Whatever

• An interesting way to use a courier service
• Three small dots were never so impressive
• And I thought those people with Bluetooth phone headsets were annoying!
• Another reason why voting this year will be pointless. Neither candidate understands the the concept of individual liberty.

The Price of Eyeballs

On a recent episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts interviewed Chris Anderson who was claiming "many delightful things in the world are increasingly free." This is supposed to be some new economics that businesses need to conform to or die. I'm skeptical.

The economics behind this phenomena is actually interesting, and Fernando Herrera-Gonzalez over at the Mises Institute I think explains it incredibly well. The following is where it clicked for me:

Google offers us free use of their search engine and other web applications. Why? Because that is how Google attracts our attention to its advertisements. Google doesn't sell its online services to us; it sells an audience to its actual costumers, the advertisers. Google is buying our time and selling it wholesale. As time is a scarce resource, and time (and attention) demand is increasing as a result of fierce competition on the Internet, Google has to pay us ever more, according to the law of diminishing returns. This payment is made not in terms of money, but as storage and process capacity. That's why Google keeps increasing its "free" offering to us, its providers, in terms of, e.g., storage capacity for e-mail accounts.

You see, we are not Google's customers. Google pays us for our eyeballs with free disk space and applications so that they can attract their true customers - advertisers.

Now Microsoft is actually making this even more blatant. They plan on paying cash to users who purchase goods found using their Live Search engine.

The interesting thing is that is this is not new. Broadcast television has operated on this model for over fifty years - they pay for your eyeballs with entertainment so that they can attract their true customers.

Wife bloggin

Whatever

• Hmmm...and they wonder why businesses must pay extortion money to politicians
• Ok, but what if you are both?
• When I saw this I nearly ruined my keyboard with drool
• Ok, maybe this is a little too much Star Wars for one post...nah! There can never be too much Star Wars!
• The corrupting influence of rock and roll
• You can bury me in the R2-D2 DVD player
• Don't ever try to do something nice for a stranger. It may be illegal. (HT: Coyote Blog)
  
• Stupid people shouldn't be activists (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
• This says it all (HT: Carpe Diem)
  

Oh Hillary!

So I see that Hillary Clinton doesn't care too much for economists:

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal.

"We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

I'm confused. Is she part of the "faith-based" or "reality-based" community?

Thanks to Arnold Kling at EconLog for the link. Also, his cohort Bryan Caplan has this intriguing view on why Hillary would be harmless as president. In summary, she wouldn't get much done because people hate her so much. Hillary, Divisiveness we can believe in!