Yes and that's what's so depressing about it.

As engineers, wouldn't it be cool if the most valuable thing we could do was building tools that are inherently valuable instead of valuable because of the tool's ability to connect users with someone who wants to buy their attention?

You know, build some software that doesn't make you feel like a pimp.

Your first problem there is monetizing it. If nobody can pay for it, nobody is going to get together to make it.

I've posted this on HN before but we at Datajoy are trying to solve the problem of consuming without paying which lets ad platforms treat us as the product: https://datajoy.us/fupm.html.

Use it, block ads, pay for content...sleep better?

Maybe we should get rid of capitalism, then. It's obviously not doing the job of allocating resources to beneficial goods or raising productivity.

It's important to separate society's tastes, preferences, and incentives with market-based resource allocation.

At the very least, corporations and capitalism give us a productive place to put sociopaths (the alternative is religion, healthcare, government, exile/six feet under). And more communal economic systems seem to work well until the anti-social types take over - North Korea was actually better off than South Korea for awhile after the war and the anti-social types always do take over.

Capitalism does a really good job of making it easier to do more with less. My phone is a weather station, a flash light, a calculator, a camera, a camcorder, etc. and it's cheaper than most Cameras were just 30 years ago. On the flip side, a lot of the materials that make my phone come out of conflict zones and I'm sure that my phone funded some warlord's attack helicopters and that's not great and it's unfortunate that the 'past of least resistance' involves such unsavory things but the solution rests with more capitalism - the warlord needs to demand a higher price or operate the mines and figure out how to build a phone and go legit.

I was unaware allocation of resources toward "beneficial goods" (to whom?) was every a touted positive effect of capitalism.

I was unaware that anyone actually believed deontic moral justifications for an economic system, so I would have thought actual benefits to the population are the only effective anyone's ever touted.

Even the USSR had money and wealth. Desire to accumulate wealth in some form is a primitive instinct.

Money isn't the only motivation someone can have. People write lots of open source code for free, for example.

A lot of open source work is professional paid work.

And good thing too but not all of it is - in fact, it's a sign of how well developers are treated that they can afford to volunteer their time and expertise for everyone: developers don't need to spend every second of every day on the grind for basic living.

Yes, and a lot of it isn't, which is what I'm saying :)

Sex work is way more honest.

And porn and games always lead the way on innovation.

stopped me from innovating though

I wouldn't give advertising that much credit. An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too.

> An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too.

That's false. There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.

eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...

I think the problem is that elections are this ridiculous zero-sum game that is able to consume ever increasing amount of resources, where almost entire contribution of one party goes to cancel out the contribution of another party.

I don't actually feel it is zero sum. There is a lot of learning that happens through debate at all levels. One might argue it is the foundation of our society.

I wasn't thinking about the debates. I was thinking about all the money spent on campaign advertisements - on posters, phone calls, radio ads, TV ads, Internet ads, and so on, and so on. All that does is cancel out similar efforts from other candidates.

All that stuff leads the rest of us to debate too. The system depends upon having informed voters. As silly as that may sound today, I do feel that puts us in a better position to make progress than the other forms of government that exist.

> There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.

A lot of money is wasted on lost elections. I did say "equal", but my point was a lot of advertising dollars fail.

Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...

How does this explain the Republican party's continued support for healthcare bills with sub-25% approval ratings? Also I don't see Barney Frank, Signature Bank board member and author of a piece titled "Yes, I Took Bank Money. And It Made Me a Better Regulator" as a disinterested commentator.

Among the Republicans I know, all Obamacare-lite bills are more popular than Obamacare.

And there's probably a belief that people will like the bills after it passes. Just as a lot of 'conservatives' eventually came out in favor of Obamacare (like McCain), I'm sure a lot of people would admit that they like Obamacare-lite more than Obamacare. Self-interested politicians might think that the bills would be more popular once some people saw their health care burdens drop. And I don't think they're wrong, the healthy people who make Obamacare possible stand to gain the most under the Republican healthcare proposals - the young, the wealthy, the healthy.

Half the country votes and half the country votes GOP, a 25% approval rating can translate to near-universal approval in a political faction.

The amount of money spent on American elections is incredible.

In the 2012 US Presidential election (seems the data is not yet available for 2016), an estimated $7B was spent in total by all candidates and private groups. This is about $21.54 per person.

For comparison, in the last Canadian federal election, the top 5 parties combined received $127M in funding (public + private contributions). This amounts to about $3.60 per person, about one sixth as much on a per capita basis.