How else do you propose removing a large group of people who also have the largest amount of wealth and political influence and a high life expectancy who are purposefully removing economic opportunity from younger, less fortunate generations?
A deadly flu (which is something that used to be and will again be common) seems like the LEAST mean/stupid option to me.
The starting premise is entirely false. I don't propose removing them at all, and I argue that you're wrong across the board.
It assumes that one person's wealth is an impediment to another person's opportunity, such that there is a finite amount of wealth to go around and no more is ever created. Classic fraudulent economic argument.
In 1932 your argument would have held just as much weight then as it does now, and would have been just as false. We're vastly better off and wealthier as a nation across the board than we were then. Wealth is not finite, and one person's success (or failure) does not mean there is less or more wealth to be had. A simple proof of this in action, is the stock market crash of 2009. Trillions were lost by the 1%, and that wealth should have been picked up by the 99% in your theory; it wasn't however, specifically because wealth can created and destroyed, it is not only transferred as your premise assumes. The 1% suffering a 40% haircut on their wealth did not create more opportunities for the 99%, which again your theory proposes to be the case.
You're putting arguments in my mouth. I'm not saying that there's only one economic pie that we all pull from, I'm just not spelling out every single way how a currently powerful class of people is robbing our future.
Sure, wealth gets created, but that doesn't mean you can't have a confluence of conditions that cause an economy/to decline.
Arguing that we're fucking ourselves over long-term is not the same as saying wealth is finite. If my premise is flawed, it's no moreso than your response.
If you want a mean but more creative fix for a large number of society's problems in one go, here's an idea: take the 1000 richest people and split them into teams, Red and Blue, 500 on each. (Don't put immediate family on opposing teams.) Put collars on them that can kill them instantly. After one year, whichever team has fewer people alive will all be killed. (A less vicious version of this is that they lose all their money.)
If you do this, you have artificially created an irreparable cleavage in the elite. You will suddenly have unprecedented social mobility in the world (and, likely, full employment) as Red vs. Blue recruit the smartest people they can (and pay them handsomely) for their existential struggle. I can't say that this will improve the world. It may cause more problems than it solves, but it will shift power and wealth to talented people in a way that would otherwise never happen.
Conspiracy theories are a massive oversimplification of what actually goes on, but elites would rather collude. If you don't give them an immovable enemy within themselves, then their enemy becomes us (and that's not a fair fight). Obviously, this Red/Blue thing is an impractical fantasy, but it may provide insight into why the world seems to demand that wars (despite their being extraordinarily destructive and seemingly utterly undesirable) happen.
> Conspiracy theories are a massive oversimplification of what actually goes on, but elites would rather collude. If you don't give them an immovable enemy within themselves, then their enemy becomes us (and that's not a fair fight). Obviously, this Red/Blue thing is an impractical fantasy, but it may provide insight into why the world seems to demand that wars (despite their being extraordinarily destructive and seemingly utterly undesirable) happen.
Thank you for explaining this in a way that won't cause the kneejerk hate-response from people. This is exactly it, but I'm a jerk and like to phrase things in ways that provoke.
We have detected a lot of ice, but we haven't confirmed flowing liquid water yet, and while water can be used to mean the chemical in any phase, it is more commonly used to mean the liquid phase of H2O.
To be fair, we know there is sometimes liquid water on mars, at least it is incredibly unlikely that there would be none at all, comets crash into it occaisionally, for instance.
Evidence of liquid water regularly occuring near the surface is very exciting though. This isn't cool because they might find H2O, we know that there is H2O, this is cool because having liquid water near the surface increases the chance of finding life.
So given that, to see significant ROI you need to find genuine experts in how to use each form of media.
So, even if it is technically possible to do well in a given media, if it is really hard to identify who is a genuine expert in that media due to it being new and full of snake-oil merchants, then you are likely to do better in a more established field.
You're correct that there certainly a lot of snake-oil merchants out there. But they're not just limited "new" media channels. Just as many slimeballs in the traditional world.
I'm going to get crucified for this, but paid advertising is somewhat analogous to software engineering/developers. There are many languages/platforms/technologies out there. Some old, some cutting edge. Each one most likely has it's own syntax/terminology, patterns, approaches etc.
So when hiring a full stack engineer, you look for someone who cuts pretty deep across a few key areas, but can also roll up their sleeves across the stack if need be. Example: Ruby Expert, Getting into Angular, and knows how to provision AWS if need be.
Same thing with full stack marketer. If you know Google Adwords, Content Marketing and a bit of PR are your core, then optimize your hire for that.
There is already a bunch of startups around this problem. A friend of mine works at Adaptly which, among many others, let buyers who don't know social media advertising essentially outsource the expertise required to do so effectively. It's always seemed a bit like snake oil to me, but maybe its a real problem.
There are literally hundreds of "startups" doing that for social media advertising. Hundreds for search. Hundreds for display, and not just regular display, but RTB(sarcasm)! There are tons of startups doing it for native ads. And don't forget video, seo & content marketing among others.
Add on to that, the partner/provider lists of "startups" that sit on top of one or many of those tools.
And let's not forget about the 1000s of agencies out there to roll it all up.
There are tons of snake oil salesman, and many good tools and people in that list. But as with pretty much any ecosystem, it's 80% crap, 10% meh, 10% bam.
And there is no one right answer. Just like no absolute answer to Python vs Ruby.
So whenever I see articles like, "facebook ads bad! look what they're doing!"
Change it to, "facebook ads bad! Look at all the things I'm doing wrong, but don't even know enough to know I'm doing wrong!"
>it is really hard to identify who is a genuine expert in that media //
Arguably it's easy - if their advertising works then they're good. If you notice a marketing company then they're doing things right to some extent (at least WRT your demographic).
It's kind of funny because Google really only controls the network of sites their ad spaces are on, the content of the ad you get is controlled by the advertiser or 3rd party ad tech provider.
The retargeting ads you speak of (Criteo runs a lot of them) is generated automatically via these 3rd party ad platforms cookie combined with an API into the advertiser's store feed (product photo, description, price, etc.) They get a stream of SKUs that you've looked at and try to get you to pull the trigger.
There's nothing to prevent the store from also associating items you've already bought so you don't get shown something that's irrelevant. My best guess is that it's just easier to not do that.
Ha...I think about this all the time. I start researching something, eventually buy it. Then a ton of targeted ads show up everywhere advertising to me the product I already purchased.
Depends if you take absolute or probablistic logic to be the more fundamental. Absolute logic has held sway for a very long time, because it is obvious that either something is there, or it is not. Since the birth of quantum mechanics however, it is looking as though probability might be a little more fundamental to reality itself than we had previously assumed. Look at the classic "Cogito ergo sum". With an absolute perspective on logic, you cannot get much further, however if looked at probalistically, you can start looking at options and start assigning them weights. Now this doesn't get you any closer to the concept of what is absolutely true beyond the initial statement, however I am not sure that it is a given that reality itself is absolute for all parameters, so the trap might be that many of what we percieve as flaws in induction are actually meaningless questions until they are reformulated probabalistically.
Alternatively I might be talking bollocks, I did first think of this while pretty drunk.
The probabilities in QM are determined by absolute, deterministic equations. I'd still say absolute logic is fundamental, at least in physics. When you start talking metaphysics, I don't think there's a good reason to assume logic works at all; all the logic we can observe is embedded "in" physics. Who knows what it's like "outside"?
I'd put it as "All empiricists have faith that there is not much point in being an empiricist if there is a comedy god fiddling the numbers on purpose, purely to screw with the notion of empiricism, so therefore they cheerfully discount that notion as otherwise they wouldn't get much done."
