141–150 of 217 posts
in the list of BS items, have to disagree a little with inclusion of "captchas, QR codes" ..these seem useful. I must be missing some nuance re their bullshittyness - can anyone elaborate?
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The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient. Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose l…
"negative externality".. "It's cognitive pollution".. "imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else", "life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard" I'm seeing some BS here..a lot of hyperbolic, pseudo-psychology BS.
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> this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work Really? People do do an awful lot of stuff which doesn't work. Is there good evidence that this stuff works?
Advertising? Yes, there is. I'm sure you can find numerous reports on its effectiveness.
So, the size of your marketing department is more related to the size of your competitors department, than any actual effectiveness. Which is another way of reinforcing monopolistic consolidation. A large competitor likely can significantly outspend a smaller one with advertising dollars, which just goes to cement its position in the market.
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Wallerstein said that Capitalism has failed for the Capitalist class, what he means is that it's costing more and more to make a dollar. The reason that income is falling is because the Capitalist class expects to continue making billions against a market which is efficient. They just squeeze that profit out of the worker's paychecks. Ultimately, that's the problem. The Capitalist project has reached its end, but the…
And let me guess, since "The Capitalist project" has failed we're going to go back to those successes of the 20th century that caused so much human misery.
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Wallerstein said that Capitalism has failed for the Capitalist class, what he means is that it's costing more and more to make a dollar. The reason that income is falling is because the Capitalist class expects to continue making billions against a market which is efficient. They just squeeze that profit out of the worker's paychecks. Ultimately, that's the problem. The Capitalist project has reached its end, but the…
And let me guess, since "The Capitalist project" has failed we're going to go back to those successes of the 20th century that caused so much human misery.
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You may welcome the billboards, but "cognitive pollution" sounds like a perfectly good description to me. Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.
> Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for. By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution." If that's the standard, then it's so vague and subjective as to be nearly useless. As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
If also has to bring you no value as it acts to distract you.
> As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
Each billboard is less disruptive, but a hundred can cry for your attention at once.
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Wallerstein said that Capitalism has failed for the Capitalist class, what he means is that it's costing more and more to make a dollar. The reason that income is falling is because the Capitalist class expects to continue making billions against a market which is efficient. They just squeeze that profit out of the worker's paychecks. Ultimately, that's the problem. The Capitalist project has reached its end, but the…
And let me guess, since "The Capitalist project" has failed we're going to go back to those successes of the 20th century that caused so much human misery.
Did you actually read what was written? It hasn't failed. It's failing to produce for Capitalist themselves in terms of profits. Capitalism has succeeded. But that means the journey is at its end. There is no going back, there is only going forward. And forward does not look like the present or the past.
The cost of production is going up while the profits are going down.
As a web person it's not hard for me to see. No one wants to pay for web development but want all the features. Technology enables this to some extent but there are limits to what can be done. The product has to be perfect and has to be free or nearly free. etc. etc. Sooner or later I will fail to deliver on expectations.
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Ess...
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The savings rate being low is insufficient to justify your claim that advertising does not create net demand. It's also possible that people choose to work more to afford more goods. I see Americans working very hard when I feel they would get more life satisfaction out of cutting expenses, primarily the big three: transportation, housing, and food.
You mean the 3 expenses that are entirely non-optional?
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Sure. Businesses (in the US, anyway) pay tax on their profits, not their revenue. Profit is revenue minus expenses. Advertising is an expense, just like all of the other expenses that go into successfully bringing a product to market (research and development, transportation, etc.).
Wouldn't it be interesting if personal income taxes worked the same way? (Capital gains tax kinda does, at least in the jurisdictions I know about; you can offset losses against gains. But earned income seems just as much like business revenue as capital gains...)
Most consumer debt was tax deductible. I believe it changed in the 1970s.