Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services

llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."

Comments

Re:It's not illegal, though

[UbuntuDupe]

Wow, I think your bizarre economic theory is what kept you from making "UbuntuDupe friend". (I know, a tragedy, right?)

Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.)

What? Businesses, even today, often sell at a loss when demand doesn't turn out to be what they expected. Ever seen a "clearance" shelf? "But then what about for the next round of production?" Well, at the next round of production, the lower demand for outputs has chewed its way back to the original factors, forcing their money costs down so that production costs no longer exceed final output prices.

You seem to have this view that businesses knowingly make products, again and again, that they can't sell profitably, and then when they predictably can't sell them, they successfully lobby the government to make people buy them, which somehow saves the economy from instability. Have you ever actually run a business? Would part of your business plan involve making a product at a loss and hoping the government will force its price up in time?

Moreover, this wouldn't explain all the other modern capitalist economies that don't have governments that suck up output "to keep people employed".

And,

So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century.

Nice use of post-hoc reasoning there.