Drumlin

Everyone wants an easy and stress free life. If you create a reputation for yourself of chasing competitors through the courts then you make yourself into a target. "Do to others as you would have them do to you".

Impression ads are important for certain industries and bigger publications. I will agree that PPC ads are common in other areas and ad blocker users wouldn't click them. For impression advertising the ad blocker will result in lost income. PPC ads are the option of last resort for an established publisher because they are almost like gambling.

It sounds like the people behind the ad blocker broke Ajax for that website while trying to block the ads - that's the mistake I am referring to.

You mention that native ads are gradually replacing direct ads as if it's a good thing. The good guys in the publishing industry go out of their way to prevents ads affecting content, they don't allow their writers/presenters etc to touch advertising and everything is clearly separate.

In the long term, ad blockers will just push out those people who are driven by ethics and you'll be left with the sleazy publications that are driven by PR. This is coming from someone who has dealt with PR agencies and constantly turned down proposals.

Does it matter if they stop visiting the site? Considering that they are using resources without giving something back in return? I guess it could be argued that they might be promoting the site to other users.

Other than that, they are essentially freeloaders and if a website has too many freeloaders it has to either get rid of them or convert them to something else. Or, I guess, the website could shut down completely.

You aren't looking this from a bigger picture. The more infrastructure that is put in place to protect single parents, the more infrastructure that gets in the way for standard families. Basic building blocks for society like marriage become less appealing because the state is too involved in the process.

It doesn't really matter how much welfare costs (obviously it should kept under control like military, health and education) and that's why I didn't mention that aspect. All I'm concerned about is the state becoming so involved in an individual's life, that it nannies them like a parent.

The most obvious example in the real world is those huge scientific projects like Cern's LHC, which requires the co-operation of multiple governments - no individual or team could attempt that. It's no surprise that the web came from there, since to create that at the time required a certain technical expertise.

If you want more software examples, how about operating systems? The good thing about software is there's a low barrier to entry, so you can have open source projects. That said, those open source experts often know their trade due to working as technicians for business or government, or relying on support materials.

The further down the road technology progresses, the less accessible it is for individuals to create.

To me, that would be a sign that you are winning the battle. If enough websites fight ad blockers, especially big sites, and the people behind those ad blockers make clumsy mistakes, then users will reach a point where they uninstall the blocker.

It's called technical 'progress' - as technology progresses, you need bigger and more specialised teams of technicians. It reaches a point where huge entities like governments and corporates are the only groups with enough resources to compete.

It happens everywhere... a constant drive to improve by building on top of layers and layers of abstraction - to the point where even the experts give up and view it as, well, magic.

> Maybe I am a linux hermit, but you guys really abide this shit?

Didn't Ubuntu do something like this with search in the past? These companies love to cream off whatever extra income they can get. Turning operating systems into services, with their increasing reliance on expensive cloud data centers is only going to make the problem worse.

> Also, it appears that statistically, single mothers are much more likely to vote Left than Right.

If you're married to the state, then you vote for more of the state. It's one of the many examples where liberty has been eroded in recent decades, but few talk about it because it's a sensitive topic.

It somehow reminds me of those advert bars that people used to put on their desktops and be paid to view adverts in the late 90s - early 2000s. There was so much money in online advertising back then that businesses created referral pyramids based on it.

It also reminds me of those daily deal websites like Groupon, which were controversial yet hyped. That was back when there was a lot of money in 'hyper' local services.

Now there's a load of hype in self driving cars, the problem is the technology is probably decades away. It's just the latest hype in a new cycle. Local taxi services will take up the slack once the investment dries up.

I used to work with a programmer who literally did nothing for over a year - he came into the office and sat there browsing the web. He was the highest paid employee. Everyone knew it was happening (including the clients) but no one mentioned it.

The company was too small to promote him to a manager position, which as far as I can tell is how the situation is often dealt with in big companies, i.e. pass the buck to another department.

Private healthcare insurance is also offered as a benefit in places like the UK, but it tends to be the bigger companies that offer it.

It means the employee can get their treatment weeks, even months before they would have otherwise - that's important if you have a painful or debilitating condition. That is, the employee struggles to be an employee due to government budget constraints.

Their high end market has also shifted from professional tools to fashion objects.

> Are we drug dealers?

Developers build the infrastructure that manufactures the drugs. The owners of that infrastructure are kingpins. The users of these platforms are drug dealers. Each follower or friend is an addict.

One of the main problems with Twitter is people sign up and don't know what to do with it - except message famous people. If Twitter prevents the plebs from shouting at the intelligentsia then it will make the platform even more irrelevant. The last time I used it, it was like talking into a void and that was with hundreds of real followers.

I think counting it in decades rather than years is more realistic. So many major innovations are described as being in the next ten years.

If you look at VR, which I think is simple in comparison, you could have experienced it in a high end 90s arcade. It is only now starting to become a mass produced product.

In my view, the current self driving cars look like where VR was before they turned the technology into arcade machines.

Only reason I own a smartphone is to fit in while working - it was like being an outsider with everyone else getting information immediately via Trello and Slack. I would often miss last minute changes to meetings and stuff.

Other than that I have no reason to own one and would love to get rid of it. I deleted all my social media accounts, I use normal taxi services and public transport, I memorize directions from my computers and so on. I don't even check my emails on the thing.

When I say 'processed', I mean meat like ham or beef - stuff that I would expect to be real meat, but instead it's sliced from what I guess you could call a mold of reformed scraps. I have no real problem with it but it struck me as unusual given how much sandwich shops charge for their food.

I've only been to a Subway outlet once and was amazed by how much of it was processed meat - a relative said the same recently. Go into a good independent sandwich shop and all the meat will be unprocessed (except where expected) and you get more options like unusual cheeses. Subway has taken what was already a fast food (the sandwich) and made it even more generic.

It was an accidental pun. I noticed it before posting the comment and almost rewrote it. I'm not one of those people who say "no pun intended", so I just let the pun go free for others to discover.

I see it as an antidote to the sort of mentally unhealthy information that society (such as TV, social media etc.) gives people. Stoicism makes people realise that they aren't the centre of the universe, that almost all people don't care what you are doing - even if sounds like they do, to take personal responsibility for your life, not to act like a victim etc. Basically be someone that people truly respect.

It comes from the politics sub, which - to put it mildly - is one of the most suspect subs for manipulation on Reddit. They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum. It's one of those issues where I look at Reddit and think... something isn't right.

Glad to help.

As soon as I saw it was Aral, I knew the direction that the article was headed. He has good intentions, but humans are naturally hierarchical - from the family upwards. Fighting against hierarchical power is a losing battle.

Another source that you might find interesting is Mark Blyth - a lecturer from Brown Uni.

He looks at these topics from a long term economic viewpoint. He has a left wing academic perspective, which clouds his conclusions though. There are lots of lectures from him on YouTube.

I suggest you read 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul. It's not an easy read, the sort of book where you take lots of notes and then learn from the notes:

https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/d...

Recent generations have been conditioned by society to accept globalisation - amongst other things. The book, which I only recently read myself, describes what has been happening for hundreds of years and it's to do with progress - technical progress, of which technology is just the pinnacle.

Those people who were against globalisation on the left were the old guard, the people who were strong supporters of trade unions and were proud of their local communities. Sanders is an example in the US, Corbyn or Skinner are examples in the UK.

Yes, news outlets that use terms like 'fake news' to shut down competitors should be treated with suspicion. The term went mainstream over a period of a few weeks due to it being pushed relentlessly by the media. It has the hallmarks of propaganda.

Presumably chickens that are bred for meat live a different existence to those reared for eggs?

It's hitting a load of third party services - for its own benefit - that were never intended for that purpose.

I would hate to run a service and find some freely available script was letting anyone use it in an automated fashion. It's like what happened with the whois system and the catchas that providers had to add to prevent abuse from scripts.