I doubt a whole day's economic output was actually destroyed. Certainly, there was some loss --- but a lot of economic activity just ends up being moved to the day(s) after. If you can't buy groceries on one day, your family probably doesn't eat a day's less of food; you just make a slightly bigger grocery run the next day. Goods scheduled to be delivered aren't tossed in a pile and incinerated. Yes, there will be marginal inefficiencies created, but I suspect that far less than (annual economic output)/365 was lost.
That said, I'd vote for Celestia if she ran for president of America. no question.
On the contrary, I think you should very strongly question that vote. You, as an "omniscient" observer of the events in Equestria, have the "privileged" knowledge that the authors of that universe have made Celestia to be truly kind and wise. In US presidential elections, there is no way to have that assurance --- all you know is the story being spun by campaign propagandists to sucker you into thinking the candidate's "publicly visible" values will be reflected in their governance. You might think you're voting for Celestia, but really elect Zombie Margaret Thatcher wearing a pony suit, running on an "elements of harmony" platform only because those terms polled highly with the influential brony voting bloc.
Destroying 30 minutes of instruction for a whole campus and violating students' civil rights is way out of proportion to the risk of getting killed by an active shooter, which for a college student is on the order of 1 in 300,000 per year.
Consider this from a Bayesian perspective. The chance of any random college student being shot on any random day is extremely low (~1/(300,000*365)), so of course it would be stupid to stop classes *every day of the year* for *every college campus*. However, given the Bayesian priors that a shooter is *on your campus today,* your risk of being shot skyrockets to far more than 1/(300000*365) --- and making everyone on campus miss a class might be reasonably proportioned to prevent something in the 1-10 deaths range.
On 1: the problem is that energy is a fungible resource. No matter how awesomely clean your local/regional energy supply is, by using more of that energy you're encouraging someone elsewhere to make up the difference with more coal. If you didn't use the "clean" energy, someone else (who otherwise would be using coal) could, since "clean" energy providing regions can export their excess to replace neighboring "dirty" resources. The way to make energy use "cleaner" isn't to use more clean energy (on top of "dirty" energy), but to replace "dirty" sources with clean ones.
On 2: if the same amount of energy is $10 during the day and $5 at night, then you wouldn't be mining $10 of bitcoin with $5 of energy at night --- because everyone would be doing the same, and the price of bitcoin would fall to match the $5 night energy cost. Your same argument that economic forces will push bitcoin to roughly match the cost of energy apply just as well here. This ability to absorb more "wasted" night-time energy might seem useful in the short-term, but all it does is compete against real efficiency gains from either moving other daytime energy expenditures to the night, or developing better ways to store excess night energy for the day.
The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.
A single "militant guy" is probably proportionally more dangerous than a big ol' military unit. Having every gun-totin' redneck in town swarm the streets to spray bullets at anyone dressed like a "bad guy" is an effective method for repelling a group of uniformed invaders; but, in an asymmetrical conflict against one guy in a hoodie, the results of such a "populist" response are likely to involve more townspeople killing each other in panicked crossfire than the "militant guy" could ever manage on his own. In this case, it's probably best to wait for the organized and trained professional SWAT team to show up.
Averaging over the whole country for the whole year, you are (as you noted) far, far more likely to be killed by something "mundane" like a car. However, on the day and in the neighborhood where a desperate fugitive (who's already shown a propensity for killing people) is loose, the odds are significantly shifted. Shutting down too large an area (e.g. a whole gigantic city) might be on the excessive side (where the specific danger is "lost in the noise" of regular daily harms); however, extra caution in a narrower area (e.g. locking down a university campus or suburb) may be well-justified in terms of risk mitigation, where the risk of being harmed within that specific geographic and time window is drastically higher than the long-term regional average risks of daily living.
sorry about the formatting glitches in my post above... some trivial work matter distracted me from my important magical pony ranting at just the wrong moment (between "preview" and "submit").
Within Equestria, there is little evidence that the governing system does not work wonderfully, to the benefit of the whole society --- but it's easy to make fictional governments work well in fiction. If you really had a true all-benevolent and all-wise dictator-for-life, that would be awesome; unfortunately, real-world attempts end up being a bit more... North Korea. My argument against the "Equestria model" does not hinge on how well Equestria works in Equestria, but how it is applicable to this world.
MLP:FiM focuses on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships (friendship, family, neighborhood, etc.), and, in this area, does a fine job (the "Elements of Harmony" work fine here). Its portrayal of political dynamics, however, is rather "thin"; merely a background and plot-device source for character interactions. Political analysis requires consideration of extrapersonal systematic and institutional dynamics, which remain largely invisible in the MLP:FiM world. I think it is extremely dangerous to reduce political analysis to a purely "personal character" level, allowing serious unchecked systematic failures not visible on the proper-personal-character-integrity level.
deconstructs the entire hierarchy of power.
...and reconstructs it into... something where the people are still on top? Right?
Of course; this is the key difference between many critiques of power --- which identify particular existing power structures in need of reform, only to replace them with the next problematic power structure --- and an anarchist approach that intentionally avoids the reconsolidation of power after old hierarchies are dismantled, by generating new institutions that explicitly broadly redistribute power to the people, with feedback mechanisms to encourage continued diffusion rather than concentration of power.
One measure to verify the accuracy of your hypothesis that GOP/Dem are coalitions is the frequency with which internal "factions" break from party-line voting (creating new coalitions distinct from party-line boundaries). Voting statistics indicate a high level of party-line loyalty, with the GOP typically acting in near-100% unity and the Dems displaying only slightly more coalition-style factionalism when right-wing factions of the Dem party side with the GOP. The near complete absence of strong coalition formations that defy party lines (e.g. a 60/40 GOP/Dem coalition squaring off against a 40/60 GOP/Dem coalition on some issue, rather than 90/10 vs. 0/100 GOP/Dem) invalidates the hypothesis that internal factionalism functionally recreates coalition politics.
Again, statistics show that the overwhelming majority still don't "get this right" --- perhaps because their subconscious is conflicted, so they aren't really trying to be 100% successful. Someone downs a bottle of valium, takes a well-needed nap, and wakes up in the hospital with a stomach pump and a referral to therapy. Guns make it a lot harder to intentionally fail. See the plot of suicide method effectiveness in the Wikipedia article on the subject: guns are ~80% effective, poisoning/overdose under 2%, cutting even less!
The key problem with the Equestria model: the leadership required to "enforce Harmony" is a racial elite (winged unicorns, with a tall white leader) who swoop in with superior power (magical artifacts that defeat dark-colored scary evil with blasts of rainbow energy). Basically, the "Equestria model" is what we already have, at least in the minds of the power elite "defenders of liberty" who employ powers of superior force to structure the world according to their high-minded ideals. You think you can find a *real* honest, kind, loyal, generous, humorous ruling elite to responsibly wield magical artifacts of power: that's about as likely as getting real alicorn ponies for our elected officials.
MLP(FIM) brushes aside the anarchist critiques of power that time and again prove to be right: "trust us, this time we're really the harmony-loving good guys" isn't a good platform for ceding ultimate political power to an elite few "princesses." We do not need political parties that promise a sparklier rainbow face to the future of power politics; we need radical reform that challenges and deconstructs the entire hierarchy of power.
Yet actual suicide statistics show that gun users have a far higher "success" rate. Other methods --- drugs, wrist slashing, etc. --- are much more likely to result in the victim passing out, or chickening out, being found by friends/family, rushed to the hospital, and given treatment (both for the immediate wounds, and long-term treatment for depression). Suicide is not typically the act of a rational and determined mind; even the small differences in effort between the "point and click" ease of a gun and marginally trickier methods make a huge difference for people carrying out the act in a half-hearted cry for help at the depths of depression.
A corollary to this point being that growing the bitcoin economy currency reserves requires and encourages wasting/destroying a nearly equal value of energy to create. If there are a billion dollars of bitcoin in circulation, that means a billion dollars of coal was burned to create those magic numbers. Bitcoin maintains its scarcity and value in the economically most inefficient possible manner: by requiring the destruction of an equal value of goods --- and specifically a kind of goods associated with some of the biggest economic externalities: energy (expending a dollar's market-price worth of energy costs the whole economy a lot more than a dollar once externalities are properly factored in).
You know why "some people sold themselves into slavery in order to keep their families from starving"? Because somebody else owned all the land, and houses, and farm implements that they'd need to work. A slave who sells himself into slavery proves he/she is perfectly capable of working hard to support themselves and their family; they would have made perfectly fine free citizens working their own land with their own tools. But because authoritarian oligopolist fuckers like you decide that society works best when a tiny few own all the resources, so the masses must sell their own bodies into slavery on terms pleasing to the few, slavery exists. And then we're supposed to be so thankful and gracious to the powerful "job creators" for giving back the laborers some tiny scraps of the fruit of their own labor. So no, I'm not going to thank the slaveowners for "graciously" allowing slaves to toil.
And saying "some slave owners treated their slaves the same as their own children" is an outright lie disprovable by a simple fact of history: no plantations were inherited by new black masters when the old white masters passed away. "Treating someone as your own children" doesn't mean arranging for their children to inherit the position of slavery under your own children's feet.
Worst thing that happens is the suspect keels over and plays possum well enough to take out a couple more people with him when law enforcement officers step in close to handle the "comatose" body.
Yes, society does place a higher value on the chattel property of the wealthy than the lives of the poor. This has little to do with favoring women over men, besides to the extent that women are seen as the precious and valuable property of men, and more useful being domestic slaves at home than cannon-fodder on the front lines. Of course, a society that values people as people (rather than pawns for the wealthy) is far more reluctant to make cannon fodder of anyone (either on their side or the opponent's).
Pay attention to the thread above; my statement about "making you buy stuff" wasn't a complaint that some company is forcing me to buy stuff through advertising --- it was a response to the parent poster above claiming people would magically stop wanting to buy things if advertising was cut back. Thus, my point was that companies don't make people buy things with advertising --- they'd be buying things anyway.
As for corporate free speech in advertising: I support free speech. That doesn't mean I support what everyone is saying, and won't speak out counter to people who are saying things I think are wrong and harmful to society. I think the massive allocation of resources to marketing is wrong and harmful; I speak out against it. I think that while folks should have free speech to talk about whatever they like, that corporate advertising gets unequal and unfair access to the "microphone" at the expense of everyone else: the megacorporate voice, representing the interests of the fraction-of-1% at the top, controls an overwhelming share of the public's "platforms for speech" (the media, the airwaves, the internet) because they've got money. Level the playing field and let the 1% have their 1% of the shouting, and the 99% their 99%.
And where the heck did you get the idea that I'd "rather the government controlled every bit of information you are allowed to see"?
Yes, they are "trained professionals" --- and out of a gigantic pool of trained professionals, you still get a lot of fatal idiocy. If you think think unleashing a bunch of gun-totin' civilians (each personally convinced they are the sharpest shooter and most level-headed adjudicator of human conflict) is going to have better results than this, you're completely looney. Handing over the same corrupting power --- a license to kill --- to any panicky racist hick, with an itchy trigger finger for vigilante justice, who fills out the forms won't make the world safer.
People don't need 20% of the entire economy (rough estimate, hard to make precise; there is more cost to advertising than direct TV/radio/Facebook expenditures; there is also wasteful effort put into packaging, just-for-selling-points R&D, higher prices for inferior goods with better advertising, monopolization and barrier to entry in markets, etc.) dedicated to "making them buy shiny new stuff" --- they'd still buy plenty if they could. We already see mass unemployment, because the middle class doesn't have as much money left to buy stuff after wealth has been accumulating upwards for several decades (not because they've become less needy/wanty). Advertising is an "arms race" situation: every company needs more and more bigger advertising to keep ahead of their competitors, not to assure that people will buy something with their money. The result is massive economic inefficiency, disguised in plain sight.
Strangely, mass protests are documented to have existed in history well before Facebook arrived --- however did they do it? Indeed, Facebook served as a communication channel for facilitating this protest. However, Facebook's ability to track, record, analyze, and sell the participants' data did not help. Nor would a profiteering megacorporation (with its own friendly FBI ties) be an advantageous ally in organizing protests against the powers closer to Facebook's empire.
Like you say, I might hate how Facebook does things, which is exactly what I'm doing here. New forms for fluid interpersonal communications via network channels? A-OK with me. Monetizing and commoditizing the "social network connectivity graph" to further entrench corporate power at the fundamental level of interpersonal interactions? DIAF.
I like having fun, and consider it a worthwhile use of power and water --- but I'm pretty sure there are more "effective" ways to have fun with less burden of "creepy stalker megacorporation inserting themselves into the entire fabric of your life."
Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
The problem (what I was wrong about) wasn't with the factual accuracy of whether or not the two pictured men have gone into hiding. The problem was encouraging a "vigilante justice" approach by (implicitly) labeling the photograph subjects as "violent psychopaths" who commit "heinous crimes." In these situations, strictly upholding the standard of "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" is important to protecting what many would consider highly important rights in our legal system (being tried according to due process rather than "it's obvious to everyone on twitter they did it"). Justice will not be better served by angry internet people declaring the verdict faster than the court system. On the other hand, great injustice is perpetrated were the two pictured people actually guilty of no greater crime than wearing backpacks at an unfortunate time and place.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt a whole day's economic output was actually destroyed. Certainly, there was some loss --- but a lot of economic activity just ends up being moved to the day(s) after. If you can't buy groceries on one day, your family probably doesn't eat a day's less of food; you just make a slightly bigger grocery run the next day. Goods scheduled to be delivered aren't tossed in a pile and incinerated. Yes, there will be marginal inefficiencies created, but I suspect that far less than (annual economic output)/365 was lost.
That said, I'd vote for Celestia if she ran for president of America. no question.
On the contrary, I think you should very strongly question that vote. You, as an "omniscient" observer of the events in Equestria, have the "privileged" knowledge that the authors of that universe have made Celestia to be truly kind and wise. In US presidential elections, there is no way to have that assurance --- all you know is the story being spun by campaign propagandists to sucker you into thinking the candidate's "publicly visible" values will be reflected in their governance. You might think you're voting for Celestia, but really elect Zombie Margaret Thatcher wearing a pony suit, running on an "elements of harmony" platform only because those terms polled highly with the influential brony voting bloc.
Destroying 30 minutes of instruction for a whole campus and violating students' civil rights is way out of proportion to the risk of getting killed by an active shooter, which for a college student is on the order of 1 in 300,000 per year.
Consider this from a Bayesian perspective. The chance of any random college student being shot on any random day is extremely low (~1/(300,000*365)), so of course it would be stupid to stop classes *every day of the year* for *every college campus*. However, given the Bayesian priors that a shooter is *on your campus today,* your risk of being shot skyrockets to far more than 1/(300000*365) --- and making everyone on campus miss a class might be reasonably proportioned to prevent something in the 1-10 deaths range.
On 1: the problem is that energy is a fungible resource. No matter how awesomely clean your local/regional energy supply is, by using more of that energy you're encouraging someone elsewhere to make up the difference with more coal. If you didn't use the "clean" energy, someone else (who otherwise would be using coal) could, since "clean" energy providing regions can export their excess to replace neighboring "dirty" resources. The way to make energy use "cleaner" isn't to use more clean energy (on top of "dirty" energy), but to replace "dirty" sources with clean ones.
On 2: if the same amount of energy is $10 during the day and $5 at night, then you wouldn't be mining $10 of bitcoin with $5 of energy at night --- because everyone would be doing the same, and the price of bitcoin would fall to match the $5 night energy cost. Your same argument that economic forces will push bitcoin to roughly match the cost of energy apply just as well here. This ability to absorb more "wasted" night-time energy might seem useful in the short-term, but all it does is compete against real efficiency gains from either moving other daytime energy expenditures to the night, or developing better ways to store excess night energy for the day.
The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.
A single "militant guy" is probably proportionally more dangerous than a big ol' military unit. Having every gun-totin' redneck in town swarm the streets to spray bullets at anyone dressed like a "bad guy" is an effective method for repelling a group of uniformed invaders; but, in an asymmetrical conflict against one guy in a hoodie, the results of such a "populist" response are likely to involve more townspeople killing each other in panicked crossfire than the "militant guy" could ever manage on his own. In this case, it's probably best to wait for the organized and trained professional SWAT team to show up.
Averaging over the whole country for the whole year, you are (as you noted) far, far more likely to be killed by something "mundane" like a car. However, on the day and in the neighborhood where a desperate fugitive (who's already shown a propensity for killing people) is loose, the odds are significantly shifted. Shutting down too large an area (e.g. a whole gigantic city) might be on the excessive side (where the specific danger is "lost in the noise" of regular daily harms); however, extra caution in a narrower area (e.g. locking down a university campus or suburb) may be well-justified in terms of risk mitigation, where the risk of being harmed within that specific geographic and time window is drastically higher than the long-term regional average risks of daily living.
sorry about the formatting glitches in my post above... some trivial work matter distracted me from my important magical pony ranting at just the wrong moment (between "preview" and "submit").
Within Equestria, there is little evidence that the governing system does not work wonderfully, to the benefit of the whole society --- but it's easy to make fictional governments work well in fiction. If you really had a true all-benevolent and all-wise dictator-for-life, that would be awesome; unfortunately, real-world attempts end up being a bit more... North Korea. My argument against the "Equestria model" does not hinge on how well Equestria works in Equestria, but how it is applicable to this world.
MLP:FiM focuses on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships (friendship, family, neighborhood, etc.), and, in this area, does a fine job (the "Elements of Harmony" work fine here). Its portrayal of political dynamics, however, is rather "thin"; merely a background and plot-device source for character interactions. Political analysis requires consideration of extrapersonal systematic and institutional dynamics, which remain largely invisible in the MLP:FiM world. I think it is extremely dangerous to reduce political analysis to a purely "personal character" level, allowing serious unchecked systematic failures not visible on the proper-personal-character-integrity level.
deconstructs the entire hierarchy of power.
...and reconstructs it into... something where the people are still on top? Right?
Of course; this is the key difference between many critiques of power --- which identify particular existing power structures in need of reform, only to replace them with the next problematic power structure --- and an anarchist approach that intentionally avoids the reconsolidation of power after old hierarchies are dismantled, by generating new institutions that explicitly broadly redistribute power to the people, with feedback mechanisms to encourage continued diffusion rather than concentration of power.
One measure to verify the accuracy of your hypothesis that GOP/Dem are coalitions is the frequency with which internal "factions" break from party-line voting (creating new coalitions distinct from party-line boundaries). Voting statistics indicate a high level of party-line loyalty, with the GOP typically acting in near-100% unity and the Dems displaying only slightly more coalition-style factionalism when right-wing factions of the Dem party side with the GOP. The near complete absence of strong coalition formations that defy party lines (e.g. a 60/40 GOP/Dem coalition squaring off against a 40/60 GOP/Dem coalition on some issue, rather than 90/10 vs. 0/100 GOP/Dem) invalidates the hypothesis that internal factionalism functionally recreates coalition politics.
Again, statistics show that the overwhelming majority still don't "get this right" --- perhaps because their subconscious is conflicted, so they aren't really trying to be 100% successful. Someone downs a bottle of valium, takes a well-needed nap, and wakes up in the hospital with a stomach pump and a referral to therapy. Guns make it a lot harder to intentionally fail. See the plot of suicide method effectiveness in the Wikipedia article on the subject: guns are ~80% effective, poisoning/overdose under 2%, cutting even less!
The key problem with the Equestria model: the leadership required to "enforce Harmony" is a racial elite (winged unicorns, with a tall white leader) who swoop in with superior power (magical artifacts that defeat dark-colored scary evil with blasts of rainbow energy). Basically, the "Equestria model" is what we already have, at least in the minds of the power elite "defenders of liberty" who employ powers of superior force to structure the world according to their high-minded ideals. You think you can find a *real* honest, kind, loyal, generous, humorous ruling elite to responsibly wield magical artifacts of power: that's about as likely as getting real alicorn ponies for our elected officials.
MLP(FIM) brushes aside the anarchist critiques of power that time and again prove to be right: "trust us, this time we're really the harmony-loving good guys" isn't a good platform for ceding ultimate political power to an elite few "princesses." We do not need political parties that promise a sparklier rainbow face to the future of power politics; we need radical reform that challenges and deconstructs the entire hierarchy of power.
Yet actual suicide statistics show that gun users have a far higher "success" rate. Other methods --- drugs, wrist slashing, etc. --- are much more likely to result in the victim passing out, or chickening out, being found by friends/family, rushed to the hospital, and given treatment (both for the immediate wounds, and long-term treatment for depression). Suicide is not typically the act of a rational and determined mind; even the small differences in effort between the "point and click" ease of a gun and marginally trickier methods make a huge difference for people carrying out the act in a half-hearted cry for help at the depths of depression.
A corollary to this point being that growing the bitcoin economy currency reserves requires and encourages wasting/destroying a nearly equal value of energy to create. If there are a billion dollars of bitcoin in circulation, that means a billion dollars of coal was burned to create those magic numbers. Bitcoin maintains its scarcity and value in the economically most inefficient possible manner: by requiring the destruction of an equal value of goods --- and specifically a kind of goods associated with some of the biggest economic externalities: energy (expending a dollar's market-price worth of energy costs the whole economy a lot more than a dollar once externalities are properly factored in).
You know why "some people sold themselves into slavery in order to keep their families from starving"? Because somebody else owned all the land, and houses, and farm implements that they'd need to work. A slave who sells himself into slavery proves he/she is perfectly capable of working hard to support themselves and their family; they would have made perfectly fine free citizens working their own land with their own tools. But because authoritarian oligopolist fuckers like you decide that society works best when a tiny few own all the resources, so the masses must sell their own bodies into slavery on terms pleasing to the few, slavery exists. And then we're supposed to be so thankful and gracious to the powerful "job creators" for giving back the laborers some tiny scraps of the fruit of their own labor. So no, I'm not going to thank the slaveowners for "graciously" allowing slaves to toil.
And saying "some slave owners treated their slaves the same as their own children" is an outright lie disprovable by a simple fact of history: no plantations were inherited by new black masters when the old white masters passed away. "Treating someone as your own children" doesn't mean arranging for their children to inherit the position of slavery under your own children's feet.
Worst thing that happens is the suspect keels over and plays possum well enough to take out a couple more people with him when law enforcement officers step in close to handle the "comatose" body.
Yes, society does place a higher value on the chattel property of the wealthy than the lives of the poor. This has little to do with favoring women over men, besides to the extent that women are seen as the precious and valuable property of men, and more useful being domestic slaves at home than cannon-fodder on the front lines. Of course, a society that values people as people (rather than pawns for the wealthy) is far more reluctant to make cannon fodder of anyone (either on their side or the opponent's).
Pay attention to the thread above; my statement about "making you buy stuff" wasn't a complaint that some company is forcing me to buy stuff through advertising --- it was a response to the parent poster above claiming people would magically stop wanting to buy things if advertising was cut back. Thus, my point was that companies don't make people buy things with advertising --- they'd be buying things anyway.
As for corporate free speech in advertising: I support free speech. That doesn't mean I support what everyone is saying, and won't speak out counter to people who are saying things I think are wrong and harmful to society. I think the massive allocation of resources to marketing is wrong and harmful; I speak out against it. I think that while folks should have free speech to talk about whatever they like, that corporate advertising gets unequal and unfair access to the "microphone" at the expense of everyone else: the megacorporate voice, representing the interests of the fraction-of-1% at the top, controls an overwhelming share of the public's "platforms for speech" (the media, the airwaves, the internet) because they've got money. Level the playing field and let the 1% have their 1% of the shouting, and the 99% their 99%.
And where the heck did you get the idea that I'd "rather the government controlled every bit of information you are allowed to see"?
Yes, they are "trained professionals" --- and out of a gigantic pool of trained professionals, you still get a lot of fatal idiocy. If you think think unleashing a bunch of gun-totin' civilians (each personally convinced they are the sharpest shooter and most level-headed adjudicator of human conflict) is going to have better results than this, you're completely looney. Handing over the same corrupting power --- a license to kill --- to any panicky racist hick, with an itchy trigger finger for vigilante justice, who fills out the forms won't make the world safer.
People don't need 20% of the entire economy (rough estimate, hard to make precise; there is more cost to advertising than direct TV/radio/Facebook expenditures; there is also wasteful effort put into packaging, just-for-selling-points R&D, higher prices for inferior goods with better advertising, monopolization and barrier to entry in markets, etc.) dedicated to "making them buy shiny new stuff" --- they'd still buy plenty if they could. We already see mass unemployment, because the middle class doesn't have as much money left to buy stuff after wealth has been accumulating upwards for several decades (not because they've become less needy/wanty). Advertising is an "arms race" situation: every company needs more and more bigger advertising to keep ahead of their competitors, not to assure that people will buy something with their money. The result is massive economic inefficiency, disguised in plain sight.
Strangely, mass protests are documented to have existed in history well before Facebook arrived --- however did they do it? Indeed, Facebook served as a communication channel for facilitating this protest. However, Facebook's ability to track, record, analyze, and sell the participants' data did not help. Nor would a profiteering megacorporation (with its own friendly FBI ties) be an advantageous ally in organizing protests against the powers closer to Facebook's empire.
Like you say, I might hate how Facebook does things, which is exactly what I'm doing here. New forms for fluid interpersonal communications via network channels? A-OK with me. Monetizing and commoditizing the "social network connectivity graph" to further entrench corporate power at the fundamental level of interpersonal interactions? DIAF.
I like having fun, and consider it a worthwhile use of power and water --- but I'm pretty sure there are more "effective" ways to have fun with less burden of "creepy stalker megacorporation inserting themselves into the entire fabric of your life."
Of course, "Power Usage Effectiveness" and "Water Usage Effectiveness" are somewhat deceptive metrics, because there's little useful societal "effect" produced by running Facebook's massive spyware operation. No matter how efficiently they churn out clock cycles per kWh or liter, spending those clock cycles on Facebook is an ecologically disastrous misapplication of humankind's resources. There is nothing "effective" about growing the share of the economy devoted to advertising.
Don't you know? The army of batshit-fucking-crazy delusions in conspiracy nutters' noggins. They have black UN helicopters, for goodness sake!
The problem (what I was wrong about) wasn't with the factual accuracy of whether or not the two pictured men have gone into hiding. The problem was encouraging a "vigilante justice" approach by (implicitly) labeling the photograph subjects as "violent psychopaths" who commit "heinous crimes." In these situations, strictly upholding the standard of "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" is important to protecting what many would consider highly important rights in our legal system (being tried according to due process rather than "it's obvious to everyone on twitter they did it"). Justice will not be better served by angry internet people declaring the verdict faster than the court system. On the other hand, great injustice is perpetrated were the two pictured people actually guilty of no greater crime than wearing backpacks at an unfortunate time and place.