The serious answers were insightful, usually a full or several full paragraphs with meaty details suitable for the audience, and honestly impressive that a CEO could do that off the top of his head.
There's a reason Elon Musk self-identifies as SpaceX's Chief Designer more frequently than he self-identifies as CEO. He's making very technical decisions after learning and understanding the ramifications of the options. He has a physics degree, which alone makes him a far cry from most MBA CEOs today, who choose among technical options they literally can't understand based on how much they like the person presenting them.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling.
All this fuss about how fast CO2 concentrations rose and no thought at all about how long a mass extinction actually takes.
The largest known mass extinction 252 million years ago that marked the end of the Permian period lasted a minimum of 12,000 years and may have taken as long as 108,000 years. You all act like it happens overnight. It doesn't. Natural mass extinctions take thousands upon thousands of years. So many thousands of years that it's relatively easy for human intervention to prevent a lot of them entirely. We will certainly save all the species with cute, fuzzy babies. Odds are we'll save every other species we find useful or interesting, and many more besides. Mass extinctions take so long that you only have to be paying as much attention as we're paying now to notice a niche starting to go empty and do something about it. Foolishly, perhaps, because mass extinctions are natural, have happened repeatedly, and are irrelevant to the survivors. If your species lives through it, you don't care what happened to all the rest. A new food web will grow up in place of the old one. And if you don't think our species can't artificially maintain a food web to support ourselves, you haven't been paying attention—we already do.
That mass extinction involved 6 million cubic kilometers of lava, by the way. That should sound like a big number, because it's a fucking big number. Enough to cover the continental US a mile deep. People who run around waving their hands about "mass extinction" events over a little burning coal should bear that in mind.
So. Sex workers on Facebook. That would explain the occasional friend request I get from accounts that only contain three or four pictures of a 20-ish girl in yoga pants and handbra. And here I just assumed it was the NSA.
I just assumed it was a more sophisticated Nigerian scam. Or a straight up spammer.
At this point there are probably very few people in the world that haven't had a picture of them uploaded and tagged.
So far as I know, Facebook does not have a picture of me uploaded and tagged. There are very few pictures of me, period. But I don't actually know, because I'm not on Facebook, and trying to find out would expose me to their machine.
Changes in tenths of degrees normally take several millenia
Says who? There's absolutely no long term temperature proxy that can reflect a decade long temperature change, in either direction. The proxies that exist that proxy times more than 1000 years ago are all very low resolution. There is no evidence whatsoever that temperatures "normally" change in several millenia, because there is no proxy with the resolution to indicate shorter term changes in the first place.
I love Randall as much as the next guy, but he overreached with that graphic.
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds.
The food that arrived long before you did? Every proposal about sending humans to Mars involves sending a supply cache well ahead of the humans, and making sure it lands safely, before humans ever launch. The US military and NASA both know a great many things about preserving food for long periods of time. NASA research into the topic continues to this day. It's something that can be done on the ground easily enough, which is mostly what NASA does these days.
People visiting Mars is much like people visiting the polar regions of Earth, or the highest mountains. You send supplies out ahead, and follow along behind. Except this time, robots can take the supplies ahead, instead of an advance party of other humans. Point is, the technique for getting people into and out of inhospitable places has been well understood for hundreds of years. Logistically, a trip to Mars is no different than a trip to the peak of Everest. Do it badly and people will die, sure enough. Do it right, and everybody is fine.
Elon Musk's own presentation to IAC this year made sure to point out that there would be 5 cargo-only launches in advance of the first human launch. Each of those launches could carry as much as 150 metric tons. 750 metric tons is a lot of sandwiches.
So I'll pull over to the side of the road and start fiddling. I'll select my phone from the car's bluetooth menu, it'll pop up a "downloading address book" popup status message. I didn't ask it to do this, there's no option to turn this off. This step naturally never succeeds. I cancel, try again. Same thing. Eventually, it'll just start skipping this step and I'll get a 'connect' button finally. This step usually works.
I'll usually have to kill the youtube process on my phone since Youtube's app is not smart enough to switch to a new bluetooth connection when it happens (when I'm in the car, I'll get a hankering to listen to a specific song I don't have on my phone. I've found Youtube is the best for that). Now, thanks to collisions in instructions between the car and the phone, the audio stream will start, auto-pause, and then start again. At that point, I'll either have gotten into a car accident or arrived at my destination.
That sounds remarkably like the audio experience in Linux on the desktop.
Yes. And that means the companies were not paying their legally required taxes?
Yes, companies were not paying their legally required taxes.
Who decides what companies should pay within a sovereign nation? Is it the nation, or the EU?
The nation. The nation made a decision to agree to certain terms when it joined the economic union known as the European Union. Those terms are binding on the nation as long as they're part of that union. Not enforcing those terms is the sovereign equivalent of signing up for a cell phone contract, then telling the cell phone company you're only going to pay 30% of the bill each month, because it's a better deal for you.
And if there is an issue - does it mean the company didn't pay its legally required taxes, or that the nation violated some trade agreement it had?
Both. The company didn't pay its legally required taxes and the nation that is letting it is violating a trade agreement by doing so.
Really, this isn't hard. If you believe in the rule of law at all, then you must also believe that sovereign nations are subject to it, or treaties are totally meaningless, always. Which is certainly an option, if you want the world at each other's throats on a constant basis. Those of us who prefer peace and quiet would like to see treaties honored.
And Apple can pay their fucking taxes. I have to. So do they.
The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth.
This rocket is fueled with methane, burning in Raptor engines. Combustion of methane and liquid oxygen produces primarily carbon dioxide and water.
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H20
Burning is never perfect, so there are some oddball species in there, but burning in a Raptor engine is pretty damn close to perfect or it wouldn't work as well as it does. Its exhaust is better than the exhaust from your furnace, even if you have a high efficiency furnace, because the fuel has been purified to a higher standard than what you typically get from a natural gas line. The rocket exhaust is far better than your furnace if you have an older furnace, and way way better than the exhaust from your tailpipe (and the tailpipes of all of your 3 million neighbors).
I saw this happen to more then one of my friends in various classes in college, and near as I can tell it is only getting worse. If you are someone who doesn't agree with the morality taught at the 'secular' university then you can be expected to be persecuted by the teachers for disagreing or debating them , especially about literature.
Yeah, and...? If your friends don't want to read certain material, they should be reading the syllabus for the class and dropping the class if it contains material they don't want to read. If you signed up for the course and want credit for the course, you do the work required by the course. That's how it is. Don't like it? Don't take the course.
Or, they could be adults, and read the material. If their worldview is so very fragile that exposure to objectionable material could shatter it, maybe they're the ones with the problem.
But of course neither of those solutions is preferred, is it? The whole point is to take the course, demand special treatment, not get it, and conclude the world is out to get you and your friends, and you're therefore a persecuted minority who must double down on your beliefs in order to hold out against the world. Yes, we're familiar with the techniques. They're commonly used by cults to isolate victims from society.
This is probably the highest value data breach in the history of mankind, and alarmingly that isn't even hyperbole.
While this is manifestly true, it's such a gigantic breach that 148 million people are not going to be victimized. There literally aren't enough criminals to take advantage of all the data.
I'm all for subjecting Equifax to the corporate death penalty just on principle, but as a practical matter, fraud rates will go up, but not astronomically higher. There simply aren't enough fraudsters to take advantage of all the opportunities for fraud presented by the breach.
Unless someone manages to automate applying for credit using the data using a major botnet with enough independent IPs to dodge some of the automated fraud detection mechanisms. Then all your spittle would be fully justified.
While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense.
Isn't that actually the problem though? Our current AI isn't dangerous because it's sapient and malignant; our current AI is dangerous because it's insensate and stupid but very very determined. And by determined, I mean spambot-determined. It WILL send 1 billion spam emails per day, come hell or high water.
Translate that into pattern-matching AI that controls mobile hardware. If we're lucky, that only means self-driving cars following you down the sidewalk, yelling at you through its government-mandated loudspeaker intended to simulate engine noise, trying to get you to buy Viagra and personal injury lawyers. If we're unlucky, it ensures that you actually need a personal injury lawyer before trying to sell you one.
I mean, there was the guy who tried to make his own toaster from scratch and it took him a year and it barely worked once. We all depend on information.
Pretty pathetic. If you're determined to make a toaster from scratch, and know nothing about toasters, make one of these. A competent blacksmith can make one in 20 minutes. An amateur might need a couple of afternoons.
Knowing that's what a toaster was for more than two centuries probably counts as information that's hard to acquire without the Internet, nowadays.
I'd like everyone involved in this project to imaging giving their grandmother a lifetime ID that can never be replaced that requires grandma to keep her private key, a 512-bit string of digits, secure from hackers, hard drive crashes, agencies with sloppy security, malware, malicious other people, ransomeware, a single typo in a long string of gibberish, back backup operational procedures, and misunderstanding the difference between her private-key, her public-key, her wallet, her address, her seed phrase, and her encryption password.
Sounds like a user interface problem.
Somewhat less glibly, that sounds like a user interface problem that could also be improved with the use of hardware keys, like smartcards or Yubikeys. When Grandma can no longer keep track of her car keys, then she might have a problem with her ID keycard, but until then, she should be good to go, if the interface is reasonable.
The anonymous coward's comment about the government losing control of its root key seems to be a far worse problem, though that too is manageable.
In addition, unlike destroying a plane, destroying a hyper-loop train would also affect the actual infrastructure. So, enjoy your cavity search.
Why? An accident on the highway also affects the actual infrastructure. There was an accident on the highway I commute on this morning. Three lanes were closed, for hours. Nobody was cavity searched (though the idiot drivers who ran into each other probably should be, to teach them a lesson).
Good Answer! And now there is the question of how fast can it stop without turning everybody into goo! And lets say I take a crowbar and drive it into the hyperloop from the top. Not by hand of course.
Not at all. It's inch thick steel. You're not getting that crowbar into the tube short of high explosive, like a sabot round from a tank, or such a large machine that someone (in uniform) will ask you what the hell you're doing while you're still setting up.
But let's say you succeed, somehow. What happens? Nothing. Pods zip right past the foot or so of crowbar protruding from the ceiling. They only occupy about 38% of the diameter of the tube, and they ride on the bottom of it. A breach in the top or sides that results in something protruding into the tube some small fraction of its diameter won't affect any passing pods at all.
Instead what we get is clickbait bullshit that implies Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and one that doesn't do online advertisement
Er, Apple spent ~$100 million on digital advertising in 2016. Sure that was down 16% from 2015, but just because they no longer call out exactly how much they're spending online in their SEC filings doesn't mean they aren't still doing it.
You won't notice it unless you're really tracking requests - if you mouseover the us.pg.com link it doesn't show the Google tracker. If you inspect the source it just looks like a regular HREF link.
You also get the squirrelly tracking URL if you "Copy Link Location" in your browser. A continuing annoyance when I have just googled for a reference and can tell from the summary it's the URL I want, so I don't need to follow it. But to actually copy it, I have to highlight and copy text, not try to copy the URL.
Spend some time with business leaders and you'll find that they're mostly clueless assholes, placed in their positions by wealthy families, running mostly brain-dead companies that make money due to some legacy accident.
Not quite true. Most of the big multinationals got where they are through intentional execution of a sound business plan—fifty or sixty years ago. They've been coasting on sheer inertia ever since. But they did get up to speed intentionally, not accidentally. The aforementioned clueless assholes polish the chrome, and occasionally fuck with the direction of the company, which invariably loses some of the inertia.
The mythology survives because people like Avi Arad exist, who took an actually bankrupt company in a fading industry and transformed it into a modern entertainment powerhouse. I'm referring, of course, to Marvel. For every 100 clueless assholes, there's one Avi Arad, legitimately keeping the myth alive.
It also does not capture brand building. Jewellers, for example, advertise throughout the year, with less expectation of sales next month than people remembering the brand name come holiday season or anniversaries. Similar for plumbers and funeral homes with local ads. The goal is being the first company you think of when you one day will use such services.
I'm not convinced brand building is actually effective.
You specifically called out funeral homes. I know with absolute certainty that a funeral home was advertising on a billboard every day last month next to a highway I commute to work on. And I couldn't tell you without hypnosis what the name of the place was. I might have a subconsciously positive response to the name if I see it in a group of funeral home names, but I doubt it's reliable.
I know that's the theory behind brand building, but I question just what percentage of the population it actually works on reliably enough to test above random chance in a double blind study. I know such studies have been done in the past. I am wondering if one has been repeated since the rise of Internet advertising.
So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?"
Dating websites generally require you to fill out a profile before you're allowed to approach other members. Women seeking men who fill out women seeking women on the website are among the 80% of women chasing 20% of the men. Those 20% know the deal, because they get approached on an hourly basis, and every single woman disclaims her orientation tag in her approach. Those women don't want to be approached at all. They want to do the approaching.
Slashdot Mirror
No harmful health effects at all. None. I mean, you will eventually get cancer but LOOK AT THE FUNNY MONKEY!
Trump was elected for a reason.
The serious answers were insightful, usually a full or several full paragraphs with meaty details suitable for the audience, and honestly impressive that a CEO could do that off the top of his head.
There's a reason Elon Musk self-identifies as SpaceX's Chief Designer more frequently than he self-identifies as CEO. He's making very technical decisions after learning and understanding the ramifications of the options. He has a physics degree, which alone makes him a far cry from most MBA CEOs today, who choose among technical options they literally can't understand based on how much they like the person presenting them.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling.
All this fuss about how fast CO2 concentrations rose and no thought at all about how long a mass extinction actually takes.
The largest known mass extinction 252 million years ago that marked the end of the Permian period lasted a minimum of 12,000 years and may have taken as long as 108,000 years. You all act like it happens overnight. It doesn't. Natural mass extinctions take thousands upon thousands of years. So many thousands of years that it's relatively easy for human intervention to prevent a lot of them entirely. We will certainly save all the species with cute, fuzzy babies. Odds are we'll save every other species we find useful or interesting, and many more besides. Mass extinctions take so long that you only have to be paying as much attention as we're paying now to notice a niche starting to go empty and do something about it. Foolishly, perhaps, because mass extinctions are natural, have happened repeatedly, and are irrelevant to the survivors. If your species lives through it, you don't care what happened to all the rest. A new food web will grow up in place of the old one. And if you don't think our species can't artificially maintain a food web to support ourselves, you haven't been paying attention—we already do.
That mass extinction involved 6 million cubic kilometers of lava, by the way. That should sound like a big number, because it's a fucking big number. Enough to cover the continental US a mile deep. People who run around waving their hands about "mass extinction" events over a little burning coal should bear that in mind.
So. Sex workers on Facebook. That would explain the occasional friend request I get from accounts that only contain three or four pictures of a 20-ish girl in yoga pants and handbra. And here I just assumed it was the NSA.
I just assumed it was a more sophisticated Nigerian scam. Or a straight up spammer.
At this point there are probably very few people in the world that haven't had a picture of them uploaded and tagged.
So far as I know, Facebook does not have a picture of me uploaded and tagged. There are very few pictures of me, period. But I don't actually know, because I'm not on Facebook, and trying to find out would expose me to their machine.
That seems like a problem of its own.
Yes, we've only recently discovered how to launch rockets.
We've only recently discovered how to launch rockets and get them back in one piece and launch them again.
Jackass.
Changes in tenths of degrees normally take several millenia
Says who? There's absolutely no long term temperature proxy that can reflect a decade long temperature change, in either direction. The proxies that exist that proxy times more than 1000 years ago are all very low resolution. There is no evidence whatsoever that temperatures "normally" change in several millenia, because there is no proxy with the resolution to indicate shorter term changes in the first place.
I love Randall as much as the next guy, but he overreached with that graphic.
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds.
The food that arrived long before you did? Every proposal about sending humans to Mars involves sending a supply cache well ahead of the humans, and making sure it lands safely, before humans ever launch. The US military and NASA both know a great many things about preserving food for long periods of time. NASA research into the topic continues to this day. It's something that can be done on the ground easily enough, which is mostly what NASA does these days.
People visiting Mars is much like people visiting the polar regions of Earth, or the highest mountains. You send supplies out ahead, and follow along behind. Except this time, robots can take the supplies ahead, instead of an advance party of other humans. Point is, the technique for getting people into and out of inhospitable places has been well understood for hundreds of years. Logistically, a trip to Mars is no different than a trip to the peak of Everest. Do it badly and people will die, sure enough. Do it right, and everybody is fine.
Elon Musk's own presentation to IAC this year made sure to point out that there would be 5 cargo-only launches in advance of the first human launch. Each of those launches could carry as much as 150 metric tons. 750 metric tons is a lot of sandwiches.
Tesla cars don't exist? Solar roofs? If that's all vapor then it is truly spectacular vapor.
OP was confused by the vapor trails from all those rockets.
Taking off: "All I see is vapor!"
Landing first stage: "It's just a big cloud of vapor!"
It's a problem for those with a stiff neck and hardening of the attitude. It's difficult for them to look up.
So I'll pull over to the side of the road and start fiddling. I'll select my phone from the car's bluetooth menu, it'll pop up a "downloading address book" popup status message. I didn't ask it to do this, there's no option to turn this off. This step naturally never succeeds. I cancel, try again. Same thing. Eventually, it'll just start skipping this step and I'll get a 'connect' button finally. This step usually works.
I'll usually have to kill the youtube process on my phone since Youtube's app is not smart enough to switch to a new bluetooth connection when it happens (when I'm in the car, I'll get a hankering to listen to a specific song I don't have on my phone. I've found Youtube is the best for that). Now, thanks to collisions in instructions between the car and the phone, the audio stream will start, auto-pause, and then start again. At that point, I'll either have gotten into a car accident or arrived at my destination.
That sounds remarkably like the audio experience in Linux on the desktop.
Yes. And that means the companies were not paying their legally required taxes?
Yes, companies were not paying their legally required taxes.
Who decides what companies should pay within a sovereign nation? Is it the nation, or the EU?
The nation. The nation made a decision to agree to certain terms when it joined the economic union known as the European Union. Those terms are binding on the nation as long as they're part of that union. Not enforcing those terms is the sovereign equivalent of signing up for a cell phone contract, then telling the cell phone company you're only going to pay 30% of the bill each month, because it's a better deal for you.
And if there is an issue - does it mean the company didn't pay its legally required taxes, or that the nation violated some trade agreement it had?
Both. The company didn't pay its legally required taxes and the nation that is letting it is violating a trade agreement by doing so.
Really, this isn't hard. If you believe in the rule of law at all, then you must also believe that sovereign nations are subject to it, or treaties are totally meaningless, always. Which is certainly an option, if you want the world at each other's throats on a constant basis. Those of us who prefer peace and quiet would like to see treaties honored.
And Apple can pay their fucking taxes. I have to. So do they.
The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth.
This rocket is fueled with methane, burning in Raptor engines. Combustion of methane and liquid oxygen produces primarily carbon dioxide and water.
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H20
Burning is never perfect, so there are some oddball species in there, but burning in a Raptor engine is pretty damn close to perfect or it wouldn't work as well as it does. Its exhaust is better than the exhaust from your furnace, even if you have a high efficiency furnace, because the fuel has been purified to a higher standard than what you typically get from a natural gas line. The rocket exhaust is far better than your furnace if you have an older furnace, and way way better than the exhaust from your tailpipe (and the tailpipes of all of your 3 million neighbors).
I saw this happen to more then one of my friends in various classes in college, and near as I can tell it is only getting worse. If you are someone who doesn't agree with the morality taught at the 'secular' university then you can be expected to be persecuted by the teachers for disagreing or debating them , especially about literature.
Yeah, and...? If your friends don't want to read certain material, they should be reading the syllabus for the class and dropping the class if it contains material they don't want to read. If you signed up for the course and want credit for the course, you do the work required by the course. That's how it is. Don't like it? Don't take the course.
Or, they could be adults, and read the material. If their worldview is so very fragile that exposure to objectionable material could shatter it, maybe they're the ones with the problem.
But of course neither of those solutions is preferred, is it? The whole point is to take the course, demand special treatment, not get it, and conclude the world is out to get you and your friends, and you're therefore a persecuted minority who must double down on your beliefs in order to hold out against the world. Yes, we're familiar with the techniques. They're commonly used by cults to isolate victims from society.
This is probably the highest value data breach in the history of mankind, and alarmingly that isn't even hyperbole.
While this is manifestly true, it's such a gigantic breach that 148 million people are not going to be victimized. There literally aren't enough criminals to take advantage of all the data.
I'm all for subjecting Equifax to the corporate death penalty just on principle, but as a practical matter, fraud rates will go up, but not astronomically higher. There simply aren't enough fraudsters to take advantage of all the opportunities for fraud presented by the breach.
Unless someone manages to automate applying for credit using the data using a major botnet with enough independent IPs to dodge some of the automated fraud detection mechanisms. Then all your spittle would be fully justified.
While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense.
Isn't that actually the problem though? Our current AI isn't dangerous because it's sapient and malignant; our current AI is dangerous because it's insensate and stupid but very very determined. And by determined, I mean spambot-determined. It WILL send 1 billion spam emails per day, come hell or high water.
Translate that into pattern-matching AI that controls mobile hardware. If we're lucky, that only means self-driving cars following you down the sidewalk, yelling at you through its government-mandated loudspeaker intended to simulate engine noise, trying to get you to buy Viagra and personal injury lawyers. If we're unlucky, it ensures that you actually need a personal injury lawyer before trying to sell you one.
They also have CNN for that purpose.
FTFY.
I mean, there was the guy who tried to make his own toaster from scratch and it took him a year and it barely worked once. We all depend on information.
Pretty pathetic. If you're determined to make a toaster from scratch, and know nothing about toasters, make one of these. A competent blacksmith can make one in 20 minutes. An amateur might need a couple of afternoons.
Knowing that's what a toaster was for more than two centuries probably counts as information that's hard to acquire without the Internet, nowadays.
I'd like everyone involved in this project to imaging giving their grandmother a lifetime ID that can never be replaced that requires grandma to keep her private key, a 512-bit string of digits, secure from hackers, hard drive crashes, agencies with sloppy security, malware, malicious other people, ransomeware, a single typo in a long string of gibberish, back backup operational procedures, and misunderstanding the difference between her private-key, her public-key, her wallet, her address, her seed phrase, and her encryption password.
Sounds like a user interface problem.
Somewhat less glibly, that sounds like a user interface problem that could also be improved with the use of hardware keys, like smartcards or Yubikeys. When Grandma can no longer keep track of her car keys, then she might have a problem with her ID keycard, but until then, she should be good to go, if the interface is reasonable.
The anonymous coward's comment about the government losing control of its root key seems to be a far worse problem, though that too is manageable.
In addition, unlike destroying a plane, destroying a hyper-loop train would also affect the actual infrastructure. So, enjoy your cavity search.
Why? An accident on the highway also affects the actual infrastructure. There was an accident on the highway I commute on this morning. Three lanes were closed, for hours. Nobody was cavity searched (though the idiot drivers who ran into each other probably should be, to teach them a lesson).
Good Answer! And now there is the question of how fast can it stop without turning everybody into goo! And lets say I take a crowbar and drive it into the hyperloop from the top. Not by hand of course.
Not at all. It's inch thick steel. You're not getting that crowbar into the tube short of high explosive, like a sabot round from a tank, or such a large machine that someone (in uniform) will ask you what the hell you're doing while you're still setting up.
But let's say you succeed, somehow. What happens? Nothing. Pods zip right past the foot or so of crowbar protruding from the ceiling. They only occupy about 38% of the diameter of the tube, and they ride on the bottom of it. A breach in the top or sides that results in something protruding into the tube some small fraction of its diameter won't affect any passing pods at all.
Instead what we get is clickbait bullshit that implies Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and one that doesn't do online advertisement
Er, Apple spent ~$100 million on digital advertising in 2016. Sure that was down 16% from 2015, but just because they no longer call out exactly how much they're spending online in their SEC filings doesn't mean they aren't still doing it.
You won't notice it unless you're really tracking requests - if you mouseover the us.pg.com link it doesn't show the Google tracker. If you inspect the source it just looks like a regular HREF link.
You also get the squirrelly tracking URL if you "Copy Link Location" in your browser. A continuing annoyance when I have just googled for a reference and can tell from the summary it's the URL I want, so I don't need to follow it. But to actually copy it, I have to highlight and copy text, not try to copy the URL.
Spend some time with business leaders and you'll find that they're mostly clueless assholes, placed in their positions by wealthy families, running mostly brain-dead companies that make money due to some legacy accident.
Not quite true. Most of the big multinationals got where they are through intentional execution of a sound business plan—fifty or sixty years ago. They've been coasting on sheer inertia ever since. But they did get up to speed intentionally, not accidentally. The aforementioned clueless assholes polish the chrome, and occasionally fuck with the direction of the company, which invariably loses some of the inertia.
The mythology survives because people like Avi Arad exist, who took an actually bankrupt company in a fading industry and transformed it into a modern entertainment powerhouse. I'm referring, of course, to Marvel. For every 100 clueless assholes, there's one Avi Arad, legitimately keeping the myth alive.
It also does not capture brand building.
Jewellers, for example, advertise throughout the year, with less expectation of sales next month than people remembering the brand name come holiday season or anniversaries. Similar for plumbers and funeral homes with local ads.
The goal is being the first company you think of when you one day will use such services.
I'm not convinced brand building is actually effective.
You specifically called out funeral homes. I know with absolute certainty that a funeral home was advertising on a billboard every day last month next to a highway I commute to work on. And I couldn't tell you without hypnosis what the name of the place was. I might have a subconsciously positive response to the name if I see it in a group of funeral home names, but I doubt it's reliable.
I know that's the theory behind brand building, but I question just what percentage of the population it actually works on reliably enough to test above random chance in a double blind study. I know such studies have been done in the past. I am wondering if one has been repeated since the rise of Internet advertising.
So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?"
Dating websites generally require you to fill out a profile before you're allowed to approach other members. Women seeking men who fill out women seeking women on the website are among the 80% of women chasing 20% of the men. Those 20% know the deal, because they get approached on an hourly basis, and every single woman disclaims her orientation tag in her approach. Those women don't want to be approached at all. They want to do the approaching.