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It would work like this: you feel like spending money or you want to buy a specific type of product? You pick-up/load the catalogue and browse until you can't take it anymore, or at least until you find something. And then follow a link to the seller's website, or get the address of the local store. No more ads everywhere, not in the physical world and neither in the online world.
Admittedly, I have not spent much time thinking about it and the possible side effects.
I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only part of a Terminal Solution[tm].
I wouldn't disallow online ads, because done sensibly (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html) they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one - any and all data on an individual is ALWAYS the property of the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner. Then require for every single use of that data to compensate the individual.[ß] That flips the incentives, because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute costs, but in actual payouts.
In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office operations to make it possible to repay people at a global scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability with capital L.
In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to pay me for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth, my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose, if needed.
ß: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their necessary activities, you pay.
The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local reporter there. Here's the first bit:
> São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized.
This case is a pretty clear example of how this is not in fact the case. By the metrics of a captialist system this should be a huge success. You have investment, voluntary contracts, free markets and fierce competition that results in huge amounts of innovation. Yet the result is horribly useless waste that hurts society. I think it's pretty fair to call it out.
Regulations are added to restrict some of the harmful effects of uncontrolled greed.
X at "its purest" is pretty awful, for all values of X.
Shocking news flash: pretty much any system has unintended consequences, distortions, etc. You invariably need checks and balances (which rob it of its "purity") in place to mitigate. When you get into the extra-legal space, where those checks and balances are most mitigated, you see some pretty terrible stuff.
I've never seen an article that blames "purist capitalism" on HN (maybe two that reference "lassie-faire capitalism"), and dozens that just blame "capitalism", no further elaboration given. The most straightforward explanation is that capitalism itself is being blamed, and I think that this explanation is supported by the recent (past 20 years?) increase in support for socialism/communism (both in the US and globally).
So your perception may be more of projection of your own POV than that of others.
As much as I enjoy hackernews, is it economically illiterate. There are 50 different economic schools of thought, and 'Capitalism/Communism' are not among them, they are vulgarities.
'Capitalism' of 1800 was mercantelism - it was protectionist, featured slave trade, etc.
'Capitalism' of 1980's was Keynesianism, when income tax was 70% in the top bracket, high inflation, cheap housing, we could build infrastruture effectively, etc.
'Capitalism' of today is 'Neoliberalism', and it's the pinnacle of laissez-faire approach to economy.
There is also Shumpeterianism which proritises technological development, Austrian school, and countless others
Just because a solution isn't provided does not necessarily invalidate one's criticism. And China as your poster child for communism? Man, I don't want to get all "no true Scotsman" on you, but...
The alternative to drinking hemlock tea is not drinking hemlock tea.
You can't not pick an economic system of organization. Even if you don't pick one, you will have one. So the question becomes "what's the best choice available?"
To choose "not capitalism" is still choosing something -- something which may work much worse.
We don't have either of those things now (neither does China). Control of the economy exists on a multidimensional spectrum, of which there are many possible options; blaming "capitalism" for a problem is shorthand for noting that, in some situation, the unrestricted free market is leading to negative externalities or a poor use of the commons.
Another way of putting this is the burden of proof to also provide on a solution is not on the problem identifier. Asking as much is implicitly making the argument that the problem doesn't exist because the solution doesn't yet exist. We can all agree how absurd that is.
Which is a completely reasonable and true point! And it's a rhetorical pattern that, if we could assume noble intent more often, would be way more popular.
However, unfortunately, when people act in bad faith, the reasonable expression "x has problems" can have the subtext "we should use [popular alternative y] instead". This is the case with supporters of socialism and communism - "capitalism is bad" is not used in order to try to improve the regulatory mechanisms around capitalism (which, as other people have pointed out, are absolutely necessary), but in order to try to drum up support for their favored economic system instead.
The pattern that consistently appears is that people who are trying to improve or draw attention to the regulatory landscape around capitalism consistently talk about regulations (e.g. focusing on the FAA's lack of oversight over Boeing, or old environmental regulations that were revoked under a recent administration), and the people who are trying to advance another agenda instead throw out lines to the effect of "capitalism bad" or "this is the result of capitalism".
Anyone who has worked at a heavily funded startup knows this. They may not have the words for it, or they may even like it, but they cannot deny that the situation creates the incentives.
Can you explain what this means, with some key examples?
If that doesn't quite suit you, feel free to reach out (email in profile) and I'm sure we could find a way to convey this conversationally.