In addition to what others have said, it's also worth pointing out that the top 1% of income earners != the top 1% of wealth. The top end of the wealth spectrum are generally not earning much, if any, income subject to federal income tax.
Even if the ethics on the advertiser's side could be solved, advertising as the core source of income for a business has it's own unenthical incentives imo. It ultimately boils down to more attention == more ads == more money. I'd argue we got an early preview of that effect when 24 hour news channels were coming into their own in the 90s and 00s, and the detrimental effect it had on the quality of programming and frankly truthfulness. The scale of the internet has only exacerbated those issues.
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
One thing to note, I have ADHD and have similar issues getting sleepy when understimulated no matter how much sleep I get at night. Getting up and moving around for stimulation helps.
I do personally wish the role of ad based monetization models were included in these conversations more often. With both traditional media and social media the conversation tends to blame ideology for their shortcomings but in reality it's just, as you noted, a bad incentive model. They aren't ideological, they're just maximizing the amount of your attention they can capture because that maximizes the amount of ad revenue they can bring in.
There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.
Ceding Crimea to Russia may just make things more difficult to be honest. There are many other parts of eastern Ukraine that are primarily ethnic Russians and I would think Russia, at least, would consider the ceding of Crimea as justification for their further involvement.
All that link states is that Russia is denying they have given an ultimatum. Ukrainian leaders still claim they have. Its all he said she said at this point...
A source in the Ukrainian defence ministry has told the Guardian’s Shaun Walker, in Crimea, that he has heard nothing about an ultimatum that has reportedly been posed to Ukrainian forces in the region to surrender before 3am GMT or face an assault.
UPDATE: The Russian defence ministry denies any such ultimatum.
Shaun writes:
He is not that senior but says he’s on a base right now and neither he nor the base commanders have heard anything of the sort. He said: “It’s probably another red herring to stir up trouble.”
> Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest?
Is it an overreach if the Yemeni government "indiscriminately" collects the mobile phone records of US citizens? Or, more realistically, China, Russia, UK, Germany, etc...? It seems to me, when you carry out that kind of surveillance (really any sort of wide reaching security/military tactics) you can only expect reciprocity. And at that point why even be bothered if the NSA can collect American data? Even if they cannot legally capture it on their own, they know exactly where they need to go to get it...
I guess my point really boils down to "Do unto others...".
Is it an overreach if the Yemeni government "indiscriminately" collects the mobile phone records of US citizens? Or, more realistically, China, Russia, UK, Germany, etc...?
By my thinking, no, not at all. It's life in the modern world of sovereign states and power politics. And of course one of the NSA's jobs is to make that kind of surveillance harder. (I'm less sanguine about the kinds of intelligence sharing operations with allies that are indeed end-runs around the Fourth Amendment.)
