My friend Aaron over at SecureTheory has a fascinating post on the use of distributed networks to safeguard sensitive locations. And no, it’s not just TIPS with fancier jargon.

Aaron thinks there’s not much point to it, because they still intend to pay the distributed camera-watchers. I’m a little more sanguine about the project, because I can see how it might be more cost effective than hiring more folks to man the monitors full-time, even if you are paying people something. That’s because to get peoplefull-time, you have to eat their full opportunity cost for some other job. But that cost may be nonlinear: the marginal hour when you’re already putting a lot of time into a task is apt to be a lot pricier than the first. So, concretely, if I’m willing to do a full-time job (40hr/wk) for (say) a thousand a week, that comes out to $25/hr. But I may be willing to spend one hour doing the same task for only $10, or spend some free time doing a few minutes here and there for much less than the relevant fraction. That’s because if I can look at the occasional image while doing something else (nobody’s work time is that dense), I don’t really incur the same opportunity cost, and (maybe more importantly) you’re not paying me to put up with nearly as much tedium.