We, as a society, poison pretty much everything as a standard part of the agricultural process.
The outcome -the goal - of that is of course, death of vast numbers of insects.
Mission accomplished. It’s a success story, strangely.
The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs up. That’s really weird.
Is it that society was convinced? Or was/is it that it is more “out of sight, out of mind”? I think for the layperson, little matters other than how much does it cost? If there is some invisible but safe-for-us chemical that increases yield and decreases cost, all the better for us, right?
I think this is one of the great things to come out of the invention of the web. We are becoming better informed and this kind of information is becoming more prevalent. It’s becoming much harder for these big corporations to hide these negative side effects (insect decline, Round-Up cancers etc) and we as a population are becoming more aware of the negative side effects of our imprint on the world.
Reminds of all those times we are told that 'customers demanded X', as if we all stood outside supermarkets with placards saying, "We demand huge strawberries that don't taste of anything". The market does what helps the market, it often isn't good for people or the planet they inhabit - that's the story of our current era and customers need to demand change on that basis.
Yeah but when faced with the choice between the tomatoes that were $8.50/kg and really nice but would go off in 2 days, vs. the tomatoes that were $4.50/kg and still nice and red and lasted a whole week but were pretty tasteless, you bought the latter, didn't you?
Customers in many cases don't have the information to know the potential long term damages of buying the $4.50/kg tomatoes. It's insane to put that burden on the end user as opposed to the tomato grower. How in the world is the customer supposed to know what pesticides are used and what the damages could be?
Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates the actual cause of these problems. Which is generally an economic system that puts private profits above everything else.
What's extra weird is that everything got really cheap, yet most people don't have any money, and the environment is in disarray. I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.
> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.
That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap.
What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it in real dollars, whose huge mortgage payment is in turn now eating more than all of the money saved from having crappy tomatoes.
Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.
To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.
Then you're comparing the sum total of the wealth of many of the richest families to that of one individual person.
The fact that rich people have a lot of money is not really a recent development. But it's the focus on the super rich which is missing the thread.
If housing prices go up, people at the 25th percentile lose and people at the 75th percentile gain. We see the loss for the people at the 25th percentile and recognize it as a problem, but then people are pretending like we can just take the money "back" from the Walton family even though that's not where most of it actually went.
It went to home price appreciation for a bunch of middle aged and retired sociologists and car dealership managers and dental hygienists. If you want them to give it back so the poor aren't so poor then you have to recognize that and thereby identify who it is you really have to fight over that money.
My point was that Sam Walton didn't seem to exactly price in carbon when he went to market with wal-mart in the 70s. Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation), the same could be true for Ikea tables, Amazon Prime 1 day toothbrush, Sugar and chemicals for candy, Pesticides on crops, Opioids, red meat, etc. We got exactly what we wanted, loads of new cheap stuff with loads of selection at our convenience. We also got a labor crisis, a health epidemic, climate change and massive knowledge and wealth inequality.
> Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation)
Not really. The profit on buying for $8 and selling for $11 is about the same as on buying for $9 and selling for $12. You make a little less, because there is lower demand and you have higher initial capital costs for inventory, but it's only a marginal difference.
The reason they don't do it regardless is that if Sam Walton tries selling only the carbon-priced thing for $12 when some competitor is selling the bad thing for $11, the customer chooses the lower price. There is still a Walmart-shaped thing in the economy whether or not it's called Walmart and founded by Sam Walton, because most customers choose that over the thing that costs more.
Because they have instant personal feedback into the price and the taste but not into the long-term health effects of sugar and red meat. But if you can solve that for voters then doesn't the same solution work for customers?
What I'm saying is that you would have to convince people that red meat is bad for them before they'd be willing to pass a law against it. If they're not convinced of that then they'll just buy it from whoever sells it and it doesn't matter if one seller here or there carries it or not as long as somebody does, which somebody will as long as people want it. But if you successfully convince them that it's so bad for them that it should be illegal, wouldn't they just stop buying it at that point, even without a law or any action by retailers?
I see. I agree with that point generally. I think we're talking past each other? I'm thinking about the morality and ethics of a supply chain and how it's disclosed/understood. Where should we be working to offload the understanding of how vast humans in a societal context impact ecology?
What I'm saying is that the upper middle class (e.g. the top quartile excluding billionaires) has more money than the upper class (billionaires), because there are so many more people in it. Tens of millions rather than a couple thousand. But then they're regular people, doctors and engineers, one out of every four Americans.
That's because the bottom 50% of the country own almost nothing. They rent and have debts. The net worth of the entire bottom quintile is negative -- if you have a dollar in your pocket you don't owe to someone then you have more wealth than the bottom 20% of the country.
History won't be looking kindly on anyone in this era. Wealthy or not.
It's not like before, when no one knew how things worked and were subsequently duped into doing dumb things. In this era, historians will find the information was openly published on the internet, in music, in newscasts, in movies, etc for all to see, and we still did the dumb thing.
I suspect entire books on everything from history to psychology will be written in an attempt to dissect and figure out what was going on and how this could happen?
$4.5/kg does not look cheap at all, I buy tomatoes for less than $1/kg directly from farmers 15 km outside the city or up to $1.5 from the Mega Image (Belgian chain) at the end of the street. The cheap ones have great taste, the supermarket ones are bad, I buy those only outside of the regular season when they are the only option.
Probably because those that produced and distributed goods and services (be it red meat, pesticides, prescription medications, airline tickets or Tupperware) did not clearly understand (or did and chose not to) and spell out the true cause and effect for the average consumer.
You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just see it as a cost and a hassle and a totem of a hostile tribe they want to drive out of their society; but the people who are paid to rail against it are paid by interests who know well what the regulation is meant to do and know that they will be the externalizers without it. And what they're paying for is agents who will bamboozle the majority, keeping them useful, angry idiots.
It's not as simple as "regulation good" or "regulation bad" -- there are plenty of companies that lobby for regulation because they know it will exclude smaller competitors, or ward off lawsuits because they followed the regulations even if people still died, or they want them to get passed while their stooge is in the majority so they can draft the rules themselves and then claim that it was already done last year when someone else wants to do something more effective next year.
There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.
The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.
Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.
I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.
When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.
But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.
Sure. There's regulatory capture. But this particular problem, the externalization of costs, is a classic one solved by regulation rather than the free market.
The problem where the pesticides are destroying native insect populations, sure. But not the problem where the tomatoes taste like nothing and have pesticide in them -- that's not an externality, it's an information asymmetry. And then it has the same problem in the legislature as the supermarket.
The problem isn't the capitalism that transitioned the US into a powerhouse that feeds the world or provides goods at discounted prices, or ensures that millennials in Minnesota can enjoy avocado dip while complaning about having to much.
This is a failure at the local level. Ever spent time in the grocery isle? Children believe their meat comes from meat packages. Not that it was a living creature at one point. As people have moved into cities, they've lost the connection to the land that provides for them, and life's interconnectedness.
Top this off with the crony capitalism that gives subsidies to farmers for tariffs, or subsides for a myriad of other reasons all of which are asinine(like ethanol or which crops yield most), and prevent groups like Monsanto from any real liability (both civil and criminal) by giving them government/EPA endorsements.. Such endorsements often take years before they recognize a mistake was made or that their data from 1977 is woefully inaccurate.
No this is a horror story of central planning gone horrifically wrong again, and no one can prosecute/sue these terrible companies out of existence because they have the EPA's blue checkmark and some politicians endorsement.
In the absence of the ability for individuals to hold companies liable for their mistakes, it is absolutely incumbent on individuals and parents to make sound choices. Depending on the government to be your saviour simply leads to more tragedy.
Negative externalities are not priced in. The whole neoliberal market game is to extract benefits while pushing the burdens onto others.
Vote with your wallet is only honest if all externalities would be priced in, otherwise it is just a vehicle for shifting the blame onto the hapless consumer.
Red isn’t a flavor and nice isn’t a texture though. Those $4.50 tomatoes are light red, mealy and flavorless. They’re the Red Delicious of the tomato world.
If you haven’t tried California dry farm tomatoes do yourself a favor, they’re worlds apart and worth every penny.
We did demand X though. The supermarkets had both tasteless strawberries and organic ones and we made our choice. Many supermarkets still have organic ones and we still pick the cheaper, larger, less tasty one.
Tasteless strawberries are around for a few reasons
1) you can't try before you buy. bigger, redder strawberries look better, so sell better, so are grown more, and so on until that's the expectation. if varieties are cultivated for their looks, that means they're not cultivated for their taste or sugar content
2) bigger strawberries are easier/faster to pick, which means they're cheaper to pick
3) people want strawberries in winter, which means for a lot of us that means we're accustomed to buying strawberries that have been shipped thousands of miles and not picked recently.
It doesn't formally mean that, but often it means that in practice.
I think some of the success of organic food is that it can in practice be a marker for attractive features that otherwise have nothing to do with "organic". Consumers learn the association and use it, even if they don't buy into the organic philosophy.
There are much better labels than "organic" to indicate flavor. "Heirloom", "local", "in-season", "small plot", "not greenhouse grown", "small", "picked ripe", "picked today" are all labels that are more likely to indicate flavor than organic, IMO.
But the best is to find a producer or label that prioritizes flavor.
Organic produce has monopolized the premium section of supermarkets. Without organic, supermarkets would find some other way to sell higher margin produce to less price conscious consumers. That dimension would probably be taste (or locality, which I have another rant about).
For me, "organic" is a marker for "bullshit label that's used to convince people to pay more." If they actually do taste better, I might buy the stuff.
Most supermarkets have pint baskets where you’re allowed to sample. Sometimes they have sampling and “pit” trays. So people do have a choice at least in some supermarkets.
The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.
Seascapes and Rosas have a decent combo of shelflife and taste.
I suppose there are certain tricks to it, but one of the big things I do to make this much less of a problem is to make meals using only one or two at most short-life items.
The rest of the meal comes from things that will happily sit for weeks on end in the cupboard without going off. Things like: Pasta, onions, tomato pureé, garlic, stock cubes, kidney beans, lentils, rice, bacon, etc.
This does mean that often the one fresh thing I use is the meat in any given dish.
This is analogous to how people used to cook as well, keeping a large store of long-life ingredients and merely supplimenting them with whatever was fresh.
In a similar boat, and I find that meat and veggies I buy from the CSA have longer fridge life because they were butchered/picked closer to selling time
Why is a long lasting bad thing better than a short lasting good thing? Why not buy frozen berries, dehydrated berries, or just cardboard, if shelf life is the priority?
I just want to share an anecdotal story with regards to "tasteless" produce from super markets.
I used to absolutely despise eating salad, I never knew why but I always just thought it was boring and I'd rather eat anything else; However, my girlfriend and I wanted to buy produce that wasn't wrapped in plastic so we started to shop at a local market held each week.
There we meet a Tongan farmer who grew everything using traditional methods, the biggest difference he said was that he used absolutely minimal irrigation (unless absolutely required due to drought at planting) and he also said that what made vegetables bitter was pesticides and it turned people off them (so I'm assuming he dind't use them). He said that the lack of pesticides and excessive water is what made his stuff taste so great, and his groups had to be a little tougher to survive so he believed they were healthier crops.
Anyway the guy was legit and he and his wife often held weekends where you could visit his farm and see everything, it was real deal.
The main point I wanted to make was that, while we were being produce from this guy, I noticed that I actually loved eating the salads, like became quite addicted to them, he even sold the flowers from all the vegetables and told us the best nutrients are found in the flours, they were delicious. Ever since we moved away and no longer had access to this guys produce, I went off them immediately again. I really dislike standard supermarket produce.
The produce I grow in my garden does in fact taste much better than the produce in the supermarket. There are good reasons for this. I grow heirloom varieties that were bred for taste and not shelf life. Watermelons and tomatoes in particular really do taste much better when they are under water stress. A watermelon that has been given too much water looks fabulous and has almost no sugar. I pick them when they’re ripe not a week before that.
IDK whether pesticides make produce bitter. But the rest of the post checks out.
Poisons are typically bitter, so that point doesn't seem unreasonable. That being said, the poisons the plants produce themselves to fend off insects are also bitter, so maybe the Tongan farmer was doing something not mention to reduce insect depredations without externally applied insecticides.
I have lived in situations where there was a good farmer's market nearby where I could buy produce directly from small local farmers, and I have had the same thing happen to me. I began looking forwards to eating a salad, then stopped when I no longer had easy access to the good stuff.
The various things that happen to produce destined for a shelf halfway across the country are really just not appetizing.
I will never forget the first green beans I ate from a farmers market picked the day before at the height of bean season. Wow, so sweet, so yummy. I grew up eating canned green beans. Ugh, what a travesty that is.
I don't think so because it wasn't actually me who cared about the produce, it was my partners idea to change suppliers. I just went a long with it and thought nothing of it.It wasn't until I realized I was enjoying salad that I started asking questions and I found out he was using different methods and not just reselling other farmers produce.
I must admit I noticed right away the the produce was far more visually appealing then what I was used to, more saturated colors, I put it down to it being washed more thoroughly.
I think it's also important to note that once I stopped receiving the better produce, I tried very hard to continue liking salads, I just couldn't do it.
On a side note, I'd like to say is, it's a shame people miss out on eating the flowers of plants, they're really delicious and a visually impressive addition to salads.
Organic only means that the grower can't use synthetic pesticides, so Organic Foods are not pesticide free. The Government has allowed various Organic Pesticides that growers can use. I still choose Organic for most of my food whether that makes a difference or not.
Getting back to the Original story, the Pesticides used in Organic Farming still kill insects.
I think you've touched on an important point here: Not only do we demand perfect looking produce, we demand it out of season, and we demand it to be shipped in from all over the world on a daily basis.
The reason we use pesticides is because farmers need to increase yields to meet demand. But what if we didn't demand asparagus in winter. What if we didn't demand apples in spring? What if people in northern climates didn't eat pineapple or coconut or bananas regularly? What if we bought food from the store that had bruises or imperfections?
Same, I often don’t bother buying alcohol or chocolate and spend that money on better quality produce, a good piece of fruit is better than any other desert in my opinion.
Organic doesn’t mean pesticide free. The pesticides used are “natural” instead of man made. Organic also means manure based fertilizer which means risk of food borne diseases like Ecoli 157h and salmonella.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine specifically with Organic Strawberries. Somehow this company called "Driscoll's" has started showing up nationwide for berries. Straw, Blue, Black, Rasp, etc... It must be a conglomerate at this point. But some people at various Whole Foods corporate and other outlets have just started bowing down to them. The offer the most tasteless organic strawberries in the world.
In France they show the country of origin (region when it is from France) and the variety. Sometimes they state if it is organic.
Generally, the French fruits are more expensive but tastier. But when it is the high season of the fruit, like july/august for melon, then the french one are also cheaper.
I don't do this, but I do notice that in super markets lots of people do try the fruit before they it. So there are ways of making sure you get good fruit.
It'd be more accurate to say 'commoditization favoring economies of scale for the sake of anti-competitive oligopolization demands X.' It then takes some PR money to make people 'demand' all the crap.
Addded: the mindless commoditization is abetted by subsidies, including the subsidy of not having to price in negative externalities.
> I think this is one of the great things to come out of the invention of the web. We are becoming better informed and this kind of information is becoming more prevalent. It’s becoming much harder for these big corporations to hide these negative side effects
We are at the end of that era. The big corporations are slowly closing down that unintended loophole in which the internet was a tool for free movement of knowledge. Google now filters and shapes results into their idea of what is OK rather than exactly what you are searching for [1]. The FBI just called conspiracy theorists a domestic threat [2] and open forums are under attack [3]. Not long ago you were a nutjob for claiming Monsanto and Roundup were anything other than gifts from God. We will be going back to that world soon enough.
"The FBI assesses anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity," the document said. "The FBI further assesses in some cases these conspiracy theories very likely encourage the targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the likelihood of violence against these targets."
I agree with your sentiment except for its defeatist facet. Let's not act like we are defeated and helpless. We can help shape the web and the internet into the shape we want and we are not helpless.
you are neglecting the negative effects of spraying billions of tons of Roundup on the planet before the public knows for sure that it is a dangerous poison.
Same with neonics, we sprayed too much and the insect populations shrunk too much and will not revive quickly since the poison is still in plants and soil.
The obvious thing is that industries work for profit and have no sympathy with insects or the health of individuals and that we are unable to regulate industries in a proper way.
For me the example of what you cite is the wonder product 'Scotchgard'.
You could put it on your shoes from new and they would stay looking new, you could spray it on furniture and it would survive spills from coffee/tea/wine. You could coat your whole house with Scotchgard and be blissfully unaware that it was a bio-hazard.
Plus who thought negatively of the 3M corporation?
3M was a brand that you trusted, it was a sign of quality and familiar through 'Scotchtape™' and 'Post-It™' notes. Their reflective products were literally brilliant and life saving. Smart people used Scotchgard. Stupid people that didn't care about their belongings didn't.
But now we know that perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS - the magic ingredient) is not what you want in your blood. Pretty much stands to reason when you think about it, but nobody in the 1980's thought that carpets laced with the stuff would lead to people being poisoned with it.
The same chemical was used in bulk by the military for fire-fighting kit and other uses, plus the factories making things like shoes, carpets and everything else led to a pollution problem. So now, along with Strontium-90 we all have a little bit of perfluorooctane sulfonate in our bodies. Lovely.
Since the chemicals are not 'food' or 'medicines' there is no regulation on what is a safe level to have in the water supply.
But we now know that from the early 1970's the people at 3M knew there was a problem. But they kept quiet and just marketed more and more variations of the product. I only learned recently that PFOS was evil. I had also stopped using it without thinking about it. Partly due to other products such as Gore-Tex™ coming along there is way as a consumer that you realise the old product has been phased out. You just pay the premium for the new and improved water repellent to not even know the old one was 'evil'.
But the execs at 3M knew all along. Like the execs at Philip Morris. Or at Exxon. Or at Monsanto.
Critical to Gore-tex is the DWR coating, which is still made of PFCs (basically Scotchgard). Sometimes they use shorter chain molecules like C6 (vs. C8), which have a shorter biological half-life, but the harmful effects are the same.
I think this "Roundup is a dangerous poison" was a propaganda meme that came out of the need to demonize US agribusiness in Europe. It's a kind of social activism protectionism. I would not be at all surprised to learn it was sustained by funding from ag interests in Europe.
OF course Roundup is not a dangerous poison. This is simply a lie that is repeated over and over by the dishonest and the gullible.
I base my opinion on three court cases in the USA where evidence was borught to court that Monsanto knew many years ago about the cancer causing risks. on what do you base "this is simply a lie" ?
Court cases are not good ways to determine science. In a particularly egregious case in the 1980s, for example, a jury returned a verdict for a defendant in which it was claimed that a head injury in a car accident led to lung cancer.
Scientifically, there is no good evidence that Roundup causes cancer.
Please don’t cite snopes, it’s the worst possible citation you can give.
Here’s a better citation: IARC (the World Health Organization’s cancer research division) conducted a review with 20 international experts of all the publicly available research on glyphosate and found that it does indeed likely cause cancer: https://www.iarc.fr/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-gly...
Whether roundup is safe or not is not clear to me, but the decision of 12 unwilling laymen with no access to independent research tools is certainly not credible.
Totally serious. The anti-Roundup fervor is of a kind with anti-GMO fervor. The goal of it is to provide a pretext to exclude cheaper US agricultural products from Europe.
I don’t trust the research that was done on roundup. Supposedly it degrades within six months.
The reality is that it doesn’t. We know this because the city of Davis, CA does public composting. Yard trimmings are scooped up, taken to the city compost yard, and over a year or som it becomes compost. Residents can pick up a quantity of free compost every year.
Around ‘97-‘98 the city compost started killing many kinds of plants.
The cause turned out to be glyphosphate. Despite Monsanto’s research, the reality was that glyphosate persists far longer than six months.
Hmmm.... wouldn’t farmers have figured this one out pretty quickly? Spray their fields then plant a month after? Sure, some of them use around-Up resistant seeds, but not all.
The recommendation when using glyphosate to kill existing plants before reseeding is to wait a week after application before reseeding. I’ve done this seeding grasses, grains, and root vegetables. It works just fine.
Tell this to my husband's brother, who has probably-terminal cancer of a type that's got a strong statistical link to the chemicals he worked with as a lawncare professional.
> If there is some invisible but safe-for-us chemical that increases yield
In fact increased yield is also kind of good for the environment because this way agriculture needs less space. (Speaking of deforestation because of agriculture...) But still, insecticides, fungicides etc. have been used far too carelessly in the past and of course it takes years or sometimes decades to see the effects...
There's certainly a trade-off. However, grocery stores in the US discard massive amounts of produce, and then still more is wasted when consumers bring it home and don't use it. It feels like we would have plenty of room to reduce yields, ship less food around, and still get everybody fed. (that's a hypothesis, not a conclusion)
I'm too lazy to get the reference but at least for Germany or EU both numbers you mention (consumer throwaway rate + supermarket throwaway rate) were double digit. So yeah, your conclusion is pretty much justified ;)
It's a mix of both. If you want to eat tomatoes in the middle of winter agriculture will have to use a lot of pesticides. If society didn't have ridiculous expectations my guess is that the industry would use more sustainable methods of growing food.
Everyone wants to eat tomatoes in the middle of winter! I also want ice cream that tastes great but has no calories. If some company makes an ice cream like that but we find out 10 years later it's leading to the extinction of many insect species on the planet. Is it really my fault for buying the ice cream? Not the producers fault for using chemicals with such huge downsides?
Of course you're fucking responsible. We all are in some way. And that's the thing. We need to start acting more responsibly instead of expecting someone else to solve our problems. We can't live in a world where we consume meat three times a week. Demand drives the market and what the market does is deforesting huge areas to grow grass to feed the cows which in turn add tons of methane to the atmosphere. Companies won't change unless we change our habits.
And no, not everyone wants to eat tomatoes in the middle of winter. People who are more knowledgeable about food production never eat fruits and vegetables out of their seasons.
How can people be responsible for knowledge they don't have? Not everyone can know everything about all of the food they eat, which is by design in some cases.
I do think we all share some blame. We live in a democracy (no matter how flawed) and we bear some of the burden of the decisions of society as a whole.
The answer to these problems however isn't just saying "everyone stop eating tomatoes in the winter." You know full well that tomatoes grown in the summer are grown using the same shit, they can just source them from somewhere a little bit further north.
Why is it that I can go to the grocery store and see two different types of tomatoes: one type is cheaper and is killing the planet and the other is more expensive but safe for the environment? I have the means and the knowledge to buy the more expensive one but we can't expect that someone living paycheck to paycheck is going to be willing or even able to do the same. They aren't the ones to blame here.
I do agree that we can't expect someone else to solve this problem for us. We need collective action to demand significant regulation and change to the economic system. Scolding individual people for making rational economic decisions when they have a boot on their neck isn't going to fix anything.
That would be true if not for massive disinformation campaigns by corporate interests. Apparently most of us can't be bothered to dig into the source / motivations behind any media story, be it TV news, newspapers, Facebook feeds, Twitter posts, or blogs, etc.
Men and women went to great lengths to make sure no one ever got a straight answer regarding glyphosate. Y'know they use it to kill wheat before harvesting? Makes it lighter so the harvester can save a few piastres. Whole wheat bread can actually be a lot less clean than white bread, because the glyphosate is not washed off of the outer layer of the grain, which is discarded in the production of white bread.
Is it safe to eat glyphosate? Well Patrick Moore says that a person could drink a glass of the stuff and be fine. He also said "no I won't drink it. I'm not an idiot."
In Hawaii I notice absurd amounts of pesticide use. Look at any place where humans gather: if it has plants, it has pesticide. Golf course, soccer field, planter, sidewalk turf.
Well, that's a problem with many aspects involving "wilderness", not just insects. The usual train of thought seems to be that yes, natural landscapes are occasionally pretty, but as a farmer it would be irrational to have them on your land.
Problem of course, if there is someone for every patch of land who says "not here", then in the end, there is no room for it to go at all.
As another person said, its more about being "out of sight, out of mind". But the biggest component is cost and availability. Large scale farming (unsustainable over the long term) with a single crop per season and minimal rotation allowed for huge crop yields over the short term which drove prices down. At this point the majority of consumers do not want to pay more than they've become accustomed to paying for any fruits or vegetables.
Sustainable farming costs more in the short term. Over the long term it is the only reasonable way to farm.
The book "Lentil Underground" by Liz Carlisle was a great read on this topic.
The outcome is also better lives, less sickness, healthy crops etc. yes there are drawbacks but the goal isnt just good or bad its good and bad, the discussion we can have is whether is more good than bad or vice versa.
> The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs up. That’s really weird.
It's probably more a "tragedy of the commons" type of thing.
If X is detrimental to society but necessary for big players to make more money, then you can bet X will happen. Especially if society doesn't find out immediately about the bad aspects.
From what I can gather (anecdotally) is most of them would rather trust the system, or blame the system, than confront the fact they are undermining their children's future. Stormy Daniel's is a concern. The shite passing for food on the kitchen table is not nearly as important.
I'm not joking when I say, we are in The Matrix - just batteries for the machine.
> The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs up. That’s really weird.
Not really. The alternative was having all our food eaten by insects and not having enough left over for ourselves. It's kind of a no-brainer in the short run.
well because evolution has made it so that what kills insects only manages to give us a really bad headache (and potentially cancer way down the line, but everything gives us cancer so that is okay)
Not really, given that our use of pesticides allows us to feed billions of people worldwide at low cost. Rates of hunger in the developed world are almost non-existent and globally hunger rates are as low as they've ever been and continue to plummet.
Pesticide treated food is safe and healthy too, so we're feeding the world with safe and healthy food. This is a great thing.
It's not surprising at all that people would say all good. There would need to be some catastrophic side effects of pesticide use for people to even think about questioning it.
So far all problems related to pesticides have been far, far outweighed by them giving us the ability to feed billions.
It would take far too long to get enough nuke capacity online to do any good, and would steal capital from more cost-effective measures. Nuke power was never justifiable on a cost basis, and is much less so now than ever before.
If your outrage threshold is this low then you’re going to spent all your life in a state of outrage.
It’s nit even interesting let alone important.
Information in github, far from being surrounded by an invisible force field of integrity protection, is actually prime hunting territory for recruiters and any recruiter who doesn’t mine it probably needs to explain to their boss why they’re doing such a bad job.
The recruiter in question, far from being apologetic should have said “yes of course I got your email from GitHub so what?”
The guy recommends avoiding this recruiter. I recommend you use this recruiter as they clearly display basic competence at the task of recruiting.
This is a big deal because the recruiter is in clear violation of the GitHub ToS[0]. Quoting from section H: "You may not use the API to download data or Content from GitHub for spamming purposes, including for the purposes of selling GitHub users' personal information, such as to recruiters, headhunters, and job boards."
Of course recruiters are incapable of sound ethical judgement. Part of living with people who have poor ethics is enacting rules which force them to conform or be excluded.
If your ability to care about rules is this low, then you're going to spend all of your life in a state of imminent lawlessness.
Your typos are honestly more interesting than anything else; your message isn't important, just wrong and at the top of the page.
I hope that you are ready to explain CCPA to your boss. I won't accuse you of doing a bad job, though.
The recruiter in question, like all recruiters, is to be avoided when possible. Avoid rent-seeking and grifting.
It's not obvious to me why the recruiter in question is in violation of this rule. The rules bans someone from extracting information with GitHub API and selling such information to recruiters. It does not seem to ban recruiters from acquiring this information themselves.
> because B2B where there's an existing business relationship are normally excluded from spam laws.
That's not just B2B, but that's part of the definition of “unsolicited”, it doesn't make the commercial part is a red-herring, either in general or in the context of this thread, which did not involve either a pre-existing business relationship or, since you unnecessarily called it out as relevant, a B2B interaction.
> The UBE (unsolicited, bulk, email) definition is the one used by most blocklists and filters
That's because “bulk”, unlike “commercial”, is easily detectable. (And also because because bulk has the most impact, because, bulk.)
> and ISP AUPs.
Virtually all ISP AUPs include prohibition on unlawful use which includes violations of laws concerning unsolicited commercial email.
The "bulk" definition is more widespread and is the definition that's enforced more often. So, mentioning "commercial" is weird because most service providers don't care whether it's commercial or not, they care whether it's bulk or not.
You could take the API info you're looking for and then cross reference it with a simple GitHub user search, filtering for users that have "available for hire" selected in their profile.
I used this method years ago, albeit manually. I didn't have much luck though as it's akin to cold calling.
I found it much easier to pay a job and let the interested candidates come to you.
Don't know what type of email he had received. Personally I think it's pretty OK for HR to contract me, but not by sending automatic/template emails.
Notice he said "(they) used the GitHub API to pull my email address", and GitHub API can be used to massively fetch these kind of information for automatic spamming.
Imagine one day you wake up in the morning by few dozens of automatic recruit emails inviting you for a job which don't fit your profile even a bit, will you be happy? This happened to me few times and I'm not very happy about it.
I agreed GitHub shouldn't take the blame because you can hide your email in the account setting, but I don't think he shouldn't be pissed off by the company who was spamming him.
This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.
I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
It's a childish and immature opinion really.
Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
On the contrary, I think the author addresses this via the "cancer" metaphor:
> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.
I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.
* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.
I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.
Yeah, the problem with that is it's a completely flawed premise.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."
No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.
Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
You are being a bit pedantic and misdirectional with that first quote. It's not an important thesis of the article that people already know about the products ahead of time.
In no way have you demonstrated a "completely flawed premise".
> It's been dishonest since the start
How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
Firstly, I don't think it's unnecessarily pedantic to say that the origins of advertising and what they are for are not what he says they are.
>How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
Because if your argument is that advertising is becoming or has become dishonest and manipulative and it needs to be pulled back to what it was before, that is a lot weaker if advertising has always been dishonest and manipulative.
> It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.
There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.
>> I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
> That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.
Not a logical flow in that analogy from my perspective. There is legitimately bad advertising out there that is blatantly malicious -- malware, popups, click jackers, spyware, non-consensual tracking, etc. -- that could be described by that to a tee. But the original article goes further and calls all advertising cancerous which is just plain dogmatic and frankly, extremist. Its extremely easy to put down advertising, but the truth is everything in life is advertising, since advertising is just a game of attention -- predating the internet and printed paper. I think an average internet denizen has a viewpoint somewhere between.
Then we have people who work in marketing, and might see the article and be opposed to the article. But I don't think that matters. Advertisement is not going to stop because of some article putting it in a undefended spotlight, it's a fulfilling prophecy from a game theory perspective precisely because you can't not advertise -- as the article notes.
What makes the current system suboptimal? I mean, the markets are Dutch auctions, which penalize overvaluation. Compared to my youth, I'm definitely exposed to far less advertizing.
If advertising truly is an arms race, then the cost is money and effort wasted on keeping up with the competition -- building an excess of supply because you lose if you can't keep up.
Of course there are also plenty of opportunity costs to wasting billions annually on the overpromotion of overpriced products that are consumed in excess...
There must be a way to do advertising that respects the consumer, and doesn't use some form of sketchy manipulation to achieve the desired goal. And yet the vast majority of advertising is (to me) offensive.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise.
That's a rather childish and immature rejoinder. The world of employment simply doesn't work that way, and people's job mobility is not infinite and frictionless.
That's because we discovered psychological manipulation for advertising in the 30's thanks to Freud's nephew, Bernays. And it was brought to light when psychology hit center stage in the 70's after the psychedelics lash-back. So our current advertising methodology is a very recent phenomenon.
I won't be offended if advertisers can figure out which ads I won't respond to and then refrain from smacking me in the face with them. Or if they can avoid annoying me with moronic gimmicks like dancing lizards selling insurance.
I'm ready. Go ahead advertisers. Delight me with silence.
>I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
That isn't relevant regarding the truthfulness of the author's claim.
Whether or not ads are vital for any industry, product or technology (an extremely complex question by the way, not to be easily dismissed with a dogmatic "X would not exist without advertising") has no logical relation whatsoever to any opinion one might have about ads.
"Dogmatic viewpoints" are the real cancer on society. Actually "lupus" might be a more apt comparison.
Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.
Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.
He doesn't directly call for the completely abolishment of marketing/advertising and actually recognizes the free markets have a place for advertising but is using that blog as a place to complain about the cancer it has become.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."
Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.
I've worked at an organization that failed to advertise its products, causing massive inefficiency & waste - lots of people have access to our technology but don't know about it and end up implementing the same basic CRUD app over and over.
Don't underestimate the economic loss caused by people just not knowing there's a better way.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
There's a huge difference between informational advertising, which I support, and manipulative advertising, which is reprehensible. Telling people that their custom CRUD app could be ready quicker, cheaper to support, and contain fewer bugs if they used your product is great. Bombarding people who already know about your product and its half dozen competitors with subconscious messages that your competitors are evil and that if they use your product their sex appeal will increase is dishonest and stupid.
I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
> I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
The good old survival bias. You did it thus it's possible for all!
Sadly the truth is, word of mouth doesn't always work, you are just lucky.
The primary reason word of mouth doesn't always work is because of advertising. If you don't scream, nobody will hear you over everyone else's screams. But if people stopped screaming, then they could actually hear conversations.
So in your world where advertising went away and Facebook/Google/YouTube/etc are gone (don't pretend they'd survive without ads), where exactly do you do the screaming? In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
You don't scream. You talk to people. They talk to other people. If your message is worth it, it'll organically reach those who'd benefit from it. Also, you could post your message in places where people interested in the kind of problems you're solving come to look for solutions. Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
> don't pretend they'd survive without ads
I don't see why Facebook and Google couldn't work with a non-advertising-based business model. You might end up having to actually pay a little bit for it, though.
> In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
> You might end up having to actually pay a little bit for it, though.
How old are you? I'm from the 90's, I'm from the generation that was on MSN all the time. My parent would have never let me pay for anything online, with no access to credit cards...
There's no ways they would have paid 5$ a month for a social networks, even if "all my friends were on it", which wouldn't be true, just like Runescape in the past.
Late 1980s. MSN didn't exist at the time. MSDN did, though, and didn't require advertising support, Microsoft was fine with offering it for free.
I didn't mention it in the article, but I do recognize what you said as about the only redeeming thing about advertising on the Internet. Free content is a huge boon not just for the less wealthy, but for kids. I do not have a good idea how we could get rid of ads on-line while not excluding these demographics at the same time. I was kind of hoping someone on HN would have some ideas, but nothing turned up so far.
But that's the problem. Businesses are always going to scream about their product, there's no easy way to put restrictions on that and still have a free market. Remove advertising and incumbents have all the advantage. Word of mouth is powerful, but it can't be done alone.
> Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
These are all advertisements, just a different type.
Informational promotion is not the same thing as advertising. A PSA is not an ad. There are many ways to inform the public of services or resources other than interrupting a media stream with ill-targeted spots. Getting someone credible to favorably review your product would be a far better way to differentiate your innovation than web ads or TV spots.
The waste you speak of sounds the result of misjudging demand rather than spamming too little. Or maybe people were informed about the merits of your better mousetrap, but just didn't care. Startups often guzzle that kool-aid.
Advertising is the last place I'd go to learn if someone's novelty is better. Who trusts ads?
Right, but there's a difference between the occasional text or non-animated static image ad and the sorts of browser-fingerprinting spyware prevalent today.
There's also a time and place for ads, and the article's examples (like actual medical documents) are neither.
We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervasive as to be unavoidable; they can also still have a net harm even if you think that orgs "depend" on them for income, which is dubious.
And just for the record, I work for a nonprofit who advertises minimally, and definitely not to the public.
The problem is nobody is having a proper discourse on how to make ads better. There is a real problem here that we can fix and need to fix if we want to keep the internet economy from eventually collapsing when everyone gets too sick of ads to avoid adblockers.
There is a wide range of aggression in advertising tactics, and the arguments made in the article apply in proportion to that aggressiveness. It is not necessary to eliminate all advertising to start recognizing and addressing these problems.
It's the average opinion of people who are uninformed, and who've never had to sell anything for a living. They live in a fantasy world where ad people are wizards who can control people's brains and make them buy things they don't need by making them sad.
Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.
It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.
> I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
There aren't many things that can only exist because of advertising. Most of the things people things think depend on advertising already existed in some form before advertising took over and would continue to exist in some form if ads went away.
Maybe they're valuing inferior products they only prefer due to advertisements?
Imagine how much better our world would look without advertising. Will some adtech devs lose their job? Yes, but honestly it would probably be worth it. They'll find work in a non-scummy industry and can be a net positive for humanity.
> I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
Those are outweighed by the things that don't exist because due to advertising, resources are allocated to less valuable things instead.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
The classic non-argument of conservatives defending the status quo. People who don't depend on advertising for their income just get criticized for selfishly demanding the stop of a practice that doesn't benefit them instead.
I have a SaaS business which exists ONLY because of advertising. It’s highly niche, really the only product that does what it does, and a few dozen people a day click through from Google Ads and find that I have a product to automate something they had been spending hundreds of hours on. You should see the effusive thank you notes I get if you think advertising is pointless. This product wouldn’t exist without Google Ads because I would have no way to find the 50 people a day worldwide who need it.
I won’t even share it’s name, why would I open source it? Lol. It makes a decent amount of money and requires close to 0 engineering know how to build. So no, I will continue to let it make money quietly...
The things I buy may be advertised, but I buy nothing based on ads. I see almost no ads because I pay to remove them from all services that allow me to, and the rest I block.
I search for a product based on its category, read reviews, and find unpaid recommendations from things like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter.
Computers. And if you want to be pedantic, you'll say but they would exist for military etc!!!!!
But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.
Not just computers but everything related to them too.
Companies would absolutely be able to sell stuff without advertising their products. Self education, word of mouth, and 3rd-party informational sources has been enough for a lot of products. Purely informational advertising - the kind you'll see in an extremely old newspaper - would probably not be considered cancerous by the author of this article.
Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see some new information about a product that solved a problem you didn't know how to solve. You'll see problems that you didn't know you had, solved in ways no rational person would expect: Your problem is not enough attractive women making eyes at you? Solution: Buy new car. Your problem is life doesn't consist of exciting parties with cool youths? Solution: Buy light beer. Your problem is you're not a professional race car driver? Solution: Buy chunky watch. And if you missed the message, the same three commercials will air during the next ad break in 6 minutes, and you'll see them when you look at your phone or computer, in the wad of glossy ads cocooned within the thin pages of your newspaper, and you'll hear about them on the radio until the host decides it's time to play another song.
That kind of advertising may be necessary for Budweiser to keep up with Coors, or for Ford to keep up with GM, but if it disappeared tomorrow, people would still know that beer and cars were a thing. People might make smarter choices on how much alcohol to drink and when to be content with their current transportation instead of buying a new car, and sales might go down a little, but that would not spell the end of society.
Oh, sales might go down a little. So GM doesn't advertise their latest model and it doesn't sell as much. No worries. It's not like the livelihood of thousands of people is at stake. They'll just find other jobs. Who cares about them?
Replace GM with a factory, and advertising with dumping toxic waste into the local river. Would you still cry about the lost jobs if someone proposed banning dumping toxic waste into rivers?
Strawman argument. When advertising works it has some upside for everyone (customers, platforms and advertisers), dumping toxic waste only benefits the dumper.
I don't see the upside of the crapton of billboards I pass daily, or the flashing, potentially malware-inducing garbage I would see everywhere on the Internet if I turned my ad blocker.
Advertising has ridiculous externalities; this is what makes it similar to the toxic waste scenario.
That's because companies have abused the ecosystem and created all this garbage. The irony is lost on them that they're going to be less profitable because they've devalued ads so much.
I truly believe we can find an equilibrium which works.
I believe we can find an equilibrium that works too, and that it starts with rolling back almost all advertising "innovation" of the last 100 years.
You'll note the game-theoretical mechanics at play here. If your competitors use garbage advertising, you can't not use it and hope to compete (much like if your competitor is dumping toxic waste to a river, they have advantage over you who tries to safely dispose of it). If one of your competitors invents even more garbagy way of advertising and gains a temporary advantage, everyone will follow suit and the advantage will be cancelled out.
This suggests that simply making it not possible (technically or legally) to engage in garbage advertising won't hurt companies much, and might even be beneficial - companies will still engage in the same competition, but at a cheaper and less invasive level.
There's an anecdote about tobacco companies that I still need to find a proper citation for, but it goes like this: tobacco companies were apparently happy about legal restrictions on advertising, because it was applied to everyone equally, so no one ended up relatively worse off, but now they didn't have to spend so much on advertising anymore.
The two scenarios aren't that different. Sure, poisoning rivers is worse. But my point is that "think of the jobs it supports" is a poor argument for a practice that hurts people at large.
Unless you think that only companies that produce 0 pollution are acceptable, all you have to do is provide the cost/benefit analysis of (no advertising, less employment) vs. (advertising, more employment).
I don't think it's a poor argument, because I don't think "advertising" is hurting "people at large." I think that's a fantasy.
Of course there's some shitty, lame advertising, and there's some "manipulative" crap, and there's shady practices like ad tracking. No one is arguing those are good. Ad people are constantly mocking shitty advertising themselves. But no one is offering better solutions.
I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution. That's a huge opportunity to make billions and make the world a better place that I would support 100%.
Unfortunately, it seems like people are more interested in infantile hot takes and engineering vs. marketing culture war screeds. I'd rather we talked about the above.
Can someone who thinks advertising should disappear explain how they intend their new fangled startup to grow and reach its target market with no form of "advertising" or "marketing", bearing in mind things like opportunity cost and cash flow management? Feel free to include/exclude whatever you want from those labels and explain why.
> Of course there's some shitty, lame advertising, and there's some "manipulative" crap, and there's shady practices like ad tracking. No one is arguing those are good.
The argument I'm making in the article is that it's not some advertising that's manipulative and shady, but that it's almost all of it.
> I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution.
It comes up monthly because it's a problem, particularly on the Internet. But solutions are hard to find, because it's a hard problem. For one, it has prisonner's-dillema-like nature - if you show up with a way to do well without advertising, a competitor will take your method, add advertising to it, and proceed to do even better.
(Scott Alexander once wrote a very long essay specifically about such problems[0], and he didn't figure out anything actionable either. It's a hard problem, and arguably the root of all the big human-caused issues on this planet.)
I have no good solutions and I said that exact thing in the article. If I ever find one, I'll let the world know. Best I can think of now is individual and collective (i.e.: regulatory) ways of resisting and reducing the individual shady practices and negative consequences of those.
The home PC revolution was started in big part by accident when IBM made a computer that was both cheap and easy to clone. They became the leader against other, much better recognized computer brands, clones appeared left and right, and here we are.
They became the leader because their product was a better market fit, and not because of advertising. If anything, PCs actually canibalized the products that IBM was actively trying to market (mainframes come to mind).
And then there's Unix and GNU/Linux, the OS of choice for servers.
Home computers were initially a novelty item, sold mainly through direct-response advertisements in magazines like Popular Electronics. This early hobbyist market created the economies of scale that made a mass market home computer a possibility.
In the late 70s and early 80s, most people simply had no idea why they would want a computer; The first home computer adverts in the mainstream media didn't really sell the benefits of one computer over another, but sold the idea of the computer:
Without that kind of advertising, it's entirely plausible to believe that home computers might have been a fad, with the computer resigned to being a specialist tool for business and industry. There's a parallel universe where the home computer and video game boom never happened because nobody told consumers why they might want a computer, the 6502 and Z80 remained niche microprocessors for embedded applications, Woz went back to HP and Bill Gates finished his degree and got a job at Honeywell.
The fact that people were already reading about electronics in magazines they bought with their own money shows that people would have known what computers were regardless. Those advertisements only worked because the audience was already interested in computers. Those computers also already existed and the notion that no one would have used a computer if an ad didn't tell them to is absurd. Computers exist because they're useful and fun and they were purchased by people who wanted computers and were willing to seek out products they wanted.
"In it's current form" is quite the qualifier. "Hey, computers would probably not look exactly the way they do right now if we had changed something thirty years ago".
I don't know whether there are examples (aside from "the funniest advertisements" shows), but computers certainly aren't one.
Advertising should still be regulated for the stability of society, but regulation is always behind, and is frequently distorted by the folks being regulated.
examples where better regulation is needed: robocalling, pervasive tracking and data sharing, dark advertising patterns, drug marketing, etc.
>This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.
You're asking him to argue against himself rather than put a strong case forward for a position. And you're framing the fact he doesn't as a mental limitation. You're denying the authors agency by asserting it wasn't even a stylistic choice about presentation; he didn't present what you would have so therefore his brain must be broken.
Businesses are made of people, and people have ethics. If you're running one, consider the way you advertise. Are you aiming at making mutually beneficial transactions, or are you just trying to milk you users out of their hard-earned cash? Not all advertising is inherently harmful to individuals or society. Choose the ethical option. It may cost your company some lost profits, but then again, you may gain loyal customers who'll want to reward a honest business.
Indeed. We remove advertising, how many folks lose their jobs that are allowing them a level of self-actualization where they can analyze advertising effects on society at large?
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.
I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
My brother has the same view of advertising as this author but also loves MotoGP and other motorsports and doesn't see the conflict staring him right in the face as sponsor-branded bikes fly past. I agree it's childish and short-sighted, and I'm certain the author would have a different viewpoint if the time came to market his own small business.
Of course, he rides bikes relevant to the series and wears gear from the sponsors involved. Not to mention all of the non-motorbike sponsors like energy drink companies, insurance companies, tech companies etc...
I think LinkedIn is despicable but I have a LinkedIn account because it’s basically expected that you have one for recruiting purposes by many employers.
This argument that you can't criticize anything if you benefit from it is absurd. If he didn't use any technology that comes from companies that advertise, he would never be able to communicate his message in the first place. In fact he wouldn't even be able to leave his home or feed himself, unless he just farmed off the land and made his own clothing. Ridiculous.
I'm not involved in those, I merely use them for obvious reasons almost everyone uses them - network effect. Facebook is the XXI century rolodex (also, I was very young when I got on it, and it looked differently then); LinkedIn account I maintain for the off chance it could be useful in finding a job. Also, that doesn't mean I like how these services work.
I fortunately avoided being ever involved in anything directly related to adtech, and I plan on staying that way.
Using Facebook to talk to your friends is literally a form of exchanging word of mouth. It's not a dating site for me, I don't advertise myself there.
A LinkedIn profile is technically an advertisement, but it's not one I push on people. Someone needs to go and look for it to find it. It's akin to an entry in a product catalog. I consider this kind of advertising to be fine, and I said so in the article.
(Also incidentally, all the jobs I ever had I got through the word of mouth.)
Github was subject to US law before MS took it over; gitlab is not MS-owned but had to do the same (not sure about bitbucket but I imagine it's similar).
Whether the #1 place to host open-source projects should be owned by a company that makes a closed-source OS is a good debate question but it's completely orthogonal to whether they have to comply with US law.
I'm not saying I agree either with the sanctions or with Microsoft running github, but I'm saying you can't blame Microsoft for the current administration's sanctions on Iran.
I don't think people actively contributing to open source ever cared about in which nation their code was hosted. Because it didn't really matter.
Now it is like an old grumpy grandpa you wanted to get rid off some time ago suddenly caught up with you and enforced some of the shittiest laws you could imagine.
But did they really need to enforce that block? I would imagine nobody would have noticed it and if github wouldn't be owned by a giant that enforces compliance to the letter, Iranian devs wouldn't be banned.
Not the fault of MS, sure, just saying that this is one of the disadvantages about the takeover.
So why haven't all websites cut off these countries?
Why haven't the ISPs cut off these countries?
Github has acted because github is under the control of a giant corporation, Microsoft or otherwise.
So there's a line that runs precisely from Microsoft acquisition to cutting off countries from the world's largest open source repository. It's a direct outcome of the Microsoft acquisition.
A lot of pages have. Or at least they don't take payments from them. Larger CDN providers will maintain "US sanctions" blacklists which you can enable with one click. A lot of companies just don't care.
I doubt it - I would suggest the rapidly escalating tensions in the Gulf, combined with a much more activist / impulsive administration has caused this.
Irans government is pretty backwards. The Iranian society is and was much more open a few decades ago. Truly a sad story of development in the completely wrong direction.
Have you seen the US lately? We're en route to undoing Roe v Wade, the Civil Rights Act, years of progress on other matters, etc, and we've already basically given up on functional democracy by allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on candidates. What do they say about those in glass houses...?
In the US the backlash is unfortunate but explainable. While conservatives could probably have been convinced with data that liberation did in fact not increase abortion cases and showing that prohibition doesn't stop them either while just increasing suffering, a lot of liberal proponents put some twitter nut jobs at the forefront of the discussion. Or maybe conservative media just put them in the spotlight. That is my impression at least. The result is predictably bad. I don't know how that abortion topic came up in the first place, but here we are.
Money in politics is a serious problem. Obama was very honest about that. While basically being bankrolled by citybank, he made that fact clear multiple times and basically asked for people holding their representatives accountable. Obviously that doesn't seem so easy.
But all that doesn't really compare to the theocratic rules the Iranian regime implemented. That is on a whole other level.
Of course they don't do that. However, that is certainly not the reason why the relations are so bad. The US government has absolutely no problem in having very good relations with government/regimes that do those things and worse (Saudi Arabia?).
The thing is that whenever a country decides to do something that the USA don't like, they begin hostilities in different levels until they a) get what they want (almost never happens) or b) completely destabilize the country.
Not lately at least. While I think Lybia was a big mistake, I tend to blame France more than the US. Iraq, Uganda, Somalia and Yemen are the wars the US is involved in to my knowledge, some of them not actively anymore. Say what you will about Trump. Him not starting wars seem to be an exception, although I don't think Obama is responsible for the Lybia situation. Politically perhaps as he omitted congress, but I still wouldn't call it a war that he started.
Hell, Gaddafi was air-striking civilians. The African Union was against foreign intervention and today civilians probably suffer more than under the regime of Gaddafi. Hard so say what would have been the right thing to do. We still feel the repercussions of that...
At no point in the last 40 years has the US government held a higher moral ground than the Iranian government. The USA has killed far more innocent people under far worse pretext than any other nation on Earth.
Think about it, why are we targeting tech? If having tech mix with finance is bad, shouldn't we disallow finance companies from offering tech services?
If it's not bad, then why are we doing it at all?
This really sounds like these politicians are once again doing too much of something no one asked for, and nothing at all about what we did ask for, privacy protection.
All they need to do is make a HIPAA like law that criminalizes any sharing of personal data at all for commercial purposes. With mandatory prison sentences for offenders. That's it. Do that and you stop all kinds of egregious privacy invasions in their tracks.
That's a really simple ask, and yet they won't do it. It's starting to get a little infuriating. No one cares about whether paypal or ebay offer a prepaid debit card or whatever. Anymore than anyone cares about Walmart offering prepaid debit. We want to make it illegal for ANY of these companies to share information. Full stop.
Why can't these people do such a simple thing that makes a whole lot of sense? The EU has protections. Even the AU has started drafting the privacy protections regs for their new zone. Why can't we in the US do that same, very simple, thing?
Worst part is now instead of having to worry about what ebay, paypal, and amazon are doing with that data, I have to worry about what thousands of anonymous smaller vendors are doing with my data after they purchase it. In a very real way, these politicians are turning what was a 9mm round flying at me, into a shotgun blast...
The politicians wont do it and the populace won't like it because tech companies have become a significant part of the economy and are a significant driver of economic/retirement account growth and international political power in the USA for the past 20 years.
> The draft legislation, “Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act,” describes a large technology firm as a company mainly offering an online platform service with at least $25 billion in annual revenue.
This legislation is clearly aimed at Apple. Today Apple Pay and a Goldman Sachs credit service. Tomorrow a credit card offering if their own to compete with other Eurocard/Visa/MasterCard services.
Facebook is only establishing an alternative currency, which major banks will be participating in if it gets off the ground.
Libra is not a threat as long as Facebook plays well with regulators and various nations’ tax offices. In addition, Libra will be run by a spin-off company, not directly by Facebook.
Apple is potentially going to cut EMV out of the loop.
There isn't a definition provided for platform utility in this bills text, but the first mention I saw of the "platform utilities" term was from Warren, which was referring to select category of companies with this definition:
Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or
more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an
exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be
designated as "platform utilities."
It looks like PayPal is at around 13B in yearly revenue so they would 100% not be included for revenue bar alone, but not completely sure how I would read if they fit into the category based on the rest of the definition.
A limit of $25 billion in global revenue? This reads like legislation drafted by large banks to secure their moat against newcomers with enough heft to actually make a dent in their market share. I don’t think this will facilitate competition or protect the consumer in any meaningful way.
$25B is the point that Warren has been targeting for a few months now, not just for banking-related services. She says that at $25B, the company is sufficiently large that they control a significant portion of whatever industry they are as well as the economy and people's lives. The goal is to target companies with too much influence and reign them in with regulations and/or breakup. Again, this number is being used for any industry, not just banking and tech (though tech does seem to be the focus at the moment).
It's weird though, because something like ACH desperately needs to be replaced. It's slow, and compared to whatever they have in the EU, it's slow and embarrassing. Not saying it needs to be blockchain (I'd prefer it isn't), but taking lessons from it would be beneficial. In the past ~30 years, the American business ecosystem cares less and less about standards and more about pushing their own standards/formats and not giving a fuck about interoperability.
We, as a society, poison pretty much everything as a standard part of the agricultural process.
The outcome -the goal - of that is of course, death of vast numbers of insects.
Mission accomplished. It’s a success story, strangely.
The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs up. That’s really weird.