Value is Contextual – Opportunity Cost

June 17th, 2009

I may sound like I’m flogging a dead horse. I have blogged about value being contextual before, and I’m going to do it again. The reason is simple – every so often when we’re working on Pressyo (yes, we’re consistently updating it behind the scenes), we keep dreaming up things that we can possibly use or do.

They’re mostly fun stuff to do – mostly armchair economics and armchair computer science. But the thing about brainstorming things to do and actual implementation is that sometimes implementations can go spurious. We’d expect something to work one way and then it doesn’t.

So, yes, we have to constantly remind ourselves that value is contextual. And because I’m such a bore, I shall bore you, my readers as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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Good = Content x Audience

June 4th, 2009

You’re only as good as how much you’re disseminated.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Grisha Perelman. You’ve discovered a valid proof for the Poincare Conjecture. Upon discovering the proof, you go back to sleep in your mother’s house, and proceed to play Tetris till you die.

Question: Would anyone know you’re good?

Answer: No. Why? Because you’re only as good as how much you’re disseminated. Read the rest of this entry »

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Good Quote

June 1st, 2009

From Rabee Tourky,

The way I see it, we’re born into markets, and throughout life, we accumulate resources. Some of us are born with higher initial endowment of resources – richer parents, big inheritence; but most of us… most of us just have human capital on our end. We only have labor, and time as our inital endowment of resources, and to me, that is enough.

Maybe all that argument about how to distribute initial endowment of resources is moot afterall?

Welcome back to the revitalized Outside the Box blog. There has been plenty of changes to Pressyo, and more to come in the coming week. As you can tell, we’ve been busy, with both our personal lives, and with Pressyo, but exciting times are coming to Pressyo.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

The Costs of Things, Then and Now

January 16th, 2009

Over at Dr. Mark Perry’s blog, he consistently posts about the costs of things then and now. The latest is the cost of a scientific calculator (hat tip to Alex Kirtland who posted this on his facebook.). You and I have at least one scientific calculator (I have three, and one financial calculator), and it’s interesting to see the costs drop over the years. The scientific calculator went from geek tool to something every high school student must have.

Why is this of interest to me? A few reasons actually: Read the rest of this entry »

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New Pressyo now fully operational

January 11th, 2009

As you may have noticed, Pressyo now sports a new look.

The new design is simpler, leaner and cleaner with the emphasis on the content, not the header or the footer. Do let us know what you think by e-mailing us.

Towards a faster loading Pressyo

The old pressyo design weights in at 312,555 bytes, while the new one now weights only 293,815 bytes. A saving of almost 6%. A good thing, considering much of the code thrown away is useless anyway. Also, by using a more standard and CSS-based rendering, we managed to NOT use JavaScript for rudimentary task like centering and rendering, which should be best to let CSS to deal with it.

Why do we sacrifice the rounded corners?

We strive for simplicity in the new design, therefore we think while beauty is important, being lean and fast loading is more important. But who knows, maybe one day we may have the rounded corners back, so stay tuned!

Finally, we hope you like the new design, as much as we like delivering it to you. Happy new year and keep Pressyo-ing!

Pressyo user experience team

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Pressyo – Public!

December 6th, 2008

Hi all, as of 7pm last night, Pressyo is public. We have decided that a full blown public beta is the best way to receive feedback from users.

So, you can now register (you will still need to be manually approved), and start using Pressyo. Unsure of what Pressyo does and how to use it? Read the Pressyo Basics.

As one of the creators of Pressyo, I recommend you try a basic strategy first – buy low, sell high. Only thus can you gain enough Yos to be rich!

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Of Trading Votes and Repugnant Transactions

November 24th, 2008

In my previous post, I talked about repugnant transactions. Today I shall expand a bit more on repugnant transactions and most importantly, the basis, the underlying building block of Pressyo – trading votes.

In the initial marketing and proposal of Pressyo’s concepts to the F3 crowd (Family, Friends and Fools), one of the first questions asked is “fine, you trade information, but what exactly are you trading?”, to which I replied “the right to vote”, I often get quizzical looks, as though I’ve been injected with a huge syringe of Retard.

Of course, soon after, the “are you out of your mind?” question comes. Of course I am not mad. Even my Chinese friends (yes, as a matter of fact, Communist China has always had democracy – in a relatively different form than its western counterparts but still democracy, its just rather ignorant of people who claim China as undemocratic) find the concept of trading votes repugnant. I’ve been wondering why.

Could it be the concept of democracy has been ingrained in the hearts and minds of the peoples of the nations of the free world that it is repugnant to even think of undoing the “one man, one vote” idea?

If you think logically about it, in a true democracy, every issue that affects the public would be voted upon. Naturally, there will be some people who are not interested in the issue. They can either be forced to vote (some countries like Australia and China enforces such laws), or not vote at all. If a third option was given – for the politically indifferent to trade votes – wouldn’t everyone be better off?

Naturally, some form of mechanism needs to be designed to prevent a moral hazard from emerging, but all in all, everyone should be better off.

There’s some food for thought for you then :D . If you do want to read more about repugnant transactions and the market design (and mechanism design), I recommend reading the greatest economist of them all with regards to this topic – Al Roth. Be aware though, his blog features some markets where even I find repugnant (assisted suicide for example).

Do tell me what you think of the idea of trading votes in politics – should people be allowed to trade?

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Thinking of Value

November 11th, 2008

How much is your time worth? How much are you (and your life) worth? These questions are sometimes very much avoided – afterall, its rather hard to discuss the fact that American babies are only valued at $90 (pdf, opens in new window). Many a times, economists and actuarists have been accused of being ‘inhuman’, by boiling down human life to mere numbers, and that you cannot attach a number to the value of a person.

Thankfully though, we at Pressyo do not deal with these issues (economists call these repugnant transactions, where a value is attached but it is generally considered untasteful – i.e. a ‘yuck’ factor). We do however deal with another kind of repugnant transaction that will be discussed in future blog posts. At Pressyo, we deal with valuating information, which in itself, presents a different challenge than say, evaluating how much insurers should pay for a lost thumb on a construction worker (about 10% of your health insurance, depending on which country you’re in).

There are several problems with trying to evaluate information. In attempt to be brief, I shall list a few down and not cite any academic sources (also, the dearth of popular academic articles with regards to this topic means that I’m too lazy to find the more obscure ones). Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Economics | 3 Comments »

Server Move Complete!

November 4th, 2008

We’ve just completed a massive move to a new server – it’ll take a while for all the changes (DNS, even this blog’s URL) to propagate correctly. Rest assured that while some things aren’t working now – they’ll be working soon.

If you’re wondering why we’ve moved servers – the private beta is now moving into a new phase. If you’re one of the few still waiting for your invite: fear not, we’ll soon have the capacity to accomodate you guys – so look out for those invites in your mailboxes!

UPDATE:
DNS changes should have propagated – you should now be seeing this blog at blog.pressyo.com! If you’re not, then, I guess you have a complaint to file with your ISP. Or possibly country. I wouldn’t know.

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Dude, What’s Taking So Long?

October 22nd, 2008

So, it’s been two weeks since Pressyo went into private beta. Many of you signed up (and thank you for that!) but have yet to receive an invite.

What the hell is going on?

Well, for one, plenty of resets. As you may or may not know (depending on whether you’ve been sent a briefing email), Pressyo has a lot under the hood, and there is more than meets the eye (cue Transformers sound effects). And plenty of tweaking needs to be done before it is ready for human consumption (you robots out there seem to be consuming it real fine).

But in all seriousness, the few of you who have access to the site already, keep posting. We really thank you for your contribution, please don’t be upset. Yes, we’ll be resetting quite a few more times before the mass of you are invited.

But, here’s the good news. More of you will be invited this coming week. And instead of you starting off with measly ¥10, you get to start out with more – ¥100 :D . Please do note though, this is not final. I’m quite sure the final amount you get to start off with will be higher, and along the way there will be more resets.

Buut.. we’ll get there, you and I. :D

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