Regulatory: Ban advertising.

All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.

“But won’t the heliu-”

“FOREVER!”

‘I just need to make the numbers look good until I can quit this company and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists without capital

‘I just need to keep things flowing toward me until I can quit this world and level up. Apre moi, le deluge.’ - capitalists with capital

Anyone with a scintilla of awareness knows it has limits, but you can’t ‘level up’ in capitalist games by accepting them.

I really want to see what percentage of ‘users’ licenses are actually paid, and/or what average percentage of ‘users’ titles are just free. I have precisely one game I have paid for on Epic (Satisfactory, because I was excited for first person factorio) but I have over 100 titles in my library. I have to wonder how many of those free games I would have to download before the server costs completely eat the profit from that one copy of Satisfactory.

I’m no fan of banning this or that particular platform (it’s like trying to get rid of cheeseburgers by banning McDonalds; the burgers are still available from all the other burger chains and all the people who use the one will just switch to others) but this is a hilariously wrong way to get to the right answer.

A doctor can arrange a sputum test. Basically, you spit into a container and they check it for active tuberculosis. Oh, wait… consumMAtion.

It’s important to understand, there is no ‘feeling the waters’ with ideas. The response to half of an idea is always separate from the response to the whole idea. e.g. ‘I will’ is understood differently from ‘I will kill, tonight’ and both differently from ‘I will kill, tonight, on stage at the comedy club.’ If you want to know how people will react to the whole idea, you have to express the whole idea.

If you are smart enough to be suspicious, you are not their target audience. They feed on the fact many modern societies expect the mentally ill/handicapped to take care of themselves.

Not a good metaphor, though.

Written terminations of contract are not accepted here. Please, bring your petition in writing physically to our offices located at the spot your house will be at 00:00 on Jan 1st, 2027. If this is unacceptable, it can also be delivered to our branch office in your cerebelum.

Is that AI?

No, just England.

Then you’re not trying hard enough.

It might be said that it puts flags in the wind, regardless of the color they show.

That’s not how pizza quality works. You wouldn’t eat a pizza with literal shit all over it and call it good because it was made by a saint.

There is a reason you are saying each thing you are saying. Saying ‘but I would never order a banana split’ in this context has a different subtext than if you said it after watching someone else order one. I won’t re-explain it, because I was fairly clear, but yes, saying ‘I would never’ is an inherently judgemental negation of the supposedly non-judgemental ‘you do you.’ It is trying to claim both the stance of ‘I don’t judge,’ and ‘I am judging.’ It is a lie, either to the listener or to yourself.

I don’t like liars, but I try to give people a chance to realize their mistake, if it is one, by explaining their error. After that, I have to assume idiocy or ill will. Whichever it is, goodbye.

Thank you for at least giving a sensible response rather than irrational anger.

Still seems odd to say software is bad for having features one doesn’t use rather than not having features one does want, but… *shrug*

Intelligence agencies will always try to gather more info, but they also love having private corporations do the legwork to get the data they can then just steal. Reducing private data collection would reduce government surveillance as well, or at least make the governments do it themselves which would make it subject to certain laws that are circumvented by having private entities do it.

The best working definition I have come up with is banning ‘one party giving payment, in the form of money, goods, and/or services, to a second party in exchange for the display of media to a third party, in specific or in general, who did not explicitly request to be shown that media.’ This would cover the vast majority of problematic advertising. And it’s absurd to pretend it has to be ‘done in one.’ If more laws need to be made to counter loopholes because the sociopaths in the marketing department refuse to get real jobs, more laws can be made until companies’ decision-makers realise how much the marketing department is costing them in fees and implementation relative to the imperceptible benefit of having them.

Companies can still use their own spaces to display relevant product information. (i.e. factual, specific information on products that are present and being offered at the location of the informational media)

Word of mouth, if not caused by coercion or compensation, is not disingenuous, so not a problem. If you really love Brand X so much that you want to let everyone know about it when you talk to them, great. That means it’s such a genuinely good product that you feel love for it. That’d essentially be the goal. If they have to pay you to praise it, it’s not a good product.

Corporate personhood also needs to go, so no difference should be recognized between what a company does and what its proprietor does. The owner should not ask/allow their representatives to do things in their name for which they do not wish to be held responsible.

As for ‘…companies showing a word of mouth…’ That’s going to need rephrasing.

Trust me. I haven’t been just spouting off about how harmful advertising is without thinking about it. I already know it will make starting new small businesses harder, and I have considered loosening the rule to only apply to businesses with positive cashflow AND/OR with revenues over <some number, maybe 10>x the median wage. That would allow small business owners to have some leeway during their early days and scale with inflation/economic changes.

Other than that, I’ve never heard any remotely sensible arguments against it. Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It pollutes the (information) environment around it and distorts people’s behaviour in all sorts of ways, and companies only need to have it because other companies have it. As seen with american tobacco companies when their ads were banned, it lowers expenses and people who want the product still buy the product. It’s a net benefit for everyone except for marketing firms, but so what? We didn’t keep putting lead in the gasoline just to keep the jobs in the lead mining industry.

I keep saying it: just ban advertising.

They want to track what you buy to more efficiently manipulate you into buying what they want you to buy. The data would be almost useless if they couldn’t advertise to you, so they wouldn’t bother. Other places wouldn’t be able to monetize their spyware if advertisers weren’t buying. Political campaigns wouldn’t have even a use for millions in ‘donations’ if they weren’t blowing it all on advertising. It’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry built on lying to people for profit.

The comic is seemingly intentionally ambiguous as an attempt to provoke consideration.