I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it’s all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.

Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to ‘connecting with consumers on an emotional level’ decades before the Internet.

While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.

Yeah i guess when you stop looking at GDP as a real fact about the real world, then it makes more sense. That’s funny 😂

Thanks for the detailed response, I’ll probably need to Google a bunch if stuff in here which I will.

But to the point that didn’t make sense to you: The american economy is considered to be big/high growth simply because it’s financial sector is so big. And yes this could mean it’s markets are efficient, but efficient at what? Often it’s trading stocks or debt instruments or some obscure financial instruments, and if that’s the case then the size of the economy seems quite made up just like Elon’s wealth.

This is exactly my point, their equities act very similarly to our real money/assets. There is nothing unrealised about it

And my second issue is that when it comes to personal wealth of billionaires we always caveat it with ‘it’s not real money’. .

But when it comes to measuring the success of any country’s economy, we don’t caveat it with something similar. Countries like Singapore or even US make a lot of money from financial services. The success of American economy is heavily reliant on these unrealised gains compared to China for example where I am guessing it will be a smaller proportion of the total economy.

The point I am trying to make here is the equities act like real money. They can be traded, and profits can be generated by said trades and deals (the profits are part of the GDP calculations). Which means that for all practical purposes equities are equivalent to real money.

Now we can debate what actually constitutes real money, and whether the definition ends at dollars or all global currencies or government bonds or assets like gold etc etc.

Is the money earned by hedge funds and investment banks part of the GDP calculations or not ?

Edit: Example if Elon Musk takes out a loan with his tesla stocks as collateral, will the financial transaction that have taken place, be part of GDP calculations or not ?

While advertising for literal scams. About 10% of Meta’s revenue is from literal scams.

This Jeffery Epstein stuff looks a lot like World Economic Forum more than anything, a circle jerk of the rich and elite.

This is bullshit.

When it comes to measuring their wealth it’s not real money.

But when it comes to calculating GDP and growth and other economic metrics these are still included. Make up your mind, either equities are real money or GDP is made up nonsense.

With all the layoffs right now, it’s a great opportunity for unions to make people aware about them and how they can be beneficial.

I wish unions were more active on LinkedIn, so that we could like and share their posts. Recent layoffs at Omnicom/IPG have led to people discussing unions in the advertising subreddit…

Everything on YouTube apart from niche special interest content creators has gone to shit because all these high viewership channels got bought out by private equity.

The choice of words is really off to me. Sounds too much like corporate speak I guess.

Because who uses “thank you for taking the time to get to know each other” in common everyday usage?

It reads as very inauthentic. Just like HR workers who pretend to be nice (and on your side) while prioritising the company’s interests over yours.

Fake niceness is nauseating.

With rising sea levels and general water shortages, why don’t we also use them as desalination plants?

Surely there has to be a way to deal with brine, it’s just salt and water after all?

Onyx Boox, runs on Android so you can install whatever apps you want.

Companies have already been SEOing LLMs for a few months now. There are companies who have a panel of participants who are willing to share their data, and this is then used to estimate what people might be searching on LLMs and now to optimise content so that it shows up on responses across LLMs.

Ads was the logical direction for LLMs and has always been the only pathway to any substantial revenue.

Hamas might be doing terrible things, but they are also fighting a disproportionate war, and it’s not like Israel is respecting any of the human rights conventions either.

And in Ukraine, the Ukrainian army is fighting for freedom from invaders and fighting a disproportionate war too, and are committing war crimes like torture of prisons or targeting of energy infrastructure just like Russia is doing.

War is always messy. To paint Hamas as exceptionally evil is unfair and probably an outcome of racial bias.