Organized crime will always exist as long as there is human demand for something illegal, it's how aggressively you manage it (investigate, jail, or in some countries, execute, depending on the crime, measured harm, etc).
Organized crime at scale only ever exists due to the government manifesting it through a prohibition that shouldn't have been put into place.
The organized at scale (beyond just a gang in a neighborhood) aspect of it requires considerable ongoing capital infusion, which you can only get from a sustainable extraction of economy. It's that pocket of black market economy that is always created by government action, without exception. Every large gang operation in the US rides on top of government prohibition or otherwise preys on regressive regulation.
The war on drugs being the greatest example in recorded history.
There are many so-called "dry counties" in USA where the sale of alcohol is prohibited. And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do. But as we learned from Prohibition, it's basically impossible to impose that kind of ban on an entire western society. But localized bans? Fine. Do what you want.
Iirc dry counties tend to have more drunk driving accidents than wet counties. Reason being that people in those counties drive to neighboring counties, get drunk, and then drive home.
I grew up in a dry county. From my experience, most people drove to wet counties to purchase alcohol to bring back to the dry county to drink at home or at parties.
The Wikipedia article [0] has a nice summary of a few studies. Notably
> Data from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed that in Texas, the fatality rate in alcohol-related accidents in dry counties was 6.8 per 10,000 people over a five-year period. That was three times the rate in wet counties: 1.9 per 10,000.[18][19] A study in Arkansas came to a similar conclusion - that accident rates were higher in dry counties than in wet
Culture can be a powerful tool for things like this. For example, smoking has decreased immensely over the past several decades. Were seeing similar drops in pregnancy due to youth of today having an immense aversion towards these activities. So if the youth decides alcohol is a no-go for social stature, that can be one way to reduce consumption for the future as well.
The next step would be to do a cost benefit analysis of these places to see if the benefits of a low alcohol society outweigh the downsides of what it takes to get there.
There are many bad things that come from living in states with heavy religious subjugation like the above examples of the Islamic world and the state of Utah, e.g. highly paternalistic and controlling attitudes toward women.
It's important to separate variables appropriately here, since religion and/or bigotry is not the only way to make it to less alcohol.
To make a statement such as less alcohol leads to bigotry would be ridiculous. Although on a somewhat unrelated note, unfortunately many areas of biological sciences make this category of error in publications often.
>And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do
once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community. that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.
>once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community
That's the definition of democracy the majority rules if it's 49.9% vs 50.1% that's how it work.
As for alcohol bans it is pointless since not everyone is an alcoholic. I think it's typically 3% for alcoholism, gambling addiction, most human seem to be predictable at 3%.
>so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.
It seems to be that unless the votes were 100% then there's going to be some moral forcing. Does this mean no laws unless we have complete and total unanimity?
> that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.
And that cuts both ways.
Consider someone who for whatever reason would want alcohol to be prohibited for their own sake. So they would like freedom from alcohol.
Coincidentally though, what “freedom” is in the context of commerce ultimately boil down to the freedom of commercial outlets to sell things. If they can’t sell a thing? Well that’s unfreedom. But the so-called consumer is always pushed in front of them.
And if you happen to live in one of these areas and do drink then what? Sell your house and move or add a lot of onerous hassle in having to go to the next county over to get booze? Giving counties the power to be puritanical little enclaves only works theoretically if you imagine people are self sorting into their communities on an ideological basis, which is much less common than people think.
"wherever you want" is not the same thing as an entire county/municipality banning alcohol. And we kinda already did this rodeo in the 20s and the experiment with prohibition was soundly rejected.
The reason Alice Springs have banned alcohol is that people from dry communities visit Alice Springs for grog. The localised ban has needed to be somewhat widened.
What nobody here seems to realise is that almost the entire social fabric is destroyed by alcohol. It’s why it has to be banned.
It's easy to debate banning alcohol in a remote city most have only heard of, it's quite another to have spent a week there as a foreigner, gone for walks, saw the renal clinics, the doormen keeping Aborigines out of the bars, and witnessed drunk Aboriginal men and women sitting in the park midday and how they acted. I'm not here to sensationalize this issue, but it is incredibly ugly what alcohol has done to these people's lives. The place is fucked up.
The local white people seemed completely fed up with the situation. I appreciated at the time that it's hard to empathize with a group of people when you consistently see them at their worst and your stuff keeps going missing and yet there was also clear racism and more than a few white people made their living maintaining government funded facilities for the various Aboriginal communities.
In the present a total ban of alcohol is probably warranted. Maybe you disagree, and I encourage everyone to travel and form their own opinion.
I grew up in a dry county in Texas. Want to see a ton of Southern Baptists who claim they never drink but actually binge drink once a week until they're blackout drunk? Go visit a dry county in Texas. Way, way more DUIs than surrounding areas.
This brings up a great point that's really common in ultra religious communities.
When you demonize some common human activity as sinful, and use social shame to try to keep people from doing it, what you actually accomplish is a lot of grandstanding and moral high horsing, and when individual self control fails, it fails hard and dramatically because there isn't a social structure in place to guide people on how to engage with vices as safely as possible.
You get massive binge drinking and drunk driving.
You get drug use with no culture of testing, so overdoses are more common.
You get teenage pregnancy and STIs because abstinence only education doesn't work and kids don't know how to use birth control and STI barriers.
You get men that don't know how to accept sexual rejection and women who aren't taught how to reject, both of which lead to sexual assault, intentional and not.
Overcoming the demons of our human nature depends in large part on accepting the fact that they are an intrinsic part of us, and learning to dance with them is more effective than trying to ignore them.
Some good results may come from bad processes. In that way a ban is similar to alcohol abuse in that it may feel good in the moment but have pernicious long term effects.
Have been reading Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright
It would be interesting to track other stats. With alcohol person can be active while intoxicated, they can move and talk... Some other drugs may knock them out much earlier.
So if people start using harder substitute drugs, there may be raise of drug overdose, while domestic violence goes down.
Also in some countries effect may be opposite. During covid lockdowns people were not allowed to go to pubs (leave home) and domestic violence raised. Lockdowns were effectively strong prohibition.
I don't think we should go down the road of prohibiting alcohol (or most other drugs) again, but I think it is clear to anyone who has been out with groups of people drinking that a sizable portion of the population has no ability to behave when under the influence and probably shouldn't be drinking. I don't know what the solution is, but we should probably start with not glorifying and promoting regular drinking as much as we do.
We should work toward banning most advertisements in most public places really. If you admit that these ads manipulate people into buying or consuming products they might not otherwise buy or consume, it's easy to extend that down to other products as well. Giant roadside billboards, for example, have no place in America.
I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have"
Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
The point is that Coca Cola doesn't need to inform anyone of their products; all that advertising they're running is trying to hack your brain at subconscious level, by teaching you associations that will make you "spontaneously" remember about their products when you're e.g. thinking about Christmas, or feel thirsty, or see a photo of a polar bear, etc.
In ML terms, they are fine-tuning you to increase the chances of your mind generating a sequence "Coca Cola" in increasing number of contexts that otherwise had you not interested in buying.
Here's an example that should hopefully be provocative.
Let's say I work in ad-tech, and am hired to do an online advertising campaign for an online casino. Let's say I leverage some generative models as part of my campaign tuning, as well as some pretty sophisticated user tracking. At the end of the day, suppose my algorithms have done a good job of creating and targeting advertisements that result in conversions. Everybody wins, right? I make money, my client makes money, consumers learn about a product they are (evidently) interested in.
Suppose further that the advertisement my algorithms generated does a good job of triggering cravings in gambling addicts (perhaps emulating the sensory experience of slot machines), and that my targeting found online communities focused on addiction. The problems with this should be obvious.
At the core, you're assuming that humans are perfect little rational automata, when the reality is that we're sentient animals with a lot of maladaptive brain behavior that can be exploited in known ways. Advertisements are not simple informational notices, but precisely crafted information packets designed to elicit specific behavior.
I agree with you that connecting consumers to products is valuable. I've bought several things from instagram ads (has the best targeting of any platform, IMO), but OP specifically mentioned public places.
Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum.
Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else.
Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere.
Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.
See I don't understand this argument either. Endless water let alone scrub brush on the side of the highway aren't anything worth looking at? I'd rather get signs that aren't targeted to me versus something so painfully boring.
I can easily look either side of the sign and see the same thing I would see where the sign is. I genuinely don't see the downside.
If you don't have a preference between seeing Vermont's beautiful hilly forests, and seeing the same forests with a tacky billboard drawing your gaze, I don't really know what to tell you other than that most people feel differently. It is ultimately an aesthetic judgment and everyone can have their own taste.
We live in a democracy and it's up to a majority to decide what to do with the public commons. It is telling, to me, that no state that has banned billboards (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) has any serious political movement from any part of the spectrum to reverse the bans.
The parent you responded to mentioned that "Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons", and perhaps this is an objective way to look at it.
Why should one profit-seeking entity get to put a billboard in the middle of everyone's scenic view without paying everyone?
And if one billboard can be put there, what's to stop there being ten, or a thousand, and then there's no more view?
A lot of problems in the world are due to profits being made at the expense of the commons. This happens with everything from resource extraction and pollution of the environment, to telemarketing which aggravates most people, to outrage driven media and social networks polluting peoples minds.
It depends on how you interpret what ads do. I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want or need. If you say that we should ban public cigarette ads, for example, you're kind of proving the point (which is why I mentioned banning additional ads if you agreed with banning cigarette or alcohol ads).
Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want?
Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.
> I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want
This just seems silly. When was the last time you came home from the store with something, look around “I don’t have a use for this? Why did I buy this?”
And I don’t run an ad blocker because I equate it with petty theft. Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
>Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
I take your point, but the other side of the coin is that I want to control what is executed/displayed on my computers (that is, my private property). Especially since it's not just ads. It's web trackers/beacons and other tools to surreptitiously gather data about me. And I don't want to share my PII/browsing habits/interests with a bunch of strangers who just want to sell me stuff[0].
If a web site (someone else's private property) chooses to serve ads, I am under no obligation to download/execute/display those ads or anything else for that matter.
And if the owner/publisher of a website wants to insist on showing me ads (by identifying ad blockers and refusing to display actual content -- which some sites do) -- unless I disable my ad blocker), that's the website publisher's right on their private property.
But I'll say it again -- I will control what content is displayed/executed/downloaded on my private property.
You seem to think that I should give control of my devices to someone else in order to consume their content. I'm unwilling to do so. As such, if someone else doesn't like that, they are free to block me from viewing their site.
But I'm not "stealing" by blocking ads, rather I'm protecting my own interests. If you (or anyone else) wants me not to do that, then block me if I'm using an ad blocker. Making the claim that it's somehow "stealing" is ridiculous on its face.
[0] To put a really fine point on that: Fuck that noise!
The problem is that that's not true in practice; ads that serve only to inform would be great, but they also essentially don't exist in the real world. Have you ever seen a black and white text billboard that says "$BRAND beer exists, and sells for $COST per bottle, has 5% ABV, and has a 87% satisfaction rating."? No, only pictures of happy people and bright lights holding a beer bottle with a logo on top. The goal is not to inform, but to manipulate.
Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after.
Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.
> I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have"
I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad?
There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes.
Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment.
Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.
It doesn't help that the US allows a great deal of advertising that is completely misleading and/or inaccurate. Many terms means absolutely nothing when used in advertising and can be used by anyone, but are clearly designed to entice people to buy crap.
What you present is the idealized vision of how advertising should work, from the perspective of consumers. In a perfect world, advertisements would not encourage self-destructive behaviors or gross unnecessary spending, they would simply inform potential buyers about the objective qualities (and detriments) of a given product to help the consumer make an informed decision.
The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.
How many people are still unfamiliar with Coca Cola?
Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure.
At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.
Twas always thus, and is beautifully described by John Berger in his book nd tv series Ways of Seeing. In, I think, 1974? Well worth your youtube time.
Most advertisements are annoying or emotionally manipulative. It’s usually not the case that someone is just saying “a cool screwdriver with the follow specs exists.” Usually it’s an advertisement sort of implying that you agree with some social agenda, or else implying that women would be attracted to you if you could afford a BMW, or something else. It’s similar to a lot of what makes social media terrible.
If they aren't manipulative, if I actually want what they are selling, why are they inserting themselves into my attention instead of waiting for me to look for them in a catalog?
The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon.
If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.
Catalogs are also forms of advertising, but your larger point on push vs pull is correct. Something being shoved in your face is invasive and abusive while having something accessible should you decide to request or seek it out is the ideal.
I've gone to some lengths to remove as many ads from my life as I can and discoverability is a real problem. There are times when I only hear about something I'm very interested in long after others have and there's likely things I'd buy, but I don't even know it exists as an option. Even with that problem, it's still worth it to me to shut out as much of that manipulation and noise as I can.
Have you ever found yourself humming a jingle from a company whose product you have no interest in, and will never have interest in?
I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own.
To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction.
In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
The concern in the US is always that regulation will hurt corporate profits. It took decades before we did anything about cigarettes and the tobacco companies fought it every step of the way. People literally rather die/cause other people to die than give up profits.
Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
How the US tackled tobacco should be a case study in how to eliminate usage of a dangerous substance.
Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
Absolutely. As a former smoker, that ban has probably done a lot more good than people realize - not just to prevent people from picking up the habit but also helping smokers quit.
Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal.
Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
> I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely
Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment.
I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
> I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot.
To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately.
I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
Ads for alcohol beverage are almost[1] practically banned in France, despite our massive wine ans spirit industry, which proves that it's actually doable.
It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success.
[1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)
The solution is to give people something else to do. The article makes Alice Springs seem like a remote city populated mostly by Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people tend to get the short end of the stick in Australia, and remote places are hard to deliver social services to. Alcohol is easy to turn to in the face of inequality, unemployment, little access to education or healthcare, etc.
Addressing all of these issues will take longer to implement and be less politically palatable to the majority voter than something that looks more like a punishment.
I mean, what solution is there, really? What else can they do?
Most of the professionals capable of providing such services don't want to move to a remote area to provide permanent services. Many of them could be convinced to provide mobile services working for the public good but most Western countries already struggle with chronic nurse, doctor, social worker, and teacher shortages so I assume Australia is following a similar trajectory. Even if there was political will to solve these issues, there simply isn't enough professionals to provide enough of these services to the urban areas, let alone the most remote ones.
I think this is a much deeper problem with modern societies than just social and healthcare services in remote areas. We've got shortages of trained professionals across the board and we're not set up for any more growth, immigrant or native.
Islam solved the problem. Complete ban, and it works, because it's a religious ban. Compare it with the American Prohibition which didn't work. I'm speaking from the most secularized Muslim nation in the world (Turkey), and it works to great extent even here. Note that it's legally free to drink here.
for everyone or just non-muslims? like in malaysia, you have to be non-muslim to buy alcohol. malaysia has quite a unique population though. indonesia regulates it heavily, you need to have money to drink, but it is only totally banned in a couple of provinces.
You’re nitpicking. Only half of the Bosnia (%51) and Albania (%56) is muslim, and Azerbaijan is the most secular muslim country in the world according to wikipedia[1], and muslims there are mostly Shiis who are very different than the global widespread and common sect of Islam, Sunnism. Shia’s prohibitions/restrictions are often very lax and they often worship less, Shiism resembles a collection of rituals more than true Islam. Sunnis consider them deviants.
All three of those countries were under Soviet rule for some time, and SSCB was known to censor and ban religion and outright murder religious people in especially Muslim countries she occupied.
Imagine if _any_ other drug were described that way. "A sizable portion of the population using meth has no ability to behave when under the influence and probably shouldn't be doing meth." In other words, stop ruining it for the rest of us who can do meth responsibly.
The alcohol industry has essentially brainwashed society into thinking that if you can't drink alcohol routinely without having some problem controlling yourself, then it's your own fault. And if you become addicted or have any other serious issues, you must have a serious genetic defect.
Again, imagine if people said that about some other drug. "He can't hold his heroin. Runs in the family."
Society's perspective isn't just marketing. Alcohol engages the brain's reward center much less effectively / directly than heroin, so it is objectively less problematic. However, alcohol's prevalence means it has many more negative effects. I'd put sugar in a similar category.
Alcohol is not “objectively less problematic”. Just because it is less addictive doesn’t suddenly make it less problematic. It affects the brain directly, reducing your ability to think critically both short-term due to its inhibiting effects and long-term due to brain shrinkage. Meaning you are more likely to hurt those around you when you consume alcohol. It enhances the likelihood of giving into your “bad thoughts”, which is exactly why we see crime decrease when it is banned.
Affects of heroin on the brain are more closely related to seeking the drug itself, rather than lowering inhibition across the board. Of course this still leads to negative behavior, such as theft or assault, but it doesn’t lead to domestic/sexual violence like alcohol can.
Sugar literally cannot be compared to either of them. Caffeine has more of a case, frankly. While sugar has an incredible amount of health problems related to it, and is highly addictive (highly recommend “Salt Sugar Fat” by Michael Moss), it is not in the same league as alcohol or heroin. You are not holding up a gas station for sugar money, nor assaulting someone because your drunken brain thought they laughed at you.
While society’s perspective isn’t just marketing, it is just plain wrong. We have normalized alcohol so readily because its been with us for millennia, that even when presented to the mountains of evidence over its damaging effects we just ignore it or, worse, play it off as a “problem for lightweights”.
> You are not holding up a gas station for sugar money
Yeah, but you're holding up literally everyone in your society.
When you get cancer from an unfortunate cosmic ray strike on the wrong strand of dna, but the Oncology department is backlogged for a month by people whose cancers were caused by chronic inflammation from overeating (primarily sugar), you're definitely being held up for proverbial sugar money.
Exact same sentiment for alcohol being a "rite of passage." Some people actually believe that drinking alcohol is a necessary step to life, as essential as graduating from school. It is genuinely some of the most insane marketing I have ever seen.
Society’s love of alcohol is literally thousands of years older than any notion of an associated alcohol industry. I’m quite sure the idea of some individuals “not being able to hold their drink” is an ancient one, not an invention of alcohol marketing.
Given that money was invented before written history began, it doesn't seem obvious that there was no alcohol industry for "thousands of years" before alcohol. Do you have a source for that claim?
> Society’s love of alcohol is literally thousands of years older than any notion of an associated alcohol industry.
True, for some society's. As it happens it not true for the Australian aboriginal, and they are the ones running amok when here is an abundance of it.
This story is very typical of what happen in every aboriginal community in Australia. It's only news here because Alice Springs has a white population, who don't like the chaos it causes and raise a stink. You don't hear about it on HN, but the smaller Aboriginal communities often ban grog from their communities in response, and have persuaded the government to pass laws to make it enforceable. This isn't some minor advertising ban. This is "if you make a mistake and fly in with a bottle of wine in your plane, your up for thousands of dollars of fines even if it's never leaves the plan or is opened".
Or to flip it around, Australia has the highest methamphetamine addiction rate in the world, leading to things like this: https://www.9news.com.au/national/r/6e676d3e-16b0-48de-86d7-... Meth is a white Australia problem, not black. But if we let Darwin have his way, then I'm sure in a millennia or so it won't be the big problem is it now. But for now white Australia's response is to ban meth.
Some people just have latent or submerged psychological issues that emerge with alcohol use and that's it. Angry drunks, sad drunks, horny drunks are all a symptom that uncovers.
> Indigenous people and advocates have long warned restrictions and bans are not the solution, urging action on addressing drivers of harm such as... family violence.
The bans reduced domestic violence calls by 37%. It sounds like the advocates don't want to appear paternalistic, and that led to them opposing measures that actually help a lot.
There are other drivers behind domestic violence, some of which compound with alcohol as people use alcohol as a sort of self treatment - mostly unemployment, low-wage environment, high-stress work environments and a lack of access to mental health care. These three can be fixed or at least be controlled by decent minimum wage laws, workplace safety/worker protection regulation, and by investing into mental health care.
Another big part, particularly in rural/conservative areas or in young people scooping up the propaganda of Andrew Tate and his ilk by the mouthful, are toxic masculinity ideals... but honestly I don't have an idea how to fight that kind of ideology other than getting the mouthpieces deplatformed and arrested.
Related to the fact that I initially wrote, then deleted, then wrote a milder form of a pre-apology for voicing helpful experience in a thread about a reduction in domestic violence.
I have seen a lot of indigenous advocates and leaders actually being in favor of prohibition. They sometimes see outsiders parking their alcohol businesses right outside the limits of the (dry?) reservation as exploitive, colonialist capitalism.
Maybe, but it's not as though that sentiment comes out of nowhere. If we compare the general consensus on the success of Prohibition vs, say, the campaign against drunk driving in the 80s and 90s, it's easy to feel quite cautious about the wisdom of bans in the area of substance addiction/abuse. Of course, the circumstances and environment are quite different in this case than Prohibition, so there's still plenty of unknowns, but still.
There are a lot of things that can be done to limit alcohol without outright prohibition that may be worth exploring. An example is what has been done with smoking.
1. Ban all alcohol advertisements. There is a ton of advertising that normalizes and glamorizes alcohol use.
2. Ban alcohol sales at large public venues like stadiums, concerts, etc.
3. Require companies to ban alcohol at all company sponsored events.
Doing these things would greatly cut down on alcohol use, while not prohibiting it and running into issues at Prohibition.
The subtext of this article is that it's applying to remote Indigenous communities. They're not drinking because it's glamorous, they're drinking because they're caught in the cultural dead zone between a a modern market economy and a palaeolithic culture.
> 1. Ban all alcohol advertisements. There is a ton of advertising that normalizes and glamorizes alcohol use.
This reminds me of the South Park "Please Drink Responsibly" advertisement that you can find on YouTube[1]. It's one of those great examples of funny, because it's true.
Alice Springs and the NT are too different from almost anywhere in the western world to translate this elsewhere. For example it’s 3 hours drive to the next settlement that might sell alcohol, which makes enforcement a different proposition.
Not really. I've visited Native American towns in North America where alcohol is banned and the locals (at least the locals over 25 years old) are quite supportive of the bans.
Did BP have to create a special blend of fuel to sell in those communities to prevent petrol sniffing, because they did for outback Australia. It really is a uniquely fucked up place.
There are plenty of Alaska Native villages that are much more isolated than Alice Springs (for one, Alice Springs actually has a road going to it -- not the case with many Alaskan communities).
Some villages are "dry", some "wet". Both have associated problems.
It's almost like social problems can't always be solved by passing laws.
So it seems like alcohol/substance abuse is a problem in places with a large indigenous population. From native Americans, to Inuits on Greenland, to Aboriginals - it seems to be a well-documented phenomenon. Lots of lingering trauma all around, which is probably compounded in the more rural areas.
I remember when visiting Greenland a couple of years ago, the alcoholism was rampant there (along with racism, but that's another discussion), and apparently it was pretty common with smaller bans around surge periods (https://www.arctictoday.com/alcohol-is-banned-in-an-east-gre...)
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Important to consider socioeconomic factors. Those populations are also often the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Alcoholism is a problem in many indigenous communities, because alcohol affects many indigenous people much more severely than it affects people descended from Europe and Asia. But substance abuse is a problem more generally in pretty much all poor communities around the world, and also in pretty much any very isolated community where people are flat out bored all the time. And many, perhaps most indigenous communities have been intentionally fenced into poverty and isolation.
alcoholism was rampant there (along with racism, but that's another discussion)
I don't think it is. Just from this article:
“We’ve got to address poverty, inequality, unemployment, educational attainment, early childhood, trauma, the very things that we know make a big difference in terms of being able to live safely with alcohol but that will take time,”
Racism is a (the?) reason indigenous peoples face these issues to begin with.
For the readers silently dismissing the idea of racism being the problem, read this[1] about George Floyd. In a different world he would've been the heir of a family who owned a tobacco farm, not someone who grew up poor and harassed by cops.
But oh no, we can't mention "Critical Race Theory" lest some snowflakes get triggered...
Its pretty clearly a vicious cycle. Racism is right in the loop too, because its a lot easier for people to adopt racist attitudes when communities that break along racial lines are undeniably having struggles with addiction.
At the risk of sounding unintentionally self congratulatory:
Once sober for years, the largest external before and after observation was the difference in emotional lability between people who drink regularly and anyone else. I'm not talking about only when drinking, but rather at any time.
One of the darkest lies that alcohol tells is that its effects are limited to when it is being consumed. Instead, consider how strong its effects are when one consumes it. The strength of that effect is related to the strength of the all-the-time effect on one's brain. We can't stimulate GABA to that degree, and whatever else it does, and not expect it to have effects on, say, anger and general emotional control in the interstitial periods between drinking.
Regaining one's fine emotional control, after a long-time regular drinking habit, is also a process of years that are mined with danger like excessive anxiety. If years of drinking matches a person's profile, they might seek the help of a physician to help the long-term sobriety adjustment process. Even if one doesn't feel addicted.
Also curious. I drink, but pretty sparingly (a beer or two per month typically) and wonder where the threshold is, if there's a threshold at all (meaning any amount has these effects).
Beginning of it: within six months to two years, ever increasing.
A limitation reached on full re-adjustment (as much emotional control as I could get back): six harrowing years without medical assistance. Not harrowing because I craved alcohol, but due to unprecedented anxiety that came around year two or three.
Drinking term: 8 binge years (late high school through the end of college). 10 casual every-other weekend years after that.
Nothing really begins to change until stone sober. It's impossible to achieve it, in my experience, if deferring to other vices with the exception of caffeine. No tobacco, marijuana, etc. They will lead to felt cognitive imbalances that will unavoidably be translated into cravings.
A good gauge is being able to go six months, or more, without drinking and not care / not miss it and feel the urge.
Once you can do that, you're on your way.
One has to gauge their true addiction level to understand if they can handle very occasional alcohol after that. If there's any craving whatsoever, I'd rate a person too addicted to partake in any and maintain control over the frequency.
If there is zero craving (again, use the six months or longer gauge), then it may be possible for, say, quarterly (or less) yet controlled outings with a non-sober friend. In other words, a couple of drinks.
Though, this doesn't apply to fall-down alcoholics. Even if they supposedly never feel the urge, they need to treat their sobriety like a precious jewel never to be messed with.
It depends on what one's goal is. If it is addiction management, then don't even think about alcohol and stay on the program for life. If it is to regain emotional function, then it may be a little different. But the journey is still very long.
could that be evidence that there's an emotional or personality situation that produces the effects assigned to inebriation, and that personality situation tends to self medicate (or try) with alcohol?
(correlation vs causation i guess is the question i'm wondering)
You're asking if a clear problem with emotional instability while briefly sober, across observation of virtually every subject that drinks long term, is from another cause than the substance abuse that causes emotional instability when partaking?
Even given the deluge of research on alcohol's long term damaging effects on brain architecture?
Sounds like you have a study to do. Everyone else will be advised to make a practical judgement until it comes in.
I see. Then I correct my prior post to: definitely.
Though, I think (with no comment on your choice whatsoever, it's a commonly used phrase), that "emotional instability" may not be the most helpful term specifically in regard to those who choose to self-medicate.
Aside from the specific group that medicates away emotional instability caused by alcohol use.
And there are probably a dozen exceptions to my statement.
But aside from that group:
It could be applied in place of "shy", but there's an argument that it could be overkill in that instance. And I don't think that you meant "shy".
In the interest of skimming over paragraphs of potential parsing over these terms, I'll focus on a segment of people who I think meet the qualification of the spirit of your question but not the term used.
People with undiagnosed congenitally conferred conditions, like ADHD and Autism, I think are prone to alcoholism. I would wager money that there is a higher incidence of Asperger's in the homeless population, for example, then in a sample of virtually any other social group aside from (possibly) any that are academically rarefied.
Will they have a degree of emotional instability? Yes. Some of which is caused by the manner in which the World has chosen to interact with their differences. Regardless, the key to diagnoses and treatment is to get to the factor that underlies it. Admittedly, after a lifetime of compounding issues that's a tough task.
Agreed: not sure what a proper term would be. And the example I think I've seen seemed very ADHD-ish, exactly like you cited. Interesting. Thanks for considering all this because the possible examples I've seen puzzled me.
That's the hardest part about quitting: the emotional come down several days after you stop drinking. It's not even really a physiological addiction issue - that would be the night sweats - because almost any psychoactive drug can substitute for alcohol during this period, but a purely psychological one driven by emotional dysregulation. Since alcohol is the cheapest and most accessible, it just tends to be the go-to self medication.
Second hardest part is that triggers are literally everywhere, especially if you don't want to hermit away for the process.
A fair few comments here, but none address the specific situation in Alice Springs.
Alice Springs is the major settlement of the 'Red Centre' of Australia, and is home to many Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians were culturally and genetically separated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years, and, in a hungry continent where no fruit laid on the ground long enough to ferment, never interacted with alcohol until European settlement. Indigenous Australian societies had extremely limited material cultures because their environment afforded them such scarce resources with which to create one.
European colonisation and subsequent attempts to both 'civilise' and exterminate Indigenous Australians were utterly deleterious to their palaeolithic culture. They no longer needed to hunt and gather for sustenance, and yet those in remote communities found it difficult to find meaningful participation in the economy that now provided for them (often through outright discrimination). Combine this with the introduction of alcohol, which intoxicates Indigenous Australians more effectively due to a complete lack of any tolerance for it, as well as other intoxicating substances, and we have a recipe for autogenocide, nearly as effective than the previous attempts through the Stolen Generations.
Petrol stations in outback Australia sell a particular blend of fuel known as 'Opal fuel'[0]: it contains less of the aromatic compounds that give the 'high' to petrol sniffers, which is also rife amongst Indigenous communities. Kava, a mild narcotic from the South Pacific island nations and popular amongst their diaspora in Australia, can only be imported into Australia in limited conditions (only for personal use, and only 2 kg per individual arrival) because it was mixed with red wine in Indigenous communities for an extra 'kick'.
Policies for improving conditions for Indigenous Australians in remote communities vary from the ineffectual to the authoritarian. (The 'Intervention' mentioned in the article is an example of the latter.) Allowing communities to be locally regulated by their Elders is a compromise, and the basis of the programme described in the article.
post script: The above is a description of the situation in remote, outback communities, and administrative centres for those communities, like the towns and cities of the Northern Territory, such as Alice Springs and Darwin. The obvious question, then, is why don't Indigenous Australians move to more prosperous towns and cities? There are two answers. One is the poor life outcomes for those who historically did move to those areas, for example, the slums of Redfern and Blacktown[1] in Sydney. The other comes from the traditional spirituality or Lore of Indigenous communities: they don't believe that they own the land, but rather that the land owns them.
When blaming alcohol i always think of the middle east with low alcohol intake has highest rates of domestic violence.
Which would suggest at the minimum that culture is a bigger factor.
And also I'm curious to see if it evens out after a year.
It could be that men who are more violent by nature tend to drink more. And that in societies where it's not accepted alcohol breaks the social barrier whereas middle eastern countries it's more accepted so alcohol is not needed.
This isn't really prohibition though, just restrictions on sales. The point isn't to make it impossible to get a drink, just make it more difficult, so that some margin of drinkers will be incentivized to do something else.
As a result, while Im sure some small blackmarkets for booze will spring up, there isn't really the same incentive for violent, organized criminal gangs to spring up as was/is the case with US alcohol/drug prohibition.
The complex interplays between personal and social harms and responsibilities, secondary effects, and cultural matters make this subject rife for disagreement...
And if we ban people from interacting with each other altogether, violence can go to 0!
People have to be given the autonomy to live their own lives. People have to be trusted by default not to violate the rights of others, because what other choice do we have? We are all just here, no rhyme or reason for it. And then, if someone hurts other people, that person should be fiercely and very publicly punished.
Prohibition will lead to abuse of other drugs and empower local criminal elements.
Inhalants, petrol, glue, nitrous oxide. Whatever is available.
There are no opportunities in these places, people get fucked up to make life more bearable.
If you've never seen a remote town in outback Australia before, the film Cunnamulla (2000) is a pretty accurate representation. Might be a little dated but not much has changed.
The health of these communities is at serious risk when you force them in to using unregulated black market narcotics and cleaning products to get high.
>The health of these communities is at serious risk when you force them in to using unregulated black market narcotics and cleaning products to get high.
In which case, all "drugs" should be legal, with safety/dosing standards and regulation.
That removes the violence inherent in a black market and reduces negative health outcomes (overdoses, etc.).
There are many other reasons (both economic and societal) for full legalization of all "drugs" as well.
> all "drugs" should be legal, with safety/dosing standards and regulation.
i don't think 1 or 2 beers per day would be better than none. i think everyone would get their 2 beers even if they don't drink. so they can give them to others or use them for currency.
How I read safety/dosing would be standardized weight/volume/concentration of the drug and not the idea of prohibiting sales over a certain amount per person per day. Which as you say would just turn in to a secondary market.
>How I read safety/dosing would be standardized weight/volume/concentration of the drug and not the idea of prohibiting sales over a certain amount per person per day. Which as you say would just turn in to a secondary market.
Exactly.
The idea isn't to limit access or consumption, but rather (as totalconfusion correctly noted) to ensure quality and dosage standards (as the US already does for prescription drugs as well as all the US states with legalized cannabis), as well as ingredient lists and other disclosures.
The specific regulations might vary (e.g., dosage accuracy/precision would likely be significantly more stringent for fentanyl than for cannabis).
My apologies for not being as clear about that as I could have been. I hope I've done better this time.
>Inhalants, petrol, glue, nitrous oxide. Whatever is available.
Relevant:
TIL that "petrol sniffing" to get high is a big problem among Australian aborigines. Opal, a special gasoline, is sold in aborigine areas to discourage sniffing; although it requires a government subsidy, doing so saves money compared to the cost of treating petrol sniffing. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6mtqb9/til_th...>
Prohibition in the US really did dramatically cut down on alcohol consumption. It also was a terrible policy with all kinds of negative effects.
So I think the takeaway is that 1. Yes, reducing alcohol consumption does make sense as a public health goal and 2. strict prohibition is a terrible way to go at this.
In America at least, I feel that alcoholism is somehow seen as less serious than addictions to "hard drugs", especially during the time of Fentanyl being present in many other drugs. For us the most affected place is Alaska. It's dark half the year and there's nothing to do but drink: which results in it having one of the highest rates of VAWG, DV and child abuse in the country, if not the highest. Meanwhile the rest of the anglophone world has culturally mandated alcoholism. Domestic violence spikes in the UK based on football outcomes during the World Cup - is it any wonder that could be connected to alcohol? Advertising matters and health information matters. We have PSAs from the ad council against nicotine but we don't have any against liver damage. If you've got family members with cirrhosis, you know what you're up against.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadThe organized at scale (beyond just a gang in a neighborhood) aspect of it requires considerable ongoing capital infusion, which you can only get from a sustainable extraction of economy. It's that pocket of black market economy that is always created by government action, without exception. Every large gang operation in the US rides on top of government prohibition or otherwise preys on regressive regulation.
The war on drugs being the greatest example in recorded history.
Remote Australia is not like the rest of world. It is not easy to supply these places with goods. Doing so illegally is even more difficult.
Those outlying communities are not just relay points in some chain going back to the coastal cities. Like you would get in other places.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01228...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211419X2...
> Data from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed that in Texas, the fatality rate in alcohol-related accidents in dry counties was 6.8 per 10,000 people over a five-year period. That was three times the rate in wet counties: 1.9 per 10,000.[18][19] A study in Arkansas came to a similar conclusion - that accident rates were higher in dry counties than in wet
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county
There are many bad things that come from living in states with heavy religious subjugation like the above examples of the Islamic world and the state of Utah, e.g. highly paternalistic and controlling attitudes toward women.
once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community. that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.
This is a natural consequence of living in groups larger than a handful of adults
That's the definition of democracy the majority rules if it's 49.9% vs 50.1% that's how it work.
As for alcohol bans it is pointless since not everyone is an alcoholic. I think it's typically 3% for alcoholism, gambling addiction, most human seem to be predictable at 3%.
It seems to be that unless the votes were 100% then there's going to be some moral forcing. Does this mean no laws unless we have complete and total unanimity?
And that cuts both ways.
Consider someone who for whatever reason would want alcohol to be prohibited for their own sake. So they would like freedom from alcohol.
Coincidentally though, what “freedom” is in the context of commerce ultimately boil down to the freedom of commercial outlets to sell things. If they can’t sell a thing? Well that’s unfreedom. But the so-called consumer is always pushed in front of them.
And if you happen to live in one of these areas and do drink then what? Sell your house and move or add a lot of onerous hassle in having to go to the next county over to get booze? Giving counties the power to be puritanical little enclaves only works theoretically if you imagine people are self sorting into their communities on an ideological basis, which is much less common than people think.
What nobody here seems to realise is that almost the entire social fabric is destroyed by alcohol. It’s why it has to be banned.
It's easy to debate banning alcohol in a remote city most have only heard of, it's quite another to have spent a week there as a foreigner, gone for walks, saw the renal clinics, the doormen keeping Aborigines out of the bars, and witnessed drunk Aboriginal men and women sitting in the park midday and how they acted. I'm not here to sensationalize this issue, but it is incredibly ugly what alcohol has done to these people's lives. The place is fucked up.
The local white people seemed completely fed up with the situation. I appreciated at the time that it's hard to empathize with a group of people when you consistently see them at their worst and your stuff keeps going missing and yet there was also clear racism and more than a few white people made their living maintaining government funded facilities for the various Aboriginal communities.
In the present a total ban of alcohol is probably warranted. Maybe you disagree, and I encourage everyone to travel and form their own opinion.
When you demonize some common human activity as sinful, and use social shame to try to keep people from doing it, what you actually accomplish is a lot of grandstanding and moral high horsing, and when individual self control fails, it fails hard and dramatically because there isn't a social structure in place to guide people on how to engage with vices as safely as possible.
You get massive binge drinking and drunk driving.
You get drug use with no culture of testing, so overdoses are more common.
You get teenage pregnancy and STIs because abstinence only education doesn't work and kids don't know how to use birth control and STI barriers.
You get men that don't know how to accept sexual rejection and women who aren't taught how to reject, both of which lead to sexual assault, intentional and not.
Overcoming the demons of our human nature depends in large part on accepting the fact that they are an intrinsic part of us, and learning to dance with them is more effective than trying to ignore them.
Have been reading Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlighte...
So if people start using harder substitute drugs, there may be raise of drug overdose, while domestic violence goes down.
Also in some countries effect may be opposite. During covid lockdowns people were not allowed to go to pubs (leave home) and domestic violence raised. Lockdowns were effectively strong prohibition.
Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
In ML terms, they are fine-tuning you to increase the chances of your mind generating a sequence "Coca Cola" in increasing number of contexts that otherwise had you not interested in buying.
Let's say I work in ad-tech, and am hired to do an online advertising campaign for an online casino. Let's say I leverage some generative models as part of my campaign tuning, as well as some pretty sophisticated user tracking. At the end of the day, suppose my algorithms have done a good job of creating and targeting advertisements that result in conversions. Everybody wins, right? I make money, my client makes money, consumers learn about a product they are (evidently) interested in.
Suppose further that the advertisement my algorithms generated does a good job of triggering cravings in gambling addicts (perhaps emulating the sensory experience of slot machines), and that my targeting found online communities focused on addiction. The problems with this should be obvious.
At the core, you're assuming that humans are perfect little rational automata, when the reality is that we're sentient animals with a lot of maladaptive brain behavior that can be exploited in known ways. Advertisements are not simple informational notices, but precisely crafted information packets designed to elicit specific behavior.
Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum.
Consider this billboard on a boat that ruins the view at a public beach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/thi...
Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else.
Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere.
Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.
I can easily look either side of the sign and see the same thing I would see where the sign is. I genuinely don't see the downside.
We live in a democracy and it's up to a majority to decide what to do with the public commons. It is telling, to me, that no state that has banned billboards (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) has any serious political movement from any part of the spectrum to reverse the bans.
Why should one profit-seeking entity get to put a billboard in the middle of everyone's scenic view without paying everyone?
And if one billboard can be put there, what's to stop there being ten, or a thousand, and then there's no more view?
A lot of problems in the world are due to profits being made at the expense of the commons. This happens with everything from resource extraction and pollution of the environment, to telemarketing which aggravates most people, to outrage driven media and social networks polluting peoples minds.
Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want?
Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.
This just seems silly. When was the last time you came home from the store with something, look around “I don’t have a use for this? Why did I buy this?”
And I don’t run an ad blocker because I equate it with petty theft. Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
I take your point, but the other side of the coin is that I want to control what is executed/displayed on my computers (that is, my private property). Especially since it's not just ads. It's web trackers/beacons and other tools to surreptitiously gather data about me. And I don't want to share my PII/browsing habits/interests with a bunch of strangers who just want to sell me stuff[0].
If a web site (someone else's private property) chooses to serve ads, I am under no obligation to download/execute/display those ads or anything else for that matter.
And if the owner/publisher of a website wants to insist on showing me ads (by identifying ad blockers and refusing to display actual content -- which some sites do) -- unless I disable my ad blocker), that's the website publisher's right on their private property.
But I'll say it again -- I will control what content is displayed/executed/downloaded on my private property.
You seem to think that I should give control of my devices to someone else in order to consume their content. I'm unwilling to do so. As such, if someone else doesn't like that, they are free to block me from viewing their site.
But I'm not "stealing" by blocking ads, rather I'm protecting my own interests. If you (or anyone else) wants me not to do that, then block me if I'm using an ad blocker. Making the claim that it's somehow "stealing" is ridiculous on its face.
[0] To put a really fine point on that: Fuck that noise!
Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after.
Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.
I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad?
There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes.
Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment.
Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.
The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.
Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure.
At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.
The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon.
If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.
I've gone to some lengths to remove as many ads from my life as I can and discoverability is a real problem. There are times when I only hear about something I'm very interested in long after others have and there's likely things I'd buy, but I don't even know it exists as an option. Even with that problem, it's still worth it to me to shut out as much of that manipulation and noise as I can.
I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own.
To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction.
In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
For a while in my generation, a small minority did.
Now though, everyone vapes.
Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.
Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal.
Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment.
I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot.
To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately.
I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success.
[1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)
Addressing all of these issues will take longer to implement and be less politically palatable to the majority voter than something that looks more like a punishment.
Most of the professionals capable of providing such services don't want to move to a remote area to provide permanent services. Many of them could be convinced to provide mobile services working for the public good but most Western countries already struggle with chronic nurse, doctor, social worker, and teacher shortages so I assume Australia is following a similar trajectory. Even if there was political will to solve these issues, there simply isn't enough professionals to provide enough of these services to the urban areas, let alone the most remote ones.
I think this is a much deeper problem with modern societies than just social and healthcare services in remote areas. We've got shortages of trained professionals across the board and we're not set up for any more growth, immigrant or native.
Cannabis?
for everyone or just non-muslims? like in malaysia, you have to be non-muslim to buy alcohol. malaysia has quite a unique population though. indonesia regulates it heavily, you need to have money to drink, but it is only totally banned in a couple of provinces.
All three of those countries were under Soviet rule for some time, and SSCB was known to censor and ban religion and outright murder religious people in especially Muslim countries she occupied.
See the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844988
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Azerbaijan
The alcohol industry has essentially brainwashed society into thinking that if you can't drink alcohol routinely without having some problem controlling yourself, then it's your own fault. And if you become addicted or have any other serious issues, you must have a serious genetic defect.
Again, imagine if people said that about some other drug. "He can't hold his heroin. Runs in the family."
Talk about effective marketing.
Affects of heroin on the brain are more closely related to seeking the drug itself, rather than lowering inhibition across the board. Of course this still leads to negative behavior, such as theft or assault, but it doesn’t lead to domestic/sexual violence like alcohol can.
Sugar literally cannot be compared to either of them. Caffeine has more of a case, frankly. While sugar has an incredible amount of health problems related to it, and is highly addictive (highly recommend “Salt Sugar Fat” by Michael Moss), it is not in the same league as alcohol or heroin. You are not holding up a gas station for sugar money, nor assaulting someone because your drunken brain thought they laughed at you.
While society’s perspective isn’t just marketing, it is just plain wrong. We have normalized alcohol so readily because its been with us for millennia, that even when presented to the mountains of evidence over its damaging effects we just ignore it or, worse, play it off as a “problem for lightweights”.
Yeah, but you're holding up literally everyone in your society.
When you get cancer from an unfortunate cosmic ray strike on the wrong strand of dna, but the Oncology department is backlogged for a month by people whose cancers were caused by chronic inflammation from overeating (primarily sugar), you're definitely being held up for proverbial sugar money.
Second century BCE. If people are loading dozens of amphorae of wine on ships and transporting them from place to place, that's an industry.
True, for some society's. As it happens it not true for the Australian aboriginal, and they are the ones running amok when here is an abundance of it.
This story is very typical of what happen in every aboriginal community in Australia. It's only news here because Alice Springs has a white population, who don't like the chaos it causes and raise a stink. You don't hear about it on HN, but the smaller Aboriginal communities often ban grog from their communities in response, and have persuaded the government to pass laws to make it enforceable. This isn't some minor advertising ban. This is "if you make a mistake and fly in with a bottle of wine in your plane, your up for thousands of dollars of fines even if it's never leaves the plan or is opened".
Or to flip it around, Australia has the highest methamphetamine addiction rate in the world, leading to things like this: https://www.9news.com.au/national/r/6e676d3e-16b0-48de-86d7-... Meth is a white Australia problem, not black. But if we let Darwin have his way, then I'm sure in a millennia or so it won't be the big problem is it now. But for now white Australia's response is to ban meth.
The bans reduced domestic violence calls by 37%. It sounds like the advocates don't want to appear paternalistic, and that led to them opposing measures that actually help a lot.
Another big part, particularly in rural/conservative areas or in young people scooping up the propaganda of Andrew Tate and his ilk by the mouthful, are toxic masculinity ideals... but honestly I don't have an idea how to fight that kind of ideology other than getting the mouthpieces deplatformed and arrested.
1. Ban all alcohol advertisements. There is a ton of advertising that normalizes and glamorizes alcohol use.
2. Ban alcohol sales at large public venues like stadiums, concerts, etc.
3. Require companies to ban alcohol at all company sponsored events.
Doing these things would greatly cut down on alcohol use, while not prohibiting it and running into issues at Prohibition.
2. I think you overestimate the number of people willing to sit through a sporting event or concert while sober.
3. Great, even more reason to skip company events.
3. Someone who feels pressured to drink at these would disagree. Especially someone who tries to limit their intake.
Lobbyists are the answer to both questions.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/substances-risk-factor-vs...
From vehicle crashes to domestic violence to sexual assault, alcohol is a huge contributing factor.
This reminds me of the South Park "Please Drink Responsibly" advertisement that you can find on YouTube[1]. It's one of those great examples of funny, because it's true.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJWEJuKXZyk
Anyhow OP's point is regarding the efficiency of prohibition, not about support.
Some villages are "dry", some "wet". Both have associated problems.
It's almost like social problems can't always be solved by passing laws.
I remember when visiting Greenland a couple of years ago, the alcoholism was rampant there (along with racism, but that's another discussion), and apparently it was pretty common with smaller bans around surge periods (https://www.arctictoday.com/alcohol-is-banned-in-an-east-gre...)
I don't think it is. Just from this article:
“We’ve got to address poverty, inequality, unemployment, educational attainment, early childhood, trauma, the very things that we know make a big difference in terms of being able to live safely with alcohol but that will take time,”
Racism is a (the?) reason indigenous peoples face these issues to begin with.
But oh no, we can't mention "Critical Race Theory" lest some snowflakes get triggered...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099585400/george-floyd-biogr...
Once sober for years, the largest external before and after observation was the difference in emotional lability between people who drink regularly and anyone else. I'm not talking about only when drinking, but rather at any time.
One of the darkest lies that alcohol tells is that its effects are limited to when it is being consumed. Instead, consider how strong its effects are when one consumes it. The strength of that effect is related to the strength of the all-the-time effect on one's brain. We can't stimulate GABA to that degree, and whatever else it does, and not expect it to have effects on, say, anger and general emotional control in the interstitial periods between drinking.
Regaining one's fine emotional control, after a long-time regular drinking habit, is also a process of years that are mined with danger like excessive anxiety. If years of drinking matches a person's profile, they might seek the help of a physician to help the long-term sobriety adjustment process. Even if one doesn't feel addicted.
Beginning of it: within six months to two years, ever increasing.
A limitation reached on full re-adjustment (as much emotional control as I could get back): six harrowing years without medical assistance. Not harrowing because I craved alcohol, but due to unprecedented anxiety that came around year two or three.
Drinking term: 8 binge years (late high school through the end of college). 10 casual every-other weekend years after that.
Nothing really begins to change until stone sober. It's impossible to achieve it, in my experience, if deferring to other vices with the exception of caffeine. No tobacco, marijuana, etc. They will lead to felt cognitive imbalances that will unavoidably be translated into cravings.
A good gauge is being able to go six months, or more, without drinking and not care / not miss it and feel the urge.
Once you can do that, you're on your way.
One has to gauge their true addiction level to understand if they can handle very occasional alcohol after that. If there's any craving whatsoever, I'd rate a person too addicted to partake in any and maintain control over the frequency.
If there is zero craving (again, use the six months or longer gauge), then it may be possible for, say, quarterly (or less) yet controlled outings with a non-sober friend. In other words, a couple of drinks.
Though, this doesn't apply to fall-down alcoholics. Even if they supposedly never feel the urge, they need to treat their sobriety like a precious jewel never to be messed with.
It depends on what one's goal is. If it is addiction management, then don't even think about alcohol and stay on the program for life. If it is to regain emotional function, then it may be a little different. But the journey is still very long.
could that be evidence that there's an emotional or personality situation that produces the effects assigned to inebriation, and that personality situation tends to self medicate (or try) with alcohol?
(correlation vs causation i guess is the question i'm wondering)
Even given the deluge of research on alcohol's long term damaging effects on brain architecture?
Sounds like you have a study to do. Everyone else will be advised to make a practical judgement until it comes in.
And I'm asking because I think i have seen some such people, but not many.
Though, I think (with no comment on your choice whatsoever, it's a commonly used phrase), that "emotional instability" may not be the most helpful term specifically in regard to those who choose to self-medicate.
Aside from the specific group that medicates away emotional instability caused by alcohol use.
And there are probably a dozen exceptions to my statement.
But aside from that group:
It could be applied in place of "shy", but there's an argument that it could be overkill in that instance. And I don't think that you meant "shy".
In the interest of skimming over paragraphs of potential parsing over these terms, I'll focus on a segment of people who I think meet the qualification of the spirit of your question but not the term used.
People with undiagnosed congenitally conferred conditions, like ADHD and Autism, I think are prone to alcoholism. I would wager money that there is a higher incidence of Asperger's in the homeless population, for example, then in a sample of virtually any other social group aside from (possibly) any that are academically rarefied.
Will they have a degree of emotional instability? Yes. Some of which is caused by the manner in which the World has chosen to interact with their differences. Regardless, the key to diagnoses and treatment is to get to the factor that underlies it. Admittedly, after a lifetime of compounding issues that's a tough task.
Second hardest part is that triggers are literally everywhere, especially if you don't want to hermit away for the process.
Alice Springs is the major settlement of the 'Red Centre' of Australia, and is home to many Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians were culturally and genetically separated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years, and, in a hungry continent where no fruit laid on the ground long enough to ferment, never interacted with alcohol until European settlement. Indigenous Australian societies had extremely limited material cultures because their environment afforded them such scarce resources with which to create one.
European colonisation and subsequent attempts to both 'civilise' and exterminate Indigenous Australians were utterly deleterious to their palaeolithic culture. They no longer needed to hunt and gather for sustenance, and yet those in remote communities found it difficult to find meaningful participation in the economy that now provided for them (often through outright discrimination). Combine this with the introduction of alcohol, which intoxicates Indigenous Australians more effectively due to a complete lack of any tolerance for it, as well as other intoxicating substances, and we have a recipe for autogenocide, nearly as effective than the previous attempts through the Stolen Generations.
Petrol stations in outback Australia sell a particular blend of fuel known as 'Opal fuel'[0]: it contains less of the aromatic compounds that give the 'high' to petrol sniffers, which is also rife amongst Indigenous communities. Kava, a mild narcotic from the South Pacific island nations and popular amongst their diaspora in Australia, can only be imported into Australia in limited conditions (only for personal use, and only 2 kg per individual arrival) because it was mixed with red wine in Indigenous communities for an extra 'kick'.
Policies for improving conditions for Indigenous Australians in remote communities vary from the ineffectual to the authoritarian. (The 'Intervention' mentioned in the article is an example of the latter.) Allowing communities to be locally regulated by their Elders is a compromise, and the basis of the programme described in the article.
post script: The above is a description of the situation in remote, outback communities, and administrative centres for those communities, like the towns and cities of the Northern Territory, such as Alice Springs and Darwin. The obvious question, then, is why don't Indigenous Australians move to more prosperous towns and cities? There are two answers. One is the poor life outcomes for those who historically did move to those areas, for example, the slums of Redfern and Blacktown[1] in Sydney. The other comes from the traditional spirituality or Lore of Indigenous communities: they don't believe that they own the land, but rather that the land owns them.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_(fuel)
1: The area gained that name for awful reason you think it got that name.
All I could think of to add was that this is a small city in the middle of Australia (i.e. an outlier of sorts?). So I thought better of it... :)
Which would suggest at the minimum that culture is a bigger factor.
And also I'm curious to see if it evens out after a year.
It could be that men who are more violent by nature tend to drink more. And that in societies where it's not accepted alcohol breaks the social barrier whereas middle eastern countries it's more accepted so alcohol is not needed.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
As a result, while Im sure some small blackmarkets for booze will spring up, there isn't really the same incentive for violent, organized criminal gangs to spring up as was/is the case with US alcohol/drug prohibition.
People have to be given the autonomy to live their own lives. People have to be trusted by default not to violate the rights of others, because what other choice do we have? We are all just here, no rhyme or reason for it. And then, if someone hurts other people, that person should be fiercely and very publicly punished.
Inhalants, petrol, glue, nitrous oxide. Whatever is available.
There are no opportunities in these places, people get fucked up to make life more bearable.
If you've never seen a remote town in outback Australia before, the film Cunnamulla (2000) is a pretty accurate representation. Might be a little dated but not much has changed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMyzyZcCJo&pp=ygUKY3VubmFtdWx...
The health of these communities is at serious risk when you force them in to using unregulated black market narcotics and cleaning products to get high.
In which case, all "drugs" should be legal, with safety/dosing standards and regulation.
That removes the violence inherent in a black market and reduces negative health outcomes (overdoses, etc.).
There are many other reasons (both economic and societal) for full legalization of all "drugs" as well.
i don't think 1 or 2 beers per day would be better than none. i think everyone would get their 2 beers even if they don't drink. so they can give them to others or use them for currency.
Exactly.
The idea isn't to limit access or consumption, but rather (as totalconfusion correctly noted) to ensure quality and dosage standards (as the US already does for prescription drugs as well as all the US states with legalized cannabis), as well as ingredient lists and other disclosures.
The specific regulations might vary (e.g., dosage accuracy/precision would likely be significantly more stringent for fentanyl than for cannabis).
My apologies for not being as clear about that as I could have been. I hope I've done better this time.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Relevant:
TIL that "petrol sniffing" to get high is a big problem among Australian aborigines. Opal, a special gasoline, is sold in aborigine areas to discourage sniffing; although it requires a government subsidy, doing so saves money compared to the cost of treating petrol sniffing. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6mtqb9/til_th...>
So I think the takeaway is that 1. Yes, reducing alcohol consumption does make sense as a public health goal and 2. strict prohibition is a terrible way to go at this.