Except that the open secret is that advertising doesn't work.

There were a couple of Freakonomics episodes about it that I found pretty interesting. Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1: TV) and Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 2: Digital).

Basically, advertising has never been especially effective, and digital advertising is little more than a scam borderline on protection racket run by Google and Facebook (who combined make up almost 60% of all digital ads). It's a house of cards that's just waiting to collapse. Google knows it, and that's probably partially fueling this current adblock-block push to get people to sign up for Youtube Premium.

Yup, and for the same reason Google is killing off the Google Podcasts app -- to push people at Youtube Music and the associated subscription. They've managed to twist their brains into a flaming wad that results in no official podcast app for Android.

I started looking for an alternative to Google Podcasts and found AntennaPod, an open-source podcast app. All I can say is I wish I'd switched earlier - so far it's a massively improvement over the Google app. The only pain in the ass is that Google doesn't offer an export feature for their app, so you have to migrate manually, or wait until Google Podcast is closer to end-of-life, when Google claims they will offer an OPML export feature. I'm not holding my breath.

I can't recommend SponsorBlock enough. It's astonishingly effective and made YouTube great (?) again.

Did you bother to read the article you linked? Because you've drastically misrepresented the alleged policy (the Israeli government denies that it is current policy). It essentially boils down to "given the choice, soldiers are better killed than held captive (for torture and leverage)":

There's also implication of some commanders telling their soldiers that suicide (probably with enemy collateral damage) is preferable to capture.

While there is plenty here to object to, it's a very far cry from "kill our own soldiers because they must be collaborators by now". If I were a soldier held hostage by Palestinian terrorists, I would certainly prefer an attempt at rescue that might end in my death instead of delaying months or longer because rescue wasn't possible without eliminating all possibility of collateral damage.

That's part of it, but since 1980 the total cost (tuition, fees, room, board, etc) to attend a four-year college for one year has almost tripled. Adjusted for inflation, it has increased by 180% from about $10,00 to $28,800. That's insane. According to the same article, "State and local funding per student for higher education dropped about 25% between 1988 and 2018".

You can point a finger at a lot of places for the cause, but I think the primary point is that the country has found itself with an "education industrial complex" that profitizes education, created in a big part by federal student loans that are way too easy to get. Similar to the way house prices were exploded by easy access to government-backed mortgages.

The importance and necessity of a four-year degree should be pulled back down to earth and there should be more not-for-profit community and state schools that make education available for a price that most Americans can reach.

There's an American saying: Once you pop, you can't stop.

Great post.

This hit me, because I know it's something I've been struggling with. I'm considering looking for a new job right now, solely in the hope it would rekindle the spark somewhat.

The only thing I'd add is that I truly think there's a team dynamic that you cannot have (or at least, in any measurable quantity) when everyone is remote. A team that never sees each other in-person is a team that will never really jell and come together into something more than the sum of the people on it. Camaraderie also suffers greatly, though that depends in part on the "online" skills of the people (how well they can communicate easily over IM and video calls). It turns out playing a lot of games like MMORPGs where that style of comms is common became an asset :)

Hah! I used FFFF this year and ran into a handful of data validation errors. But I actually found it kind of fun to try and decipher what the XSD schema validation rules meant. I love (in a horrified way) that the site just vomits the schema validator's raw messages (including xpath!) right at the user and expects them to figure out what went wrong.

It's completely bonkers but also completely understandable, given that FFFF is run by Intuit. How many people have encountered

Business Rule X0000-005 - The XML data has failed schema validation. cvc-complex-type.2.4.a. Invalid content was found starting with element `TaxpayerNumberB`. One of `{"http://www.irs.gov/efile":TaxpayerNumberB}` is expected.

and said "screw it" and paid for TurboTax instead?

I agree with no unlimited edits, but a short-lived edit window wouldn't be terrible. Something like 3-5 minutes so that you can fix teh sutpid typos or broken HTML you always find immediately after hitting Submit.

Oh, I'd guess any website still running on Perl 5.8 have the same problem.

One of the real tragedies of Slashdot is that it's a perfect candidate for open-sourcing the platform. Much of the audience has the interest and skills to modernize the site, add features (scratch itches), fix bugs, etc - without also trying to Betafy it. Sure, there's room for abuse and it would require some careful curation but given that the site has been frozen in carbonite for 10+ years it's only a matter of time before it is shut down simply for lack of available software or expertise in ancient code or databases.

The current repo of Slashcode on SourceForge (or the clone on GitHub) is ancient and has little resemblance to what's actually running Slashdot these days.

Definitely - I even admit as much in my post :)

I look at it as a combination of implied contract and a Sucker's Choice.

Publishing something on the public Internet means you are okay with the anonymous public seeing it; however, there's no contract between the website and the user that they'll read the website exactly as the publisher wants them to. Maybe they use a screen-reader. Maybe they disable all images or Javascript. Blocking ads is just another choice the reader can make and, as others have pointed out here, for good reasons (security, privacy, bandwidth, etc).

The Sucker's Choice here is assuming that the user only has two options: Accept the content completely as-is or completely avoid it. There are more options and more nuance. This is the "socioeconomic contract" idea I was trying to share is that it's mutually beneficial for publishers to give people options for how to pay for something, and when readers rejecting them all anyway, it can lead to worse outcomes (such as lawyers getting involved). The "moral gray area" isn't about absolutes (after all, there are no moral absolutes), but looking for some nuance when the publisher *does* give the reader those additional options.

Fully agreed. That's why I wasn't talking about Facebook specifically, but ad-blocking in general (which, to be clear, I support under *all* circumstances). Facebook just happened to be the subject in the larger topic.

Hah, welp, the response is a little more vehement than I was expecting. I'll reply to you since I completely agree with your sentiment and like your sig.

That the topic here is Facebook isn't something I considered, no really see it as relevant. I'd say the same about Google or Twitter or Slashdot. I'm a die-hard ad-block user and have no plans to give it up. And I outright admitted to being a bit of a hypocrite on this issue. My point was simply that when someone is given a choice of two ways to pay for something and instead chooses "none and I'll have it anyway", that can be raised as an argument against all ad-blocking. It allows companies and easier time to say "well, capitalism didn't work, go for the lawyers".

As for the "moral gray area" that people took offense to, that's all it meant. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with blocking ads; but I think it does open the door a little wider to corporate disagreement about ad-blocking that might backfire somewhat in the end.

But the Troll mod is nice. Never change, Slashdot <3

They are, but there's a larger moral gray area when using an ad-blocker to avoid ads when you also have the choice to pay for a product.

I fully support blocking ads when the only way to use a product is to be the product and dismiss any bogus arguments that blocking ads is stealing or immoral. However, when you're given a choice to pay $X for access or accept advertising, it seems a lot more dubious to claim the moral high ground while also declaring you're changing the deal and will neither pay nor accept ads.

Can you still do that? Sure, but don't pretend it's not quite a bit more like theft. Not "you wouldn't copy a car, would you?" (yes I would) but more like bringing a high-speed tape duplicator into a Blockbuster and snagging a few copies of shows you want to watch. You're not depriving anyone else of a physical thing, but you are violating a socioeconomic contract.

For me personally, if a product is available for sale as an alternative to ads, I will either pay for it or not use it. I buy Android apps and eschew ones that contain ads. I've paid for Pandora for a long time, because I like having a "radio" station when working out or don't want to pick a specific album. But I freely admit to some grandfathered hypocrisy - I block ads on YouTube because I have done so for 15+ years and pricing YouTube Premium at $14/mo is asinine when I only want to block ads, not the other junk that comes with it. (And I won't lie - YouTube making $30 billion annual revenue does a lot to absolve me of any internal strife over this.)

There isn't "religious magical thinking" and "secular magical thinking". It's all just delusion, sometimes shared as a group and sometimes private. Trying to separate one form from the rest imparts tiers of acceptance, when delusion of all forms should be stamped out by rational, thinking people.