I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
The choice citizens would make every single time is to see the website without ads. Of course, publishers aren’t happy about that, since they would have to close shop. Maybe the EC should consider both sides of the equation.
Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally. And there's not a lot of companies that can handle a 90% drop in revenue.
The real solution would be to make users pay for the content, but charging for something that users used to get for "free" is also essentially impossible.
It doesn't have to be untargeted. You know the type of content the website hosts, therefore, you know a lot about the type of visitors. You can then charge appropriately for advertising that is targeted at those visitors. Don't show diaper ads on a site called Jalopnik. Instead show ads for Armorall, jack stands, tools, etc. When you visit a media site specializing in content like real houswives or kardashians, don't show the previously suggested ads. Instead, show ads on inane fast fashion, beauty products, luxury items, etc.
Targeted ads are always dumb as they tend to push an item that you've looked into before purchasing, but never realize that item has been purchased and you are no longer interested. They never get that the person researched item but has not looked for some time for item. Let's now advertise accessories for that item. If it was a fridge, show stainless cleaning items, for dishwasher, show ads for different detergents or other kitchen related items. It's not hard. For whatever reasons, they can't do targeted well. Targeted doesn't work as advertised.
We’ve been talking about federated micropayment technologies for some two decades. I’d happily pay for content but I refuse to sign up for 30+ publisher websites. If I could opt to pay $.25 for some article without giving the site all my personal data or incurring a subscription I’d be all for it. As it is I either “steal” the content through an archiving site or simply leave the site. More and more it’s the latter. I’d also happily pay some monthly fee for unlimited content from a consortium of publishers rather than disable my ad blocker, and let them sort out how much each one gets based on my browsing habits. None of these seem like hard technical problems, it’s certainly not impossible. I think the days of believing content comes without any cost are long behind us.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
If targeted advertising, as a whole, is banned, you can be pretty damn sure the payout for untargeted will come up—not necessarily to match what targeted is now, but way more than that 10% figure.
Ad spend, in aggregate, doesn't change that much based on new "innovations" in advertising annoyance. If you've still got roughly the same amount of money being spent on untargeted ads, continent-wide, as you do now on targeted, they're going to pay out much closer to parity.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.
Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.
As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.
The preponderance of dark UI/UX patterns in advertising and cookie consent pop-ups, as well as the grey-hat browser fingerprinting and DRM based tracking, unfortunately stand testament to exactly that.
Given that ~98% of Internet users couldn't even articulate what javascript does as part of their browsing experience, the exfiltration and reassembling of their PII via meta-data into sellable profiles for targeted auctions is completely beyond their capacity to comprehend or engage with. Thus consent is de facto ungrantable.
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Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure.
Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".
A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation.
I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
A quick google suggests more than a third of Germany pays for supplementary private health insurance (Zusatzversicherung) in addition to what their taxes take care of.
Generally charitable foundations figure that you can withdraw 3% per year from your savings and never run out. Remember you have to account for not only good years, but also really bad years, so even though you can average 10% over the long term in the stock market there will be decades that you are negative. There are also bond investments that are safer, but have worse return. And inflation is always eating into your savings so if they don't grow by that much every year (on average) eventually you will run out of money.
3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
> You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Or he could scrimp and put four hard years towards making manager at McDonald's. If he gets it, then he can demand they match 44k a year (his passive income at that point) or he walks.
He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.
30k gross, not net, so it's about equal to the median salary.
I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.
The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.
(I'm going to assume that we actually withdraw slightly more than 3% to cover taxes, so that we are getting $30k/year after taxes).
I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.
The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.
A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.
That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.
I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.
You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.
We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.
We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.
Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
well and septic is cheaper than city services. However the city services are a small monthly cost while the well/septic is a big one every 20-30 years: budgeting is easier
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.
Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
thankfully nobody's forced to live in the Bay Area. With a million in the bank you could live off the interest in Portugal or an even cheaper city in Asia without touching the principal. Frankly on 40k you can even live here in Germany comfortably where Eugen hails from too.
It’s amusing that censorship in social media is preventing you from posting what you want to post and yet you are asking for censorship of something else (or at least that’s what I understand by your calling this “dangerous”)
Have you considered the possible perspective that you yourself deserve censure? You’re the one who asked something (which I infer you deem) questionable to Grok.
To be very clear, getting Grok to say henious shit not something I want to subject to random people who follow me on social media even if it's not explicitly against the ToS. If I were to do a writeup or a repository on this, I would need to be very delicate and likely need to involve lawyers, which may make it a nonstarter.
> Why have such thoughts to begin with?
Because my duty to test out how new models respond to adversarial output outweighs my discomfort in doing so. This is not to "own" Elon Musk or be puritanical, it's more as an assessment as a developer who would consider using new LLM APIs and needs to be aware of all their flaws. End users will most definitely try to have sex with the LLM and I need to know how it will respond and whether that needs to be handled downstream.
It has not been an issue (because the models handled adversarial outputs well) until very recently when the safety guardrails completely collapsed in an attempt to court a certain new demographic because LLM user growth is slowing down. I never claim to be a happy person, but it's a skill I'm good at.
