Ticks do not require the consent of the host to drink blood.
Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.
Yep if the host agreed to die, then the market is a success. We've discovered the most efficient outcome – sucking the customer dry until they die! Thank you to the free market for delivering us this efficient result.
Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.
A business’s viability outside of advertising doesn’t change the morality of advertising.
Regardless of which side of the camp you fall on, you can’t argue that ads are “good” just because some businesses need them to survive. In fact, I’d wager if a business NEEDS ads to survive, it’s probably a net negative on society as a whole.
That's when you call any type of promotion advertising, in that case, sure, there is some innocent advertising. People here are (obviously) talking about 'modern' advertising which is what google/fb etc are doing which is just plain bad for everyone except for Google shareholders (I would imagine, besides money, it's not even good for the people working on it as it must do your head in to be a brilliant engineer and then working on tech so miserable and foul as that).
You think all businesses should just spread awareness by word of mouth? Can you put a sign on your store or is that an ad? What if you don't have a store? Yes, advertising can be really awful but that doesn't meaning all advertising is "cancer." If you have a good business that creates actual value for people, advertising it can actually be seen as a good thing.
It is clear we are talking about modern digital ads. Ads in magazines aren't as bad, but manipulating public opinion to sell the ads were/are. That's what Google/FB do at an absurd large scale right now.
> If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.
It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.
Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).
Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.
Maybe 1 percent of Google's headcount is actually working on ad technology. There isn't some brain drain problem where people are doing ads instead of curing cancer.
Directly working. But then you have all the vehicles that, in the grand scheme of things, exist solely to enable ads and make data mining for them easier, such as Chrome and Android. Then there are products that exist primarily to lock you into the Google ecosystem so that you're forced to interact with the rest of it.
At the end of the day, if most of company's income is from ads, it can be safely assumed that whatever else it does is somehow about ads even if it doesn't contribute directly. Well, or else Google is incredibly inept.
Those "US STEM grads have their skills wasted" are solving those problems (optimal ad load, bad ads, etc.) but its a very hard problem. Don't be so dismissive.
There are "very hard problems" that don't need to be solved, or are far lower priority than other problems. Hard doesn't imply being "productive, useful and beneficial to society."
Setting aside the moral aspect which is highly subjective and seems to have a price tag (for example tech CEOs quit any sort of morals for a good paycheck), the productivity question is a measurable one.
Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)
From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.
Some of the demand induced by ads is useful; people becoming aware of stuff they didn’t know exists, and finding that it provides a useful service for them.
But most ads are trying to convince you to buy their brand’s version of a product that you already know of, or (even worse!) a new version of an old product. Any demand induced there is just wastefulness.
If Amazon can figure out that I’m interested in headphones, I already know more actual information about headphones than their ads will give me.
I can’t relate to that. When I see a banner ad I find it obtrusive whether it’s from Bank of America or my favorite HAM radio company. If I’m in the market for a product I value hearing the testimonials of people in my life rather than an advertisement.
The one case where I find ads useful, when word of mouth isn't an option, is in a static image on a site (review site, blog, whatever) where I'm researching a thing. The ad would be related to that thing, doesn't need to know a thing about me other than I'm browsing that page, and is related to the content on that page. I click on those ads sometimes.
I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.
>I’m trying to think of anything I find useful that I stumbled upon thanks to ads over the past twenty years or so, and I’m pretty much drawing a blank. It certainly seems negligible.
Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?
If you're "really interested" in something, you're already following new releases, doing extensive research for purchases etc, so why would you need ads?
Even worse, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race where the only limit on expense is what your competitors are spending, it's actually worse than unproductive because it increases company expenses without increasing product quality, leading to higher costs on everything for everyone.
You cannot be serious it. All of the ad tech companies produce a service people want otherwise no one would use them!
There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.
At least a few evil people attack once in a while thus proving some defense is needed so they they are not completely unproductive/useless. Much as I wish they were not needed.
It is though, more value is generated by the MIC than is put in and war has yet to ruin the productive capacity of the United States. The societal ills of this are why it’s popular to call America an evil empire
No actually, that's about the opportunity cost of war. There's a left-wing argument I frequently see that the US finds wars to increase profitability but I'm talking about the propping up of firms to keep the industrial capacity ready. It is not the most productive use of capital, but it is productive.
I don't either, and I don't want a war with either Russia or China nor do I want the slow escalation that is currently happening. But the political reality is that the US will not be decreasing defense spending any time soon. There's no voting this situation away.
