Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

In this case even only paying the main dev a US wage would be more than the taxes on everything.

We're paying taxes on our employees, they're paid like regular French employees and therefore the employer is taxed accordingly. This is not income tax on our donations or swag sales.

I would prefer if the non-profit in France were "employer-taxed" less than for-profit companies, but no one seems to care.

>Their resources would go further if they left.

So, what, say "thanks for the funding that got us started, we're off to fill our pockets somewhere else now"?

No, because they would have to pay on the open market for the things those taxes provide for. The tax they’re paying is insignificant compared to their costs.

You’ll note their developer costs are a fraction of what they would be in the US.

EDIT: I ask because I was once accused of smurfing (I'm only a casual player) in the chat during the endgame.

Those are all practical arguments, but the point I'm making is that advertising doesn't have to be this way; it's the implementation that's the problem, not the theory.

In my ideal, advertising and marketing are about really understanding what the other party needs and finding a truly mutually beneficial agreement that actually generates value through exchange (A has X but values Y more highly, B has Y but values X more highly, simply by the act of exchange, value is generated).

I was even pro-tracking at one point because the more you know about people, the better you can understand their needs so the better you can offer them something they'll value. In the abstract, I still think there's something here. But it has to be done responsibly and with a user-before-profit mindset.

By contrast, ad companies have time and again proven themselves irresponsible with this information, e.g. selling it to shady groups.

There are ethical ways to go about it. In certain contexts, what people think of as advertising is really just information. It's totally fine to inform people when they ask for it.

When people open a store app, it's because they want to see products. There's no ethical conflict when the store app does what people want it to do. What's unethical is the constant product spam when people are trying to do anything else.

I agree that it could be posted somewhere locally in the real world, and it may have been, but the interesting part is that I dont live in my hometown anymore, even though I travel there frequently. I live in another country, 4 hours away, so I would have never seen a real world ad. Only instagram and all the data they connected about me knew my ties to my hometown and my interest in the music hence they showed the ad.

I agree on all the stalking points and I dont like that they have all this data, but this one time it was useful, i can not deny that.

Benq is qisda, and it is a very established ODM/OEM. They have a measly profit margin of 3%. But they also sell a lot of other electronics than just TVs.

Hisense has been selling TVs since the 1980s, and has a 6% profit margin, although I don’t know how trustworthy the Chinese financial figures are. But they also sell a lot of other non TV items.

TCL is relatively new, although they started LCDs more than 15 years ago. But again, they sell more than just TVs. They have the highest profit margin at 10.7%, assuming their numbers are correct.

Vizio seems like the best company to see how much selling TVs earns.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/tvs/tv...

>“For many years, TV making was limited to the few large consumer-electronics companies that could afford the investment,” says Paul Gagnon, senior research director for consumer devices at Omdia, a market research firm. But then it became easier to source components, which in turn increased competition and lowered pricing and profits. “For some brands,” he says, “the TV business here in the States was not profitable anymore.”

>Companies including JVC, Magnavox/Philips, and Toshiba exited the U.S. market, licensing or selling their brands to companies in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere looking to break into the U.S. market.

Because Google spends billions of dollars contorting and manipulating the entire internet ecosystem to only work with Google's model of the internet.

There are really simple solutions how the internet can be ad free and function much better than it does today in terms of serving information people. The internet is far, far worse due to the financial incentives involved

Taylor Swift could publish an RSS feed, or pay Twitter since it's basically a marketing channel for her. Messaging apps could have been p2p (and maybe ISPs would've had a reason to get ipv6 working since otherwise you'd hear "IM doesn't work on Cox" etc. Or maybe ISPs could provide federated chat gateways like they did with email). ISPs might bundle hosting (they used to), or Microsoft would have had a reason to have built Personal Web Server into something everyone uses today. Maybe people would share viral videos they liked on something like gnutella using magnet links from forums.

It might not work for companies trying to corral the entire world onto their platform, but maybe that model isn't very good.