In addition to what others have said, it's also worth pointing out that the top 1% of income earners != the top 1% of wealth. The top end of the wealth spectrum are generally not earning much, if any, income subject to federal income tax.
Even if the ethics on the advertiser's side could be solved, advertising as the core source of income for a business has it's own unenthical incentives imo. It ultimately boils down to more attention == more ads == more money. I'd argue we got an early preview of that effect when 24 hour news channels were coming into their own in the 90s and 00s, and the detrimental effect it had on the quality of programming and frankly truthfulness. The scale of the internet has only exacerbated those issues.
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
One thing to note, I have ADHD and have similar issues getting sleepy when understimulated no matter how much sleep I get at night. Getting up and moving around for stimulation helps.
I do personally wish the role of ad based monetization models were included in these conversations more often. With both traditional media and social media the conversation tends to blame ideology for their shortcomings but in reality it's just, as you noted, a bad incentive model. They aren't ideological, they're just maximizing the amount of your attention they can capture because that maximizes the amount of ad revenue they can bring in.
There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.
Ceding Crimea to Russia may just make things more difficult to be honest. There are many other parts of eastern Ukraine that are primarily ethnic Russians and I would think Russia, at least, would consider the ceding of Crimea as justification for their further involvement.
All that link states is that Russia is denying they have given an ultimatum. Ukrainian leaders still claim they have. Its all he said she said at this point...
> Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest?
Is it an overreach if the Yemeni government "indiscriminately" collects the mobile phone records of US citizens? Or, more realistically, China, Russia, UK, Germany, etc...? It seems to me, when you carry out that kind of surveillance (really any sort of wide reaching security/military tactics) you can only expect reciprocity. And at that point why even be bothered if the NSA can collect American data? Even if they cannot legally capture it on their own, they know exactly where they need to go to get it...
I guess my point really boils down to "Do unto others...".
"An earlier version of a headline accompanying this article on the home page was incorrect. The health law is projected to result in a voluntary reduction in the work force equal to 2.5 million full-time workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, not two million fewer jobs."
Just personal speculation, but I think that his remaining "on the run" has extended the discussion over the actual issues. Of course there has been a lot of focus put on 'Where Snowden will go' and 'What options does he really have' but even events such as the forced landing of the Bolivian president's plane have added to the spying discussion. Honestly I think if Snowden had remained in the US and been arrested, there wouldn't have been enough "intrigue" for the media to continue running the NSA story at all.
Problem is without being convicted, he has already spent 3 months in jail... So not only does it seem an overblown charge, he is being punished for it while still being legally innocent (hasn't been proved guilty).
I just wanted to point out that, from the Ars Technica article above, "only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time". That, to me, really sounds like its either you OR someone on your shared list, not you AND someone on your shared list.
I've always viewed it as similar to a regional copyright protection in that a region is allowed to advertise that only it produces the "real" product. Much like any shoe manufacturer can create a shoe exactly like Nike, but only Nike can advertise as actually being Nike.
To be honest, it may be a good thing that the internet didn't find the right person in this case, because I think the reaction would have been different and may have ended up reinforcing this behaviour in the future. As it is, we have been able to take this a lesson on the power of such internet outlets with hopefully far fewer "casualties" than there could have been.