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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. There are advanced cultures in the world without this ambition you speak of (I'm looking at you, Holland), where convenient life in a local environment that is all accessible by bike, eating lots of fish, and caring less about immense wealth and impressions and more about quality of life.. it is attainable.

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I'd be interested to see a comparison on the amount of advertising done per capita in Holland vs. the United States.

Once I stopped watching television, I was no longer exposed to such incessant advertising.

As a result, I stopped caring so much about impractical consumption. I.e. buying the new car they show every 10 minutes in such persuasive and skillfully crafted multi-million dollar targeted advertisements.

Me too. I rail against advertising incessantly on here, but I really think it's far nearer to the core of the issue than a lot of people think.

Even a lot of anti-ad folk are like "just make them less intrusive and it'll be fine". No, that's just an extra annoyance. Ads are, at their very essence, incredibly bad.

Just did some number crunching and it appears Holland spends roughly half as much on advertising per capita than the US.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spendi...

And the coolest thing about Holland is that they are one of first to do terraforming on a large scale by creating a local environment under the sea level!

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