31–40 of 107 posts
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It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?
Well, it's not just him. It's Google versus Mankind. Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
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Nobody wants ads (*) but somehow they are never banned. Makes you wonder, are we living in a democracy or not? (*) shown at inconvenient moments and tracking the user; yellow pages were fine
I do not recall ever hearing of an organized effort to ban ads. These days, good luck getting bipartisan agreement, especially with all the dark money in politics being legalized and normalized. That said... The modern internet is built off many free services paid for by people who buy stuff from ads. It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Hosting costs money. I could see…
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> It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because ther…
In no way is the consumer helped here, in the end.
To make things worse, the consumer is nudged into buying more stuff and thus contributing to global overconsumption.
Browsers should not have access to the clipboard.
If copy and paste is disabled in my default browser that would be something like 80% of my total of my total use cases for the clipboard in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is hard to imagine a world without ads - many sites and services would disappear. Don't you see the problem with that statement? Ads are profitable, and we are paying for them, indirectly, through buying products and services. Adtech takes a chunk of that profit. Therefore, we pay more than we should!
So you are paying more than you should for a loaf of bread because your local shop is making a profit? because if you went to the factory you could buy the same loaf for less? Of course you could make the bread yourself for even less because the factory is making a profit, and grow the wheat yourself for even less because the farmer is making a profit. You are not 'paying more than you should'. Not least because ther…
The sad thing is that we need adblockers in the first place. Granted, even in the 1990s there were ads; I remember blinking banners and what not. But often the underlying website was still fine as such. Fast forward some years. Now if you look at e. g. medium.com but many other websites, you are CONSTANTLY bombarded with pointless pop-ups, slide-ins, and pester-naggers. No I do use ublock origin (it works on thorium…
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
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Well, it's not just him. It's Google versus Mankind. Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.
The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's not just him. It's Google versus Mankind. Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.
Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.
Websites being hacked does not necessitate ad block. It necessitates better browser security. The title here is fallacious. I say this in all fairness as someone who uses adblock extensively, where I don't even like cookies being held by ad companies.
This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.