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Re:Why I Work on Ads by floatrock on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:33AM (#27064788)
Sounded like buying indulgences to me.

"My sins are forgiven as long as I tithe some of my profits". Buys your way out of the issue, doesn't change the lifestyle.

Re:Why I Work on Ads by loeg on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:11PM (#27065396)
He'd have more take-home income if he worked outside of ad-tech and didn't give 50% of income to charity. So from a utilitarian perspective, I think I'm basically fine with this? Even if ads are "evil" (I am skeptical), they are very much a first-world problem compared with major global problems like malaria, clean drinking water, and hygienic bathrooms.
Re:Why I Work on Ads by floatrock on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:50PM (#27066834)
The trick to the utilitarian calculation is to include the externalities of all the work he's putting in -- an engineer's salary is only a subset of the value they create for the company.

The question is really how do you count all that excess "value", and is it good-value or evil-value. Once upon a time, the culture over there explicitly stated that they didn't want it to be evil... the bikeshedding going on here is opinions about the current implications of it all.