'Incredibly noticeable': alcohol ban cut family violence, crime in Alice Springs

Yeah, but you're holding up literally everyone in your society.

When you get cancer from an unfortunate cosmic ray strike on the wrong strand of dna, but the Oncology department is backlogged for a month by people whose cancers were caused by chronic inflammation from overeating (primarily sugar), you're definitely being held up for proverbial sugar money.

I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad?

There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes.

Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment.

Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.

Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum.

Consider this billboard on a boat that ruins the view at a public beach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/thi...

Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else.

Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere.

Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.

Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want?

Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.

The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.

Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after.

Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.

Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure.

At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.

The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon.

If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.

I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own.

To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction.

In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.

Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot.

To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately.

I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago

For a while in my generation, a small minority did.

Now though, everyone vapes.

Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.

Though, I think (with no comment on your choice whatsoever, it's a commonly used phrase), that "emotional instability" may not be the most helpful term specifically in regard to those who choose to self-medicate.

Aside from the specific group that medicates away emotional instability caused by alcohol use.

And there are probably a dozen exceptions to my statement.

But aside from that group:

It could be applied in place of "shy", but there's an argument that it could be overkill in that instance. And I don't think that you meant "shy".

In the interest of skimming over paragraphs of potential parsing over these terms, I'll focus on a segment of people who I think meet the qualification of the spirit of your question but not the term used.

People with undiagnosed congenitally conferred conditions, like ADHD and Autism, I think are prone to alcoholism. I would wager money that there is a higher incidence of Asperger's in the homeless population, for example, then in a sample of virtually any other social group aside from (possibly) any that are academically rarefied.

Will they have a degree of emotional instability? Yes. Some of which is caused by the manner in which the World has chosen to interact with their differences. Regardless, the key to diagnoses and treatment is to get to the factor that underlies it. Admittedly, after a lifetime of compounding issues that's a tough task.

Exactly.

The idea isn't to limit access or consumption, but rather (as totalconfusion correctly noted) to ensure quality and dosage standards (as the US already does for prescription drugs as well as all the US states with legalized cannabis), as well as ingredient lists and other disclosures.

The specific regulations might vary (e.g., dosage accuracy/precision would likely be significantly more stringent for fentanyl than for cannabis).

My apologies for not being as clear about that as I could have been. I hope I've done better this time.

Edit: Fixed typo.

There are many bad things that come from living in states with heavy religious subjugation like the above examples of the Islamic world and the state of Utah, e.g. highly paternalistic and controlling attitudes toward women.