It's no Space X, but giving people a cheaper, more reliable cab that can be used for carpooling seems more meaningful than spending one's time working for a company whose primary purpose is getting people to click on ads.
This nonsense needs to stop. That's not how "meaning" works.
Marketing and advertising are one of the primary drivers of the economy and very likely the reason the company you work for is successful in staying in business, finding customers and paying you. It's also the primary business model behind several of the largest companies on the planet and funds an immense amount of content across the web for everyone.
The advertising industry is not full of evil hackers running scams. It has some of the brightest people working on challenging problems and has driven several other sectors forward, including software development and database technologies that are often discussed here on HN and used for many other ventures.
There is no inherent ranking of morality, it takes all kinds of jobs and people to make this world go around. Claiming otherwise is shortsighted and simplistic at best, and never leads to good discussion.
One is moving humanity forward potentially into a spacefaring species in our lifetimes. The other is playing zero-sum games to help Pepsi avoid being outcompeted by Coke.
Besides listen to it from Musks own mouth, "Meaning is about the delta between impact and scale. Whether you help millions of people share a photo more easily or send one person to mars."
If you work for a company selling ads, do you derive meaning from how the company invests its profits? Or from the direct effects your actions have on the world?
The rationalizations some people will accept to avoid taking responsibility for how they spend their own lives...
Edit: clarity
Do you go around telling construction workers that their life is meaningless and they should instead be building rockets to carry you to another planet?
The point is that SpaceX is a making a potential contribution to humanity's future, which makes it a more meaningful way to spend your working years than an advertising company.
The fact that an advertising company thought that SpaceX was a good investment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this argument. It completely misses the point.
Also you're comparing a single company to an entire industry. Advertising is one of the reasons why SpaceX is successful in the first place, along with thousands of other cutting edge companies. SpaceX is exciting, but advertising has far greater impact collectively than you might think.
You're talking about meaningfulness at the individual level, and I completely agree, nobody should be judged for how they find meaning and edification in their work, as long as they're not a hitman or something involving a similar level of individual amorality.
But I also agree with gp and others that there is a difference between doing ad tech and rocket science. It's not that ad tech should be demonized, but I can't deny that there's something more meaningful about space exploration, and here I mean "potentially meaningful to much/all of humanity". And for some, this broader sense of meaningfulness overlaps significantly with their individual sense of meaningfulness, in which case they probably would have a hard time finding ad tech work meaningful.
Exactly, that's you - but others are completely different. There is no absolute ranking. Individual meaningfulness is all that exists. You might be in a group of people that all believe the same but that's about the extent of it.
I personally see space travel as just another step in the growth of technology. It's definitely exciting but not some grand journey towards meaning. It's just science and tech and progress.
And there are billions more who couldn't care less for space. Many say we should cure cancer first before spending money on space because it's more "meaningful", yet it's clear that both are important pursuits to the people involved in them and that there is no right or better thing for an individual or society to do. So why is advertising somehow beneath that? Is allowing efficient commerce and communications to build the economy and wealth somehow not up to the same standards?
This letter from 1970 by Dr. Stuhlinger of Nasa is an incredibly reply in defense of space vs feeding the hungry, switch out space travel with anything else and it still holds: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
This is not even consistent. Even if you admit only individual meaning, then certainly there are aggregates of those values across society. And advertising is not as high as feeding the hungry or contributing to world peace, as obvious examples.
Collecting stamps may be meaningful to you as an individual, but society also judges your contribution as more or less meaningful. Psychologically, your own experience of meaningfulness is influenced by the opinions of others.
So you can see already that even if you disregard any questions of morality in how you spend your life, the idea that meaning is purely individual already breaks down and becomes inconsistent. We are social animals.
That is a wonderful letter and an excellent example of how the cost of space exploration can be justified. Advertising, while wasting more human resources, does not need this kind of justification, because it is not usually funded by public institutions. However, if you were to try to write such a compelling letter to justify the vast human expenditure of energy and intelligence on advertising you would find it difficult.
The letter makes specific examples of the benefits to all of us on Earth of how space flight requires technological progress, which improves our well-being, and how space exploration inspires us to better appreciate and protect our planet. You cannot replace space travel with advertising and make the same arguments.
Whether space travel or curing cancer is more meaningful, it's certainly good that we are doing both. However, the same is not true for advertising. If you took 99% of the talented and capable people in advertising and put them to work on curing cancer, feeding the poor, providing health care or education, or any of a number of other areas, society would be better off.
Some people derive meaning from making a good living and supporting their families. If advertising is the way to do that, great. But if you derive meaning from the value that your work provides to society (and to some extent, everyone who works does) then advertising (in the majority of cases) is not for you.
If we could disarm all the world's armies overnight and prevent all wars, and spend those resources on something else, wouldn't be better off? We cannot, because the competitive structure of our world is such that unilateral or universal disarmament are both impossible to achieve. Military spending and war remain necessary because we have found no way to move beyond them.
If we could create a world overnight with no advertising, we would be better off by all the productive areas that energy and creativity could be redirected to, but we can't because of the competitive structure of our economies. Advertising is made necessary by our current system, but that does not mean it is equally socially valuable or provides the same meaning to those who work in it as every other field.
In making this comparison, I mean no disrespect to the military. You can agree that war is horrible but still serve from love of country. There is nobility in that. I don't think you can make the same claim for advertising.
This is what I said. There is no absolute ranking. It's groups of people thinking the same thing, and very few things have a majority, but even if they do it doesn't matter since it's a belief. There is no "right" or "better" yet you keep saying advertising is worse somehow. Even space travel is far from the top if you actually look at the entire planet and that's what I was trying to show with that letter.
> You cannot replace space travel with advertising and make the same arguments.
Yes you can. Every industry makes progress that is felt everywhere else. That is the point. Advertising has moved the entire internet into the commercial age and allowed the absolutely vast amount of content today, not to mention the success of every major business that you rely on and work for. I don't see how you can discount that at all.
Yes. Advertising is worse. It is a net loss to society, necessary for structural reasons of competition between companies but otherwise nearly valueless in comparison to the human energy and time devoted to it, and with significant negative externalities for all of society. There are many industries that are better than advertising.
This is why it isn't rated as one of most people's favorite feel-good industries, even though you claim to think that's irrelevant.
Take the money out of the equation and ask yourself how many people would still be working in advertising if we lived in some sort of Star Trek world where people decided what to do based on their abilities and what is best for society.
> Every industry makes progress that is felt everywhere else. That is the point. Advertising has moved the entire internet into the commercial age and allowed the absolutely vast amount of content today, not to mention the success of every major business that you rely on and work for.
You're arguing in defense of advertising, but I think you've painted yourself into a corner here. Yes, in some butterfly effect way, every industry affects everything else, but the scale is not always the same, and not every effect is positive.
What would have happened to the Internet without advertising? We would still have e-commerce because it is tremendously efficient, but we wouldn't have banner ads, or spam. We would still have content, because people like to create and share, but we wouldn't have fake news sites (the ones that were built by teenagers for the ad revenue) or Buzzfeed, Outbrain, and all of the rest of the shit content that exists only to game advertising. Would we have Google? Youtube? Facebook? Maybe with different business models.
If you look at the actual impact of advertising on society, it's not easy to argue that it is one of the better industries. So I can understand why you took the approach of trying to say that all industries are really the same, and anyway it's all just beliefs which you say don't matter. But that argument doesn't hold up.
I'm curious where you would draw the line beyond which people in an industry become responsible for what their industry does, or if you draw that line at all.
One example is that you can be a self-employed bookbinder in a remote town by advertising your services online. This allows you to find customers who want your services that you would not otherwise be able to find. Those customers are able to find more bookbinders than would be possible without online advertising which drives down price.*
So, online advertising is not always zero-sum, it allows some business that would not be able exist without it. The existence of more businesses reduces price for customers.
* I got this idea from an article I read previously and am not able to find.
But the "cheaper" part is largely because rides are being subsidized by VC money no? Is it that meaningful if its not sustainable?
Uber is a private company so their accounting isn't publicized but as far we can tell, the VC subsidies target a very specific situation: the low prices from competition such as Lyft/Didi
Leaving out the "price wars" aspect, the unsubsidized higher Uber fares would still be lower than:
1) taxis (especially out to the suburbs)
2) the TOC (Total Cost Ownership) of owning a car if consumers make a behavioral change from buying their own car and instead, switch to an on-demand "car as a service". E.g. using Uber 10 to 20 times a month is less than purchase price of car + loan interest + taxes + annual registration + insurance + parking garages.
Similar with number 2, if don't actually know what the subsidy is worth how can you state this?
Keep in mind that Uber isn't subsidizing every fare in every city in all circumstances because even with a $11 billion war chest from VCs, that's unaffordable. They are strategically subsidizing in specific markets (e.g. price wars with Lyft and previously Didi in China).
In the early days (2011?), Uber didn't have heavily subsidized fares and riders still chose them over taxis because they cost less.
My comments are based on observations from analysts, comments from investors Bill Gurley (Benchmark) and the CEO.[1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t...
"In February, Uber earned an average of 19¢ per ride in the U.S., according to previously undisclosed financial documents."
You realize that comments from analysts have been hugely wrong before? See Henry Blodgett and Mary Meeker.
Yes they're often wrong but I wasn't talking about predictions. I was talking about how they described the past. Uber was already beating taxis in limited markets without any subsidies.
If I'm interpreting your position correctly, you believe that the only possible way for Uber to be cheaper than taxis is through subsidies. This isn't true.
Financial arbitrage of transportation by using crowd-sourced cars instead of taxis has been discovered by a dozen companies besides Uber. In fact, the opposite tactic of no subsidies and aggressive surge pricing can still be cheaper than taxis.[1] Put another way, Uber (crowd-sourced cars and not the luxury Black Service) without subsidies is by design, cheaper than taxis. What the subsidies attempt do is make Uber cheaper than Lyft/Didi.
The subsidies were part of a competitive strategy to try and bleed Lyft and Didi to death. (It didn't work with Didi and Uber called a truce with them. How Lyft plays out remains to be seen.) However, the subsidies are not necessary for Uber fares to be cheaper than taxis.
[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-ride-share-cabs-...
How were they "beating" taxis? On price? Are you actually beating something if you are cheaper but losing money?
The links you are posting are really fluff pieces. This one is some reporter's anecdotal summary of spot prices for two particular destinations in a single city. This is no way a serious piece of business journalism.
You keep making statements about the specifics and extent of the subsidies but you don't actually know this do you? And none of the links you have posted support these assertions you are making about these subsidies or lack of them.
Advertising makes up about 20% of the US economy. Is it really so hard to believe that there are rewarding, ethical jobs available in that other 80%?
So does that mean any journalist working on hardcore investigative journalism is working on advertising? If yes, your world view is a bit warped. If no, please explain why you think a Google search ranking engineer is essentially working on advertising?
Incentives matter. A lot. Companies who derive the vast majority of their revenue from advertising will have their culture and technological choices shaped by the underlying business needs.
Heavily marketing dozens of largely unsuccessful moon shots to keep people excited does very little to change this underlying analysis.
Newspaper business models continue to be mainly advertising driven, so I don't disagree with your analogy, just your conclusion. Advertising shaped journalism enormously even before that business model was crippled by Google and Facebook. I would have the same difficulty working for Buzzfeed as Google.
I worked at Google, on Search. My work (and my team and org's work) was never affected by Ads and how Ads worked. We just focused on making Search better. So I object to your imagination of how Google culture and choices are shaped.
You seem to be interpreting "incentives and culture" as "explicit directives or pressure from Ads". There are many ways for culture to grow. Chinese walls can prevent many overt pathways from growing, but they aren't an antidote to the overall role incentives play inside companies.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi...
So yeah, let's be more realistic and say that advertising makes up 2% of GDP. There's got to be an ethical job in one of the industries making up the other 98%. I've never worked for an ad-supported business and I don't find employment difficult to come by...