Yes and no. The MAGA revolution is internally carried by the lower class not associated with and uninterested in geopolitics. In fact they believe in exceptionalism and don't understand why they feel exploited and don't know who is doing it. However it would not be possible politically if not tolerated by the upper class who is smelling decline (of their wealth), because competition has moved into their part of the value chain, so they do two things. One, they now support protectionism to shield from competition. Two, they wish to exploit the lower class harder, so they point them outwards to avoid a physical revolution or an amicable redistribution.

If you want to explain MAGA you have to understand it's a convenient alignment of the upper class and the lower class for different reasons.

I am deeply curious to see how people on the left will digest Trump if he doesn't get reined in by congress/wealthy people. I think a lot of them are going to be caught flatfooted if he gets his way with taxes (no income tax under $150k, no tax on tips), and if he gets his way with global trade restructuring (on shoring of blue collar work).

Trump is currently causing an earthquake on behalf of the middle-lower class. Maybe blue tinted glasses prevent them from seeing it, but right now he is definitely doing the opposite of "entrenching the power of billionaires and the elite".

Unfortunately, I believe that this is a severe miscalculation on Trumps part, as the "kill the billionaires" class seems to be much more fueled by anger than by rational understanding.

That's typically not the target audience you want, people who are not willing to spend money and whose time is worthless.

Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.

Why not just eliminate the sale of personal data? That seems pretty cut and dry.

Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.

I feel like all the “targeted audience” stuff is used more to sell ad space and get its metrics rather than actually “targeting” ads.

That's only part of the problem.

I'd happily support that but the harms of advertising go beyond the problems of surveillance capitalism so heavily restricting ads seems like a good idea on its own.

No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.

And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).

The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.

It's a scheme for the top-top to once again, not pay for anything because they pass the cost along. The W2 class gets to redistribute amongst themselves.

Again, not flowing back to the right people. All of this could have been solved by sane redistribution, but no. It'll still be redistribution but in a cruder, less apparent form.

If the profits went back to Apple HQ directly they would serve to raise the share price and allow stock buybacks and stock based compensation for employees. Same as they do now.

You may not like a tech company succeeding at exports and having a rising share price, but that is distinct from the overall point which is that properly considered these are US exports obscured by the US tax code which incentivizes profits abroad.

"Alpha chimpanzee goes apeshit and decks chimpanzees who exchange Giant Polished Units for bananas with student chimpanzee."

It doesn't say genius-level creativity, just any novel research-like creativity. I don't agree but that's a strawman.