Effective income equality, ad-supported business models

UK households with the lowest income faced the fastest cost of living rise in the past 11 years, figures show.

The rising cost of domestic gas and electricity was one suggested reason for the trend.

Households without children and retirees also experienced faster price increases in their typical basket of goods, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The ONS analysed inflation rates for different households from 2003 to 2014.

Those who spent the most money saw the lowest level of inflation, the ONS concluded.

This could be explained, in part, by prices of package holidays and education barely rising over recent years.

Full article here. It's not just absolute but effective income inequality that is seeming to rise.

Among some sizable number of people I follow on Twitter, ad-supported products and services in tech are seen as evil. ”You get what you pay for!“ and “If you're not paying, you are the product” and variants thereof are common dismissals or denunciations of any ad-supported product.

They lament the proliferation of free apps in mobile app stores, turn their noses up at Facebook, lament the ad-free days of Twitter. Look at anyone who writes such things and a few things become clear. They're almost always fairly well-off (middle to upper middle class on up) and so spending a few extra bucks is no big deal to them. Also, they almost always generalize off of one egregious example.

Ad-supported business models have enabled many people without the financial means otherwise to access many products and services. You may not think it's that important for someone who's poor to access Instagram without paying, but that's a very privileged stance, one that ignores how many people in other countries use such services.

Many businesses can only achieve the scale necessary to be useful with a free, ad-supported business model. Facebook is just one example. Sure, it means that many companies that set off in that direction will fail—scale businesses require, well, massive scale—but a high extinction rate for those who attempt to build a scale business is to be expected.

Finally, it's hardly clear that either a pay or ad-supported business is more friendly to customers. Derek Powazek had a great post on this a few years ago.

I don't mind paying for services I love. For example, I'm strongly anti-piracy when it comes to people who can afford the things they pirate, no matter what reasons they come up with to justify their behavior.

I'm happy, though, that the things I enjoy come in a mix of pay and ad-supported models. As I've noted before, I just hope ad-supported businesses embrace the natural evolution to native ad units more and more in 2015, especially all the old media sites I enjoy but whose user experiences are being destroyed by their advertising unit selection.

I don't now how I got from an article on income inequality to a discussion of ad-supported business models, but all my New Year's Eve alcohol consumption seems to have connected some strange regions of my brain this morning.

Are some diets mass murder?

Richard Smith writes of the demonization of certain foods based on weak science and how it may have been a form of mass murder. He focuses especially on the coordinated denunciation of fat.

Reading these books and consulting some of the original studies has been a sobering experience. The successful attempt to reduce fat in the diet of Americans and others around the world has been a global, uncontrolled experiment, which like all experiments may well have led to bad outcomes. What’s more, it has initiated a further set of uncontrolled global experiments that are continuing. Teicholz has done a remarkable job in analysing how weak science, strong personalities, vested interests, and political expediency have initiated this series of experiments.3She quotes Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of the Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and one of the founders of Oldways, as saying, “The food world is particularly prey to consumption, because so much money is made on food and so much depends on talk and especially the opinions of experts.”31 It’s surely time for better science and for humility among experts.

Medium-length piece, well worth a quick read.

It's a tough habit to shake, isn't it, this American hatred of fat? Most people around me still cut the fat off on any piece of meat they eat, despite the fact it may be a good, filling source of calories. Maybe you don't like the texture, but much of that negative association may be as the result of thinking it will just go straight into your artery as a gelatinous plug.

A real world experiment in police enforcement

In the wake of the murders of two NYPD officers, arrests in NYC have plummeted.

Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.

Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.

Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.

Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.

The latest official stats are here (PDF).

The police unions deny any coordinated work stoppage.

Mr. Bratton said on Monday that a “weeklong period of mourning” and demonstrations that were straining resources were contributing to the drop-off in arrests and summonses. But he said the slowdown should not concern New Yorkers. “I would point out it has not had an impact on the city’s safety at all,” Mr. Bratton said.

A top union official flatly denied that there was a job action and pointed to the orders to double up and the need to police demonstrations as the main reasons.

We rarely have such a stark change in public policy with which to analyze the effects in the real world. This is a case where a crude A/B test jump-started itself in the real world (it would be more useful if it were only specific precincts within NYC that saw this decline in arrests rather than all of them, but we can still look at the effects across cities). It will be interesting to look back in a few weeks and see if there are any new conclusions to be drawn about the broken windows policy.