Will cable TV be invaded by commercials? (1981)

They may simply know their market well enough to know that people who tend to do McDonald’s take it as a “different kind of food”.

European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you will get is the one your insurance covers?

I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice.

I understand ads for non prescription drugs and little things like cough, but ads for HIV treatment I can't fathom.

As for your question, while the ad might be massively bad targeting for you, it might still be the best they have where you fit in the restriction set by the ad publisher, so better they get money on a poor match than no money at all. Usually a publisher that has terrible targeting.

The socialist party (biggest left wing party at the time, and in power 2012-2016)here in France talked at lengtht about this idea during Sarkozy's implementation of the repressive Hadopi system.

Pay a yearly fee, don't get punished for pirating, money gets redistributed. Similar but also vastly different to how we already have a specific contribution for French state medias, and then one to finance French production (movies, music,...).

It didn't get past the heavy talk part because no matter how you turn it, the abuse / unfair redistribution / increasing need unrealistic compared to usage is unavoidable.

The "growth for growth's sake" is a thought-stopping meme. Let's unpack why that's an inaccurate reason for why companies do what they do and also why people who don't even work at those companies also care about growth.

The commenter you responded mentioned Netflix and "growth". Remember that Netflix went public in 2002 with an IPO.

When any company sells shares of ownership to investors, they're making a deal with society that if you buy their stock, your money will "grow". For investors' shares to become more valuable, Netflix has to grow new revenue, grow new profits, grow new markets, grow new products, etc. Why do so many public investors (and the so-called "investors" includes your grandparents' pensions, teachers/firemen retirements, etc) care about their money "growing"?!? Because they want to protect their future purchasing power. (My previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15728480)

On other hand, if a family restaurant wants to just open one location with 20 tables and a payroll of 10 workers and just be a stable business that never grows, they wouldn't be able to sell public stock because nobody would buy it. There's nothing wrong with being a company that never grows -- but that's not the deal Netflix made with society.

So to rewrite your question a different way which gets at the root of where the motivation of "growth" comes from... Are we questioning the value of companies "going public"? Or are we questioning the ideology of fiat-money "inflation"? How do we make your grandparents pensions not care about "growth"?!? That's very difficult to solve!

There are also non-public entities that also want "growth". Countries like growth because it raises the standard-of-living for their citizens. Some small private businesses like some limited-scale growth because the owners like the challenges of running bigger business (e.g. expand to 5 restaurant locations instead of just 1.)

Even though the pandemic has shown the benefits of less smog in Los Angeles because of less economic activity, it still has not removed the root of human reasons for desiring "growth".