Cynical arguments are facile. I'm not interested in hearing that people are dumb or evil. I am genuinely curious how these companies attract talent.
Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
I also agree that people have choices.
I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.
Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.
And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.
And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food".
I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat.
But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me.
Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".
But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited.
I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made.
I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.
All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.
If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.
If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.
The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.
This kind of situation is win-win-win.
The plumbing website makes money from the ad - supporting their operations so plumbers can keep a good source of plumbing educational content.
The SaaS company gets to put their product in front of users to look at and consider buying.
The users get to see a potential product with no obligation that they may have not ever heard of before.
Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.
Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.
Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.
Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.
But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.
The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.
Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].
For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.
All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.
Consider the half of the US population that doesn't vote, not only do they not vote... but most of the time it's not even a system that they think about at all. There are a number of people who barely even know who the candidates in any given election are. You can live your entire life within a very narrow line of sight.
The "banality of evil" [1] is term coined by Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann who killed over a million Jews in the HOlocaust. She described Eichmann as an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who was (in his mind) advancing himself in the Nazi Party. The term has been exapnded to describe how disconnected most jobs are from their outcomes through complexity. You might be working on an AI feature that just identifies from external phone activity when someone is home or not. Sounds harmless right? What if you knew it was used by militaries to assassinate journalists while they were home so they got their families as well?
This also feeds into the concept of "social murder" [2].
Cognitive dissonance was best described by Upton Sinclair [3]:
> It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Even if you, as a tobacco employee, realized the connection between what you were doing and selling more cigarettes, you'd find people rationalizing it by saying things like "I'm selling to willing buyers" or you'd couch it in terms of personal freedom.
Lastly, violence, specifically state violence. We (generally) have a skewed view of what constitutes "violence". We all understand that if you get attacked by someone in the street it's violence. Where it gets more contentious is for something like eviction. Many will say "well that's protecting somebody's asset". Others will argue that putting people out on the street, particularly in a wealthy country, is state violence [4].
I bring this up because we live in a society that doesn't guarantee basic necessities. So you need a job to pay for those things. Well, that's putting a proverbial gun to people's heads. If someone is selling tobacco, are you going to tell them they should risk homeless for that moral stance? Would you? I don't mean that as a provocation. It's a thought experiment. How much would you give up for a moral stance personally? What if it impacted your spouse? Your children? There was a time when certain jobs exempted you from the draft. What if you had one of those jobs and it was immoral? Would you go to Vietnam instead?
[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
[3]: https://rowansimpson.com/quotes/salary/
[4]: https://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/news/evictions-can-kill-...