But in reality most advertising money is spent by companies like Coca Cola, that we all already know. And they know that too, which means they know for a fact that continuing to spend money on advertising pays off.

This is something I found myself recognizing not too long ago. Why would a company like Coca-Cola, already the dominant force in the soft drinks market, need to spend so much money on advertising? It’s not to attract new customers, but to drown out their competition. If you have big players like Coke continuing to spend millions on each ad buy, smaller competitors get priced out and their message is lost in the signal noise.

If you’re selling me a new brand of cheese give me a discount at the store and I’ll try it.

Sometimes it can’t be that cut and dry though. E.g. even at a discount, there is no way a good pack of aged cheddar will be as cheap as the orange-colored plastic called Kraft Singles. Someone who has only ever eaten Kraft Singles won’t know what they’re missing and will just keep buying the cheaper option they know.

The vendor would need to first make folks aware of the difference in quality to convince people to buy. But this is one thing I think stores like Costco get right, at least. There are always people offering free samples of their product. Let the product speak for itself, for free, with no obligation to buy if you don’t like it.

If you’re selling me an expensive technical piece of equipment send review stuff to various people and organisations that test them.

This is also not foolproof because I’ve heard of reviewers being cut off from free products to review if they don’t give a positive rating. There are a lot of “sponsored reviews” as well which are, in fairness, usually disclosed, but they’re something you have to sift through to find less-biased takes.

This is my preference, but even then today I have to look at every recommendation with scrutiny. Astroturfing is only getting worse and worse.

It’s hard to rely on people I personally know to have previously purchased some niche things I need, or trust that their selection criteria are exactly the same as mine, so I have to go online and look deeper. But then when I go online, I have to accept that a lot of what I find will be fake users posting fake experiences to promote the product they want to sell, so I just end up trying to find as broad a sample as I can and trust my gut.

It’s a timeless classic for sure.

I looked it up, it does look like a line from the original PS1 script. Cid says this line, in the context of Cloud being potentially short-sighted by letting people finish their personal business before entering the Northern Crater.

Cloud: No! What I meant was… What are we all fighting for? I want us all to understand that. Save the planet… for the future of the planet… Sure, that’s all fine. But really, is that really how it is? For me, this is a personal feud. I want to beat Sephiroth. And settle my past. Saving the planet just happens to be part of that. I’ve been thinking. I think we all are fighting for ourselves. For ourselves… and that someone… something… whatever it is, that’s important to us. That’s what we’re fighting for. That’s why we keep up this battle for the planet.

Barret: You’re right… It sounds cool sayin’ it’s to save the planet. But I was the one who blew up that Mako Reactor… Lookin’ back on it now, I can see that wasn’t the right way to do things. I made a lot of friends and innocent bystanders suffer… …At first, it was revenge against Shinra. For attackin’ my town. But now… Yeah. I’m fightin’ for Marlene. For Marlene… For Marlene’s future… Yeah… I guess I want to save the planet for Marlene’s sake…

Cloud: Go and see her. Make sure you’re right, and come back. All of you. Get off the ship and find out your reasons for yourselves. I want you to make sure. Then I want you to come back.

Cid: Maybe ain’t none of us’ll come back. Meteor’s gonna kill us anyway. Let’s just forget any useless struggling!

Cloud: I know why I’m fighting. I’m fighting to save the planet, and that’s that. But besides that, There’s something personal too… A very personal memory that I have. What about you all? I want all of you to find that something within yourselves. If you don’t find it, then that’s okay too. You can’t fight without a reason, right? So, I won’t hold it against you if you don’t come back.

It’s not perfect, but the basic idea is that assuming malice as default in every scenario will cause one to spiral into paranoia.

It’s not saying “people are never malicious and always just stupid” but just asking someone to take a step back from the situation and ask which is likelier in context.

Hanlon’s Razor is an old adage that boils down to: when you think someone is intentionally trying to be evil and ruin something, take a step back and ask whether it’s likelier they’re trying to be intentionally malicious, or if they’re just stupid/incompetent.

For example, you go to a restaurant and tell the waiter that you can’t have dairy, so you order a pasta dish without cheese. They bring it out to you, but look, there’s cheese. You can assume either that the waiter or the staff in the kitchen absolutely hate you and intentionally gave you cheese just to spite you…or that they just screwed up and forgot. The latter is probably likelier.

I was half-joking about potentially updating this idea to include an additional stipulation about AI bots online, which are good at looking like stupid people but actually are often malicious. Bots are used to sway political opinions. You have cases where they are trying to pass themselves off as real people to drown out legitimate discourse with a simulation of it, and cases like Musk’s Grok AI where it’s programmed to ignore truth and instead answer questions in ways that further his agenda or inflate his ego.

So sometimes when you see political posts that just defy all logic, or are ignoring a hard truth that is staring them in the face, you’re inclined to ask “How can this person sincerely believe what they’re saying right now?” And often the answer will be that they don’t, because they’re not a person, they’re a bot just regurgitating propagandic talking points.

I thought Hell could be found in the other country with Turk in its name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater

All fun and games until Lembot_0009 is replaced by Lembot_000A.

Not sure from the banning perspective, but when deleting an account, there’s a toggle for whether or not you want to delete your posts and comments along with it.

Preferably fried and with a side of honey mustard.

I truly suffer for my fart.

…especially after eating too much dairy.

The post is also from 2022, and the tech has changed a bit since then.

You mean there is truly no higher fart?

Might be the conspiratorial part of my brain coming through, but I’m half convinced it’s not just a stupid person, but an AI that completely missed the point.

I almost wonder if there shouldn’t be an extension or corollary of Hanlon’s Razor somewhere to account for AI.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be better explained by stupidity, but never attribute to stupidity that which can be better explained by malicious chatbots.”

I think you could, but there’s a good chance that it would emerge as a separate religion out of Christianity instead of changing the identity of Christianity. Another user said it well already, that Mormonism and Islam are basically already this.

The new scripture develops upon the ideas of the existing religion, but when a large group rejects the additions, a schism occurs, causing the existing religion to stay mostly the same while the new religion goes off and does its own thing. Hence why Judaism did not stop being a thing when Christianity emerged; enough people rejected the legitimacy of the additions and just continued on as they were.

So theoretically I’d say the answer is yes, but it’d need to be compelling enough to convince the vast majority of Christians to get behind it, otherwise it just becomes its own thing.

Nicole noticed me once, that’s the only time in my life I ever felt special.

I’ll admit I also had to do a double take at the thought someone would think Philadelphia wasn’t American, but you’re right in that a lot of products borrow foreign-sounding names because they sound trendy. Something that you are always exposed to us easy to overlook where it actually comes from. No one should hold that against you.

Not to mention the number of companies that used to be headquartered in one country but moved or were bought out by a foreign one. 7-11 comes to mind as an iconically American convenience store, and they were American, but are now based in Japan and have a much stronger association as a Japanese brand.

I was interested in PieFed and plan to give it a try at some point, but still have only used Lemmy. The other formats just aren’t as interesting to me. I don’t care about specific people, so Mastodon isn’t my bag. I care more about the conversations with friendly internet strangers. I don’t even have profile pictures enabled on Lemmy, I’d prefer everyone to just dissolve into a sea of unrecognition.

Yeah that’s why I picked a later year to arbitrarily start counting from, what does it matter?

Edit: sorry, I think there’s been a miscommunication, I thought the conversation had veered towards comparing modern Russia to modern USA. Ideology built on our forebears and all.

Edit 2: I don’t appreciate the condescension though, you can correct me without being mean about it.