“1 in 10 people believe they are not at risk when using illicit sources to watch TV, film or sports.”
ONE in ten? Man, they’re even bad at cherry picking statistics 😂
They even cite a study with only 1,000 participants for their statistic that “32% OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VICTIMS OF FRAUD”
In the title, at least. The body of that claim’s card says that it’s the people, or someone they know that have been victims of fraud.
Gosh, I hate dishonest scare marketing campaigns.
Just keep in mind the possible cons of using AdNauseam.
With traditional adblockers like uBO, the ad content never gets loaded. With AdNauseam, it does, it’s just not shown to you.
That means the ad network is likely to get:
And it also makes you heavily identifiable, because to any ad server, a single user mass-clicking their advertisements by the thousands is going to make you very easy to track across sites, just by behavior alone.
So while it’s good if you just want no ads and to do a little monetary harm to surveillance advertising, it’s not good if you want privacy. (Unless you set it to show ads, but still click on all of them, and you’re the type that does sometimes click on ads, then it does become good for obfuscation)
I’d definitely recommend the same team’s other work: TrackMeNot, as it does a decent job of obfuscating your search queries. (Just make sure that if you use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, you disable any auto-searching on Google, since that just gives them your IP, without obfuscating the searches you aren’t making there anyways)
I don’t know of any super high-quality ones that run well, but the Open Assistant project, (now archived) collected responses from voluntary participants (myself included) to build what is now considered a very high-quality dataset of chat conversation pairs, truly open source, and all voluntarily submitted instead of scraped.
The models are reasonable for fine-tuning, but aren’t very good compared to newer models from large companies.
TLDR; “weak people have to conform to social consensus otherwise they get hurt I guess?”
I, on the other hand, am a big, strong, high T alpha male, that isn’t worried about what anyone thinks! I am a free thinker, and I know my opinions are correct because I instantly based this entire opinion on a subjective, anecdotal view of the world that I then extrapolated meaning out of, the best evidence! /s
(in response to him selling the family home)
“My family took it well,” the 53-year-old told the New York Post. “My wife’s super supportive. My kids are probably better for it, if we’re keeping it real.”
Just another demonstration of how the Hedonic Treadmill effect means becoming a billionaire won’t meaningfully improve your life compared to the negative impact you inflict upon all of society by taking millions of dollars of worker’s and consumer’s value from them!
There are people who think that “positive” or “negative” words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.
From what I’ve seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto’s book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions.
Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.
How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.
Already spinning up a docker container!
I completely get that.
I mostly have just thought of housing as a different kind of beast, since unlike working a job, I don’t have to invest in real estate to save for a house or retirement, but doing so might make it easier to accomplish that.
The biggest problem is definitely going to be full on landlords and private corporate investors, but I don’t want to add any more to that problem, no matter how small my impact might be.
TLDR; I want to protect against systemic risk factors, as most of my net worth will be in the market, unable to support me during a financial emergency. It could also carry possible tax benefits, and make it easier to sustain mortgage payments on a home.
I’m mostly trying to ensure that if, for instance, my entire emergency fund is drained from a major medical emergency (or something similar) during that time, I have something I can rely on that is generally more stable to sell during that time, which will overall carry lower tax implications on sale than stocks that have already appreciated significantly more.
Plus, once I get to the point of being close to owning a home, I want to ensure no major financial event could potentially significantly impact my ability to afford mortgage payments.
I plan on investing as much of my income as I can to retire as early as possible, which means the majority of my liquid cash net worth will just be in my emergency fund, with a smaller additional amount in savings. I would prefer some level of extended, more stable assets, that will still grow at least a bit over time to meet my financial goals, but won’t be subject to as large drops as the whole market.
I don’t plan on investing much of my portfolio into real estate if I do decide to go that route, only 5-10% total, more as a hedge than as a primary strategy. Most of my investing is still in comparatively high-growth index funds.
I appreciate that take.
I just don’t want to be yet another contributor of many to a problem, y’know? Like how even though corporations are by far the largest contributors to climate change, I still try to reduce the excess emissions I possibly produce whenever I can just to help a tiny bit more.
I’m still investing in the stock market regardless, I just want to make sure that diversifying my portfolio won’t have an outsized negative impact on others since, well, that would suck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure if it adds any more clarity, but to be fair, this question was about morals, which is entirely subjective based on personal opinion.
Thanks for your addition to the conversation though, I appreciate it!
To be clear, I wasn’t talking about liquidations, I was talking about actual market performance. Housing is necessary, even during a financial crisis, whereas unnecessary purchases of goods from corporations become secondary. Thus, housing can stay more stable while stocks crash.
While the market does always go back up, to some degree, I want to be at least slightly more resistant to the possibility of a major failure, (i.e. multiple major tech companies going under from some highly unforseen event) that could lead to entire stocks not existing to go back up again in the future.
I would also theoretically be investing via publicly-traded REIT funds, which could be liquidated in the same manner as stocks.
Wouldn’t that then mean that there would be no rental apartments available and everyone would be forced to take a loan and buy a home?
Not exactly, first off, I mostly mean real estate that is required for survival. Housing, not including the types of places you’d use for a quick vacation stay like hotels, corporate office real estate, etc.
If there weren’t landlords, there would be a significant decrease in housing prices, due to a few factors, namely banks now offering lower-rate loans (since the higher-paying institutional investors are out of the picture), higher supply availability (instead of investor hoarding of empty rentals for property value over use by humans), and generally larger amounts of capital available to spend on new homes, rather than rent payments going to alternative asset classes in wealthy investor portfolios.
It also doesn’t mean no rentals would exist at all, but that properties wouldn’t exist solely for the purpose of being rented. (think someone renting a portion of their existing house, or adding an ADU, instead of buying an entire single-family home solely for the purpose of renting it as an investment.)
Landlording is only a problem because it reduces the supply of housing available for people to own directly, and by the extent of it existing, increases housing values. If existing properties are partially used as rentals by those who have extra space to spare, any of the issues I mentioned functionally don’t exist.
It’s because they’ve conditioned their audience to believe a few key things:
Let’s break that down.
They want money to be more important than voting, because they understand that their political demographic does not win the popular vote in most cases, and their policies are inherently not popular with the majority. But when they can get money instead, then use that to influence votes and policy, well, that just might get them the policies they want without substantial votes from the public.
They want people to fear giving money to “woke” corporations because it makes them seem like the only source of real truth, and objectivity. They’re the voices of reason in a world that’s all against you. Then, you’ll be willing to pay for their subscription streaming service, and their subscription streaming service for kids, and their merch, and their chocolate, and their razors, et cetera et cetera.
They want you to associate buying products as the way to define yourself, because when you so strongly identify with their politics, you’ll spend as much money as you can signaling to those around you that you don’t support the “woke” agenda through your wallet, you only support those who truly embody your cause. Giving them money becomes a symbol of your values.
And of course, they wouldn’t get any sales without this as a selling point. If they just start a razor brand, not affiliated with their political ventures, who’s gonna buy? Their razors are effectively the same price as Gilette’s, just without the likely higher standard of quality and availability in physical retail locations.
But when they combine all three of those tactics I mentioned to make their target demographic believe they need these razors to display their values, stop a perceived evil agenda, and make their voice heard… well, then you’ve got a good revenue stream.
Both jokes can be true 😅
I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there’s still an argument to be made.
For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.
Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they’ll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it’s physically impossible to cram any more in.
I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won’t tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.
If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla’s acquisition of Anonym)
Even citing Google’s own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It’s their fault users don’t want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.
A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn’t just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.
Google recommends to “Treat your visitors with respect,” but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you’ve even seen the content don’t actually respect you, they just hope you’re willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don’t even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven’t given me good reason to even care about your content yet?
This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have “x number of free articles remaining,” or those that say “you’ve read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?” get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.