dumb-saint

> "We" is referring to something much broader.

Yes, it's all very poetic. Can you define it though?

What else did "we" do? Were "we" the nazis? Or were we the allies? Were we the indians or the europeans? Did we write "All along the Watchtower"? Did we invent the first digital computer?

"We"? I don't remember dissecting any bodies or making any discoveries in the field of anatomy. Do you?

If you hard-code group selection (setting the group as the unit of evolution), then you are already assuming what you want to prove.

MacOS doesn't run on other mobile devices.

They are the same for the purpose of the argument being made above.

So you gave up on democracy?

Oh, I think you misunderstood me. I don't blame the people who enlist at all. I also point my finger at the profit-makers.

When I say "you guys" I mean "Americans". All of you.

PS: What a weird thing to down vote this post -- it simply clarifies my initial message.

With no lack of empathy for the veterans (of all countries) and the horrible things they go through...

Don't you guys ask yourself how come you are always at war? Why you have "generations of veterans", even though you have by far the most powerful military force to ever have existed?

There is no credible conventional threat to the US, and there is no unconventional one that can be mitigated by fighting a war.

Not participating in unnecessary wars would help the mental health of soldiers much more than therapy or whatever else.

So you "cringe on" Wikipedia?

> I said you were paid for your attention

I get payed for my attention in euros, after signing a contract or entering an agreement. Maybe that sounds silly to you, but that is how I roll.

I assume that you are implying that I have some moral obligation to the people publishing publicly accessible content. If you are not implying that, then we are all in agreement and there is nothing further to discuss. We both agree that ad blockers are fine, case closed.

If you are implying that, you are wrong. The WORLD WIDE WEB was not built on that premise and we were here before the marketeers and advertisers arrived. If the former manage to make some money while providing people with something they want, that's fine. I have nothing against honest business. But don't try to pretend that I have any obligation to do anything just because I accessed a resource that you made public. If you want to charge for your resource, name the price and make it private. Maybe I'll buy it. I buy books all the time. But it's not my fault or moral failing if your business model doesn't work.

You are using the concept of "relationship" with two different meanings.

When I click a link, there is a relationship between me and some entity in the same sense that the term is used in computer science to describe relational databases.

This is not a relationship in the legal or ethical senses. By clicking a link, I did not agree to anything at all. All I did was react to an announcement that there is some resource somewhere, and deciding to take a look at it. If I decide to do it from a terminal and read the HTML directly without rendering, that is no one's business and my actions are not unethical in any way.

The advertisement industry is starting to behave like the music industry in the early days of the web. They are willing to destroy the best tool ever created for global human communication and knowledge sharing for the purpose of protecting an obsolete business model.

So what you are saying is that, simply by clicking a link, I become obliged to execute whatever piece of code is served to me on my machine or render any media on my display without knowing in advance what it contains?

That is not how the web works, and that is not the social contract that it was built on. Sorry if it doesn't fit advertisers' needs, but that is really not my problem. Maybe advertisers and payed content could go to some other medium that accommodates all the restrictions you desire, and then we can all be happy?

Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things.

Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.