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PT6A posted:Yes, that's exactly my point. Consumer choice doesn't simply vanish under a socialist system; if anything, it just means there's fewer bullshit distinctions between things which are very similar. There can even still be "prestige" brands, because money doesn't vanish, it just doesn't go towards enriching the capital class. 
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Jan 24, 2021 18:21
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Tubgoat posted:Flavor variants are easy enough to set up, though. Local differentiation. Take oatmeal. Company makes instant oat meal in packets. Bigass central factory makes all the oatmeal. Gets shipped to regional factories that package and flavor to local preferences. In the US we have like apple cinnamon, brown sugar cinnamon, etc. In India they get a dozen different types of Quaker Curry Oats. A large number of grocery product work this way including cereals, sodas and booze.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:24
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And under a socialist system, the idea must remain that, to ensure meaningful collective ownership of the means of production, the people who are responsible for managing the means of production are accountable to the rest of society. If Cereal Factory No. 24's head manager decides "we're going to make just one flavour from now on," there should be a way for the people to say, "no, I like other flavours, let's replace that person with someone who has a plan to make other flavours of cereal." The idea of socialism is not to create some sort of banal, pleasureless society where no one has any choice. That's a lie promulgated by capitalists to make it seem less desirable.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:31
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PT6A posted:Yes, and we've made fun of it to create a Canadian gang tag just recently! But, that, in itself, is marketing. A basic package like that communicates that "this is a basic and affordable version of whatever the thing is, and it will satisfy the need you have for this product without being flashy about it." That may or may not actually be the case. And that's what I get for browsing the forums on a phone with avatars turned off - now I look like a blind dumbass! You're absolutely right that, outside a world where brand-less packaging is imposed, no name and its ilk are just marketing. Of the sort of that often works on people who insist that advertising doesn't work on them. And certainly those who want to give off the image of not giving off an image. That's the problem with consumerism and marketing- you can't escape it. Even not engaging with it is a choice that gets packaged up and sold to you as being against the very thing that it is. Last week one of the leading car magazines here in the UK named the Dacia Sandero - the cheapest new car available to buy here - as its Car of the Year 2021. Dacia is Renault's budget brand, based in Romania and with a long-established business model of taking expired Renault platforms and repackaging them as basic, cheap, functional cars to fill the bottom run of the car-buying ladder in Europe and bulk out Renault's sales in the global south. They market them in a similar way to No Name - the fact that it's a brand with zero kudos or aspirational value, that the cars don't have any needless or extravagant tech, and that they have a reputation for being cheap to run and reliable is the whole point. You buy them for what they do, not the badge on the front. And of course that has become the entire 'brand value' of Dacia and the keystone of all its marketing. It's deliberately marketed as a car for people who aren't image conscious, who aren't interested in Keeping Up With the Joneses and who just want a car that gets them from place to place in a reliable and efficient manner. Which appeals a lot to people who are actually quite keen to give off the image of not being image conscious. A bit like those old VW Beetle adverts in the 60s. PT6A posted:Now, one thing I'd like to talk about is the "mostly needless choice" aspect of your post. Needless for whom? I would hazard a guess that it's an application of the Pareto Principle: 80% of distinctions are irrelevant to any one person, but the 20% which are relevant change from person to person. Lib and let die posted:Here's a choice: one brand of whole wheat breakfast cereal, and nobody goes hungry, or 17 different variations on cheerios and, well, take a look around you today. I guess it's mostly your Pareto Principle. As you say in reply to the other posts, there's a huge spectrum between 'twelve different sorts of plain corn flakes because all the companies want to fight out their own share in the market for plain rolled and toasted maize flakes' and 'an entire warehouse full of Human Morning Nutrition Product (Flakes, Maize, Rolled) in plain cardboard packaging'. Edit: In other words: PT6A posted:And under a socialist system, the idea must remain that, to ensure meaningful collective ownership of the means of production, the people who are responsible for managing the means of production are accountable to the rest of society. If Cereal Factory No. 24's head manager decides "we're going to make just one flavour from now on," there should be a way for the people to say, "no, I like other flavours, let's replace that person with someone who has a plan to make other flavours of cereal."
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Jan 24, 2021 18:33
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PT6A posted:And under a socialist system, the idea must remain that, to ensure meaningful collective ownership of the means of production, the people who are responsible for managing the means of production are accountable to the rest of society. If Cereal Factory No. 24's head manager decides "we're going to make just one flavour from now on," there should be a way for the people to say, "no, I like other flavours, let's replace that person with someone who has a plan to make other flavours of cereal."
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Jan 24, 2021 18:33
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Have there been any good categorical studies that estimate how much cheaper health insurance and meds would be it we removed their advertising budget? My ex's friend worked in pharma advertising and told me it was minuscule but I honestly don't know.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:44
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BiggerBoat posted:Have there been any good categorical studies that estimate how much cheaper health insurance and meds would be it we removed their advertising budget? My ex's friend worked in pharma advertising and told me it was minuscule but I honestly don't know. Not that I have seen, and I imagine they're as eager to reveal those numbers as a paroled serial killer is to brag about his rap sheet in public. Whatever we're imagining the numbers are, they are infinitely worse. Your ex's friend needs to give you numbers to compare because lmao my weight is miniscule compared to a beluga whale.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:46
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Tubgoat posted:If's like complaining about day-to-day life; you're really just finding a million different ways to complain about capitalism. What’s the best kind of ketchup? What about people who like spicy ketchup? What about people who specifically like whataburger ketchup? An equitable economic system doesn’t need mass standardization.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:46
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:What’s the best kind of ketchup? Those people are correct. I have no idea what that specific variant is like. I am well aware, but the manufacturing processs can be standardised, what you're describing are minor flavor tweaks that can be hosed with in the latter stages of production and part of the set-up should be finding out what flavors people want.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:49
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I think we all pretty much agree: socialism doesn't require a lack of choice, and the presence of multiple flavours of Cheerios is probably not responsible for food insecurity in general.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:53
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PT6A posted:I think we all pretty much agree: socialism doesn't require a lack of choice, and the presence of multiple flavours of Cheerios is probably not responsible for food insecurity in general. Apple cinnamon is okay too. Corn flakes are best eaten while masturbating because gently caress YOU, KELLOGG, YOU PIECE OF poo poo MOTHERFUCKER.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:59
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Tubgoat posted:Honey Nut and OG Cheerios are both bomb af. Agreed on all points. The issue isn't the fact that there are many different flavours of Cheerios, it's that each one of those is competing against a similar product from a different brand and thus all the producers of honey-nut flavoured O-shaped breakfast cereal have a motivation to pay their workers less and cut corners that shouldn't be cut, and to give the resulting profits to the capital class. And just lmao if you don't stroke it every time you have a bowl of corn flakes out of spite. You're missing out!
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Jan 24, 2021 19:10
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Graham crackers too.
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Jan 24, 2021 19:18
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PT6A posted:And under a socialist system, the idea must remain that, to ensure meaningful collective ownership of the means of production, the people who are responsible for managing the means of production are accountable to the rest of society. If Cereal Factory No. 24's head manager decides "we're going to make just one flavour from now on," there should be a way for the people to say, "no, I like other flavours, let's replace that person with someone who has a plan to make other flavours of cereal." The other lie here is the implication that a large variety of choices is preferable to a smaller selection of them. Capitalists know this to be false. There is such thing as an economy for attention/decisions.
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Jan 24, 2021 19:58
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A decent variety of choices is a good thing, provided those various options actually have any meaningful distinction between them, instead of simply being cynical branding exercises. The very first thing that came to my head is laundry detergent. I usually buy the type with no colorants or perfumes, because I don't really see the need for them, I want my clothes to be clean and odorless rather than perfumed. There's a particular brand that specializes in this niche of cleaning products, which is particularly important for people with allergies. It's also Nordic Swan sustainability certified and comes in straight-forward near-generic packaging. I would hate for someone who actually wants perfume in their detergent to be forced to buy the non-perfumed variety, just as I would hate to be forced to buy the perfumed variety. What I don't like is the endless rows of completely functionally identical bog-standard perfumed detergents that seem to advertise themselves solely on the color of their boxes. Do we really need 50 varieties of those? KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Jan 24, 2021 20:47
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KozmoNaut posted:A decent variety of choices is a good thing, provided those various options actually have any meaningful distinction between them, instead of simply being cynical branding exercises. Perfume falls under flavor variant, afaic, and can be workshopped, voted on, etc and added or not added as requested. There could be 50 variants, but they wouldn't all be manufactured to excess, only to demand. I stopped using dryer sheets because they leave an offputting soap texture on my clothes which makes them unsuitable to wipe off my glasses.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:42
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Tubgoat posted:I stopped using dryer sheets because they leave an offputting soap texture on my clothes which makes them unsuitable to wipe off my glasses. We don't have dryer sheets here, besides I don't have a dryer and line dry everything instead, but I completely ditched fabric softener years ago. It's just unnecessary perfume and it ruins towels by making them non-absorbent. Acetic acid works great as a replacement, to keep clothes soft, prevent colors from fading and reduce limescale buildup. But you can't really do fancy marketing for a basic utilitarian household chemical, so instead the market is flooded with crappy fabric softener.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:57
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KozmoNaut posted:We don't have dryer sheets here, besides I don't have a dryer and line dry everything instead, but I completely ditched fabric softener years ago. It's just unnecessary perfume and it ruins towels by making them non-absorbent. Or maybe some people like whatever it does, and wash their shirts separately from their towels or whatever. I don't use fabric softener or dryer sheets either. I don't think it's a mark of my moral superiority, it's just a personal choice. There's a disturbing current in this thread of: "if not for advertising, people would be smart like me, and agree with all the things I think, and like the things I like."
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Jan 25, 2021 00:15
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No advertising is not going to suddenly make people all have the same desires. Advertising can not save a product that nobody or not enough people want nor is the absence of it going to eliminate certain desires or how people like to function. I have worked on many doomed campaigns where from the outset failure is the only expected outcome. Health meds would be cheaper if we didn't have advertising, but the primary reason they are expensive in the US is not due to advertising itself so much as the extremely bafflingly stupid way in which healthcare is managed. Other countries allow certain types of medical advertising and do not have prices anywhere remotely in the range of what the US charges for drugs.
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Jan 25, 2021 01:53
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My understanding is that the fabric softener industry is dying because millennials just don't give a poo poo and the ads have thus far failed to convince them that they should.
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Jan 25, 2021 02:00
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Same thing with the still to me loving hilarious "badass" miracle whip campaign.
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Jan 25, 2021 03:11
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For a brief time, I forgot Miracle Whip existed. That wss nice while it lasted.
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Jan 25, 2021 03:17
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PT6A posted:Or maybe some people like whatever it does, and wash their shirts separately from their towels or whatever. I don't use fabric softener or dryer sheets either. I don't think it's a mark of my moral superiority, it's just a personal choice. It's perfume and some people like that, just like any other perfume product. That's the only real benefit over acetic acid, fabric softener smells nicer. But it also has drawbacks like tubgoat mentioned, it makes your t-shirts unusable for cleaning glasses, something that's also a major drawback for me. Do we really need 50 functionally identical brands of it, though? Not sure where you saw any particular claims of moral superiority in my posts, though. quote:There's a disturbing current in this thread of: "if not for advertising, people would be smart like me, and agree with all the things I think, and like the things I like." No, it's more along the lines of "advertising is deceptive and manipulative, and we don't like that". Clarste posted:My understanding is that the fabric softener industry is dying because millennials just don't give a poo poo and the ads have thus far failed to convince them that they should. So that's golf, homeownership and fabric softener that we've killed so far. We're on a roll, baby! KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 08:34
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I got my first really loving creepy ad last week. So the week prior I used my phone to order some silicone egg rings from Amazon. They come in a few days, they work great, etc. A few days later I’m watching YouTube and I get a McDonald’s ad. It shows the individual ingredients of a sausage and egg McMuffin and says, “sure, you have all the ingredients to make one of these at home. But you know it won’t taste the same”. This can’t be a coincidence, right?
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Jan 25, 2021 09:12
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Solkanar512 posted:I got my first really loving creepy ad last week. So the week prior I used my phone to order some silicone egg rings from Amazon. They come in a few days, they work great, etc. A few days later I’m watching YouTube and I get a McDonald’s ad. Correct. Same as when you and your friend are discussing something, you'll get ads for something related, or search suggestions will be related to what you were discussing.
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Jan 25, 2021 09:16
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It's perfectly normal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
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Jan 25, 2021 09:34
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KozmoNaut posted:It's perfectly normal. We found out over a decade ago that Alphabet Soup can turn your powered down phone on to tap you while it still appears off. If you have a smartphone and haven't rooted it to your preferences, it is literally always listening to you.
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Jan 25, 2021 10:03
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My Wireshark and Pi-hole logs say otherwise, but you do you. Your phone is not listening on you in order to tailor ads to random things you say. This is absolutely trivial to check with basic network logging and app diagnostics. E: If you insist on having the voice assistant tech turned on, then yes obviously your phone is listening for the hotword, duh. Switch that poo poo off. E2: I should clarify that it is possible that a phone can used to surreptitiously wiretap persons of interest, but that is a targeted effort and not nearly the same as listening in on everybody all the time, simply for targeted advertising. The cost:benefit is way off. In summary, your phone is not listening to you 24/7, but don't be a fool and bring your phone to a protest or something. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 10:22
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They're hoovering up all the data they can, cost is not an actual concern because money is fake.
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Jan 25, 2021 10:59
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Figure ~60GB of data per user per year if using a very efficient codec. Figure 2.5 billion smartphone users, that's 6 exabytes of data every year, to store and sift through for context recognition, which is both difficult and computationally very heavy. Not to mention the CPU usage and battery life on the phone itself to compress that audio, plus the data usage for sending it. And that's before you somehow figure out a way to send that data, to make it not show up in network logs. Pretty impressive. E: I work at an ISP/telco. We log source/destination IPs only and that's still a massive headache to do that for millions of subscriptions. It's also illegal and I hate it, but it's the facts.
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Jan 25, 2021 11:28
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Oh they're not listening to it in realtime, it's saved until it's needed to smear/imprison/etc a political dissident.
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Jan 25, 2021 12:35
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At least 6 exabytes and rising per year. Just in case. When it's easier to just make poo poo up as needed.
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Jan 25, 2021 12:41
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I dunno, man, military tech is always multiple decades ahead of what is publicly acknowledged, and the U.S. has pulled out all the stops to store all the data on everyone they can, in enormous data centres in Virginia, Nevada, etc. I'd be shocked to learn that the U.S. isn't recording literally every electronic signal within their borders. But actually, you make a good point, it's easier than ever for intelligence agencies to falsify records.
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Jan 25, 2021 12:46
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Critical speculation is certainly not a bad thing, but I don't think the military is sitting on storage devices with hitherto unknown massive storage capacities. So far I've not seen any proof of this 24/7 audio surveillance of phone users, even though it would be reasonably trivial to show it in network logs or app diagnostics. Various US agencies probably have the ability to intercept anything electronic, but listening to literally everything all the time would be silly. The cost:benefit just isn't there when you have much more direct methods available. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 13:01
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They don't have it because if they did they'd be selling it to me in every meeting I have with those companies. And like, right now there are (were? Been years) companies that put ads into the system doctors in the US use to write prescriptions for patients and you can display your medicine's ad while the doc is choosing which one to prescribe. You don't need super tech to have hosed up ad systems.
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Jan 25, 2021 13:06
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Clarste posted:My understanding is that the fabric softener industry is dying because millennials just don't give a poo poo and the ads have thus far failed to convince them that they should. My kid got an allergy to something in the dryer sheets, now I can't have any. Surprisingly, they're not that static-y Tubgoat posted:We found out over a decade ago that Alphabet Soup can turn your powered down phone on to tap you while it still appears off. Gonna need a cite on that which doesn't boil down to 1) carrier hooks 2) the radio can actually turn on the main processor??????????? 3) always on listening for the wake up word If the phone was still awake doing speech to text, or networking, or any kind of io, I'm going to be annoyed about all the effort that's gone into keeping the phone from waking up
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Jan 26, 2021 02:32
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One thing I noticed after returning from my deployment to Afghanistan is just how pervasive advertising is in America. After spending 9 months on a small base in the desert with no ads other than the occasional ad on the internet, it was a bit overwhelming to come back to the States and realize that everyone is trying to sell you something all the time. You become numb to it, but the difference is striking if you've been away for awhile.
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Jan 26, 2021 02:43
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PeterCat posted:One thing I noticed after returning from my deployment to Afghanistan is just how pervasive advertising is in America. After spending 9 months on a small base in the desert with no ads other than the occasional ad on the internet, it was a bit overwhelming to come back to the States and realize that everyone is trying to sell you something all the time. You become numb to it, but the difference is striking if you've been away for awhile. I've noticed the same thing after cutting the cable and listening to more podcasts instead of the radio. Podcasts have ads too but they're not nearly as frequent. On the rare occasions I go to someone's house or a restaurant with TV's, it's really jarring how often ads are running. Or when I run YouTube on my phone or Apple TV since I have no blockers on them. I don't see how anyone can stomach YouTube without UBlock or something.
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Jan 26, 2021 15:33
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KozmoNaut posted:My Wireshark and Pi-hole logs say otherwise, but you do you. I believed this for a long time but I really genuinely don’t anymore, although I unfortunately do not have the tech brain or know-how to check it. It is so uncanny when it happens. The clincher for me was when someone was trying to make me laugh asking for “wa-wa” (water lmao) and I immediately got an Instagram ad for the grocery chain Wawa, a chain I’d never heard of and doesn’t even exist in my state. I’m just not buying that this isn’t a thing.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:31
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Your phone isn't listening to your conversations to target ads. That would be virtually impossible to keep under wraps. Think about what's involved: 1. security researchers would have noticed 2. that kind of project would require a ton of engineers to build, somehow with none of them being a whistle blower, 3. it would require a ton of servers to crunch all that data, 4. it would be extremely illegal 5. this service actually has to be sold to advertisers. How could it be kept a secret if it's offered as a service to any paying company? One thing that I believe does happen is that IP address targeting can resulting in people getting ads based on other people's browsing habits (such as when they share a wifi network). It can create the sense that the phone is "listening to you" because people are likely to talk about stuff they've seen online (or have been actively researching online) and then you'll get an ad based on their browsing, but you connect it to the conversation.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:31
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