I can’t help seeing ad blockers as fairless content consumption, like choosing to download films, musics and books without paying the creator and the distributor (VOD, MOD, concerts, libraries…). Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?
Although we all be happy to se more competition, using an ad blocker on Google sites (and G-add financed-sites) have no positive effect for the competitors.
Don’t take me wrong, I hate Ads and Google methods but we can’t all rob the same store and hope there will be infinite food on the shelves and that the next store will benefit from that.
Google doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not written in the stars that Google must succeed. If Google's business model doesn't meet web users expectations then it's perfectly alright for Google to fail as a business. Businesses fail all the time.
Google is not special or different. Google can adapt or die.
Remember also that as Google has grown and captured more of the available attention and advertising dollars, other businesses that rely on attention and advertising such as free-to-air TV or print media have contracted and even failed. Google has shed no tears for them and, correspondingly, there's no need to shed tears for Google.
The other funny thing is Google could probably exist purely from its innovations. Its just too hard to convince the shareholders to give up on the safe and lucrative ad business.
> Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?
I guess we would be free from companies such as Meta and Google? Where do I sign up?
You also seem to think that advertisement has no impact on alternative distribution methods. The fact that other viable options are scarce currently only shows that ad companies have a stranglehold on creative industries through their monopoly.
I sincerely hope that having produced a comment like that, you are not using ad blockers of any kind in any browser, including the reduced functionality Chrome uBlock Origin on manifest V3.
For me, ads broke the informal social contract between provider and end user years ago. Small, unobtrusive advertisements might've been okay, but ads eating an inordinate amount of my time and bandwidth, which exfiltrate my personal information, and which are served to me via SEO tricks and dark patterns are not okay. If sites want to ban me for not viewing their ads, fine. In the meantime, I won't lose any sleep over using my adblocker.
For you, if you are lecturing us on the moral imperative of viewing ads, then you better be viewing those ads yourself rather than only espousing cheap rhetoric.
This is a comical view. If protection of downloadable material that someone wants you to pay for, is removed by an ad blocker, then that is broken by design. Make a website that is suitable to sell things, is the solution.
I principally agree with you. But in reality, the ad-funded model has failed. It failed a long time ago.
There were never any restrictions placed on it, so it became a self-sustaining downward spiral to the current state of things. When I see the internet without an ad-blocker it is completely unusable. Quite frankly, I would most likely stop using most of the internet altogether if I couldn't block ads.
So what is the alternative? Same as always: paid services. A service / platform can either work out a pricing model that works for people, or it shouldn't / can't exist in that form.
Some people will argue that they'd rather have ads and also content for free and that's fine. Maybe some people can tolerate them. I cannot. I find them to be as close to experiencing physical pain as possible. It's like pure mind-poison and I will bend over backwards to avoid ads.
I am waiting for the age of smart-glasses to begin so that I can filter out ads in real-life as well. I simply never, ever, under any circumstances want to see any advertising ever.
If I want a product or service, I'll go search for it. I don't need anything to be suggested to me. And this is just my battle-hardened mind. I daren't think of what ads do to un-developed, children's minds.
It should be the government's responsibility to severely restrict advertising until it nearly doesn't exist. But that's not the world we live in, so I have taken matters into my own hands.
Part of it too is that unlike circa 2012 we are all far more aware that it's not simply an ad. An ad means you're basically under corporate surveillance, and they gleefully not only use that info to "better serve you ads" (i.e. better manipulate your purchasing), they gleefully sell that info to other parties 1) without your consent or 2) alerting you to who has it. Every ad you see is another pandora's box opening up and spreading your info to basically anyone who wants it, and you're not really aware of what exactly is happening under the hood. There's no transparency, and certainly no way to undo the damage. Even the services that purportedly help you with that get caught turning around and selling your data all over again.
Point being, it's not just an ad. It's not just some cereal commercial broadcast to everyone watching cable based on the viewing habits of large swaths of the population - relatively general stuff. It's decades of investment and research weaponized against us to extract as much info about us as possible to use it against us for maximum profit with no concern for how it impacts us or ability to ever opt out.
Running ad blockers for me is a matter of principle. The amount of tracking and telemetry that exists on the Internet is 1. massively invasive from a privacy perspective and 2. massively wasteful from an energy, bandwidth and time perspective.
If you have something worth selling, then sell it.
Alphabet has unfortunately reached a size where it is completely self-sustaining and acts outside of 'normal' market forces affecting businesses that need to make something or sell a certain volume of products. They just keep growing because now it's a good investment to have. There's a few companies like this now. They could just completely stop doing anything tomorrow and they'd probably remain one of the biggest market-caps in existence for decades.
It seems to me that adblocking adoption increases the more companies actively fight it/ramp up their advertising and drown us in it. I mean you have Microsoft injecting ads straight into their OS last I heard (correct me if I’m wrong) and they even charge for windows.
People clearly will live with ads but there is a point where it becomes way too much and some people simply won’t tolerate it at that point.
We don’t eat intelligence: bikes, bottles, food, energy… have room for improvement but I hardly see how AGI would replace them.
Same for physical services like labors, miners and cooks, even taxi/bus drivers for +99% of the world. Automation immensely improve their efficiency and the Modern Times is the past for half of the globe, but AGI isn’t the main facilitator.
Replace all (most*) Silicon Valley -and cousins- similar "products" and services, perhaps yes !
You don’t see how robots would replace all these roles? I take it you never seen a Waymo or read about how agriculture needs a tiny fraction of humans in the US vs a couple of decades ago? And those aren’t even “AGI-level” solutions…
Waymo aren’t build, maintained and disposed by robots only. Even if they were we’ve still to see how that can be deployed (and make sense economically) to more than a couple percentiles of the richest people in the top cities. That has nothing in common with "replacing the humans".
Agriculture efficiency mainly comes from last century fertilizer. The modern robot trucks are also limited to some richest countries and farmers and have nothing to do with AGI.
Your vague dream of AGI solutionism missed the barriers to technologie deployment: raw ressources availability, politics, demography, energy… IA can have a small impact there but it certainly won’t replace ALL products. How would a computer replace a mining truck or a reactor turbine?
If I missed your point you’d be wonderful to clarify it, perhaps by detailing the first post "replacing all products":
- what do you consider a product?
- ALL as in Everything (obviously not I guess)?
Regarding "don’t you see how robots…" I clearly see the theory but also can’t see how it would happen in reality for the reasons I mentions in my precedent post: mainly access to ressources/energy to build/maintain those robots for a signifiant time scale and socio-politico barriers.
I’d be glad you reconsider explaining your point because I only see vague allusions, but if you want to stop the conversation here that’s all up to you.
My personal 2 cents on the "ethical producer" solution:
1. I don't need honey or other animals products to live an healthy and happy life but there's many people that think the opposite. Some of those honey consumers care too about bee condition and satisfy a part of their consumption with the "ethical" products. Not buying those products will let them have access the market with more ease by not putting more pressure on the price and the quantity available. I understand one person choice has a very small impact, but it's the same as with voting.
2. I recognize many small beekeeper treat their bees way nicer than the industrial one, and that they genuinely love their hives. However love isn't the question when you think about ethics: culture, habits and customs have very important weights in our actions. There's absolutely not doubt more than 13% of Egyptian parents deeply love their child, however most of them practice a very questionable and invasive tradition on their girl [0]. I think small-shop honey production is still an exploitation of another species: the bees didn't come by themselves and sometimes the queen is captive in a special room. harvesting their honey is a theft: they didn't produce it for us humans. It's not always very natural either: some beekeeper give them white sugar during winter - which helps keeping them alive - but they would probably have chosen to keep the honey instead. The smoke usage attest of the not-so-cooperative process, it's at most a forced-symbiosis.
I too feel like it's the same for other animal products.
Git commits only differences with the precedent commit, not the entire repository. Therefore the video is only committed once as long as that video doesn’t change.
A very poetic and spiritual take, however IMHO he missed the elephant in the room for the compassion argument: breeding is much more cruel than killing by the harsh, prolonged condition. The killing in comparaison is nearly instant and arrive as a relief of that condition. Both comes together though and only considering the quicker and "natural" one isn’t fair.
JUST Eggs aren’t the only alternative, through: seeds, beans, mushrooms, grains…
I guess you know that the reason of shitty treatment is price, would you rather buy 20x priced eggs ? There’s many family farms that would be happy to deliver them anywhere at that rate.
It's a shame that we've just settled for this as the only answer, "you want better food, you have to pay more".
I think decent treatment of animals and access to decent food is a basic human and animal right. But yeah, it's hard to have this discussion if all it ever comes down too is economics or the decision between communism and capitalism.
If the question is about satellite vs ground instrument: the geographic coverage from the satellite is much greater. Geostationary instruments over Europe cover the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East.
If that was not the question, can you provide more detail?
Thanks, this is indeed the question. Thinking out loud: the coverage is probably somewhat conic therefore if you want to scan the ground or lower atmosphere an high altitude is optimal, while scanning the upper atmosphere could be done from the ground.
Perhaps earth's spherical shape gives an advantage to the satellites in both cases ?
Maybe, though a GEO satellite (or really any satellite) will always be much much farther from even the upper atmosphere than the ground will be, so satellites have a pretty dominant coverage advantage.
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t exists, although MFI could be representative for the west) and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
evem tho unique starts with a vowel, we say a unique, not an unique, I guess because it's pronounced like "younique", long u. Short u would still be an tho. As in, "An understanding"
the "does" in "doesn't" absorbs subject-verb the conjugation, does is now the verb that needs to agree with the subject, it. Exists returns to it's infinitive (unconjugated) form, exist.
"They arguments doesn’t hold" typo they ought to be the, those or their, not sure what you meant. Since arguments is plural you want don't, not doesn't, alternately "the argument [singular] doesn't hold"
'national ones creates money' subject verb agreement again, either one creates or ones create
"and the are" s/the/they
"bitcoin pools mentioned ahead": ahead doesn't quite apply to comment threads, like on a road you have cars in front (ahead) and in back (behind), but with comments it's above and below, because you scroll up and down, not forward and backward. You could also say aforementioned referring to something mentioned earlier.
> It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them. It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.
GP fights agains ads, not Google. And not being able to win 100% of the gain shouldn’t restrain someone from taking action it they consider the win share worth the pain.
> $38,000 in clicks boosts Google's revenue by $38k
You should include costs here, and if (big if) a substantial part of the clicks comes from bots and get refunded, the associated cost comes on top of the bill. At the end the whole business is impacted. I agree 50/50k is a penny through.
> I hate ads […] I manage a Google Ads account
[no cynism here, I genuinely wonder] how do you manage your conscience, mood and daily motivation? Do you see a dichotomy in what you wrote and if so, how did you arrive to that situation? Any future plan?
I’m asking as you kind of introduce the subject but if you’re not willing to give more details that’s totally fine.
> chicken livers are usually cheaper per amount of protein than most other kinds of meat
Any idea why? My layman guess is it’s a non-famous byproduct of chicken muscle, that people tends to consume more. Would removing the availability/demand (=make it more popular) reverse the price?
Thanks for the information about carotene > vitA, it resonates like the heme/non heme iron where the heme one is easier to get but can slip to too much, leading to more oxidation and then (in extreme case) concert (IIRC that’s one of the way too much read meat induce cancer risks). OTOH non heme iron (in cereals, peas, fruits, vegetables and milk) is directly used for catalysis and isn’t store, so one can’t get too much.
I’m a layman, don’t take what I said as authoritative. You’re welcome to point out if I’m wrong or add precision.
Although we all be happy to se more competition, using an ad blocker on Google sites (and G-add financed-sites) have no positive effect for the competitors.
Don’t take me wrong, I hate Ads and Google methods but we can’t all rob the same store and hope there will be infinite food on the shelves and that the next store will benefit from that.