Don’t worry! You would replace that with a new white knuckle anxiety that misconfiguring your infra deployment would exhaust your four figure cost limit, causing AWS to helpfully shutdown ALL of your infra to avoid any accidental overspend.
I’m all for websites collecting less personal information. But I wish they wouldn’t base it in child status.
Now all I read is “websites must collect a ton of personal information about you and send it to the government to verify your age, and also tell them all the websites you visit.”
Why are we so worried about corporations getting our data? The worst thing they’ll do is try to sell me something. It’s the government I’m worried about - they can do far worse.
> websites must collect a ton of personal information about you and send it to the government to verify your age, and also tell them all the websites you visit
I wonder if charges can be configured to wait for a given time to begin charging. That way you could plug in your car whenever you want, but still get the benefit of waiting.
Not necessarily - reducing the workforce and closing stores may well be a healthy consolidation. Taking on debt may perform the same function on the balance sheet. You should worry if they take on debt to expand stores or the workforce.
This is likely simply due to the fact that more homes have AC now:
... "By 1980 that number had risen to 63%, and in the 40 years since then air conditioning has grown exponentially and is now present in a whopping 95% of homes in the US according to the most recent US Census."
https://www.fixr.com/blog/2021/06/22/presence-of-air-conditi...
You might say that this is because we need it more now, but I think it's actually just that we can afford to install it now in every new home and so we do. It's just considered standard equipment.
I agree. Not only “we can afford” it but in many cases have no other choice, because other forms of heating a home have been regulated out of existence.
The issues with these articles is that they focus on money, and the price of energy, which leads people to believe either consciously or not that something can be helped with money. It can't. There is a fundamental supply constraint that has nothing to do with money.
People will consume less, either because prices rise and they choose not to pay them, or by rationing, or by random blackouts (gas-outs?).
Instead of what? Making the switch will require tremendous effort that must come from something else, which Germany will necessarily lose (not produce). Likely this would be distributed through the economy so that there will be a bit less of everything else - shoes, haircuts, food, etc.
This is not a path forward. The people with the money to pay for the content are the same people with the money to buy the products that advertisers make money by advertising.
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
This is Youtube's fault, as they could (should) require video creators to identify the start and end timestamps of sponsor segments, and then their player should just skip those automatically for logged-in, paying subscribers.
While I like this idea in isolation, I think it would just lead to sponsor insertion which is hard to skip. Like product placement in movies.
You can't skip the sponsored segment if literally 100% of the video has HelloFresh boxes in the background, or if an important part of the video happens while the creator coincidentally eats a bowl of Keto cereal.
Or what about those LinusTechTip videos where Intel gives them $5k to build a dream system for an employee (Intel based, of course). I find those entertaining but they're really just 20 minute long Intel advertisements.
You are right, but in essence this is Youtube's platforms, so they can tune the experience of their paying users. If I pay, I shouldn't see ads.
Videos don't have nipples around, or else they would get flagged, right? Do the same for unmarked ads. This is of course a handwavy way to propose a solution... the idea is that something could be done to improve the ad-free experience of viewers who pay. Otherwise, they'd better remain using the latest published version of Vanced, which even integrated SponsorBlock (again, pirates offering a better user experience!)
Video creators do get a higher amount of money per-minute-viewed from YT Premium subscribers than the do from free users with ads. But the sponsorship slots from NordVPN and the like can pay just as much as the video earns in youtube revenue, so youtube would have to pay a lot more.
Incidentally, yes. I get to choose what my computer displays to me and that's non-negotiable however. If that breaks your business model that is 100% a you problem.
I feel like this is somewhat of a false dichotomy - I pay for plenty of content and have a good number of subscriptions, but that doesn't make the ads go away like magic.
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
I pay for several subscription services, yet they always want more and more of my data. Whatever I give, it's never enough, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
Most of the content I consume is produced for free without any expectation of payment. My friends don't get paid for posting pictures on Instagram. However, Meta still sees the need to inject an ad between every two posts and greedily extract value from its users.
