew the chair would be worth more to me than $50 and whatever else I could exchange for it. At the end of the day, I'm happy with my chair, or at very least, I feel responsible for having made the decision. I'm not surprised when the bill comes at the end of the month, because I remember making the call. If I eat out at a fast food restaurant a few times a month, I may not remember the exact number of visits, or how much each trip cost when I get my credit card bill. But, I at least feel confident that each time I went there, I made the decision that at the time, it was worth $5 to get my taco. But if I visit 2,000 websites on my cellphone, and get a bill at the end of the month for $30, I may not feel so confident that I visited each of those websites will a full understanding of the consequences. Partly this is due to lack of transparency. If I could see the cost of a page before I went there, or at least track my progress (debt?) over time, I could get enough feedback to self-regulate my usage. That would help me keep my overall use and overall cost in the same ballpark, but I'd still have a hard time looking at my bill at the end of the month, and deciding whether or not the 2,000 micro-decisions I made were each justified. Now take out the flat-rate, like in the case of the road networks or newspaper articles. Imagine that your data-usage fees varied by time of day, day of the week, and which websites you visit. Instead of the one-shot decision of 3 cents per google search, now you're faced with scheduling issues where waiting an hour to do your google search might only cost you a penny, or you can do it in 15 minutes for 2 cents. As the complexity of these decisions moves beyond the ability and motivation for people to make, your satisfaction and confidence in your bill decreases. This is why the cellphone companies use block-subscriptions to sell their service. People buy more than enough minutes or bandwidth to cover their needs, and can then make one decision that $30/month is worth their overall usage. (It doesn't help that the cellphone companies are predatory, and quite happy to charge you obscene rates for going over your plan.) But the efficiency of these networks suffers as a result. With a subscription plan, everyone calls during peak hours, because they have no incentive not to, and the services get overloaded. Things like free "night and weekend minutes" are a halfway measure to increase efficiency (and act as a great marketing ploy) by encouraging people to move nonessential calls to times when the network is free by offering monetary rewards (free minutes and therefore a reduced bill). The trade-off then is between the unpopularity and the efficiency gains that are lost, or only partially achieved. And that's assuming that there really were efficiency gain on average with an unpopular pricing scheme. Otherwise, if people end up not caring or acting irrationally because it's beyond their abilities, you simply end up with capricious and opaque pricing schemes, on top of the normal inefficient usage patterns. So now the micro-management system is useless, and unpopular.
That's why I think micro-payment systems imposed on people are doomed to fail. But, they have a shot if people can express their preferences, and let a computer make the hundreds and thousands of micro-decisions for them while protecting their interests. The most talked-about example of this is probably the so-called "Smart Grid". Power companies are faced with incredibly volatile and complex markets. Every time you flip on an appliance, a huge amount of power starts suddenly starts flowing into it, creating what's essentially an electrical shock wave that flows all the way back to the power plant. If they don't compensate for all these jolts to the grid, the system collapses, and everybody loses power, and/or fries their toasters (both literally, and figuratively). A number of years ago, someone documented that relatively large spikes would occur during television commercial breaks, as everyone left their televisions to go turn something on or off. (I can't find a source for this right now, but if I do I'll put it in. I'm fairly confident in the assertion however.) The power companies also have to match total power output with the amount people are using, to avoid either wasting power, or causing black/brown outs. So, as demand spikes during the day, they turn on increasingly expensive generators to make sure it all works. But if everyone washed their clothes at 3 AM, when all the lights were off and the businesses were closed, it would be much cheaper for the power companies because the total load on the grid is greatly reduced. But currently there's no way to communicate such a complex set of power pricing to consumers, and even if there were, there's no way to measure it so that the bills could be computed. And after you solve those, you still have my earlier points on the failure of micro-pricing schemes. What the designers of smart grids hope to do, is to put electronics into every appliance and home on the grid, to report and coordinate power usage and pricing schemes. The dream is that your computer or heater could enter "low power mode" during peak usage times, or short bursts of strain on the grid, and your dishwashers and laundry machines could wait to turn on until rates were cheaper. The power company would then return some of the savings to you in the form of cheaper power when you're using it at the non-peak times. Assuming you could get all the electronics in place, I think there's hope for regulating continuous things like air conditioners. Almost everyone I know regulates their thermostats and air conditioner usage to save money on the power. If they could either get a read-out of the current, actual costs, or be able to set preferences on their computer, they could only do so more efficiently. Imagine if you could tell your air-conditioner to not only turn off when you're not home, but try to keep your monthly bill under $20. Perhaps while keeping the house under 85 degrees at all costs. At that point its just a question of user-interface, to specify what you're willing to spend and tolerate. I have less hope for sporadic things like dishwashers and laundry machines. I guess I wouldn't mind my dishes being done by morning, but if I have to go switch my clothes into the dryer I want to know before hand when it'll be done. But at any rate there's hope. I would do my laundry at 3 AM if you paid me enough.
The salvation for micro-pricing systems of road-usage is the advent of trip-planning GPS navigators. Whether you're planning your trip on Google Maps which advises you that you can save time and money if you wait an hour to leave, or informing your portable GPS device that you value your time at $15/hour, the computer can process all of the possible route information and optimize it for you. Saving 5 tenths of a cent for a 3 second delay may not matter much to you at any given time, but saving $20 for an hour of time spent driving over the course of a year might be worth it. At any rate, now you have the capabilities to make that call. Run one of these in conjunction with the ability to look up your current account status, and you've got a shot at having a workable system. Particularly if you can see options and prices you can choose between before each trip, or the pricing and timing differences on your bill at the end of the month had you have selected one of the "economy" or "speed" modes. Granted this all really only matters in big cities and other high-congestion areas, but those are also probably the only areas where you would want to implement some kind of variable toll or taxing system.
Newspapers are harder. I'm not sure about the per-article production costs a newspaper had, so it's hard for me to say whether or not they could get enough to compensate for the loss of subscriptions with mandated filler purchase, or how much they actually make off of the in-page advertising. I honestly think a micro-payment system through Paypal could work if the prices are small enough. But sometimes it's hard to tell if an article is worth $0.15 cents before you read it, and you still have the problem of getting your bill at the end of the month and not quite being able to account for where it all came from. Computer technology is less able to help us here, because even with access to the full text, computers aren't yet good enough to tell us how good an article is (on average), and predict whether or not we'd like it. I think there is hope down the road if AI technology continues to improve however. I don't think it would take much to integrate a payment system into Google Reader. Individual articles could have some kind of "paid content" icon, with a listed price next to it. AI technology could process what kinds of articles I read, and allow me to rate them, and set price levels that I would be willing to pay for them to train it. All the "Web 2.0" is doing this already so that they can data-mine peoples preferences for advertising. Just take some of that technology and pump it into predicting price levels I am willing to pay for it. Then, let me set maximum price thresholds or monthly bills, and view their progress, and let the AI automatically filter content that is either outside my price range, or costs more than expected interest in it. Perhaps have a "premium" category of things I'd like to look at the headlines for, but be warned about the price before I click them. Add a button to let me flag "this article was stupid/over-priced" and you've got a shot at a workable system. Cable companies and Newspaper companies have always gone with subscription services to "networks" of content (be it channel selections or a series of newspapers), but I really think with the Internet proliferating the number of content/article providers, there's too many with too little control to make subscribing to a giant "news and content network" plausible. The only way I think it could work is with a micro-payment model, perhaps coupled with an AI to help keep my bill within reasonable bounds. The big problem is that it's so hard to quantify the trade-offs involved. In my car, I can choose to spend the extra hour on the road, or pay $5, and time and money are both quantities that aggregate across multiple trips. The amount of "life-enrichment" I get from reading an article is hard to compare to another article, let alone calculating the amount of money I saved by missing out on a few dozen "liferichment points". But if you read a lot of articles and the prices involved are too small or large, I'm not sure a human could keep up with the necessary decisions. So put me down for a "maybe" on the future of online news articles with micro-payments.
Finally, cellphones are a lost cause. Choosing to delay a call from "prime-time" daylight, to "free night and weekend minutes" is about as complicated a choice as I think people are prepared to make. For web surfing its even worse, because there's often no way to tell how much data is required for a given visit to a site, or surfing session. The best I can offer here is lots of tracking and transparency (which so far the cellphone companies have resisted providing, whether out of avarice or laziness). I think there's some hope for AI programs to track your usage patterns, and offer suggestions, but I have a hard time seeing large enough price incentives for people to care. A trip to Youtube might pop up a message saying something to the effect of "Normally you download 5 MB on a visit to Youtube, which will cost you $2 right now. If you wait an hour, it would only cost you $1." Perhaps more useful would be "You usually talk to your sister for 3 hours, but if you call her after 6pm, it would be free." But I suspect that most phone web-usage is too time sensitive enough to delay, and setting truly variable rates would be too chaotic to make meaningful future predictions. The best I can offer if the networks get really desperate is a message when you start your browser saying "Current rates are 0.10 cents/ KB", and maybe someone doing causal browsing would decide it's not worth it right now, but I'm not sure that's really much of an improvement over the flat-rates they offer now.
So uh, I'm not sure if I had a point in all this, but the next time you see someone talking about micro-pricing schemes, be skeptical, and look for the computers!
20100506
Statistics
Since we have entered the "Propaganda Age," there seems to be an increasing distrust of published statements and experts in general, and statistics specifically. I think that this is deplorable, so I would like to go on record objecting to this trend. It is true that there are many dishonest ways to gather information and misleading ways to present it, however that is only half the story. For every deceptive presentation of data, there is an honest interpretation that can refute it once all the facts are known. If you accept the existence of objective reality, and the consistency of rational thought, anyway (so my arguments won't reach the true laissez-faire existentialists, but what can?). If you accept objective reality, there is one set of data, and if you have enough knowledge you can interpret it, or at least be swayed by someone who presents a superior interpretation. So what you should do is verify statistics, not simply doubt all of them. Check the sources, find credible interpretations, and make yourself smarter if needs be (it can't hurt).
Because in all honesty, as much as the producers of propaganda like to slant statistics, they would love it if everyone stopped believing in them altogether. Once you give up your right to rational thought and argument, all you have left are your innate emotional prejudices and opinions, which are way easier to manipulate (research autobiographical advertising and cognitive dissonance for starters).
So remember to Think!
Because in all honesty, as much as the producers of propaganda like to slant statistics, they would love it if everyone stopped believing in them altogether. Once you give up your right to rational thought and argument, all you have left are your innate emotional prejudices and opinions, which are way easier to manipulate (research autobiographical advertising and cognitive dissonance for starters).
So remember to Think!
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