I feel like a water slapper sometimes in how pointless my job is
The entire marketing industry
The entire marketing industry is gross and needs to die.
But let’s not act like it’s pointless. Propaganda (advertising) works, and works well.
it works, but it only works because we’re propping up capitalism with the bodies of workers. Marketing serves no fundamental purpose for society
Nah, it works because our understanding of human psychology is real, and lots of people are susceptible to the messaging of advertising.
Propaganda (what advertising is at its core) still works under communism, it doesn’t suddenly stop working because capitalism no longer exists. If that was true, images like the one below wouldn’t have needed to exist to help promote the communist message. (Propaganda isn’t always inherently evil, sometimes it’s purpose is to help spread a political message that can be positive.)
I agree, marketing serves no fundamental purpose for society, because it’s essentially just lies to sell a product or service. However I vehemently disagree it only works because of capitalism.
Good framing of the issue. It is just strategic dissemination of information. That is morally neutral. The strategy, however, can be motivated by good or ill intentions. This is a good distinction to make.
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Elon hasn’t branched X into toilet paper yet but wiping my ass with his tweets would be pretty magical.
If your product is good, it will sell itself with the most minimal of advertising.
This demonstrably untrue otherwise there would be no reason for huge market controlling products to advertise. I don’t believe in the wisdom of the markets and I’m not sure why you do.
That’s not the case. The following two statements can be simultaneously true:
- a sufficiently-good product would sell through word-of-mouth
- corporate executives are not satisfied with the small amount of purchases this would generate, because they want more profit.
Advertising is a way to generate morepurchases (and so more profit), but it might be increasing from a non-zero amount.
I don’t think that the person you’re replying to is entirely correct (some products or markets really do require advertising to make consumers aware), but they’re closer to right than they are to wrong on a level playing field. But if the other side is using advertising, you basically have to do the same in order to remain competitive.
The fax machine was around in the 1800s. If they’d realized, they could have done wonders, but the product never really caught on until it was about thirty years from being replaced.
My job is basically to do things to the pixels on my screen in a way that the pixels on your screen do something interesting/helpful/valuable.
Pixel Slapper.
Would you rather slap water?
Sit next to a pond and slap water? Hell yeah. Fresh air, nature, automation. What’s not to love
Mosquitoes.
if the water is being slapped it’s not stagnant so no mosquities :)
Sore joints. Sitting on wet grass all night. Mosquitoes. It’s cold.
This is not a time of leisure. That’s a job and it comes with all of the negatives of one.
Slappin palm would get sore
Russia has been a horrible place to be a peasant for a long time. In most of Europe peasents gained a lot of freedoms after the black death. But in Russia peasents, or serfs as they were called, only suffered worse. The serfs in Russia couldn’t even marry or move without the permission of their lord. The lord, or boyar as it was called locally, had pretty much full ownership over you. Russia pretty much enslaved their whole population until the mid 1800s. Complete disregard for the life of the commoner has been a constant theme of Russian life for a long time and it arguably continues to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia?wprov=sfla1 Some dark but enlightening reading about the historical situation of peasents in Russia. Peasents were de facto enslaved there for far longer than anywhere else in Europe. I can’t imagine living through such a time. Dedicating your whole existence and work to serving some fat boyar who cares nothing about you. At any time you could get drafted for a deadly war which you probably are not going to be returning alive from. This arguably still happens there today.
Anyone knows which book they’re referring to? It sounds a bit like Chekhov.
Dunno about Russian book but the same story is in Tale of Two Cities
‘You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome mists at night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day.
Good book would recommend.
“Bro, bro, remember that gun I mentioned earlier, bro?”
– Checkov, probably
I’d think the sounds of random pond slapping would be more annoying than frogs, but I guess I’m not rich enough to have the correct opinion on this
Midwife toads sound like a fire alarm when the battery is running down, get a bunch together and they’re really fucking loud … I imagine a bunch of frogs might be similar
I mean you don’t have to slap it like it has slept with your wife.
Or you have yet to hear frogs during night.
Apparently in the time of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette had a play farm where servants would take, clean and replace chicken eggs under the hens so Marie Antoinette could gather them later. Many nobles in France had such play farms. The pond story reminds me of this tidbit.
We know the Qu’ils mangent de la brioche scandal was fabricated (though a lie used to turn opinions against the royal family). In truth it was the failure pf Church and King in the Estates-General to read the room and then the King’s failed effort to escape France that sealed the Queen’s fate in the Place de la Révolution.
Queen Marie Antoinette was by far not the worst of spoiled nobles, just in way over her head.
They also used to have professional hermits that had to stay in the woods so that they could show them to guests.
If I got paid to live in a cabin and act like a bigfoot that would be a dream.
You actually are allowed to do this, nobody will stop you.
While that’s true, unfortunately I think the “getting paid” part might be the difficult part.
I only got to know about the “let them eat cake” bs from Contra.
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I wonder if the ultra rich understand just how much genuine malice is directed at them.
People were cheering for the submarine to implode.
It really seems like the world is full of tinder, waiting for a spark.
tbf those frogs sound annoying af
