I have a bizarre love for the heat death theory, partially because it goes so well with Lovecraft's "And with strange aeons even death may die" in my mind.
I too like it as well but because of a different author and story: "The Last Question" by Asimov [1]. It is a short but a must read (and it is free to read as well). It is one of the most beautiful and optimistic scifi stories. Asimov was and still is so ahead of his time.
Although just like the things you list, I can think of a plethora of ways with which advertising can literally, indirectly change my life by convincing me to purchase a product or service.
Yesterday I promised myself to not buy cigarettes anymore nor ask anyone to do it on my behalf. This first step only requires tremendous willpower when visiting a store, as the dispensers are placed at checkouts so I must stand right next to them when I'm in the queue.
Focus on the smell. Make it long enough (about 24 hours) to notice other smokers smell. That is the smell of other people being repulsed by you. You smell like that in every elevator, every time you introduce yourself to someone, and no amount of gum or tooth brushing covers it up. You can't smell it while you smoke, but the rest of the world can.
It was enough to keep me dedicated knowing I could confidently talk to anyone after I quit without having to wonder if they were immediately put off by my smell.
People who still smoke always complain that ex-smokers are the worst and most judgmental about smoking, and it's 100% true. It's because we feel seriously ashamed of ourselves for being so stupid for so long, it comes out as assholishness sometimes.
Everyone uses that little trope, "like kissing an ashtray" but I find that untrue. There's a really weird acidity when you're kissing someone who's just smoked, like coffee-breath and garbage.
I dunno, they might need to get close and smell the breath, the smell of cigarettes to this day (from a distance) still makes me crave one, ever so slightly. Even after having quit 13 years ago (I quit in 2003). The only off-putting smell is in ashtrays or their breath/clothing. The actual burning smell though, that gets me to this day.
My Dad quit smoking when I was little, back in the days when people "chain smoked" (i.e. They used a lighter once a day, and just kept lighting new cigarettes with their butts). He credits his success with this tactic: He loudly told everyone he knew that people who can't quit smoking are pussies. Fear of total public humiliation was enough to keep him from relapsing, or so he claims. He never did relapse that I saw though. He also told us this story often enough that none of us kids ever touched a cigarette.
Goodluck. I just quit cold turkey a few years back and just refused to do it again. Now if I try have a drag of someone else's it tastes so vile that I can't see what I ever got from them. It can be done. Just do it!
I would think it only fair to put the burden of the health damage on the company who sells addictive products.
If you sell cigarettes and a customer looses part of the lung, you pay or behave to prevent.
If you sell alcohol and a customer drives a car in a crowd, you pay or behave to prevent.
If you are a narco and sell crack, you pay for the results.
The problem is not the unknown problems with those substances, its the fact that the producers are detached from the consequences of their actions.
By that logic, no individual is responsible for anything they ever do because just about everything is "addictive" or "habit forming" in some way. Your suggestion is terrible for a number of reasons, but primarily due to the shirking of personal responsibility that it promotes.
Should Hershey be required to pay medical costs for morbidly obese individuals because they eat a dozen chocolate bars a day? Sugar is a highly addictive substance, after all.
Should automobile manufacturers be required to pay the medical bills of every individual injured in a high-speed accident because driving very fast generally causes an adrenaline rush, which is addictive?
Stop making it someone else's problem. Start casting blame where it needs to be - on the individual(s).
Nobody is forced to start smoking, or start drinking, or start eating sweets, or drive recklessly, or to do this or that. I'm tired of the popular trend of infantilization that offloads the burden of one's own actions onto society/industry/government.
I think it would be a great start if we started to differentiate- some humans are capeable of this, but others are not. To just leave them to there suffering because they had a "choosing-chance" is just wrong. No pr-opaganda can explain the facts on the ground away, sorry.
Right and wrong are not objective units of measure, please don't be insulting by trying to state "facts" regarding something being "right" or "wrong".
As far as "leaving them to suffer" goes, there are plenty of ways for people to get help with just about every health condition and disorder that's lifestyle related. They simply require that the individual actually take responsibility for their own existence and reach out.
Who makes the decision that someone is "not capable" of caring for themselves, and at what level? Do you force them into a special program? Do you take away all of their other individual rights at the same time? Who decides what aspects of personal responsibility apply to which people? That's a very slippery, dangerous slope to tread. Smarter people than you, or I, haven't been able to come up with "the right" answer.
Nobody is forced to manufacture addictive products, advertise them in misleading ways, pay celebrities and filmmakers to use them conspicuously, or buy prominent product placement everywhere a person trying to quit has to go, either.
You are introducing irrelevant other ideas to distract from the core of the OP's argument, which while a bit excessive IMO, warrants an honest discussion, not hyperbolic overreaction.
Ugh, what a nasty little, finger-pointing, stone-casting society you seem to desire. Is there anything that you'd blame on society/industry/government, or is it always 100% the individual's fault?
Who said anything about throwing stones, or pointing fingers? Nothing in my post indicates that help should be refused to individuals who make poor decisions and then try to recover from them, just that, in a free society, the onus should not be solely on the head of "a higher authority" (govt, industry, etc) to be responsible for doing so.
The world you seem to desire would make cellphone manufacturers and service providers fully liable for accidents that happen when an idiot is using their phone and gets in a car wreck.
The individual chose to get into a car, and drive somewhere, and use a cellphone, all at the same time. This despite the fact that it is made abundantly clear that doing so impairs driving ability much like alcohol would, via advertisement and public notice and safety publications, in the news, and even by state law in some cases. You cannot prevent people from doing stupid things. You can, however, make them bear the repercussions of those stupid decisions.
The world you seem to desire is one where every device and tool is covered in thick layers of bubble wrap and warning labels and dozen-pages-thick usage contracts to indemnify the manufacturer.
The world you seem to desire is one where no criminal is punished for their actions because they were just "a victim of their environment and don't know how to do anything else".
And that is something that I cannot and will not agree with, ever, on a fundamental level. Personal freedom comes with personal responsibility.
If there's a tool designed in such a way that using it in an accidentally-slightly-incorrect manner will electrocute the person using it - sure, hold the manufacturer responsible.
But if there's a tool that does exactly what it's designed to do, but someone uses it for a completely different purpose in a completely different way than it was designed to do, and it electrocutes them - that's on the user's head.
> Start casting blame where it needs to be - on the individual(s).
Those are your words, my friend. Maybe I misinterpreted them. I didn't say individuals are 0% responsible. It's a mix, right?. Individuals deserve blame but also support. Companies deserve protection from inane lawsuits but also bear some responsibility.
> But if there's a tool that does exactly what it's designed to do, but someone uses it for a completely different purpose in a completely different way than it was designed to do, and it electrocutes them - that's on the user's head.
Sure. That doesn't apply to tobacco or sugar. We're using it in exactly the way the sellers intended. I don't know why you're stuck on the reckless driving example, when it doesn't really pertain to the general context of the article.
> I'm tired of the popular trend of infantilization that offloads the burden of one's own actions onto society/industry/government.
Sure. But my question stands. Do you think the society/industry/government ever bears >0% of the responsibility?
> Sure. That doesn't apply to tobacco or sugar. We're using it in exactly the way the sellers intended.
Moderate tobacco use, in some forms, moderately increases cancer risk. Moderate sugar consumption doesn't overtly increase the risk of heart disease or obesity.
Overuse of most tobacco products dramatically increases your cancer risk, just as overuse of sugar dramatically increases its associated risks.
My point stands that nobody is forcing you to start smoking tobacco or eating large volumes of sugar. Why do you want to push all of the responsibility away from someone who willingly undertakes an optional activity with known risks?
It's not like every widely-available tobacco product hasn't had 50% or more of its packaging plastered with "warning, cancer!" labels for the last 30-odd years.
Should tobacco companies be held responsible for objectively-false advertising and marketing? Yeah, if memory serves they got beat up pretty well for that by the government many years ago. When was the last time you saw an ad for cigarettes on TV? It's been quite a long time since I have. That problem has already been taken care of.
With sugars you might be able to make an argument about a lack of in-your-face warnings - but why should those be required? Moderate consumption is fine. Excessive consumption is where the problem starts kicking in. Various government entities are already kicking up a stink about sugar-heavy products, so I wouldn't be surprised if we got such warning labels in the future anyway.
> Why do you want to push all of the responsibility away from someone who willingly undertakes an optional activity with known risks?
Where did I say or even imply that? I just said it's less than 100% – but more 0%. You're obviously quite passionate and/or angry about something, some injustice you've seen or something. I feel like we're talking past each other and you want to have an argument just for the sake of arguing on the Internet. I'm not super interested in that.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Maybe we'll meet in person one day and debate the issue in a higher bandwidth medium. Cheers.
Good thing we don't write those apps to be addictive. Good thing we all have clean consciousness - else we might end up compulsively venting guilt by propagating aggressive libertarian ideology's.
Good things.
I program Robots for a living, and you know what - im guilty of those peoples lives going to hell when they are let go.
They are not guilty that they can not retrain at 40.
They are not to blame that there endurance might not be high enough to get a degree.
Its also not the CEO who employs me to do my job, which i just do. I could quit my job anytime.
Im guilty and thus must work hard, to even that guilt out.
I try my best to promote basic income and unshaming unemployment in my home country.
Individual responsibility, suddenly sounds less happy, does it? Sounds like hard work and shame.
You arguments sounds suspiciously like shirking responsibility's by idealizing other people. Imagine if a whole society would do that, what a catastrophe, could you even call that a society anymore?
My dad also quit a long time ago; he's really proud of it, because he just decided to quit one day and it worked, without ever relapsing and without very negative effects. Or so he says. I don't really believe all of it, but the point to take away seems to be that it's all about willpower.
I was intrigued by this a while back. I think of training a NN as generating a function, an equation, from a training set which, given a specific input, outputs a prediction. If you can come up with an equation-input pair that, when executed, a) accurately enough approximates some data, and b) requires less space than the original file, you have achieved (most likely lossy) compression.
I would guess one of the reasons to be the fact that there are a myriad of (money-free) hosting providers out there offering plain drag&drop file uploading with PHP support (often paired with a mysql database access). This makes PHP software extremely easy to install.
Not that it would be even possible to run non-PHP server side scripts with majority of said providers...
Indeed. I follow the Wekan Kanban board project which is Meteor-based, and it seems like it's every couple weeks someone asks "how do I install this with cPanel" (which generally means, shared hosting with PHP/MySQL). It's kinda sad to explain to them that their existing hosting probably isn't going to let them run Meteor.
