Quote Investigator

> achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better

There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half.

Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of.

The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.

> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.

First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657

> Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

translated to

> I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is.

(note the archaic then)

This was a popular piece of wit at the time.

Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later

> You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.

But it's still quite different.

There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

> speaking as an overeducated Asian American

It is only people who are not educated enough that feel the need to call themselves "overeducated". That single phrase tells me all that everybody needs to know about you i.e. a self-aggrandizing "troll" hiding behind anonymity on the Internet.

Given your ignorance (both of the domain knowledge and basic communication etiquette) I had tried to educate you by pointing to actual resources but of course you are incapable to studying/debating them. To say that all are "reducible to naive cultural relativism" is the height of ignorance. Nowhere in any of your comments has there been even a indication of coherent thought and ideas but merely empty verbiage and needless vitriol. You would do well to follow this age-old advice - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/17/remain-silent/

> What does “democracy” mean to you? A country where people vote, but unelected bureaucrats and lawyers actually run things and will do what they think is best?

"People" generally don't have the expertise to run things in a complex modern world. Bureaucrats and lawyers aren't always better, but pace Damon Runyon (quoting sportswriter Hugh Keough), that's the way to bet. [0]

"Democracy" in a complex modern world means that "people" periodically get an opportunity to toss out the bureaucrats and lawyers — because ballots are better than bullets.

[0] "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/04/race-swift/#google_vignette

A similar idea about the importance of planning as a way to improve your understanding of a problem was expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in a speech while he was in office as the US President in 1957 [1].

Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/

To wit: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Or in another case, there's a political scientist, whose name I don't currently remember, who's made fun of for predicting 9 out of the last 5 recessions. Sure, he may have predicted the ones that happened, but a broken clock is also right twice a day. Your predictions aren't worth much if you can't avoid false positives.

EDIT: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/01/predict-nine/]