Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.
Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.
The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low
risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
Can confirm this with YouTube advertising. When enabled for growth, it's nothing but bot farms. When I reached out to Google about it, they acknowledged the unusual traffic but did nothing about it. They are running a huge fraudulent business.
An inefficient system is always going to be ineffective. The author tries to posit that anything that isn’t market based is inherently inefficient and that their Chicago School solution is a success because it’s market based.
None of this is supported with evidence outside the new system working better than the old one.
Militaries efficiently allocate nutrition without markets (it’s the most important work they do) as do grocers.
There are a lot of ways you could improve on this, many not requiring the complexity and overhead of market based solutions.
This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.
Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.
African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.
If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.
I have been selling my extremely high quality plastic clothing (Veillance made in Canada items and Canada Goose) and been replacing them with wool and cotton.
Ventille cotton can keep you dry without plastic. Developed in WW2 by the UK for hoses and buckets when rubber was in short supply. Wanted cotton is another option but doesn’t breathe.
Mover - a Swiss brand - have an entire range of plastic free clothes of high quality.
Tons of other options but the above are easy substitutes at the high end.
Bonus, unlike even the best plastics these age beautifully and there are no taped seams to degrade.
I work in Hollywood and this is or true. We do not have to pay to have buildings in the background. Nor does TV. How would anything be filmed outside if news crews had to pay fees for filming like that? I have made films in NY, London, Paris, Sydney. We can shoot someone walking through a city as long as we have permits for the space. The skyline is free. As is anything else we capture from space we have rights to.
I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.
(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).
Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.
The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.
LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.
America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.
It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.
I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.
Look it (as my relatives confounding say)
LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.
They did no such thing. Sales numbers were tiny outside Japan. People only tolerate lossy compression when that’s all they are offered. Hence the streamers introducing lossless options years after launch due to demand.
Minidiscs were briefly widely available here in the UK and were only short-lived because they were almost immediately replaced by iPods and other mp3 players, also with lossy audio only. Nearly two decades went by during which the only portable music options not widely considered obsolete were lossily compressed, despite the fact you could still buy CDs and listen to them on the move. It's disappointing (and I certainly don't agree with it) but the vast majority of people do tolerate lossy compression even when there are lossless alternatives that are only marginally less convenient. Minidiscs and iPods proved it comprehensively and Bluetooth earbuds have done so again.
Edit: I'm very glad lossless is finally mainstream again but I'd be more inclined to believe it's due to "demand" if I weren't routinely the only person on the train wearing wired earphones.
Nothing has managed to capture the mixtape model. A tangible object made with care you could give as a gift and was unique and valuable. CDs got close but people didn’t have the gear to make them until mp3s had arrived and overshadowed them. Plus CDs with handwritten tracklists didn’t feel as nice as tapes and blank CDs were invariably ugly.
Music as an object is a thing and playlists are in no way the same. You can’t even control the music on a playlist as it’s in the gift of the streamer.
I think the qualities of a cassette mentioned have clearly helped with the mixtape model. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't also a product of that particular era.
It certainly depends on geographical zones, too, but I remember people burning audio cds for quite a while, and taking them on the go with portable players. This was quite widespread before portable mp3 players became common.
Hell, where I grew up, cassettes were still in regular use until the end of the 90s, and mixtapes had grown increasingly rare.
Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.
Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.
The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.
It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.
The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.
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