I love this. Eventually, this kind of taxation will happen. Especially in countries where the Rule Of Law is breaking down.

I recently finished crossing all of Toronto (from West to East) on foot, and had gone through some rmarkably pedestrian-hostile areas. Sometimes its shocking how some parts of a city are designed just for cars. And don't get me started on Markham...

I love the kind of phenomena you're describing with the Seoul neighborhood, where a place has become unmoored in time. From online sources, you'd think it still exists, but it is gone IRL.

There was a mall in my vity that got demolished, but Google Maps still showed it active w/ interior layout and shops' details. It inspired this project: https://jacobfilipp.com/place/

This is very well written (and, yes, it exxagerates - but that's to heighten the effect).

My solution is to remember: when you're living in hell, you still have to go to work in the morning. And at some point you'll start knowing the demons' names and make small talk about how their kids are doing in college. How can you bring a little joy to a bad situation? Do a strange little wiggle dance and go sideways instead of staying on the pre-assigned track that's been laid out for you.

I'd be curious to hear of your progress on this idea. Its not dumb, and it sounds similar to what co-ops do.

>I hope someone else does this so I don't have to.

This is a type of challenge I've been thinking of a lot. A "you have to dedicate your whole life to becoming X" challenge - I had the thought of doing something similar here in Canada with groceries. An obviously profitable business where the challenge is "how do you resist a sweetheart buyout" when the cartel comes knocking with cash...

I think this framing device was unnecessary. This was interesting historical food for thought without tying it to AI. I think its relevant to a mass-unemployment, economic depression scenario too, and others.

I loved that book!

I've worked in different parts of the online ad industry for years. This is correct: fraud is a systemic and convenient part of the business model. The victims are the advertisers, who's in-house marketers don't know enough to detect/call out fraud.

Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.

And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.

Has anyone ever had any success building a digital products business with pay-per-click ads? We're always tempted and dabble, and every bit of traffic seems accidental, completely disinterested or obviously a spammer clicking around trying to collect the "conversion".

It's literally the quickest way to burn money.

Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is very, very, very hard to make a profit off PPC.

Yes, of course people have built a successful promotion engine with PPC. But if there was a repeatable method I could describe to you then, well, I'd be a very rich man!

I always recommend focusing on Sales first, and coming up with a steady, repeatable way to move people from "being aware of your product" to "deal won". With people. Manually.

Only then, when you have a sales funnel that's economically viable, you can start paying to bring more people into it through PPC.

As qingcharles commented, PPC is a fast easy way for big players and fraudsters to fleece you. There is a lot of domain knowledge to build on the path to effective PPC advertising. Here is one piece of practical advice: every ad network has an "opted-in by default" gotcha. Your job is to discover it before you give them a dollar. Sometimes it looks like "relax my targeting criteria for broader reach" that will bring in irrelevant visitors. Sometimes it is "also run my ads on partner sites/off network", those sites will have extreme fraud. Sometimes it looks like "automatically pick the right landing page URL to promote, so I don't have to think for myself" which will drive paid conversions to your Contact Us form.

ugh PMAX is such a scam. I can’t believe there is a PM somewhere getting paid good money to completely light Googles’ reputation on fire.

PMAX is particularly awful because it incentivizes the scammers to actually book meetings with our Sales team, and waste their time with a no-show.

(For anyone unfamiliar with how the PMAX scam works: PMAX will send more ad traffic to sites that perform well for an advertiser. So scammers who own a network of fraudulent sites will fill out that advertisers' forms, register a great conversion rate, and get a lot of ad traffic directed to their network of bot sites. When you spot the fraud, Google will say: "um, maybe put their IPs on the ad blocklist?" like its 1998 and the most sophisticated click fraudsters are the ones who can click their mouse the fastest. Enshittification Endgame.)

There is a lot of material on this theme. One place to start is a book like "The Last Bohemia" or a general search for books about Williamsburg (the Brooklyn neighbourhood) at the library. Lots of first-hand stories about how that pattern of gentrification plays out.

I suggest you keep it quizzical - that little not-knowing is like spice in a recipe.

I wonder if it was AM's writing contest. Your writing is great, keep going.