> During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters.
> The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.
Encouraging people to vote is buying elections now? What in the world?
Per the article, the funds spent weren't on ads, but on funding until-now exclusively government-funded election infrastructure and workers. And that this private funding favored Democrat counties in an attempt to skew the vote, by making it easier to vote in Democrat counties, or to have election officials disproportionately encourage voters in Democrat counties (I'm not familiar with the details of how US elections work, so I'm not confident about this, but that's the impression I got). If so, that's more than just "encouraging people to vote" - selectively overfunding elections in certain counties has just as much a biasing effect as underfunding them in others. I'm sure if the story was that Republicans slashed election budgets in Democrat areas, you'd agree that was unfair, no?
One might argue that this funding merely countered Republican efforts at voter suppression, and brought the elections closer to "fair" than they would be without it. The article doesn't say what the total spending per voter (government + private) was per likely Republican/Democrat voter, so this is possible. Though private funding of elections is worrisome regardless.
As noted in Time's February cover story, the Democratic party clearly outflanked its opposition in 2020.
"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
There are plenty of people who are difficult to convince to reduce their meat consumption using vegetarian food and meat substitutes alone. Providing choices like this will make it easier to get more folks to reduce meat consumption or go vegetarian.
Not necessarily. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have zero compunction about the practices of factory farms, so long as they get to enjoy their meat.
> I'm sure there are plenty of people who have zero compunction about the practices of factory farms
Like the people who work there. If you had compunction, you would lose it quick, or else you wouldn’t last long
Many people have shown an extraordinary lack of compunction in doing things far worse than factory farming (from the viewpoint of human-centric ethics at least), e.g Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Sinjar
Slaughterhouse workers are among the most exploited in any country, usually recruited from the lowest paid immigrants, and while some do it for 40 years without issues - or might already arrive with their own baggage -, many end up with PTSD or other psychological issues.
Agreed. Really poor conditions, here in Germany they are housed really poorly, are treated badly because of loopholes in worker rights. Some of those have been closed, because this year we had major corona outbreaks in slaughterhouses.
In the US the Food Megacorps had to weigh to shut down due to COVID related incidents in order to keep their supply chains from falling apart, and make sure meat was present when everyone was panic buying or restructure; in the end they just accepted that local poor and (mainly) immigrant labour deaths are an inherent extranality and an unavoidable part of the total calculus of getting the economics of factory farming to work [0]. Some even created a betting pool on how many would contract COVID in the processing plants, it's really fucking sick but an apt reflection of the Global Food Industry as whole. [1]
Fortunately, CSA memberships and community gardens sold out in record numbers this year, which is the only thing to take solace from and I hope it persists from now on.
I've personally reduced my protein consumption significantly to last year, and really mainly ate eggs and salmon that I had frozen from last years harvest. I ate chicken once or twice every week and usually made soup from kombu/katsubushi when I used up the bones.
It's boilerplate for companies that lose money! Most IPOing companies outside of the tech sector certainly don't have this in their S-1.
It's only not notable because if you've even skimmed the rest of the S-1, you already know whether they make money or not. If you haven't, it's possibly the most notable thing there. It's the single bit of information that tells you most about the company's historical financial performance.
If you're spending more than you're making, then you're almost certainly projecting LTV.
The big, falsifiable assumption here is that your acquisition sources will keep sending you users of the same quality. Because of the way that ML systems work, this tends to not be true, and if you are using long windows it will both take you a long time to realise this, and cost you a bunch of money.
This is normally how companies go bust/stop growing as a result of LTV models.
While in a vacuum larger losses aren't painting the full picture, but then if you take their revenue growth only increasing by 70% into context it looks even worse!
I recently had a director reach out to me about joining their team to work on rebuilding an ad system from scratch, so unfortunately your fear may very well be valid.
Correct, they used to display regular ads on their website (but never in the actual games) for those users that did not purchase the Premium subscription. Users with the premium subscription would then see only user-created ads for user-created content.
It was honestly quite jarring and this new approach is better for developers on the platform, as they can reach way more people.
I think it would be naive to not imagine advertising as part of the long term strategy for a platform like this. After they go public, it's going to be a big tool in their toolkit for profitability.
exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
> And it alleges that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private plane trips, including for extended family when he was not present; traveled to Africa with his wife on a safari gifted by an NRA vendor; and spent more than $3.6 million on luxury black car services and travel consultants in the past two years.
How do you figure? Uber Black is their high end service: professional drivers in luxury cars. The cost is 2-3 times that of Uber X, and (depending on your city) can be more expensive than a cab.
Private black car service means Jeaves is waiting for you in an S Class anywhere you go in the world. Uber Black is basically just higher tier Uber, they don't sit outside idle waiting for you to finish your meetings though, they're just an app way to hail an airport cab. Again, big difference.
