121–130 of 379 posts
I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
in Italy, which is not the heart of tech bubbles, there have been reports (I got a call too!) of telemarketers cold calling people to invest in cryptocurrencies. This genuinely frightened me.
The cases they told about were pure scams where the fraudsters stole the cryptocurrencies directly.
I believe this to be a good decision. Investment should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any investment advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud. This is no different for cryptocurrencies and reminds me of the penny stock scams.
That's just not how advertising works. Investments are products like anything else and advertising is literally designed to expand the number of people who might purchase a product. You can say this about any product with differing utility among possible users.
> Truck buying should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any truck advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud.
I don't need a truck to live in the city, but that doesn't mean Chevy should be banned from running advertisements in a city.
I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it. People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole spac…
> People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken).
To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this.
In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
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in Italy, which is not the heart of tech bubbles, there have been reports (I got a call too!) of telemarketers cold calling people to invest in cryptocurrencies. This genuinely frightened me.
I've received a couple in the UK. Low end telemarketers (overseas, poor English, zero knowledge of their subject matter) and clearly originating from random dialling or a list of mobile numbers without names, so making traditional boiler room operations seem sophisticated.
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Agreed. I'm amazed the comment got such a negative reaction. I can't think of anyone I know who would be happy about being called a chick, however casually.
There's some who self identify with it, Skepchick and The Dixie Chicks come to mind, but it can be considered somewhat derogatory, dismissive, or at least belittling in some contexts to some people. I think context and age matters a lot here (as well as personal preference) - young women and (especially) girls may use the term amongst themselves but middle age women almost certainly wouldn't, if you called your boss…
I suppose the interesting question to ask is does HN think of itself as more of a professional/formal discussion community than one that leans towards casual/familiar?
(I'd assume that the answer is that it probably varies with comment writer and both sides of the argument are represented here and have fair points.)
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Rx advertising / marketing towards general public is banned in most countries. However, many countries allow for Rx drug advertising / marketing targeted towards consumers.
What is the difference here? Aren't prescription drug consumers the general public?
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USA drug purchases fund most global drug research. That money comes from somewhere. It's fine for us to question whether this is the best way for drugs to be marketed in our nation, but for the rest of the world to do so seems a bit ungrateful?
If people stop using these drugs if they're not advertised maybe they're not that useful in the first place? Isn't there enough money to be made selling real treatments for real diseases?