Retention and clickthrough rates have cratered hardcore as people are becoming significantly more jaded and poor, there’s a lot of fear in the advertising industry now as they actively watch the decoupling from spending and result with metrics we don’t have access to, and are hoping their clients don’t catch on.
Google was caught trying to fake these numbers several times and lost (in some cases temporarily) several big advertisers from the disclosure.
Stock photos can create a strange reality if you take them on face value, women ridiculously excited at a forkful of salad, groups of people over 5 have token representation, periods are blue for some reason, No one in the bar actually drinks and just keeps raising their glasses in generic joy and celebration.
I like this post because it goes a long way to proving that highly technical jobs have depths of nuance that your average laymen will never even consider.
Like when you see ‘hacking’ in movies, as an IT guy it makes me hardcringe every time.
Another example of this is how Hollywood portrays ‘poor’ families as having houses 3x larger than anything you could ever afford and two cars but they are just making sad faces all the time.
Because that’s what struggling is to hollywood writers, they lack the nuance to understand what being poor really means.
The problem is that these media images being made are MORE compelling to people who don’t understand the nuance. That tray of utensils looks fine to me as a knowlessman and I would feel that whatever content was hosting it was medically reliable.
You as a professional know it is ridiculous only because you have the practical experience that the artist lacked.
The real danger is when people start believing the artist more because of how much more aesthetically pleasing they can make their misunderstandings, and trust me it is a real danger.
We need a massive reformation to clean the conservative disease from Christianity.
When you punish the homeless, the needy, and the foreigner in your lands, you are doing the OPPOSITE of what Jesus commanded, and should lose the right to call yourself his follower.
for now Reddit is still a font of information and advice from knowledgeable people.
That too is changing. For the last few months, most technical posts I search on reddit are starting to get filled with [Deleted] for all the actual answers as reddit’s current push to ban left leaning users has removed all the people who actually were interested in giving answers in the past.
I mean yeah, there was always a few [Deleted]s in every old thread but in the last half year it has become the majority of them.
Humanity is not, by default, rational. It takes a lot of effort and introspection to get there. A lot of people don’t bother.
Humanity is still, biologically, a tribal creature incapable of meaningful connection past around 100 people and prone to hyper aggressive behavior to outgroups.
Humanity also has to pretend to be more than the club wielding stone age tribesman we still biologically are otherwise society breaks down into angry fighting tribes.
Like it is now.
We pretend that humanity in general is rational, capable of understanding truth, and interested in expanding their understanding of the world.
This is false.
around 40% of humanity are still angry little tribesmen, and those angry tribesmen HATE anything that even smells of intellectualism.
I used to volunteer at a homeless rehab mission and almost none of the people we took in were the stereotypical ‘television homeless’ image.
Most were, as you say, normal and in some cases propsperous people who ran into medical issues or suffered long term untreated mental illness.
Even things like one guy had a messy divorce. His wife cheated on him and mentally manipulated his son into hating him. She got nearly everything as well as hefty child support payments. He was a plumber with two crew working for him, making good money at the time.
The child support payments and the cost of having to rebuild his life zeroed him out and he turned to drink to soothe his hell. Eight months later he was on the streets and panhandling.
From a productive member of the community with a family to a homeless man sliding into addiction and mental illness.
Meanwhile his shitstain wife lived high on the hog in the house he paid for, all while badmouthing him to his own blood.
One other thing to point out is that agriculture allowed for large mobile armies.
For hunter gatherers it wasn’t easy to stockpile enough long term storage portable food to take to war, nor could you predict periods of bounty (which is why so many ancient cultures had prohibitions to making war during winter that almost no one broke) to plan long term campaigns. This style of sustenance also kept nomadic band population low as following the herds and the reduction of ease of hunting and complications in moving gave significant advantage to smaller social units.
We see a radical increase in social group size with the advent of agriculture, eventually leading to more permanent town and eventually city living instead of nomadic bands as you generally needed to be in one place to keep others from taking your crops and tending them year round.
I fully understand that there are a lot of luxuries and even just basic life improvements that wouldn’t be available to us if we had kept as small hunter gatherer bands, and maybe a lot of people alive now couldn’t survive or thrive in that kind of environment, it would be a very, very different world than what we know today but one thing I do know is that of we had never discovered agriculture we would never have eventually become a species that could kill off 95% of the life on the planet with the press of a button.