That's what I was thinking. Beyond the slippery slope ("pay for no ads" to "premium no ad plan") or the security risks... it's paving for the way for a whole new Internet. An Internet with toll booths for the tubes, where every action is a reason to nickel and dime you. Maybe that had to happen, as our society is generally motivated by greed, but... it sucks.

Where's the value though, other than "so I can give you better ads"?

I don't dispute that knowing what people are watching, for how long, and other information that builds a profile for a person helps you target them better. But at the end of the day... target with ads, right (arguably if you know enough you can also target them for phishing, or know when they're not home for burglary, but... that's different)? I've worked with a digital app team whose boss always touted the value of data. Ok, what are you doing with all that data? It still comes back to ads.

I don't dispute that marketing can be needed, I just have trouble wrapping my head around all those industries that are propped up by ads only, maybe it's a me-problem.

That's the saddest part. I read the title of this story thinking "Weird, Walmart becomes a TV manufacturer... I get it'll be lower price for them, but at the size of Walmart they could also be in the food business, cleaning products, clothing, whatever".

Why do we need so many ads? There's a whole ad industry, with agencies, production companies, and giants like Google that have a market cap like 4x the size of Walmart. All built on ads. I can't even understand how the companies that make and sell real products (Walmart, P&G, car manufacturers, whatever) pay enough to sustain those, to that scale. Let's be honest, with no ads I would still be buying shampoo. It's a zero-sum game, all companies bought into this frenzy to grab market share from competitors, but end up just lining the pockets of the advertisers.

Your comment, like many others, has an American-centric view of the world. If you want to go shopping in Paris, from the suburbs, I'm not sure cars are the best option. Yeah you can do it, but I recall parking being a bitch in the 90s, even if you drive a goddamn Renault 5, and I can't believe it would have gotten better. If you're from the burbs, you park close to the RER and you take public transit into Paris. Hell, I'm not even sure Parisians shop with a car inside Paris, it's just stupid.

Also, if you live in cities, you'll notice closing a street to cars is a GOOD thing for commerce. I've noticed it anecdotally, but there are studies about it too. The whole "ah shit I've gotta drive my car to buy stuff or watch a show" is a North American, suburban perspective.

Admittedly I don't know how BC Hydro works, so question for you.. do they set specific prices for different business customers? Or is it a residential rate, and a business rate?

If they set specific rates per company, then sure. Set the price, set a timeline (build a hydro or nuclear or some other renewable plant? 10 years?), go. But isn't that a slippery slope? If they can set the price per customer, and it's ok to jack up the prices for this company... what prevents them from having lower prices for some and higher for others? Doesn't that lead to political favoritism?

If this was not the government, but rather a private parking company, would it be acceptable? SUVs take more space and cause more wear and tear on infrastructure than small/lighter cars, so does the Free market get to adjust prices to account for externalities?

People are angry when the terms (official or unofficial) change. They feel they've been blindsided, and are stuck in a "pray that I alter it no further"-cycle.

Yes, the terms always said "you're not supposed to share", but people did and it was fine.. and now that changes, and some people that never shared but had unusual living / travelling situations could get caught in that cross-fire. As for the price.. yeah it's cheap, but if you accept small increases without any complaint, soon you'll see more and more small increases (which is what we see now). At some point you have to stand for the principle of the thing. Netflix at $10 or at $15 isn't going to break my bank, but I refuse to accept "watch ads or upgrade your plan". Doesn't matter that it's just $5, people are getting tired of being nickel and dimed. I want the frog (us) to escape the rapidly boiling pot before it's too late.

No I get it.. sarcasm aside I can see some use cases, like the ones you mentioned. But when I make a decision, I weigh the pros and the cons, and in the cons column, there is definitely the "I'm sharing my DNA with a company with little history, and I suspect that information will be widely available to other companies / governmental agencies in the near future". My post is only that now, people don't seem to care about their personal information, or don't even know to think about it. They treat it as worthless, or maybe we've been trained to view it as 100% normal to share, mostly by the large tech companies that rely on it for advertising.

Yeah but most /. posters come from another generation. All websites allowed pseudonyms, you never responded to A/S/L on mIRC, and I made a million fake e-mail addresses. Then came Facebook and other social media, and they insisted on your online persona being really you, the meatspace you. Now a decade later, every cat website somehow wants you to create an account with them, and ooh wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to create accounts on different websites, you could just login with your Google account, or Facebook? Who cares that they track you in everything you do, that's going to simplify my life!

Given the PII sharing trends we've seen, why would you be surprised that now people think it's ok to give their DNA to a random company? Isn't that totally worth it to tell your friends "Hahaha I can tell I'm 2% African"? /s

This is the Amex issue. Amex has one of the best benefit programs for consumers - % rebate/points, discounts at random merchants, etc. But they also charge the highest merchant fees, and that's why they're unpopular with commerce owners.

I fully agree with you, I was thinking "there's no way they can get rid of $20B "worth" of that stuff without tanking the price", but I just googled the trading volume of BTC and Yahoo Finance tells me it's around $23B PER DAY. I can't fathom how there's enough crypto bros to sustain that, but maybe there is? And so the government could get rid of those 50K coins in a few weeks, or months... that's amazing. Time to turn these bits of data into service to the population.

That's all gone in the face of modern capitalism. We need growth, ever increasing profits, which is being squeezed by cutting on the workforce, or by "reducing work" in anything that's not considered essential... meaning corporations take risk. And they make that trade-off, because even if the CEO is somewhat on the hook for the consequence of a risk materializing, their prime job is to increase profits. They get canned immediately for not raising profits, but may only get canned in the future in the case of an accident. You're right though, the shareholders should ask for that head to roll, but... eh.

The more time I spend with public companies, the more I miss private ones. A CEO wouldn't (or would be much less likely to) take that sort of risk if they owned the company, and could have a long-term vision with no external pressure for constant growth. Modern capitalism with faceless shareholders means large companies don't work that way.

Didn't realize eBay's P/E was only 12. Contrast that to the S&P500, at like 26, makes eBay feel cheap in comparison, no?

Also, a P/E of 12 doesn't mean investors are thinking the share price will go "12 times further than this", whatever that statement means. It's just the ratio of share price vs. earnings, it doesn't really tell you expectations on future share prices or company earnings. If you could buy the entirety of a local business for $120K, that each year makes you (the owner) $10K in earnings, would you think that's a good deal or not? That's the question you need to answer, and the answer depends on what other opportunities exist in the market, what is the level of earnings seen historically, what you can expect for this company, or for the market, etc.

There was a study eBay did on that, which I like to link to (the original article was in HBR I believe, which may be paywalled, so here's a Guardian summary). But yes, that's exactly right. Marketers love showing "look, I bought this exact keyword and here are the exact clicks & sales that come through from it", but those sales would have come anyway, just not linked to a Google ad. I'm sure there's some use to advertising, for brands to be top-of-mind, but a lot of the ads we see daily seem more of a scam that the marketers are running on their own companies.

100% this. I wish I liked self-checkout. I like the concept, but in practice, it's slower than waiting for a cashier because the anti-loss features make it kick out from the standard flow 50% of the time (bags weight, your pants touching the scale, scanning a barcode that wasn't meant to be scanned because somehow broccoli heads have a barcode but this grocery store in particular wants you to input it as a "non-coded item").

Except at the cheaper grocery stores around me, they now have usually 1 cashier, and 1 cashier managing 8 self-checkout machines. So.. yeah "choices".