Maybe some do, but there is a distinction between intentionally making people feel bad about themselves, and advertisements that simply holding up some look or personality as attractive/cool. Some people might interpret the latter as an attempt to make people feel bad about themselves, but I respectfully disagree.
When it comes to intentionally making people feel bad about themselves, I don't see much of this, since negative advertising is not very popular. Most advertising I see is motivational/aspirational, i.e. showing people an image that people believe they can attain.
This article strikes me as a person who begged for attention via social media changing their tactics and begging for attention by being anti-social media. That is to say, this strikes me as quite vapid.
Reading this made me consider the possibility that people with anti-government sensibilities have intentionally gotten themselves into critical government roles and employed these, or similar, techniques. The procedural productivity killers seem like they would be extremely effective, and easily passed off as incompetence or a simple proclivity for bureaucracy.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the slow moving, budget draining, enthusiasm killing bureaucrat were really a subtle and effective anarchist?
Honestly, I think that sort of thing is happening.
Look at the changes to the Post Office. Two seemingly small things combine to put real pressure on what is otherwise able to operate just fine.
One was a change in rates, which basically favored large publishers. Small distribution and citizen mail subsidize big publishing, who then can ramp up on their volume.
The other was a pre-pay requirement for benefits that is just nuts! Something like 25 years.
Now, the Post shows a loss and there is a lot of discussion about how to "improve" it, privatize it, etc...
I'll bet there is a fair amount of this type of thing going on. Some analysis to identify critical targets, planning to impact them, then messaging to maximize the leverage / profit / change from those impacts.
Anyway, back to the Post. Either one of those things would have been both manageable and to a degree justifiable. Both combined are a real mess.
Wow. That is an intensely personal, and really thought provoking, post. I happen to be going through something startlingly similar, so this hit home pretty thoroughly.
I wonder if this is more common in our industry than in others. It feels like it is incredibly easy to get wrapped up in tech and, as Jesse noted, it seems like it is happy to take everything you're willing to give.
>Possible, but if you want us to the ignore the hugely differing economic incentives for men and women wrt pregnancy then the discussion isn't going to go anywhere.
What possible incentive is there for a man to impregnate a woman, especially without her desire? I don't think many guys are out there begging to pay child support.
There is no incentive for man to impregnate a woman. That question, however, takes pregnancy as the given outcome. A man does have incentive to have sex: he likes it. anigbrowl's point was simple: by most measures, pregnancy is more "expensive" for women than for men, so women have higher incentives to not take the risk.
It is. But it's still not as "expensive" as pregnancy for a woman. I use scare quotes because I don't just mean monetary costs, but all kinds of costs.
You're still missing the benefit side of the cost/value equation. It might not seem like this to you but having a child is a major value to many people.
A woman has multiple options to prevent unwanted children (including two after the fact options). She therefore has full control of the child/no-child outcome based upon cost/value for her personal situation. A man has two options to prevent childbirth: a permanent vasectomy or using a condom (these fail and they fail too often in real world settings). A man has limited (or in the case of a condom mishap potentially no) control and potentially if the woman decides it should be so no value whatsoever.
I completely understand the upside. I am, however, assuming a situation where both parties do not want to have a child, right then. The original scenario was, implicitly, casual sex. (Original scenario: "her: do you have protection? him: um, sure. I'm taking that, uh, that pill thing.") We can be more charitable and assume that scenario could play out a few months into dating. In such situations, not wanting a pregnancy is generally taken as a given. The entire discussion - birth control - even assumes that pregnancy, at the moment, is not wanted. So I'm confused why you're bring up the value of having children (which I do not deny) in a discussion about the incentives for men and women in avoiding unwanted pregnancy.
Perhaps your confusion is that I stated "There is no incentive for man to impregnate a woman", and you interpreted that as a universal statement. It was not. It was a direct response to the question for a man's motives in the given scenario, which assumes unwanted pregnancy.
The point I'm trying to make it that the cost is not the only part of the equation and that we must also account for reward and control.
Cost/reward
When the female birth control pill became available the cost/value was weighted very heavily against the woman and female control was much more essential. However today the cost/value is more evenly weighted. Back then a man could deny everything and move on leaving the woman with the baby and a ruined life. Now the man can't deny everything and as a minimum will be committed to child maintenance but he may still be denied access to the child. So the situation now is: woman high cost coupled with high reward; man moderate cost and potential reward controlled by the woman.
Control
Let's assume that both parties decide for themselves based on their own cost/reward situation. Let's assume that they don't always inform the other of the their decision honestly. Neither is perfect judge of character.
Current situation
Scenario 1: Man wants child. Woman does not. Woman controls outcome. No child.
Scenario 2: Man doesn't want child. Woman does. Woman controls outcome. Child.
Scenario 3: Both want child. Child.
Scenario 4: Neither want child. No child.
Situation with male birth control
Scenario 1: Man wants child. Woman does not. Woman controls outcome. No child.
Scenario 2: Man doesn't want child. Woman does. Man controls outcome. No child.
Scenario 3: Both want child. Child.
Scenario 4: Neither want child. No child.
P.S.
Personally I think that the pill was one of the greatest drivers of women starting to have rights on a par with men (I'm not saying that 2015s western world is perfect gender equality wise but it is a lot better than the 1950s western world was).
P.P.S.
I just think that men should if possible have the option to control their reproductive function and that it does not matter whether woman trusts the man -- the man's control does not affect the woman's control (except in the scenario that the woman is a deceptive actor - NB that the inverse situation where the man is a deceptive actor is already under the woman's control).
Don't be so stupid. Men and women both enjoy sex but pregnancy involves a lot of extra physical work for the woman because it takes ~9 months to grow another human being (or more than 1) that's 5-10% of the woman's own body weight, not to mention that human infants are completely helpless for a long time after birth, in contrast to many other animals.
This is just a fact of biology before you look at any of the social contextual factors.
I did not mean to imply anything of the sort. However, Alex spoke specifically to what the incentives for men are, so I explained the incentives I think men have. For women, I only mentioned the risks. I think a charitable reading of what I said would assume that I think women also have positive incentives.
The incentive is the net present value of having sex Right Now, versus the cost of money, being unable to sleep for the next 18 years, and financial obligations. Given how often people (in general) don't use a condom, even when they're available, I get the impression that most guys are not thinking very hard about the future.
Since I've never had an account on Reddit, I wouldn't know, and since I rarely post memes on HN [and this isn't that meme], nobody has being seeing a lot of such comments from me.
I submitted the article because it was intellectually interesting. I also find internet memes intellectually interesting and I find the ways and reasons that people argue on the internet intellectually interesting...which isn't the same as finding, to a first approximation, actual internet arguments interesting anymore.
Anyway, the incongruity of the subject matter in relation to popular perception of US history is particularly intellectually interesting. The Lincoln County War, like similar violent episodes in the American West indicates that any group of ordinary Americans could be cast into the role of the people standing in the way of manifest destiny's fulfilment.
History is more absurd than LoL's. Look at the photograph.
I've always quite disliked advertising. I really think that it's a rather insidious force in western culture, and it has always bothered me that it's so aggressively forced into people's day to day lives. It nearly always preys on people's insecurities, is intentionally designed to distract you and is often just an eye sore.
I know it's a little goofy and "edgy", but this article reminded me of a quote by Banksy (a well known graffiti artists):
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. FUCK THAT. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe then any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."
Banksy
It's overly angsty, but I like the idea that some cities are taking it upon themselves to rid themselves of ads, rather than street artists destroying personal property to accomplish it.
Yes, i do love Banksy's take on advertising, much as i do Bill Hick's (even more angsty) [1]. Though you do have to wonder, i thought i heard Chomsky say that 1/6 of the world is engaged in Marketing/PR and Advertising which for me boils down to 1/6 of the world playing zero-sum games with each other for your ever dwindling attention span (assuming you actually watch tv and don't install an ad-blocker).
And the psychologists involved in creating it know exactly how to funnel that refuse into your brain despite all your efforts to the contrary. There is no such thing as “safe contact”.
Even more interesting is watching these people trickle into the professional environment. Universities need to accommodate this stuff, to an extent, because the students are their customers. Managers do not.
It's an interesting concept. I agree with you completely, but we're basically saying that the gifted have no responsibility to the average and below average. While in this specific situation, it seems obvious that a child shouldn't have to receive a lower quality education in order the help those with less ability, that concept has some Randian implications if you extrapolate it to society in general.
They are going to spend the rest of their lives helping those with less ability -- who do they have to be handicapped in school so as to be less capable of doing so? And have a miserable time of it to boot?
Very true. It's a feedback loop as well. Schools perform poorly, so affluent people remove their high-performing children, which lowers the average performance of the school and gives it less funding. And so on.
The thing is, you can't blame people for optimizing for their own children, but doing so drags down the quality even further for everyone else. It's a problem that requires some serious intervention.
I honestly think that is a 'treat the symptom' analysis.
We need to think about why there are poor performers to begin with and it has very little to do with the few hundred dollars per student a school might lose because of not hitting performance targets.
