A depressing reality to this question is to just look at the current crop of billionaires. None of them need money, yet many of them spend their time pursuing more.
I know all of us have these quaint answers about all the noble or fulfilling things we would do, but the data doesn't seem to support that.
I've met people who were born into enough money they never needed to work, and a lot of them are just pretty normal people sans jobs. I think the interesting question here would be how would you live if you had enough without working, but little enough that you still had to think about how to stretch it over a lifetime. E.g. are you flying first class to spend a few days skiing in the Alps this weekend? Probably not, but you can make sandwiches and go for a hike instead of clocking in to work.
The specifics do matter. You can have a very comfortable month-long international trip for certainly low five figures. (Obviously can do less but a few $K/week for a couple is a reasonable baseline.) You can also quickly add to the tab by picking the luxury hotels, first class flights, limos, etc. that may or may not add a lot to the experience considering.
I've traveled a lot and sometimes the splurge is really worth it. Often, it's not unless the money involved is just pocket lint to the person.
I agree - I've travelled enough on my own dime and the corporate one to know that you definitely don't want to get the cheapest room on Expedia, but satisfaction doesn't scale linearly with the amount you spend. Filet mignon doesn't automatically beat a nice warm rock to sit on.
Because the work they do is satisfying and interesting. Take that away and they’re less of a person. They can’t stop because the person they are is tied up with what they do.
I mean, I think it is a different scenario. The kind of person who makes a billion dollars has something going on in their brain that makes them want to keep going. Think about it: by the point where they've made a billion dollars, they've long since passed on the opportunity to retire comfortably. They already had all the money they needed, and, faced with the chance to stop, they decided to stay in. They flew past $10MM, past $50MM, even $100MM—far more than anyone could ever spend unless they really tried—all while saying "no, I'm not done yet". I would not expect someone with this mentality to suddenly stop at $1 billion. They are in it for something other than reaching the point of not having to work anymore. I'm not saying I admire them, in fact it sounds like a terrifying inner life to me.
On the other hand, the rest of us, the 98.7% of people who are only working for the paycheck that allows us to do the other things we actually want to do instead of our jobs. The extent to which we work is the extent to which we must pay for those needs. Remove the need to work, and we wouldn't be working anymore—not at those jobs, anyway.
What I'm saying is, I believe non-generational billionaires are weird outliers, and we can ignore them for the purposes of this question.
Our CEO is obsessed with "engagement." He has a problem where older employees are not engaged and are retiring in droves, and the incoming employees couldn't give two shits less about the company. They keep begging retirees to return.
I think this is microcosim of our wider economy. If it is, output is going to fall off a cliff, soon.
Is there a functional reason for why toilet lids do not close in an air-tight fashion? If there were no openings for the particles to escape through, it seems like it would make closing the lid more effective.
Wouldn't the air above the water tend to hold the water in the bowl, since emptying the bowl would create a partial vacuum? And would that effect, if it exists, be enough to prevent effective flushing?
My daughter (14) is currently going through this scenario. She was in a Montessori school from pre-school through 8th grade. The school she went to did not offer 9-12 so we had to transition her to a more traditional school for high school. We were extremely concerned that the daily classroom structure would be a problem, but she's adapted wonderfully. Despite never having traditional grades, tests, and quizzes, she currently has all A's and B's and is doing great. Speaking for myself, I don't think I give my kids enough credit for just how adaptable/resilient they are.
The same thought came to my mind. When wearing my polarized sunglasses, sometimes the screens on gas station pumps will be unreadable. However, if I rotate my head slightly one way or the other, the polarization filter is removed and I can read the screen clearly.
I did something similar in college. A company paid cash for installing software that displayed ads on the bottom of your monitor. It qualified your ad viewing activity based on mouse movement.
At night I would open the software, wrap my mouse cord around an oscillating desk fan, then go to bed. Earned myself $50/month
That was my first ever exposure to programming. I installed as many of those crap ad bars as I could on a backup computer and wrote a macro that would open Internet Explorer, browse thru the same 10 sites in a loop, close IE, repeat.
This setup provided enough income to cover the costs of my dedicated phone line and ISP access.
Not that i have not done many questionable things like this when i was a kid, but at what point is it an admission of fraud that can get one in trouble?
When the incentive to prosecute (i.e opportunity for resources gained vs opportunity for resources lost) reaches a certain thresh-hold there's action. Generally, that thresh-hold is high because the value gained from prosecution is low, even in cases were one party is quite apparently guilty.
The only real exception would be the "let's make an example of out this person" case. When crime is rampant, prosecutions might happen with greater likelyhood in order to deter more crime for occuring. An example would be pirating music. It is not feasible to prosecute people for pirating music, but suing 1 party publicly will get 1000s of people to stop instantly.
I remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum.
I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.
On site owners site? That extensions likely punishes owners of sites visited by you by suspending their ad network account for click fraud. I can see how that might be considered harmful.
AllAdvantage was great while it lasted. My method as a highschooler was a free mouse trembler app, coupled with 4 rotating Geocities sites I made to auto-forwarded to each other in a loop every 45 seconds.
There were programs that would run up the 40 hour weekly limit in seconds. I'm assuming AllAdvantage had no real sanity checking when receiving data, which to my eyes means they deserved to go out the way they did.
lol I remember AllAdvantage; I had a set of programmable Legos and I made a little jig that would sit there and spin a wheel under the mouse ball back and forth.
Remember, you aren't ripping off the shady ad companies. Actually, you are doing what they want you to do. You are ripping off the merchants (people buying ads) who just don't know better.
But this is a positive-sum world where it's actually better for us all the fewer people that get screwed. So although it may be better if they used alternative methods, it's actually a step backwards to turn this into a zero-sum game
I'm not sure about the latter part, but I think the first part is pretty clearly true.
The theoretical economic value of advertising is new product discovery. If you needed a thing but didn't know there was a solution and you saw an ad, then some of the value you gain would be attributable to the ad.
Imagine a world entirely without ads. Would you really be lacking a lot? I doubt it. Especially with the internet, it's easy enough search, to receive word of mouth, to read reviews, or to ask friends for help with a problem. But let's assume it happens some. Ads might at least get you to a solution sooner, so count the value gain there as well.
Now subtract all the money spent on things where ads encouraged a purchase that was not valuable or even wasteful (e.g., didn't live up to expectations, was fine but the need wasn't urgent so it sits in a closet, was bad enough that it actively cost you extra money). Subtract further the amount of money spent on ads, hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Subtract also all the time spent watching, listening to, and reading ads. Further subtract the amount of value that would have been gained had that time been used as a person wanted. And further subtract all the value that could have been gained had those creative people creating ads been doing something beneficial.
I can't come up with any reasonable numbers that suggest advertising is a net societal positive. It exists not because its targets want it, but because businesses are in an arms race to manipulate consumers in ways favorable to the advertisers. It's like military spending: most of it happens not because anybody really wants it, but because nobody wants to lose to the other guy.
Advertising can be very helpful to get a new product or service in front of people, which then allows you to start building word of mouth referrals etc. Without it, there are many things that would never see the light of day. And because it costs money, it provides somewhat of a filter; while we all feel inundated with a lot of garbage advertising, you'd have to wade through far more to find interesting new products otherwise.
This isn't to say that you can't currently find useful things in ways other than ads; obviously that happens all the time. But without ads (or other similar forms of marketing) it might not be viable for many of these things to be launched in the first place, allowing you to then discover them.
How many products do you know where most of their ads were an initial announcement to the world, vs. how many are throwing up ads constantly just to fight back the flood of other ads?
And requiring money is often bad too. Many very good products just don't profit enough to afford mountains of marketing.
Ah, right. That's a good point. We have to consider the other arm of the counterfactual. Against his companies that can't launch because they can't get an audience, we have to compare the companies that can't launch today because they can't afford to buy an audience.
I think this is true in the already-ad-saturated environment. But if we imagine a world without ads, it's hard to think there wouldn't be other ways of getting a product out there.
One obvious way is through buyers. A lot of clothing and housewares brands, for example, don't advertise significantly. Instead, they shop their wares to buyers for retailers. Another is through reviewers. Electronics companies, for example, have a long tradition of sending out gear to magazines and other sources of reviews. Car magazines are another good example. In the modern age, that also can mean lending or giving gear to people influential in an area.
If ads didn't exist, I think we'd see more of that. And we'd certainly see more of other approaches. Look at ProductHunt, for example, where startups can put things in front of a crowd of early adopters for nothing. It would be pretty easy to imagine specialist versions of that for particular interests. And look at Tesla, which famously didn't run ads; plenty of people have heard of them.
So I agree you're right that some new companies today could be at a disadvantage if they don't buy ads (although definitely not all of them). But I'm not convinced that's a necessary case if we end the ad arms race.
What, what I believe consumers should do is install ad-blockers en mass.
Actually, no. What they should do is install ad blockers that specifically send in fake ad clicks and fake ad views and data to the advertisement companies so that they lose money.
There isn't much point to complaining when there are so many more disruptive and effective things that a bunch of consumers could do.
WiebeTech sells a bunch of interesting computer forensics hardware. I’m guessing these are typically used by law enforcement when seizing unlocked computers to keep them unlocked.
And that's the horrific part to me. Instead of making sane software or sane policies, it ends up making perfect sense, at least at an individual's level, to manufacture a piece of specialist hardware that does nothing but jiggle a mouse.
One of the use-cases of the jiggler is during police raids, where they're used to keep a computer from locking itself. Obviously that's not the use-case you're imagining!
You summed up my feelings perfectly. So many notable moments in my life played out over AIM conversations, especially discussions with my girlfriend (now wife) when we were geographically separated during our college years.
This sounds very similar to the ideas in stoicism. Your feelings are your own creation and subsequently completely within your control. If you are feeling bad about something, it's not because of that something, but because you are -choosing- to feel bad.
It seems to me that you could just put some kind of sensor on the inside of the gas pump access door that notifies someone as soon as the door is opened. If you know there is a maintenance guy scheduled for that day/time, then you just ignore the notification. If not, then you know that there has been unauthorized access to the pump.
That requires money and ongoing effort on the part of whoever monitors that system. As the article stated, there is not a monetary incentive to the responsible party (the station owner) to make this happen. Even with an incentive, it's still an arms race with the bad guys. Things will only get better when we have more secure payments.
Lots of people have access to gas pumps and their keys. Not just the station owners, but the managers. Also city/county/state weights and measures regulators, the guy who maintains the attached screen that shows the local news and weather loop, and probably more that I don't even know about.
From what I've seen about gas pump locks, they look about as "secure" as those round keys that came with every IBM AT-clone in the early 90's. They kept the weak and the ignorant out, but you could unlock your buddy's rig at will.
So... is the trick to have your own key so you can open these things and have a look inside before you swipe your card? If the store is not going to offer me security, I'm going to take care of it myself.
I know all of us have these quaint answers about all the noble or fulfilling things we would do, but the data doesn't seem to support that.