This calculation somehow assumes that clicking banners on your free time equals lost money in terms of production.
If the average time for toilet visits per day is 12 minutes, we are losing 89.8 million hours a day collectively across Europe, and continuing the same logic in as in the article, with 25€/h this sums to 5% of EU GDP being spent down the drain.
Maybe we should focus efforts on a productivity programme to ban bathroom visits?
There are a few assumptions there that make me scratch my head
1. the general 'utility' of informing users about cookies (or giving them the opportunity) and getting 'consent' is completely ignored.
2. The time spent is assumed to be 'working' productive time, not leisure time
3. They ignore the existence of tools that automate these (auto accept/reject)
At this point, why not calculate the 'economic costs' of every activity we do outside of work? I imagine reading and watching TV and movies would have massive productivity hits...
Agreed. The Great Filter theory has weak assumptions that a) all ”living” systems evolve in a similar way as the biological systems on earth, and b) that this evolution ”advances” somehow towards space expansion.
Our biological lenses make it seem like the complex system we call ”life” is the only similarly complex system that is possible in the entire universe.
They can with computer assistance, and this AI sort of has that in that it’s both some “intelligence” and a whole lot of memorized internet, with the issue that we don’t know how to separate those things.
So you are saying that since Amazon paid no taxes they made absolutely no money on the sales? Arranging the company structure so that billions in profits are seen as losses in the bottom line is ridiculously easy and makes the whole corporate taxation system a joke.
They made money, sure. That's revenue. If I sell a widget that costs 1 dollar for 2 dollars, I made 2 dollars in revenue and 1 dollar in gross profit. But if I spend that 1 dollar towards the construction of a new factory, I made 0 dollars in net profit. So why should I get taxed on money that I didn't get to keep or profit from?
Amazon is not a profitable company, if you want to see how, just look at their yearly earnings reports, they're a public company so anyone can look.
> But if I spend that 1 dollar towards the construction of a new factory, I made 0 dollars in net profit
You have net profited $1-worth of factory. New assets don't magically stop being profit. Not even if they depreciate, because cash depreciates too.
The only thing one needs to ask is whether corporate tax makes sense in principle at all when one could instead "just" tax human use of assets owned by corporations as personal gain. Everything else gets taxed at the personal income or property side already anyway.
Are you seriously believing that Amazon, the third largest company in the world, with enough revenue to dwarf the economy of many country, owned by a the second richest person in the world, who capitalist in a capitalist country is not profitable ?
You seem very arrogant discussing things that are purely theoretical (absolute zero objects). A healthy debate includes space for speculation, and you are shooting this speculation down with arguments like ”it just doesn’t work like that”, which does not bring anything to the discussion.
When people are speculating that effects will happen, even though we've done this and they didn't, by asserting that an impossible goal wasn't reached, it's appropriate to ask them how.
If you feel that it's appropriate to use emotive words like "arrogant" when someone says "please tell me how that's possible," then I guess I'm not that worried about your opinion.
If the average time for toilet visits per day is 12 minutes, we are losing 89.8 million hours a day collectively across Europe, and continuing the same logic in as in the article, with 25€/h this sums to 5% of EU GDP being spent down the drain.
Maybe we should focus efforts on a productivity programme to ban bathroom visits?