The incorporated woman
economist.com
economist.com
Ten dollars a year on average. Facebook had $7B in revenues last year from 700M users. That's assuming all of Facebook's value comes from users' data which is not entirely fair. Even if you're an American (making your info more valuable on average to advertisers), you still spend more on toothpaste, hopefully.
I get valuing privacy but where did the myth that your data is worth a lot originate? Most people will give their details for a coupon. Not because they don't know data's value but because they do and it's almost nothing. You need to aggregate millions upon millions of users to eke out a profit.
Regardless, I like this bit of cold accounting applied to your own life.
she calculated how much had already been invested in JLM in its 35 years of pre-corporate existence. Her mother figured out how much it had cost to raise her as a child; college education expenses were added in, as was a modest inheritance and her earnings to date. Adjusted for inflation, the total came to just over $1m, and Ms Morone confesses to being dismayed at how little output this investment had produced.
That calculation doesn't yet include the expected value of my harvested organs should I die, and while it's harder to put a price on organs than blood (which is sold to hospitals) it's reasonable to presume they're extremely expensive.
Morbid as it is, this perhaps shouldn't be too surprising in a world where there are individuals earning 1000 times as much as others. If it were possible to directly trade lifespan, a 1000x earner could double his lifespan by shaving 1% off 100 people, compensate them with 2x their lifetime earnings, and still have 800 times as much as the typical person left over.
Which is close to zero, provided you're willing to lock up a whole bunch of women as baby factories and go bottom-dollar of keeping the livestock fed.
Organs are considered valuable because it's illegal to sell them, the black market price doesn't reflect a potential market price. You also aren't de-rating the general worth of human lives in a society where organ harvesting like this were common place.
Or to put it another way: there's so much insanely wrong with this that it's the height of tech-minded naivete to think what you've come up with is a meaningful number.
The implication of the calculation isn't nearly as sweeping as you think, it's merely that more people should donate blood. Especially if it has low "cost" to them compared to others (say, because they're not queasy about it).
Given what we know about what people are willing to pay for both, I think it's fairly clear what society values more. If an evil genie forced me to choose between reliving my life in a way that either deprived the world of my blood products or of my labor, and I knew that on the basis of money alone my blood was more valuable, then unless I was doing some particularly civic-minded work it would seem obvious I'd contribute more as an unemployed blood donor.
That's my point: this calculation doesn't produce a meaningful number. It's why we regulate and exclude it from the market to start with: its get weird quickly, and its why my example is as it is - because it you really start thinking about it, making more blood isn't that difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Self-Improvement_of_Salvado...
What say you now?
There's an argument to be made that medical benefits aren't all they're hyped up to be. The decades during which life expectancy improved most in the US were the 1910s (for women) and 1920s (for men). This was largely the result of municipal sanitation, sewerage, increased food production, refrigeration, and improvements in pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood care.
In the past 50 years, most life expectancy improvements can be attributed to falling rates of smoking and drinking, and improved automobile safety.
There's a timeline of introduction of vaccines for various diseases, the period from 1920-1960 was particularly active. A few others (notably Hep-C and HPV) have come on-line since.
Acute medical intervention actually accomplishes relatively little.
(I guess my post should have read "earned income").
Edit: actually my post does reference earning rather than simply collecting. Unemployed and those on welfare don't earn. So what is your point exactly?
"Starving actor" is pretty much a trope. Superstars are rare, though they do again tend to display a winner-take-all (or much) tendency. Even successful actors often struggle once their careers are over. For actresses, that's not infrequently by their mid-30s, though there's some longevity being evidenced now. Perhaps 50-something is the new 30-something.
Similarly with athletes. Success is rare, and careers are often very brief. Consequences (especially in contact sports) are also high -- American football players have notoriously low life expectancy.
The other element is that the negative product of actors and athletes is pretty low. OK, perhaps energy and resource utilization extravagance in coverage of their work by hack writers, but that's about it. They're not destroying companies, felling tropical rainforests, or invading countries. If you're particularly unlucky, they may give a popular face to a hideous ideology (say, Mel Gibson or wartime propoganda of numerous stripes). A few gambling problems and wrecked marriages, but the same can come of dice, cards, or drink rather more readily.
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* Clarification: nor do they comprise a significant portion of the super-rich. If you look at the Forbes 400, very few of the entries are even associated with entertainment. From the 2011 list, I find, searching for "Television", "Entertainment", and "Movies":
Key: Rank:Name:Wealth:Age:City:Source
78:Saban, Haim:2,800:60:Beverly Hills, CA:Television
83:Spielberg, Steven Allen:2,700:58:Pacific Palisades, CA:Movies
235:Winfrey, Oprah:1,400:51:Chicago, IL:Television
320:Siegel, Herbert:1,100:77:New York, NY:Television
375:Sillerman, Robert FX:975:57:New York, NY:Entertainment
One is an actor (in any significant fashion).
Haim Saban: businessman / financier, record, film, & TV producer.
Steven Spielberg is, of course, a director.
Oprah Winfrey is a television and media celebrity and owner.
Herbert Siegel is better known as Herbert "Herb" Ellis, a character actor, known for portrayals of law enforcement officers on film and TV. He helped create Dragnet, Joe Friday, Room Five, The D.A.'s Man, and Peter Gunn.
Ah, and two listings under sports:
164:Kroenke, E Stanley:1,800:58:Columbia, MO:Sports, real estate
346:Jacobs, Jeremy Maurice Sr:1,000:65:East Aurora, NY:Sports concessions
Kroenke owns the LA Rams.
Jacobs owns the Boston Bruins.
Neither is a professional athlete.
I guess I just noticed this a long time ago in large companies. A guy at the top makes a lot of money. He often provides a symbolic role, a bit of (often bad) strategy, much ass covering, credit taking, bus pushing and ladder climbing... but the real services the company provides are actually carried out by people making much less.
So... I maintain, that the actual importance to society of task performed is often inversely correlated with earning.
I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared to make it, but I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared to say I wouldn't either.
Given that Google's personal data tracking has creeped me out and onto another search provider who doesn't do that (DDG), it's cost them, net net.
Personal data is more important to Facebook because they do not have search intent to advertise against. Personal data are really the only criteria for targeting ads there.
Twitter is somewhere in between. You can target ads to "look alike" personal data criteria, or to hashtags (which are essentially a keyword search).
Google has search intentionality. They benefit from the fact that they're aware of when you're likely to be looking specifically for something. Plus tremendous marketshare in search -- on the order of 80% or so.
Amazon has purchase intentionality. Fewer transactions, but where they are, Amazon has disintermediated advertising because they're fulfilling the transaction. Also tremendous marketshare in commerce. Their margins on sales however are low.
Apple is a slightly different beast: hardware, plus some software/information goods (largely entertainment sales). And no, I haven't peeked at their financials. Profits on the hardware side are tremendous, though marketshare is relatively low. Marketshare on their software/information sales (software, music, video, books, games) is higher, margins tend to be low.
Facebook is in the ads space, and lacks for intentionality though its' got a lot of loiter time. People spend hours on the site (or can). The focus should be less on transactions per page, as on opportunities per user. Focus on detecting when someone's in a purchase state and utilize that, as well, perhaps, as the relationships between users and vendors which can be provided. Of all the majors, I'd say FB's position is the weakest, and the degree to which the user experience seems to be deteriorating under increased conversion pressure seems to support this.
Of possible breakouts:
Google going into direct retail or direct retail partnerships, which seems to be happening with Google Shopping Express, could be a net win. Google's disadvantage is increasingly negative response to its data profiling. Abandoning this for other bases on which to generate revenues would be an interesting move.
Amazon is a latent player in the hardware space. To date I've found its tablet and e-Reader products unappealing because the're too ostentatiously shopping malls thrust before the user. A much, much softer touch would be more successful for me. Jeff Bezos's personality may be the company's Achilles heel. Amazon also have an interactive an online component through their forums (and product ratings) which might be leveragable into social space, though I consider that a very long shot.
Apple could branch into either retail or search. It's risk is getting out-competed in hardware, particularly in the iPhone/iPod space where Android is now eating its lunch. On the other hand, there's an opportunity in that Apple doesn't rely on the intrusive surveillance that Android is predicated on. That pivot is complicated by iOS being a closed rather than open operating system. I see the opportunity being frustrated by Apple's preference to keep its software platforms closed. Its laptop and desktop market could grow at the cost of further decline of Microsoft, though challenged by Chrome devices.
Facebook has the most difficult transition of any of the four. It's not in retail, pushing advertising reduces the appeal of its other offerings, and it doesn't have a hardware offering. Yet. That last could be a breakout, though again, I see this as a long shot.
Of the four, FB is the most likely to fail or decline. Google is probably well-poised to retain king-of-the-hill status. Apple is likely to remain as a center of the personal-electronics / entertainment market, though pinched by Android in small devices. Amazon could be vulnerable to an open-platform based retail system based around or promoted by Google, though it would take a lot to topple it. Expansion into devices would be useful but not a major game changer.
Other disruptive elements: a decentralization of social networking space through open-protocol networks (e.g., Diaspora, Friendica), and self-hosting systems (e.g., FreedomBox). A federation of search, whether through meta-providers (e.g., DDG) or truly federated search (YaCy). An open handset or open hardware spec. All of low to modest probability, but not impossible.
The data tells them which eyeballs to target.
The sad thing IMHO is that the onus is on me, to try to be anonymous.
"Dear Mr Bjelkeman-Pettersson, we have accumulated a quite interesting collection of data about you. It sure would be a shame if this information would leak to any irresponsible third parties. However, for a small annual fee we are willing to implement a stringent privacy policy..."
Just because that value is a small amount for me as an individual doesn't mean that it's a good idea to just give it away.
However, they don't mention the novel in the piece. It's worth a read (not particularly well executed, but some imaginative exploration of the key idea).
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-unincorporat...
Some of the ideas are played with really well: the whole notion of stock and whatnot, the touch on how terrible VR could be, and so forth. There's a lot of dumb stuff too, though: no real exploration of the space stuff worth mentioning, no real character development (characters are basically static, even the evil ones--compare with, say, Doctorow's Makers), awkward singularity/AI plot points...
It's not a bad book, and it has some fun ideas in it, but it's not a great execution (as has been said).
I honest to god am trying to figure out real answers to questions along those lines. I think it is a big part of why women make less than men: Everyone values our emotional intelligence but then expects us to give it away free, out of the goodness of our hearts, like mom's modeled after "The Giving Tree."
What does it say about the current state of our laws, that an individual had to register as a corporation in order to gain MORE protection over their personal information and their privacy?
Corporations seems to have way too much power, which is often at the expense of individuals and even governments.
I'm utterly intrigued and can't wait to do some digging