I find it completely plausible that advertising is a zero sum game for the reason above, and a negative sum game when you consider the externalities and the money spent on it.
The point of a nation of laws is to restrain the powerful, the powerful don't need laws to do what they want done, and the law is the only safe redress the abused have against them. Which is why unpunished abuses of the law by elites in society is so damaging in the long run, it erodes the very foundation of what it means to be a just society.
Maybe web devs should more carefully consider how much crap third party scripts and resources inject into their sites, rather than caring about a tiny bit of convenience.
In sum, insurance companies are not selling their product at a loss, and if they are operating efficiently, they aren't selling their product to you at a loss either.
there are an almost infinite amount of ways to host services from behind firewalls without port forwarding, or any network admin approval. Tor is not special in this regard, nor dangerous due to supposed bad people controlling the network.
Amazon on one hand wants to pretend to be a third party market place to avoid liability, regulation, inventory holding risks and so on, and on the other hand wants to collect all the profit, data and exert control as a first party seller.
Yep, Intel clearly hasn't learned a single thing from the disaster that has been price segmentation on features like AVX-512, the result is the vast majority of software never bothering to use it, because it can't be guaranteed to actually be present.