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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Well, people want those things. Is there something inherently wrong with that, or do you just find it aesthetically displeasing? To me, this is a bit like complaining that so much talent in painting in the Renaissance went into religious art.

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A lot of those wants wouldn't exist without advertising

That's sort of a warmed over marxist critique. It gets presented at lot as fact without any real evidence and I find that hard to believe. As someone who works adjacent to advertising, it just doesn't seem all that effective. Most ads are basically just informational or reminders that a thing exists anyway.

There are a lot of different products because in advanced economies people have a lot of disposable income and credit is cheap. As such, consumer good proliferate.

A lot of intrusive and weird functionality comes bundled with products that consumers would not ask for individually. I can easily see someone wanting to by a little vacuum cleaner robot to keep the floors clean while at work - without realizing it has the ability to determine what kind of couch it is bumping into and relaying that information to some server somewhere.

Well sure, once you have a little computer and suite of sensors on the thing there are a lot of incentives to add crap onto it because the marginal costs are so low. Imagine you a PM or mid level exec at Robot Vacuums Inc and you want to advance your career and get a nice bonus. If you can push to get some cool sounding new feature onto the new model you might get promoted or a nice bonus. It probably won't improve sales and the customers don't want that feature but it doesn't hurt sales either so its easy to see how these things prliferate.

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