TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that’s about it. People need to know that your product is out there, and what it’s like.

I get that, if you’re arguing from an economic efficiency standpoint, there was an argument to be made that the spreading of new information through advertising helps to spread new innovative ideas and thus increases overall societal efficiency.

It’s just that a) in the Internet age, we have other, non-advertising ways to spread information (i.e. specs and reviews), and b) if advertising was actually still about genuine education, then it would not scale in effectiveness the way it does with volume and repetition.

You’re right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:

1. psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.

2. engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.

i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I’ll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it’s probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.

This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising’s ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it’s effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.

How about Canada And Mexico sign agreements with Europe, Latin America, and the TPP and see how the US manages without being able to exploit anyone?

Canadians don’t need the US, they have literally 10x the natural resources per capita. The US is not negotiating from a position of power.

No, the necessity of food and shelter to your survival determines the value, money is just a unit of measurement for value.

Now compare how many people would consider a strong work ethic at the office bad to how many would consider spending a lot of time on DnD bad. The difference is massive.

I mean, again, no one is going to consider a hard work ethic at the office bad by default, because it pays for you and your family’s food and shelter.

If you flip the incentives around, i.e. you got food and shelter for playing DND and nothing but socialization for being at the office, then people would consider a strong work ethic at the office equally bad.

I mean it doesn’t pay the bills, but it does get you respect from other speed runners and from people who respect speed running.

It’s also somewhat a matter of your specific hobby … speed running video games is pretty niche and useless compared to most hobbies.

Like on one end of the spectrum, there are hobbies that help everyone, like volunteering, cleaning up or beautifying your community, helping friends and family and loved ones, or organizing community programs.

Everyone is going to respect the hell out of you for that, and it’s pretty easy to see those translate to jobs if you needed them to.

Then there are hobbies that can be beneficial to you or to anyone, like hobbies where you create stuff (whether it’s knitting, 3d printing, home renos, gardening, cooking, etc). These are much easier to use to help others, and to turn into side hustles if you want to.

Then there are hobbies that you like that create community and socialization, from playing team sports, to DnD groups, to parties, to multiplayer video games, to organizing dinners and events.

Then there are hobbies that primarily benefit you and benefit the community only indirectly (in the sense of you being a better or more capable person). This includes stuff like running, weight lifting, reading a book, etc.

Then there are hobbies that don’t even really benefit you but you do anyways, like watching TV, scrolling social media, or getting slightly better at a pointless mechanical skill.

Since when is a strong work ethic at your hobby considered bad?

American judges have also been hobbled by decades of Republican legislation and judicial interpretations.

The American legal system has fucked itself into a corner where judges have to make these incredibly dumb technical rulings in specific interpretations and precedence, whereas as judges in many other western countries have much more freedom to look at the big picture or take into account systemic effects.

touchthebelly

It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!

First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:

Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.

And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.

The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.

Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:

• Light switches without clear On/Off/Dim/Scene Select labels on the buttons, are again, bad design. It’s perfectly possible to have a smart switch that is very easy to understand.
  • You know what also sucks? Having to tear out an entire drywalled ceiling and do 120V electrical wiring just because you want your light switch in a different spot, or you want it to control other lights, or you want a three+ way switch.
  • You know what’s nice? Having a complete separation between powering the devices, and controling the devices. It’s nice to be able to turn individual lights on/off/to different colours and brightnesses depending on what you’re using the room for.
• Turning on the TV and it not turning on the streaming box, means it’s an old tv or someone disabled HDMI CEC. New TVs will synchronize with the streaming box and soundbar / receiver automatically.
  • And I would argue that just having it start playing a random commercial filled channel, is worse for your brain then intentionally picking something to watch, but maybe that’s generational.
• I don’t know how the author, their mom, or the rental supplied tech guy couldn’t figure out how to look up the instruction manual for the dishwasher, because literally zero models of Miele dishwasher require wifi for setup or use.
• Black glass oven buttons with opaque symbols have nothing to do with smart appliances, that’s just bad design, and the author chose and bought a badly designed dumb oven, then blamed smart homes for some reason.
• Programmable thermostats have been badly designed since the 90s, and yet, literally everyone uses them. Why? Because if it’s your home, you look up the instructions, program to a schedule that makes sense, and then you don’t have to go and adjust it multiple times a day. Modern smart Thermostats do the same thing but are usually more intuitive and nicer designed. This is because the author rented an AirBNB (i.e. a home designed for people to live in) rather then a hotel (a home designed for someone to temporarily stay in).
• The author seems to not like touch screen numpads on their alarm system instead of buttons, because they display the weather while idle. Like ok, again, it’s an AirBNB, not a hotel. The buttons are clear to someone who has literally never used them, but uglier for people who use them every day.
• And with lag, yes, there is inherently more lag in a digital control device then an analog one but there does not have to be lag to the UI, that’s just bad hardware / software, and as long as they’re wired, the actual control parts of modern control systems have literally imperceptible lag, on the basis of <100ms.

Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:

• We’re still in the infancy of smart home tech.
• A lot of minimalist high design home stuff is functionally terrible.
• Renting an AirBnB means dealing with a home designed for someone else.
• Owning a software company makes you stressed out and rage at every little thing that’s different.

Mass manufactured catcaves are inferior to artisanaly crafted cat forts.

I mean, in that case, this just feels like adulthood. I don’t sleep to stay healthy (even though I probably should), I have so much stuff to do that I sleep just enough so that I have enough energy to get everything done.

Does still be healthy include feeling rested?

If so, this has to be the craziest opinion I’ve ever heard. You’re trading 8 hours of time for the feeling of curling up in a bed, and for the feeling of waking up in the morning?

You can get that with a 15m nap, and I’d do that like once or twice a week. Life I way too short and there’s so much other shit I would do with an extra 8 hours in the day.

No shit sherlock.

It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.

The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction

Reflection doesn’t induce energy, it dissipates it because it does not reflect perfectly.

You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.

Go out to a field and try to produce an echo. They literally require walls to bounce off of.

Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?

You need some space yes, ideally the inside of your chamber needs to be mostly empty and insubstantive.

However, echo chambers can not be filled with too much space, because echoes don’t work at infinite scale. Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall. To be truly echoey and hear multiple echoes of the same sound bouncing back and forth on the walls in front of and behind you, you need those walls even closer together, for not just the extra distance travelled, but also how much energy is lost during each reflection.

An echo chamber is inherently a closed space because open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.

Echo Chambers’s defining characteristics are walls that cut them off from the outside world, being large voids with little substance inside, and hearing what you say repeated back to you.

Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.

Tehran has more than one suburb, and Tehran also isn’t the only city in Iran. If there are 400 bodies in one suburban morgue, and you extrapolate across the country, you’d hit 12,000 very fast.

I mean there’s the video of 400 bodies in one morgue. It could be fake, but the reporting is not based on vibes. Kind of sounds like you can’t accept that a religious fundamentalist dictatorship could murder its own citizens for thinking independently, despite that pattern repeating throughout history ad nauseum.

A single video shows ~400 bodies piled up in one Tehran suburb.

What the honest fuck are your talking about 600ish sounds more believable? More believable based on what? Based on you dick riding the Ayatollah?