261–270 of 657 posts
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As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen. But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.
Wow. Banning something unhealthy. That didn’t work out so well for alcohol or drugs. The last thing I want is more government power.
*depending on your definition of working fairly well
A few reasons that we don’t see this:
1. It seems a slightly weird thing to tax. On the other hand, sugar taxes are becoming a thing in some places.
2. Elected governments may not want to piss off the media companies who they feel elected them.
3. Maybe people don’t care about advertising and so would feel like such a tax was for some hidden purpose. São Paulo (iirc) banned almost all public advertising. I wonder how the people there feel about it.
He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…
Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.
Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results).
EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some.
She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others.
Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.
I have no idea what brand my clothes/shoes are, if any. None of the food I buy has any branding whatsoever. ever seen a branded cucumber? nope, neither have I. I only buy new eletronics when the old one breaks, and I almost always get the cheapest one. Other than that, almost all of the rest of my spending goes to housing and savings/assets.
If everyone was like me, the advertising industry might not exist, or at least be much smaller.
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I would be happy to pay Google for ad-free search. Even $5/mo from me would be much more than they get from me now, and it would cover costs for thousands of unpaid users.
I don't know what Google's average revenue per user is, but Facebook supposedly is around $8 / month. I would expect Google to be in the same ball park. $5/mo probably isn't enough for Google.
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It hasn't done any of those things to me, however, so kindly get your hands off mine and out of my business please.
Are you sure it hasn't raised your risk?
A lot of HN users wish to "optimize" these facets of other people's lives through government regulation, but it's no less odious than going up to people in person and knocking their drink to the ground. It's not your choice.
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I'd really love to have an AR real-life ad blocker. Replace all billboards with works of art. Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.
I am not sure this is a technology problem, this is more of a societal problem. This city had the will to experiment with removing ads, and it had good results https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... How many cities have the will to even attempt something like this? Maybe a handful. I understand the irony of that page having multiple ads :P
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Computers. And if you want to be pedantic, you'll say but they would exist for military etc!!!!! But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products. Not just computers but everything related to them too.
Companies would absolutely be able to sell stuff without advertising their products. Self education, word of mouth, and 3rd-party informational sources has been enough for a lot of products. Purely informational advertising - the kind you'll see in an extremely old newspaper - would probably not be considered cancerous by the author of this article. Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see s…