renholder

>Perhaps this is selecting for desperate job hunters who send thank you notes.

That's entirely plausible. I mean, you're probably <insert arbitrary percentage here> more likely to not turn an offer down, even if it's below the cost-of-living for the area in question, if you're willing to go to those lengths, yeah?

Their solution to the problem of having offers turned down seems to be not to investigate why but to just hire the people most willing to take them... I mean, they found a loop-hole but to quote the Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

>What about 95% of the content on the internet that ads pay for?

This is such a pedestrian argument, as if advertising pays for the content to be made and then hosted - when the truth of the matter is that someone else pays for the content to be created (and hosted) and that cost is recouped (with additional profit added on top), after the fact by advertising.

For example, advertising companies are not paying for YouTube content creators to create their content and then for it to be hosted on YouTube. Advertising companies seek those with the largest audience (typically, that requires having made content a priori, yeah?) and then make partnerships with those people and, then, those people may make videos pushing those products.

WSJ, since this is predominantly an American board, doesn't have advertisers paying their reporters', photographers', editors', etc. salaries. Advertisers are not paying for the content to be created or to be hosted. All of that is done by WSJ, who then recoups the costs via advertising, yeah?

So, the only point at which "95% of the content on the internet that ads pay for" is true, is (predominantly) after the content has been made and hosted and is only true over time (e.g.: not with immediate effect).

>Malware isn't advertising

You have that backwards from the OC's comment: Advertising networks have been used to push malware.

>...and security is an issue in any industry and sector.

This comes across as a whataboutism, "So? Other industries have security problems, too!" and, whilst true, largely ignores the fact that those other industries (mostly at large) weren't leveraged as attack vectors to spread malware. (I'm assuming your meaning of "industry" infers the meaning of "commercial industry", that generates revenue in exchange for a product or service, which would ignore the obvious things like P2P and the like.)

>But online ads and the technology that makes them work have played a considerable part in the development of almost every aspect of what we’ve come to enjoy as the free and open internet of today.

Online ads and free and open internet are not synonymous and I really wish that people would stop trying to equate them as such. The pervasive advertising systems that are running today (e.g.: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) aren't running to make the internet free and open but to squeeze out more profit margins for their respective shareholders and nothing more.

Were online ads the cause of the move from dial-up to "high-speed" internet? I'd argue it was actually pictures, graphics, movies, etc. and the desire to be able to consume those at a reasonable rate that caused the move from dial-up to "high-speed" internet.

How did advertising play a role in the development of that portion of the free and open internet? (Genuinely asking, in case I'm missing something here.)

Right!? You can't have prisons run by for-profit companies and then expect everyone to believe you want low recidivism rates - much less low crime rates. Bodies make the businesses money, businesses making money keep running the jails/prisons, and "being tough on crime" gets the votes - so it's a self-perpetuating machine.

>These services are ludicrously expensive. Video calls cost 40¢ per minute in Newton County, 50¢ per minute in Lowndes County, and $10 per call in Allen County.

The use of the video system is now compulsory, in person visits are banned, and another at-cost for families of criminals is seemingly tacked on because... ...freedom? Capitalism?

At what point do we agree tapping the families of inmates (note: not the inmates, themselves) out of money is going too far?