You'll have to look to find it, and the articles are behind paywalls.
They're not being trumpeted all over financial media -- but they should be.
What article? That Unilever is threatening to pull online ad campaigns stating that they believe half or more of the "clicks" are fraud. It was in the UK media -- quietly -- this weekend.
In other words, robots click them -- not humans, who actually watch the ads.
This story ought to be front-page news. It's not, and the financial media will not cover it the way it should.
Here's why it should be:
1. This is not new. These issues have been known and talked about for more than a year. It was news last year, and then it quietly "went away." Gee, you don't think Zuckerpig laid into the financial media, do you? Naw, nobody would ever to do that when if their little ad game blew up in their face the stock price of Facepig would be zero. Consider that if half of the online advertising revenue is false then the actual value of said platforms is nil since their cost of operation exceeds the true human-generated revenue. That makes all of these so-called "businesses" worthless.
2. Nobody has an incentive on a platform like Facebook, where posters do not get a cut of the revenue, to stick an army of robots out there and click the ads, except for Facebook itself. This is decidedly not true for Google's "Adsense" platform of course, or Youtubes, or whoever else where publishers get a piece of pie. There, if your traffic is high enough, there's an economic incentive to cheat. For someone like me it's not because the amount of money involved is too small, but for someone with a site that's garnering tens or hundreds of thousands a month in payouts you can easily cover the cost of a robot or three (hundred) to generate some false traffic.
The problem of course is that there aren't that many people with a big enough take to be worth employing robots, other than those who deliberately set up sites to do this and have no organic traffic at all. Those people ought to be easily identified and shut down within days, making such a strategy worthless since you won't get paid, if the sites in question cared to do so.
The problem is that all the incentives run the wrong way for the so-called "online advertising industry", unless they get caught and all of their businesses are destroyed. Otherwise the incentive is to cheat or at least look the other way on purpose while others cheat especially if, as is being alleged and has been alleged for over a year the "cheats" are half or more of all of the clicks.
In that case the incentive to cheat is not just clear it's an imperative because without the "false" clicks none of these firms have a viable business at all, except for possibly Google, and even Google is selling at 3x any sort of rational valuation.
The others, if there's any truth to this, are literal zeros.
ALL OF THEM.
Ask your friends -- how many "real" ads do they view and click on any of these sites? Can you find one person among your friends who actually does so and finds value in these ads? Tell me folks -- isn't it true that essentially all of the ads you see are for things you already bought and thus don't need again?
"Machine learning" my ass.
You know what the truth is, but by God the "industry" and media will do their level damndest best to hide it, especially given the bubble valuations of everyone in this "business."
Before you say "oh, you can't be right about this; it would never go on that long" let me remind you about the late 1990s. In 1997 multiple "DSL" providers were leasing "dry loops" from the telcos, putting in DSLAMs, and pulling backhauls from there to enable DSL to companies and homes. Every single one of them wanted to "partner" with us, of course, with my company getting a cut of the revenue and providing the Internet service. They all came in and made their pitches and I threw every one of them out after examining the numbers. Why? Because every single one of them had no prayer in Hell of ever making a profit and when they blew up it was going to blow back on my company since the customer would associate their loss of service with us, not them. Every one of them, a few years later, blew up. Every. Single. One. It was instantly obvious on any sort of analysis of their businesses and cash flow that it was impossible for them to make a profit. Yet not one was called out in the financial media or anywhere else and all were "strong buys" in the stock market.
And gee, look at the "online ad revenue based" stocks this morning -- all up, as is the market. Isn't that fancy..... I wonder how they'd be doing this morning if CentralNevertruthBullCrap was to run a quick pencil-and-whiteboard analysis on the fact that if you cancel half the ad revenue all these so-called "ad revenue driven businesses" have negative operating cash flow and thus are zeros?
Over the past decade, health care delivery has deteriorated – under the watchful eye of insurers and legislators – to the point where it can no longer be managed effectively or efficiently without enormous staffs who spend their days negotiating on behalf of patients while working for doctors and hospitals. Insurance premiums have skyrocketed while reimbursements to doctors have decreased.
Well, gee, let's think about this for a minute.
Who has cheered this on and allowed it?
Doctors.
Who has told people for decades to eat less saturated fat, which means to obtain caloric balance you must eat more carbs? That would be doctors. And what did medical science know 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago and in fact every farmer has known it for ages? Carbs (especially grains) make that which eats them fat.
What comes with being fat? More medical expense.
Diabetes. Joint damage. All sorts of other medical problems (back issues, hip replacements, heart attacks, etc.)
What does a farmer feed a cow -- or a pig -- to fatten it up? Grains, in other words carbohydrates, which is exactly what all those doctors told people to eat.
How about nearly 1 in 4 Medicaid recipients being on opiates? Those can't be bought over the counter, so who wrote the prescriptions? Doctors.
Remember, though health insurance is falsely promoted and sold to you as though it is actual health care, it still relies on a business model which makes a greater profit by turning down your requests rather than approving them. I’m reminded of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, where paper pushing bureaucrats sit at desks in endless offices and spent their time keeping you from ever getting to your goal (The Castle) rather than enabling your passage there.
And where is your physician in all of this? These days you can probably find her squinting at a computer screen as she robotically documents your visit.
Voluntarily, you forgot to add.
What prevents a doctor from refusing to do that and instead telling the customer exactly what he or she will charge for the 5 minutes of time you get in the "average physical" with same, negotiating that in cash? Do you really think it would be unaffordable -- if you fired all the paper pushers and then wanted to make, oh, what -- $200/hour? Let's see, 5 minutes per patient and 5 more to "recover" from the incredible stress of seeing each one and you'd have to charge..... $33.33 each.
Unaffordable eh? I think not. Oh, and you could actually give everyone 10 minutes that way, if your incredibly-fragile psyche could handle going from one room to the next without a (smoke?) break.
Don’t get me wrong, we doctors continue to do our best to commit to the Hippocratic Oath – “Do no Harm” – as well as the more evocative Oath of Maimonides, the 12th century physician, philosopher and Torah scholar.
You're lying and so are the rest of your ilk.
You enable the sort of nonsense that goes on today. You have an office full of paper pushers by choice, not force. You've been willing and intentional co-conspirators in driving up the cost of medical care by 10 times what it should be here in the United States. You prescribe opiods at a rate that kills 20,000 people a year through "accidental" overdoses, virtually all of which are traceable to one of your prescription pads. You kill over 250,000 more people in the United States every year via "medical errors", the third leading cause of death in the country, exceeded only by heart disease (much of which you caused through your "recommendations" as well!) and cancer.
I certainly understand why you want to defect attention from this, since nearly 300,000 dead bodies properly charged to your so-called "profession" wouldn't look so good. When you add in the human misery and disease that has come from the explosion of obesity and diabetes much of which is directly traceable to the "recommendations" your profession makes along with the pill-pushing (statins, for example, which among otherwise-healthy people with elevated cholesterol are now known to double the risk of diabetes without any cardiac benefit) the true toll of the segment called "doctor" in our economy would rival that of Pol Pot or that old (and very dead) chap Adolf. Whether you kill with a gun, knife, shovel or pill bottle dead is still dead and the financial asset-stripping the medical profession engages in today arguably exceeds that of the Nazis!
When this outrage detonates our nations finances (it's already starting and is going to get a lot worse) one has to wonder whether OpEds like this will be sufficient to keep the public from figuring out not only the toll in lives but in money as well. It's not like the data isn't out there for anyone who cares to look.
We got outraged about 10,000 alcohol-related car crash deaths and made DUI a serious matter.
Maybe we should consider what we ought to do about a "profession" that through negligence and knowing bad advice kills 300,000 people a year -- every year -- or 30 times as many Americans, never mind ripping them off to the tune of over $3 trillion annually at the same time.
That's a debate you'd rather we not have, isn't it Marc?
There's a relatively-common view among certain people, exposed in public by a person who recently registered on my system, claimed to be a retired MD, and promptly got banned.
He was commenting on my 100 Million Dead article -- where I laid out the utter impossibility of what the so-called "health system" has been doing on a fiscal basis for the last 30+ years, and what it proposes to continue to do backed by the people in Congress and the President -- screw Americans to the wall with an ever-increasing piece of the total economic picture.
Why did he get banned? It started here:
I'm a retired MD and can tell you the current system is a criminal enterprise.
In other words he admits that the current system is a criminal enterprise to which he was a part.
It gets better (as if self-stating that his own profession is a criminal enterprise isn't enough), and that got him banned:
Tickerguy your timeline on the meltdown is not clear. Why not health care become 30-40% of the economy. We have squandered money on a far worse "noble lie"ie The Cold War.
Why not the Fed take their balance sheet to $20 trillion. I can see the farse going longer than you imagine. I realize we may need to decide if titanium is going into joint replacement or weapon systems but it seems the charade may be far from over.
Thus emerged the fabled "MMT" nonsense, which is propounded upon by people who have advanced degrees but either failed middle-school math (where you learned exponents) or, much worse, they're intentional peddlers of a fraud just as is anyone running a ponzi scheme.
You see, it's easy to print money, especially when you can do it with a mouse-click.
But you can't print value, and since "money" is simply a divisor when you print money you devalue all existing stock of same at the exactly moment you do so by the exact percentage you emit.
That's arithmetic, and arithmetic is, like all physical laws, not subject to suggestion.
You see, the "justification" he tried to run is that despite admitting it's a criminal enterprise he then wants another criminal enterprise (fraud) to cover it up -- and what's worse he thinks it will work.
Well, no. It won't.
And the disaster is here, in your face, now.
I know, I know, you don't believe my numbers. Many of you don't believe the MTS either -- the canonical statement of the US Treasury, released monthly, that tells you exactly what is taken in and spent, where, and when. You can't really argue with the MTS, so instead politicians and people on the street alike stick their fingers in their ears and scream "na na na na na na na na" when you bring it up, exactly as does a 2-year old being told it is bedtime.
I understand that people look at me -- just a guy who ran a multi-million dollar corporation and thus saw all sides of the balance sheet as I had to write the checks, along with matching them with my expectations from my original business plan, as "not credible." That's ok -- I don't have a bunch of letters after my name for what I believe are perfectly good reasons and many of them have names matching those running these claims in the media on "MMT" and its derivatives right here and now, or even worse, are sitting in places like the Eccles Building in Washington DC.
But then you have an article like this, published by Bloomberg:
Take a good stare at that folks.
If you just retired at 65 your medical expense is projected to be $280,000.
If you're 55 right now and a male (you die earlier) your expected health care costs from 65 to death total a half million dollars.
If you're 45 it's nearly $800 large.
If you're female it's far worse, since women live longer. About 2-3 years longer, to be exact. If you're female the total is anywhere from 30-42% higher.
Are you understanding the problem of escalation -- that is, exponents -- here? 10 years previous that total was about $150k. 10 years prior to that -- if you retired in 1997 - it was under $75,000 total, or about $3,750 a year. That many people could pay but right now most of those people are in the process of dying, and in another 5-10 years they will all be dead.
This article was written to scare people into the stock market, among other things. I'm sure of it. But what it ought to do is have the exact opposite effect: It should result in a revolt, right here, right now, today.
There is not one person in ten who can pay the amount of money demanded today, say much less of those who will retire 10 or 20 years from now. As a single person you can easily eat quite well on $300 a month, or $3,600 a year. A couple can do so on about 50% more; it's simply how the economics of scale work when it comes to food at home. Yes, there's inflation in food, but over 20 years @ the Fed's 2% "target" it will add about 50% to those costs before you die.
We can therefore simply extrapolate (and skip the spreadsheet or 20 calculator operations, adding them up.) The man in this instance will consume approximately $100,000 in food over that retirement lifetime.
Bloomberg projects that he will consume anywhere from roughly three times that much (retiring today) to eight times as much if he's 45 today.
If you're in the 0.1%, you can pay this.
If you're not, you can't.
Period.
You can't pay that amount of money over the next 20 years if you retire today and you sure as hell can't pay it if you are 55 or 45. While you might be able to amass that amount in retirement funds if you spend it on health care you'll have nothing for food and shelter -- and will be in the street, starving to death.
That's a fact for 95% or more of the population. It's math and the simple reality that most people do not make enough to cover that bill. They don't now and they never will; that amount of money is so wildly beyond the median earnings power less expenses (that is, what someone can save and invest) that fully 9 out of 10 -- or more -- Americans cannot pay it.
It's IMPOSSIBLE.
It also can't be shifted to the "taxpayer"; if you attempt to do so the federal government instantly collapses.
Illinois is already in the throes of this. Michigan and their cops are not far behind. Virtually all states will be in this situation 10 years from now.
This, more than anything else, is why I came to the conclusion more than five years ago that I had to get rid of the extra weight I was carrying and keep it off. It wasn't a choice -- yes, I have some money but even with my level of wealth this sort of escalation threatened to screw me and if there was a catastrophic problem on top of it even in my personal situation I'd be in the street.
Look folks, you have one thing you must do right now, and that is get any metabolic disease issues solved on a permanent basis, right here, right now, today. This means you cannot be fat.
This is not a "fat shaming" thing it's a matter of literal economic and physical suicide if you don't do it today.
If you are overweight or obese today then there is exactly one means that has solid scientific evidence that supports it working on a permanent basis (yo-yo dieting does you no good and might hurt you even more than just remaining fat): Get the damn carbs out of what you eat. Simply put you not only have to get rid of the extra weight you must keep it off indefinitely.
The above, however, ought to sink into everyone who is a politician, a law enforcement agency that is currently ignoring the rampant violations of both consumer protection and federal anti-trust law, a doctor or surgeon who currently willingly participates in these schemes, a hospital administrator who knowingly and willingly is a part of it, a pharmaceutical business employee who is part of the scheme to charge people in the US 5, 10 or 100x what others in the rest of the world pay for the same thing and more.
You are all responsible for this. You are either responsible for causing this situation or refusing to act under 100+ year old law to put a stop to it.
Every one of you.
We could start with this bill -- a one-sentence bill -- and then go from there to the link at the bottom of that page. It's obscene that such a one-sentence bill hasn't been introduced and passed years, even a decade or more ago.
We can still do it now, and we must, because the alternative is going to destroy this nation. That's not speculation it's a certainty -- whether you wish to admit it or not.
When, not if, there are millions of older people who cannot pay these amounts the entire group of the above people are going to have a very large problem.
If you're lucky that problem comes at the ballot box and in the pew on Sunday, when you get spat on. It comes when your car breaks down and the tow truck driver demands $10,000 -- 100x more than he demands of someone who isn't in these fields just as you ****ed his father who needed medical care out of 100x as much money as he should have paid. It comes when there's a hurricane or tornado, your roof gets damaged, and the roofer looks at you and says you go last because you screwed his mother out of 50x what she should have paid for a drug -- and then it rains in your house for the next six months and destroys everything in it. It comes with indictments, asset stripping and even prison sentences for virtually everyone in the medical and pharmaceutical industry. And yes, even the latter is if you're lucky.
See, if you're unlucky then some small percentage of those tens of millions of older people decide they can't get justice at the ballot box or by mere social shaming. You might even pass some more laws to call such shaming "discrimination", perhaps. These older people recognize they're going to die soon enough anyway, and decide that they're going to live to the postulate that you can only execute a man once, and test the premise that there is in fact no Hell.
That small percentage, a very small percentage of the people who you have ****ed relentlessly for decades, and who you have all laughed at for the last 30 years and continue to laugh at, will decide to go hunting.
For trophy, not food.
That's the end of the civil society folks, and it will happen if this horsecrap medical-system wide isn't stopped now.
