Hacker News Reader

ionisedon China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars

You might be surprised to learn about some of the shit the US does to its own citizens.

ionisedon What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

Advertising likes to determine that for us, and people are easily manipulated by it.

ionisedon Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

You mean capitalism would collapse.

Society would continue on in another form.

ionisedon Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

I'm thinking you haven't done much 'unskilled labour'.

ionisedon Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

If you're talking about software development, it's not hard to learn.

You can teach someone unskilled to be a developer in around 6-12 months. Within a year or two they will be working unsupervised to a professional level.

You don't need university for it. You don't need a degree. Anyone can learn it. It's not magic, it just takes time.

ionisedon Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks

The fact the people believe the cycle of boom/bust is somehow an inevitability of life rather than a flaw in our economic ideology is yet another cynical neo-liberal deception of the working and middle classes.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

I'm not being a cynic and a snob. There are studies showing how much simpler, more generified and more homogenous and less dynamic pop music has become over the last few decades.

It's an actual thing that has happened.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-pop-mus...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jul/27/pop-music-soun...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

You didn't address the point of my post though, the pop music analogy was just an example you used that I felt didn't work very well because music, even pop music, doesn't harm your health or exploit addictions in the ways many advertised products do.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

> hey aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat

Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you.

Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is harmful to their bottom line, because they are selling you what amounts to a mild poison.

People fought to get this labelling required by law. These companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

> They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.

The difference being my health isn't harmed by a pop singer trying to improve their voice. Nor are they creating a need or addiction to music that didn't already exist. There has always been a need for music among humans. Even tribal war drums count as music.

I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit, but really, pop music is such a small part of the entire musical landscape.

Even if it were, what damage to people is pop music causing? What addictions is it fostering?

You could debate about the dumbing down of music that manufactured pop music encourages, but we are talking about actual harm caused by fostering addictions here, which things like sodsa and cigarettes do, as a result of their being addictive as well as damaging to health.

The pop music analogy isn't a very good one, because music doesn't damage your health by encouraging your addiction to substances harmful to your health.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?).

So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

> And anyway, value is determined by the buyer.

I disagree. You can make anything seem valuable by defining value in the most cynically narrow terms possible like that.

By that same logic, heroin has great value in society, and hitmen and we shouldn't be trying to stop these things. However we do, because the popularity of the product is no measure of its contribution to society.

Continue on with that logic and literally everything is valuable, making it a meaningless distinction.

> You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.

I can and did. It's an opinion not an assertion.

If you are creating a need that didn't already exist, like targeting people's predisposition to addictions to substances like sugar, or nicotine, or heroin, then I posit that you have created no real value whatsoever.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

I always order Tango at places like that because I like the taste. I can't remember the last time I saw a Tango advert, but Coke which I avoid like the plague because it tastes like ass, has ads absolutely everywhere.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

I would never say 'advertising doesn't work on me' but it definitely doesn't seem to have the intended effect (persisting the brand in my memory for future sales) in a lot of cases.

Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.

Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

> Money is your score at the game of life.

In the saddest and emptiest of lives, sure.

Living only to increase the number on your bank balance seems like a terrible waste of life to me.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

Or people enjoy soda because the of insane amount of sugar put in it by people intending to make the product as addictive as possible.

Remove the sugar from soda and you have awful-tasting water.

Sugary drinks are no better than cigarettes, and the people pushing them know exactly what they are doing and what they are exploiting.

ionisedon Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

Just like heroin and hitmen.

ionisedon World Population Growth

It is zero-sum if you are talking about the proportions of overall wealth that go to different demographics at any given time.

People like to trot this 'not a zero-sum game' line out all the time as if it is somehow meant to make us feel better about the grave imbalance of wealth we have currently on this planet.

We already have the resources to feed and cloth everybody to a good standard, but it would require some sacrifices on the part of many wasteful developed nations, which they simply will never do.

Plus, if you want everybody to have a modern quality of life even within the confines of a developed nation, some greedy people are going to have to start paying more in wages and taxes and accept that the social contract and safety nets are the only thing between themselves and an angry mob.

ionisedon WhatsApp users will start seeing in-app ads within ‘Status’ feature from 2020

Why do you think they are the smartest people alive, compared to say, a scientist at CERN?

ionisedon WhatsApp users will start seeing in-app ads within ‘Status’ feature from 2020

Happens to me too.

ionisedon A Solution for Loneliness: Get out and volunteer, research suggests

> A church, or other "good community" doesn't make people better, this is an individual's decision.

but the churches we are talking about are religious organisations that claim a monopoly on morality.

The whole (claimed) point of their existence is to preach, convert and forge people into better, more virtuous versions of themselves.

If it is failing even in that one simple premise, then what good is it?

ionisedon A Solution for Loneliness: Get out and volunteer, research suggests

The 'badness' in people is supposed to be tempered or mitigated by these 'good communities' though. That's their whole point.

If they can't even manage to better people as part of their church than the average person is then what good is it other than creating cliques and an 'us versus them' mentality?

ionisedon The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

"It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, speciesism, racism, and sexism are some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung.

According to Galtung, rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an "avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs"."

ionisedon U.S. business contributes smallest share of federal taxes in a generation

You want to revolt against how society has worked pretty much since the dawn of civilisation?

ionisedon GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe

No, we can't agree.

ionisedon GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe

Pursuing cases takes time.

It's not like you just complain and the next day the business in violation starts behaving.

ionisedon Millions of Instagram influencers had their contact data scraped and exposed

> Are podcasters with ads sellouts too?

Depends what they are shilling and whether the creators of the show would actually endorse those products themselves genuinely.

Like, I personally wouldn't have an issue endorsing something that I use myself, but I would absolutely be a sell-out if I did it just for the money. I'm not a salesman.

ionisedon Millions of Instagram influencers had their contact data scraped and exposed

Yeah, these people have always been known as shills, sell-outs and charlatans.

'Influencer' is new-speak trying to hide their shadiness.

ionisedon DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

If you're mass-deleting your Facebook posts I imagine you don't care about a ban.

ionisedon Experiments find higher social class more likely to have inflated sense of skill

Are you implying that America doesn't have 'classes'?

ionisedon Experiments find higher social class more likely to have inflated sense of skill

Someone might want to tell them that over half the wealth in the US is inherited.

ionisedon Ecuador has begun giving the US some of Julian Assange’s possessions

Note for the future; Asylum granted by Ecuador is worthless, regardless of how much of a shitty house guest you are.