3 ms·

I agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad. I also agree that people have choices. I disagree th

I agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad. I also agree that people have choices. I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.

cm2012 4mo ago
Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty. Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery. And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.
- moritzwarhier 4mo ago
  Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world". And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food". I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat. But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me. Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".
  - cm2012 4mo ago
    Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.
    - moritzwarhier 4mo ago
      Of course! But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited. I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made. I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.
bondarchuk 4mo ago
By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them. All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.
- cm2012 4mo ago
  My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself. Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives. In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising. Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested. This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled. People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth. However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
  - bondarchuk 4mo ago
    >People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.

cm2012 4mo ago

Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty. Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery. And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.

moritzwarhier 4mo ago
Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world". And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food". I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat. But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me. Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".
- cm2012 4mo ago
  Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.
  - moritzwarhier 4mo ago
    Of course! But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited. I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made. I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.

bondarchuk 4mo ago

By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them. All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.

cm2012 4mo ago
My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself. Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives. In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising. Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested. This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled. People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth. However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
- bondarchuk 4mo ago
  >People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.