Tag: value

Posted on by Tim Worstall

So, Just How Much Is That Data Facebook Steals From You Worth?

My own view around here is that since it is Facebook itself which gives the data value – Facebook best being described as a system to add value to data – the value of our data is zero. But this is an attempt to be a little more specific than that:

Value of data: There’s no such thing as a free lunch in the digital economy
Wendy C.Y. Li, Makoto Nirei, Kazufumi Yamana 23 July 2019

Online platforms that provide services at zero monetary cost benefit greatly from the data these transactions generate.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Is Ezra Klein Insane? Facebook Is A Problem Of Capitalism Apparently

There are silly ideas, left wing ideas and then some so insane that only the truly gaga can possibly believe. Like this one from Ezra Klein – Facebook is a problem of capitalism. Or perhaps of free market competition – Ezra does the usual trick of confusing the two. Proof that we should never be taking Klein’s suggestions for how to run the world seriously.

Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problem

Given that Ezra edits the place yes, he is responsible for that headline.…

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Posted on by Tony Carden

Jan Care*

Well, well, well, just look what’s happened!

That overhyped and touted IPO by Lyft is now in the doldrums. There’s this piece here by USA Today:

Need a Lyft? The stock price of ride-hailing company ends lower following last week’s IPO

According to USA Today on Monday the stock – launched at a mouth-watering $72 was trading down at $69—a fall of $3 from its IPO price, but $19.6 down from its peak of $88.6.…

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Posted on by Alex Noble

When is 3% More Than 97%?

When Rex Nutting says so, apparently.

“My own view is that most billionaires do create some value, but they generally take more than their share of money and power. Their wealth far exceeds their economic contributions.”

He insists that cronyism alone is the reason billionaires don’t deserve their wealth, but then fails to identify government as the root cause of it.

To be fair, he has at least correctly diagnosed the disease we suffer in the West (which is beyond most lawmakers) but then he goes on to misidentify the major culprits, gives some examples of their behaviour without any reference to the key factors, and finally finishes with a gruesome flourish like a weightlifter suffering a rectal prolapse.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

That’s The End Of Blockchain Then – It’s Not Actually Useful For Anything

That Bitcoin doesn’t have a greatly useful role as anything other than a speculative tool is clear enough these days. True, it’s half a decade since I first said this and it’s not entirely proven as yet but that’s the way to be betting. It’s long been thought though that blockchain does have some uses. A permanent and unalterable register of something or other, with an inbuilt error checking system, yes, we can all imagine at least that this could be useful.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Facebook Adds $2 Trillion A Year To The Global Economy – Zuckerberg’s Not Rich Enough

A great question of our times is, well, where’s all this economic growth then? We’ve a technological revolution going on but wages and GDP don’t seem to be rising. Is this capitalism in its death throes as the rich b’stards gain everything?

Well, no. Wages are really a measure of what you can consume and if consumption is going up then so are real wages. And we’re not actually interested in GDP, what we want to know is what value can people consume?…

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Posted on by Kent Wennerlund

What Is The Value of X? It May Depend On Your Level Of Enlightenment.

Those evil market driven capitalistic pigs never manage to do anything for their fellow man who is not rich. A lot of people know this to be true. A lot of people are idiots.

The race to improve in order to sell stuff in our – supposedly ever so nasty – competitive environment does yield some particularly nice results for those of lesser means.

Take cell phones for instance. It is getting quite hard to truly distinguish one from the other in this day and age so we get some odd – but nice – results.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Parks Have Value D’Oh. So, We’re Richer, More Productive And Less Unequal Than We Pretend

Over the weekend we had a charity which supports the idea of public parks telling us that public parks have a value to people. That seems pretty uncontroversial of course, to the point of certainly being true. The question will only ever be, well, what value?

They tell us one large each:

Parks and green spaces generate health benefits that would cost more than £34bn if they did not exist, research by Fields in Trust has suggested.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Facebook Should Pay You 2.52 Cents A Day – The Value Of Your Data

We’ve all seen the fools shouting that data is the new oil. That Facebook makes a mint out of the data we give it for free and therefore they should be paying us for it. Said fools missing two really very important points. The first being that the data, as data, has no value at all. The second that even once it is processed into information which is useful it’s still worth a pittance. At which point the collapse of the entire complaint of course.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Sad Ignorance About The Value Of Facebook And Google

It’s entirely true that Facebook and Google are worth large amounts of money. It’s also true that some goodly portion of this comes from their aggregation of the data we so freely give them. That isn’t though, the same statement as that the data itself has value. Sure, that could be true but it could also be true that it’s the aggregation which produces the value, the data itself being worth near nothing.

And, you know, that probably is the truth, it’s the information which is valuable, not the data.…

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