The bankruptcy settlement had a bunch of money going to families of the victims, and also to the states for anti-addiction programs, and also some money towards documenting the Purdue wrongdoings, so that the public would have better visibility just HOW this was allowed to happen in the first place

The only way the victims actually see any money is through civil litigation.

Now, 3rd party releases are a genuinely weird thing: a court ruling that a party that's not directly involved in the case is immune from future lawsuits. Partially the reason it went all the way to the supreme court is that there was a circuit split - they were allowed in some circuits, but not others. However, (and this is according to a friend who represented the victims in the settlement), it's really unfortunate that THIS is the case where they get struck down. If the Sacklers walk away from the settlement, it makes the victims getting their payout much less certain, and certainly delays that payout by many years.

I suspect that specifically "family punishment" fails the cost-benefit analysis due to practical reasons, but the question of "should we weigh the suffering of good people equally to the suffering of terrible people in our ethics system" is interesting to me, and I don't currently have answer.

Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and set a cookie, but now you can't do that.

This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.

1) Data leaks by companies that collect and store true PII - this is your Equifaxes of the world, and they didn't collect that data using cookies. 2) People are generally creeped out by the idea of their movements across the web being tracked.

And so, even though no ad-tech company has ever really had a data leak, and although the tracking across the web has never really resulted in any negative outcomes, people are using (2) to try and kill ad-tech for often disingenuous reasons.

This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable.

And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.

I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads.

> Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.

Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.

You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.

I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now.

Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?

The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it.

The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, "we're not going to let AdTech track users" = "we're going to make only ads on large platforms effective", which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask "where did the old internet go"?

The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

Now, there are still obvious energy losses from creating and then burning ammonia. One thing that this technology could be very helpful with is overcoming the NIMBY-ism around nuclear power - that is, build nuclear reactors to produce ammonia, then ship the ammonia to where it will be used. It would obviously be more efficient to just run power lines from nuclear power plants, but given the wide-spread opposition, it could be politically easier to build the nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere.

And I also agree that you can't blame a patient for getting addicted. However, in US law there is something called the "clean hands doctrine", which denies remedies if the accuser has acted in bad faith wrt the subject of the claim. In practice this might translate to arguing that because the patient is breaking the law in misusing opioids, they don't deserve damages.

All I'm trying to say is that while Purdue is definitely morally responsible, legally it's kinda difficult.

Broadly, the things Purdue is accused of are 1) Aggressively marketing opioids to doctors, and 2) Lobbying the states to change various laws around prescription and marketing of opioids

The problem is that for direct liability, there are two more actors that need to be considered - the doctors, and the patients themselves. Doctors are considered to be experts, and patients are often breaking the law when they misuse opioids. Both of these facts break the chain of liability, and so arguing that Purdue is legally liable for the ultimate addiction of the patient is difficult.

As a result, people have tried to sue Purdue under more general "public nuisance" statutes, rather than regular tort liability. A public nuisance is when someone interferes with a right that the general public shares in common. However, this area of law is not very well developed - a lot of it is carryover from old British law, and winning those cases isn't a slam dunk. So there are certain objectors to the settlement, but I don't know why people think that it would be easy to hold the Sacklers criminally responsible or to get more money than this settlement.