Comment by bee_rider
Comment by bee_rider 4 days ago
Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.
Comment by bee_rider 4 days ago
Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.
It's parasitic, not productive.
A tick can contain a lot of blood, doesn't mean it produced that blood.
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.
Hackernews has finally declined to the level of reddit. :(
Because is fucking undproductive, useless and detrimental to society. Advertising is a cancer, an immoral activity.
If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
Own a small business, still cancer. Will never use and lo and behold, all runs fine.
Hi. I own a business. I still find ads to be cancer.
> 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.
That's a problem that advertising both created and feeds off of.
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.
It's like saying there is good and bad diseases because some solve other problems like space in nursing home.
Stealing is raking billions every year as well, yet I wouldn't call it productive.
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.
The same could be said of tobacco companies. You might want to rethink your argument.
Ah the broken window fallacy.
What makes you think pay is necessarily correlated to productivity?
Taken to the extreme, literal theft can pay well, and produces absolutely nothing.
Pay indicates the transfer of wealth -- it can be a heuristic for productivity, sure, but productivity is clearly not its only source.
I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters?
Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.
Experienced this(or actually, a similar phenomenon) myself during the brief, beautiful moment in my life when I was working in Switzerland and was making as much as the locals, while hailing from a country with approximately 20% the GDP per capita, if not less.
Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.
It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job.
If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.
Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.
What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.
It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...
There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.
For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.
These companies hire all of these exemplary graduates and pay them so well because (1) they are flush with cash because businesses are essentially held hostage to adtech; and (2) so that they won't go out into the world and build systems that make them irrelevant, as smart people are wont to do from time to time. Someone on your payroll doesn't have the time nor the inclination to knock you from your pedestal.
Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.
These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.
It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.
Options traders are paid well. It's still unproductive.
You're just shifting around a bunch of numbers temporarily to make a bunch of money for someone and lose a bunch for someone else.
Lots of shit we do is well-paid and unproductive.
If, as a species, we eliminated all bullshit jobs, there's a good chance only 20-30% of the species would be working. Here in America, only around 50% of people are actually working. Everyone else is in school, or retired.
Options traders help with the efficient allocation of capital, which is actually very valuable to society.
You are downvoted because what you say is unpopular, but nobody tried to refute what you say.
Despite what some people may think, options are not just for gambling, but some people - like farmers who have to plan for uncertain weather - use them for a real purpose. And of course the use of option in the financial sector for hedging is extremely important too. But it's easier to dismissively say that trading options is a "bullshit job" and go back to one's ivory tower.
They are mercenaries hired to maximize the share of the loot that goes to their employers.
the internet ad industry is raking billions from all over the world into the USA, how can you call that unproductive.