1. experience in tech has mostly been that everyone is insanely focused on actually selling stuff, probably because we see direct results from online channels
i guess i havent done much "brand" advertising work (vs conversion ad analysis) tho
you earn a living and you give people stories about the stuff their buying that makes them not only get the stuff, but feel better as a person for having bought it
this is huge value add
people are way too down on capitalism
often the best thing you can do for someone is to show them how to tell a better story about themselves
but what am i saying. look at this soulless capitalist. ha ha
@ryanpbradymedia practically every communication is in a sense manipulation. this is not _necessarily_ malign.
if i tell you that a hostile army is on the way, and my hope is to cause you to flee that army: ive manipulated you, but for a good and honest purpose
@ryanpbradymedia if i pay you a compliment, i am trying to change the way you view yourself for the better; this is usually a kind act, although of course it might be wicked if i am lying or if my objective is to do you harm for my own benefit
@ryanpbradymedia advertising is dicey because it's communication done explicitly for ones own financial benefit.
this demands a high level of integrity but if you can convince someone to buy something that they'd benefit from, and cause them to /feel good/ about doing so, it seems win-win to me
@ryanpbradymedia related :)
anyway, i hope ive . . . sold you on the upside of marketing. and if i havent, some consolation: i did not study ads, and what i did in my early "meaningful" work was unbelievably heinous. so you couldve done much worse.
i have no opinion about the object level discussion except that the company in question used marketing to make its customers feel BAD, and i expect probably made no one else feel good
the reason that nerds are unhappy about trump firing federal reserve people isnt because they particularly like those specific people
issue is that it makes the fed look beholden to the executive and this is a very bad outcome for economic stability
the fed hasnt covered itself in glory lately for sure but the counterfactual where its progressively and openly politicized is pretty much just a world of hyperinflation and impoverishment because thats a side effect of how unstable governments use politicized central banks
i think a steelman for "end the fed" is that we've left this absurdly powerful yet nigh defenseless institution sitting in plain sight like a loaded gun during a period of immensely high trust and as that period comes to a close someone is gonna make a first grab at the pistol
ok finally discovered a kind of lore i want to know about in a non clickbait way:
what one-shotted you?
eg for me it was 90s movies about how having a career and a house in the burbs is the worst thing that can ever happen to someone
i didn't realize i'd been Had until my 30s
everyone will give boomers and millennials shit about the social justice and narcissism, and rightly so. but the motherfuckers who tricked me into nearly ruining my life are genx
for those of you not familiar getting one shotted is getting wrecked on first contact with something. classic deployment attached
"everyone is the same and nations are fake" is the core dogma of the mid-late 20C liberalism that grew out of the war era. in the years since it's become a mostly-unstated and broadly-unassailable assumption of imperial policy
regrettably it is also disastrously incorrect
the history of this idea is worth studying. you can see the modern notion start to emerge in the progressive era and out of socialist thought, and gain some traction with (eg) the league of nations
ideologues might say that league failed bc it wasn't REAL world government
among socialism-inclined intellectuals, which is to say nearly all intellectuals until molotov-ribbentrop broke some out of their reveries, ww1 was understood to be a failure _caused by_ national identity
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being
you can get support for fargroups in time limited cases. there's a long history of (eg) american assistance for people on the other side of the world in disaster recovery
but duration breeds resentment, and organized charity is very hard to maintain with this sentiment
when you're talking about an outgroup for whom that resentment is ingrained and continuously salient, forget it
"multiculturalism" kills welfare states in the long run
amusingly this was one reason some of the more libertarian neoliberals supported open borders
i was disappointed that liberals did nothing in the face of the awokening. but that can at least be explained as cowardess
what's worse is that the awokening is over, they're not taking the fact that the awokening occurred as a serious problem to be guarded against going forward
one is left with the impression that either they are fine with everything that happened or they learned absolutely nothing from the experience. both of these possibilities seem disqualifying
what is the point of liberals who can't be bothered to care for liberty, one wonders