107 karma · joined August 28, 2025
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en
Each ad placement is small cost, but your placement, frequency, and reach is absolutely dictated by how much money you spend.
You will see capital L Liberals complaining about hypocrisy the whole time the autocrats rise to power, completely missing the point that hypocrisy doesn't matter. There's no scoreboard out there that says, opponent was hypocritical, automatic loss.
You can tell yourself this is the free exchange of ideas all you want, but when it's an auction for who can hold the microphone it's anything but free.
Try again.
The thread is about how an "At last I got mine" attitude towards making money from government propaganda ad revenue is a shit attitude.
You are the one who is out here building windmills to tilt at about bans on government propaganda. That's not something I ever suggested. Nor is it even germane to the thread. Again, you are engaging in some elementary school level straw manning.
One does not need to ban government propaganda, or propaganda generally, to avoid being proud to be paid to spread it. Consider: you could be not proud you sold that ad space. You could not sell that ad space to those people. You could not sell ad space generally. I'm sure one could come up with other ideas as well.
I hope you see now how infantile your diversions are, how juvenile the comments around thinking around corners. You wandered completely off topic and seem quite upset I didn't follow you there, then invented a version of me that did to fight.
The fundamental feature of capitalism is the inversion of commodity -> money -> commodity relationship into money -> commodity -> money.
"Well, at least I made money on the government shutting down discussion" is deeply messed up.
But I think the root causes here are more cultural. When I was coming up decades and decades ago we valued highly educated people, Americas rocket scientists and such. Over time, however, people started thinking education wasn't masculine, that it wasn't cool. Then social media hit the scenes and people started amplifying some of our worst instincts -- anti vaccine, anti intellectualism, pro conspiracy. What used to be your fringe neighbor became someone who could influence online.
Add the Vietnam, the gulf war, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, and you've got generational trauma of sending generations of youth off to fight. That interrupts a lot of education and when those folks become parents they have different values towards education.
Plus, as you describe, schools are a commons. We systematically under pay and under value teachers, while over paying and over valuing admin.
And there is an anti collectivist culture in the US now. In labor and in community, there's much less "let me give up my time for the community" and much more "how can I get mine" mindset.
I think it's really complicated and a lot of different factors play a part. I don't think there's a single root cause, and it's going to take a while to unwind.
There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
Still, the mind wonders -- here's a pocket of relatively warm, surely we could do something with that waste?
It would be neat if we could harvest that heat and use it for some purpose, but today we largely use it to make steam.
There's mean content ("I think you are an asshole") and there's content that's going to cause actual harm because it either goads others to violence or because it creates a constant cortisol increase from fear and dehumanization.
YouTube has some value but shorts being not opt out able is a serious problem. Reddit has some value too.
Signal, discord, and the other realtime messengers much more of a concern.