Traveling, especially without airplanes (which is perfectly possible in lots of parts of the world -- vacationing to a train/car-accessible country that is), is trivial compared to industrial production of crap.
Making advertising illegal would decrease needless consumption (and pollution) by a ton, plus all the benefits for our quality of life.
Let's say you're selling product X at price Y. There are three kinds of people you could reach with advertising:
* People who have an unmet need for product X at price Y.
* People whose need for product X at price Y is already met, but who can be manipulated into buying from you rather than someone else.
* People who don't need product X at price Y, but can be manipulated into needing it.
Advertising is only good for society to the extent it reaches the first group. Influencing the second and third groups can be profitable for you, but on a societal scale it's just a game-theoretic arms race that wastes resources, plasters our environment with ads, and makes people miserable with new needs. We should totally try to discourage it.
Do you volunteer to be the one to inform business owners and small art house cinema operators that they're now forbidden to engage in any marketing of their goods and services, and all the media that the majority of their revenue is now illegal? This is a completely unrealistic fantasy unless you want to provoke a large scale uprising.
I'm in favor of a more creeping push. For example, banning roadside billboards is a great idea, every city that's done it is happy with the results. (I've lived in a city where every major road was lined with billboards, ugh.) Or banning cigarette ads - in fact it's a boon to cigarette companies, because it curtails the spending arms race but doesn't shrink the market (the buyers are addicted anyway). Or blocking popups and popovers - if implemented consistently, it would help small businesses a lot, because they wouldn't have to plaster their website with crap to stay competitive.
Sounds reasonable, but in the context of the need for an urgent screeching halt to avoid global disaster, such legislation has only a slim chance of passing in the most "enlightened" districts, so it seems kind of useless to talk about.
I may seem pessimistic and indeed I am. But like other people do their part by encouraging people to consume less, I try to do my pathetic part by telling them to stop wasting time on hopeless utopian ideas.
>Do you volunteer to be the one to inform business owners and small art house cinema operators that they're now forbidden to engage in any marketing of their goods and services, and all the media that the majority of their revenue is now illegal?
Actually, small business owners and small art house cinema operators would (or should) be delighted from such a change -- it means the films they play could get as much marketing revenue (0) as the blockbusters now advertised all across town.
This would TURN people towards the more quirky, smaller scale and generally the less able to advertise today, not the opposite...
Depends on how you define advertising. It's fundamentally impossible to have a market without marketing. The cinema gets its audience by posting events on Facebook, and that's advertising, right?
>The cinema gets its audience by posting events on Facebook, and that's advertising, right?
No, that's just posting their events on their own channel that people have to subscribe to to see.
But even if we classify that as advertising we can still allow that -- we're inventive, as humans -- without still not allowing for 90% of what today is used for advertising.
When you ban that 90%, all that desire and energy and capital will sink into the other channels, and the outcome will be nothing like you wanted, just like banning drugs is nothing at all like deleting drugs from society.
For example, you've almost certainly been manipulated into feeling mildly inferior because you aren't young and taking joyrides with friends in your convertible on winding roads by the sea. Or if you're not that kind of person, you might be feeling mildly inferior that you haven't yet built a hobby project that would take the world by storm.
In other words, most people spend their lives being unhappy about status of some kind. It's partly an innate need, but mostly manufactured by overexposure to images of abnormally high status people. Reducing such exposure (remember that Israeli law that said models should have realistic body weight?) would help reduce misery.
As to who gets to decide? We come up with guidelines and make them law. It's not harder than other stuff regulated by law. Anyone can tell when an ad shows an alluring life instead of selling the product on merit.
Addendum: I'm not trying to be difficult here (well, maybe a little) but I'm wondering exactly how "what people need" differs from "my personal opinion of what other people need".
In your opinion, people don't need to take joyrides in convertibles. I understand that.
But other people's opinions differ. Why should your opinion be privileged?
I'm not proposing to take away the joyrides. I'm proposing to take away manipulative ads featuring joyrides and see if happiness improves. It will either improve or not, that's a factual issue, not a matter of opinion.
>What does "manipulated into needing" mean, exactly?
It means a huge half a trillion dollar industry is leveraging psychology, black marketing, covert paid endorsements, and tons of other things besides, plus plain old brainwashing from constant exposure, to make you crave and buy stuff in general, and stuff that they sell in particular.
Just read what kind of research and effort goes in things like the design of a supermarket, self placement, and tons of other things, with measured changes to consumer behavior -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The idea that we're some perfectly rational, non manipulated, thinking machines that can decide for ourselves is laughably unscientific.
I keep coming across this idea and as much as I dislike advertising, I have trouble seeing how making it illegal would reduce consumption. Intuitively, I've always perceived it as a zero sum game. Never heard of anyone who started sitting on top of a pile of cash after installing uBlock either.
>I keep coming across this idea and as much as I dislike advertising, I have trouble seeing how making it illegal would reduce consumption.
There are some books about how the advent of modern mass advertising (and a lot of pushing) made people turn to consumption. I've also remember reading some accounts about how tv strikes (that thus prevent ads being air) resulted in reduced consumption but don't have a reference.
I think it's the same idea behind banning cigarette ads to reduce smoking, and similar to banning very thin models to reduce anorexia etc.
Even if it doesn't work that way, banning advertising could be its own reward!
This would be a cool black mirror episode. All the billboards are just white with large black font: "COKE". "FARMERS INSURANCE". Or maybe instead of brands you just get assigned some short ID. EAT SUGAR CEREAL#21. TV commercials can only have average looking actors dispassionately read off product features that have been empirically validated by a third party. Store shelves just have Dharma Initiative style plain cardboard boxes. There would be high stakes government run double-blind tests to determine the best drive through burger or shower gel. It'd be great.
Telling people to please stop doing things that are profoundly enjoyable, in opinion columns, seems like the stupidest possible idea for how to solve the climate crisis.
Or, like, my life is a nightmare for reasons X Y and Z and now I can't even go on vacation to a warm place when the winter comes?
How much of flying is business travel anyway? You think people are going to tell their bosses they're not taking the plane for that sales meeting because of teh climate?
Maybe a tiny amount of virtuous people, but generally hell no.
The vegetarianism and animal rights movement has had many decades to convince people to give up meat and it's just not happening. People eat more and more meat.
> The vegetarianism and animal rights movement has had many decades to convince people to give up meat and it's just not happening. People eat more and more meat.
Where are you getting your stats from? Vegetarianism seems on the rise to me. There are some stats to Back it up, too: 2.5% in 2009 to 5% in 2014.
I first heard about it in Swedish statistics when all my friends were vegetarians or vegans and I really expected the trend to be reversing but Swedes were indeed eating significantly more meat (this was a few years ago).
From what I see in restaurants it seems obvious that meat eating is at no risk at all of declining except within a small enclave of virtuous herbivores.
And from what I understand of human nature, a juicy steak or burger is way more vividly satisfying than the idea of marginally improving the climate prognosis. It's like if sex turned out to be harmful to coral reefs—people would kill themselves rather than go celibate.
A few more Americans not eating meat is nothing compared to all the other Americans continuing to eat more (particularly by eating more chicken) but more importantly the rest of the world.
Shark fin soup has been a highly prized delicacy in Chinese cuisine. I'm sure many Chinese people (who could afford it) found the experience profoundly enjoyable.
Many environmentalists, including the basketball celebrity Yao Ming, campaigned against it, highlighting how the world's shark population is collapsing.
I disagree, here's Mark Twain's quote on the matter:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
I think it's less applicable now that the world is getting more homogenous - i.e. you can go to almost any country and spend most of your time in your American hotel, drink coffee at Starbucks, shop in American-style mall and even speak English to lots of locals. Of course, you can go out of comfort zone and interact with local culture, but in the past it was a necessity and now it's an effort you need to consciously make. Not to mention that a lot of the local "authentic" "experiences" you can stumble upon are actually a show for the tourists, so you need to make an extra effort to filter them out.
The world is getting more homogenous but it has a long way to go, so I think it is still extremely applicable. And the world is nowhere near as Americanized as you think, I would argue that in most places it takes much more effort to avoid the local culture and stay in a Westernized comfort zone than what you suggest.
How about nationalize all Uranium on planet Earth thereby resolving fuel costs only to the cost of extraction, and building 1000 CANDU heavy-water reactors in Northern Ontario in a 10x100 grid - building only 3 variations (proven models) with very simple designs, and then simplifying the fuel cycle process dramatically.
The French do 85% of their Electricity on Nuclear because they built a bunch of identical plants at the same time thereby saving massively on costs.
And then repeat in the Nevada desert.
Costs have a lot do do with 'insurance' 'fuel' massive overhead of bureaucracy. It's like building a tunnel in Boston - massive soft corruption, stupidity etc.
The actual, bare-bones costs of a nuke plant should not be that high.
Do 1000 at once, as an 'international project' ...
And then coordinate with major economies to do likewise: China, India, Europe & Africa (built in Sahara), Middle East (built in Saudi Arabia defended by American troops), Argentina.
Built in regional pricing mechanisms (i.e. guaranteed x% to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Vietnam, Brazil etc.)
No need to nationalize the uranium (I am quite skeptical that would reduce the "massive overhead of bureaucracy" you mention), but other than that your plan would indeed solve the problem (to the extent it is a problem).
The problem is that the people behind this don't actually want to solve the problem. They just want to use it as an excuse for a power grab.
Nationalization would be required because once the plan was announced, the price of Uranium would go through the roof - and then bidding/speculation would start and Uranium would be coming up all over the place. Specifically: Russia.
Australia, Russia and Canada have most of the known deposits.
If the market price of Uranium is literally $0, well, Russians get nothing directly out of digging it up.
The grand concern would be, once something like this got going, there would be copycat entites in places that are not ready for it, i.e. China, Russia, Iran. Maybe China is today, but they are always teetering on revolution, or some kind of massive upheaval. There's no place like Canada for a vast expanse of boring, stable, calm, political stability and basic (but never exceptional) operational effectiveness.
Western governments would only pay 'cost' for digging up Uranium in Canadian (or other sanctioned) mines, thereby creating 0 demand for Uranium on global markets.
Nothing would stop the Russians from doing whatever they please. If this 'massive project' done by private entities - Uranium prices would rise dramatically, thereby creating incentive for Russian gov/private entities to ramp up Uranium production.
But with a 'nationalization' - well, global Urainum prices might remain weak knowing ain't nobody in the 'Western World' going to pay crazy prices for something that's too dangerous and no government would allow the sale of.
The 'nationalization' by Western Governments would surely be accompanied by a ban on private sale of it.
So the market would collapse making Russian gov/private entities less willing to put any dollars behind it.
But of course they can do whatever they want whenever they please - as they can today.
By the way - even with governments notorious and dysfunctional bureaucracy - I still think it would be cheaper than buying it from private entities where most of the cost would be in the form of some kind of rent extraction, not very related to the cost of extracting it.
That's probably not something the Washington Post is likely to advocate for though. Their relationship to the military industrial complex is eerily close, especially now that they're a big customer of Bezos: http://www.accuracy.org/release/cia-cloud-over-jeff-bezoss-w...
Sure, once corporations are regulated properly and prevented from contributing unnecessarily to emissions, I will stop taking leisure flights. That's a promise I know I can make because I will never have to keep it. Until then, I don't see what the point is and I actively refuse to make changes when the entities most responsible for emissions, corporations, are allowed to do nothing and go on about their polluting ways. Nothing I do will make a difference. The plane I gave up my seat on will still fly and still use about as much fuel. My not flying on said plane will not prevent thousands of other planes from, for example, delivering tomatoes from the other side of the world when there are plenty of local ones. Pass legislation addressing the 80% of the problem (corporate pollution) and then ask individuals to address the other 20%. Doing things in reverse is not only dumb but quite ineffective.
I live without a car. I work remotely. I barely showered for nearly 6 years (cough... while homeless).
No one wants me as a role model.
Note how the guy lecturing you to cancel your plane tickets went to Morocco with his wife. He has a genius award. He is an award winning author. You generally don't get there by keeping your butt at home.
This is so very "Do as I say, not as I do." If this is such a great thing, why did you speak at the conference in Morocco? Why didn't you turn it down instead of bringing your wife and then calculating the total damage?
Edit:
Ah, a downvote. How ironic. "We don't want you as a role model and also shut up. No one wants to hear your opinion either. "
I downvoted your comment because the first two paragraphs are off topic, seems like you just wanted to talk about yourself.
They deleted it before I could post the following reply:
Other people talk about themselves all the time on HN. That usually doesn't make a thing downvote worthy. But I get a lot of flak for it, presumably because people find something inherently disturbing about me.
I don't think it is off topic. If you really want a strong role model for how to live light on the land, you could admire me and follow my advice. Instead, my many websites get no traction and I get a lot of open hostility.
That is exactly my point. People only listen to and admire the type of people who fly to Morocco. People who actually walk the talk have no influence and never will.
50 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadTraveling, especially without airplanes (which is perfectly possible in lots of parts of the world -- vacationing to a train/car-accessible country that is), is trivial compared to industrial production of crap.
Making advertising illegal would decrease needless consumption (and pollution) by a ton, plus all the benefits for our quality of life.
Might as well make money illegal.
* People who have an unmet need for product X at price Y.
* People whose need for product X at price Y is already met, but who can be manipulated into buying from you rather than someone else.
* People who don't need product X at price Y, but can be manipulated into needing it.
Advertising is only good for society to the extent it reaches the first group. Influencing the second and third groups can be profitable for you, but on a societal scale it's just a game-theoretic arms race that wastes resources, plasters our environment with ads, and makes people miserable with new needs. We should totally try to discourage it.
I may seem pessimistic and indeed I am. But like other people do their part by encouraging people to consume less, I try to do my pathetic part by telling them to stop wasting time on hopeless utopian ideas.
Actually, small business owners and small art house cinema operators would (or should) be delighted from such a change -- it means the films they play could get as much marketing revenue (0) as the blockbusters now advertised all across town.
This would TURN people towards the more quirky, smaller scale and generally the less able to advertise today, not the opposite...
No, that's just posting their events on their own channel that people have to subscribe to to see.
But even if we classify that as advertising we can still allow that -- we're inventive, as humans -- without still not allowing for 90% of what today is used for advertising.
The human race survived without computers for a couple of million years, so obviously we don't "need" them on an existential level.
In your scenario, who gets to decide what other people "need"?
In other words, most people spend their lives being unhappy about status of some kind. It's partly an innate need, but mostly manufactured by overexposure to images of abnormally high status people. Reducing such exposure (remember that Israeli law that said models should have realistic body weight?) would help reduce misery.
As to who gets to decide? We come up with guidelines and make them law. It's not harder than other stuff regulated by law. Anyone can tell when an ad shows an alluring life instead of selling the product on merit.
Who is "we"?
" Anyone can tell when an ad shows an alluring life instead of selling the product on merit."
"Product merit" largely lies in improving the user's quality of life.
In your opinion, people don't need to take joyrides in convertibles. I understand that.
But other people's opinions differ. Why should your opinion be privileged?
It means a huge half a trillion dollar industry is leveraging psychology, black marketing, covert paid endorsements, and tons of other things besides, plus plain old brainwashing from constant exposure, to make you crave and buy stuff in general, and stuff that they sell in particular.
Just read what kind of research and effort goes in things like the design of a supermarket, self placement, and tons of other things, with measured changes to consumer behavior -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The idea that we're some perfectly rational, non manipulated, thinking machines that can decide for ourselves is laughably unscientific.
There are some books about how the advent of modern mass advertising (and a lot of pushing) made people turn to consumption. I've also remember reading some accounts about how tv strikes (that thus prevent ads being air) resulted in reduced consumption but don't have a reference.
I think it's the same idea behind banning cigarette ads to reduce smoking, and similar to banning very thin models to reduce anorexia etc.
Even if it doesn't work that way, banning advertising could be its own reward!
How much of flying is business travel anyway? You think people are going to tell their bosses they're not taking the plane for that sales meeting because of teh climate?
Maybe a tiny amount of virtuous people, but generally hell no.
The vegetarianism and animal rights movement has had many decades to convince people to give up meat and it's just not happening. People eat more and more meat.
Where are you getting your stats from? Vegetarianism seems on the rise to me. There are some stats to Back it up, too: 2.5% in 2009 to 5% in 2014.
[1] http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/is-2014-the-year-of-the-v...
https://ensia.com/articles/these-maps-show-changes-in-global...
I first heard about it in Swedish statistics when all my friends were vegetarians or vegans and I really expected the trend to be reversing but Swedes were indeed eating significantly more meat (this was a few years ago).
From what I see in restaurants it seems obvious that meat eating is at no risk at all of declining except within a small enclave of virtuous herbivores.
And from what I understand of human nature, a juicy steak or burger is way more vividly satisfying than the idea of marginally improving the climate prognosis. It's like if sex turned out to be harmful to coral reefs—people would kill themselves rather than go celibate.
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-and-seafood-production-consu...
Many environmentalists, including the basketball celebrity Yao Ming, campaigned against it, highlighting how the world's shark population is collapsing.
Shark fin sales dropped by 70% in China.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/chinas-choice/2014/a...
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
/sarcasm
Sometimes there is no reasonable alternative to flying for a very important trip, but some people seem to not consider the problematic aspects at all.
The French do 85% of their Electricity on Nuclear because they built a bunch of identical plants at the same time thereby saving massively on costs.
And then repeat in the Nevada desert.
Costs have a lot do do with 'insurance' 'fuel' massive overhead of bureaucracy. It's like building a tunnel in Boston - massive soft corruption, stupidity etc.
The actual, bare-bones costs of a nuke plant should not be that high.
Do 1000 at once, as an 'international project' ...
And then coordinate with major economies to do likewise: China, India, Europe & Africa (built in Sahara), Middle East (built in Saudi Arabia defended by American troops), Argentina.
Built in regional pricing mechanisms (i.e. guaranteed x% to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Vietnam, Brazil etc.)
And 15% goes directly to atmospheric CO2 capture.
Now there's a 'Marshall Plan'.
The problem is that the people behind this don't actually want to solve the problem. They just want to use it as an excuse for a power grab.
Australia, Russia and Canada have most of the known deposits.
If the market price of Uranium is literally $0, well, Russians get nothing directly out of digging it up.
The grand concern would be, once something like this got going, there would be copycat entites in places that are not ready for it, i.e. China, Russia, Iran. Maybe China is today, but they are always teetering on revolution, or some kind of massive upheaval. There's no place like Canada for a vast expanse of boring, stable, calm, political stability and basic (but never exceptional) operational effectiveness.
2) How are you planning to get the Russians to go along with this?
Edit to add:
3) Why shouldn't the Russians (or anyone else) get paid for digging it up? Mining uranium isn't something that people are going to do for fun.
Nothing would stop the Russians from doing whatever they please. If this 'massive project' done by private entities - Uranium prices would rise dramatically, thereby creating incentive for Russian gov/private entities to ramp up Uranium production.
But with a 'nationalization' - well, global Urainum prices might remain weak knowing ain't nobody in the 'Western World' going to pay crazy prices for something that's too dangerous and no government would allow the sale of.
The 'nationalization' by Western Governments would surely be accompanied by a ban on private sale of it.
So the market would collapse making Russian gov/private entities less willing to put any dollars behind it.
But of course they can do whatever they want whenever they please - as they can today.
By the way - even with governments notorious and dysfunctional bureaucracy - I still think it would be cheaper than buying it from private entities where most of the cost would be in the form of some kind of rent extraction, not very related to the cost of extracting it.
That's probably not something the Washington Post is likely to advocate for though. Their relationship to the military industrial complex is eerily close, especially now that they're a big customer of Bezos: http://www.accuracy.org/release/cia-cloud-over-jeff-bezoss-w...
Oh, give it a rest. You've been playing the "only x years left" routine for at least 25 years now.
As I recall, Manhattan was supposed to be under water by now.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-cl...
According to Al Gore, we had only ten years left in 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01...
According to the World Wildlife Fund we had only five years left in 2007.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/climate-change-five-years-lef...
More failed "only x years left" predictions can easily be found with a bit of Googling.
No one wants me as a role model.
Note how the guy lecturing you to cancel your plane tickets went to Morocco with his wife. He has a genius award. He is an award winning author. You generally don't get there by keeping your butt at home.
This is so very "Do as I say, not as I do." If this is such a great thing, why did you speak at the conference in Morocco? Why didn't you turn it down instead of bringing your wife and then calculating the total damage?
Edit:
Ah, a downvote. How ironic. "We don't want you as a role model and also shut up. No one wants to hear your opinion either. "
Weirdly validating.
I downvoted your comment because the first two paragraphs are off topic, seems like you just wanted to talk about yourself.
They deleted it before I could post the following reply:
Other people talk about themselves all the time on HN. That usually doesn't make a thing downvote worthy. But I get a lot of flak for it, presumably because people find something inherently disturbing about me.
I don't think it is off topic. If you really want a strong role model for how to live light on the land, you could admire me and follow my advice. Instead, my many websites get no traction and I get a lot of open hostility.
That is exactly my point. People only listen to and admire the type of people who fly to Morocco. People who actually walk the talk have no influence and never will.