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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

Family member of mine wanted to turn on TV news the morning of Thanksgiving just to get an update on "the weather". The immediate and visceral negative reaction of everyone under the age of approximately 40 was pretty hilarious. After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news just feels like an incredibly arduous waste of time compared to what I can read in just a few minutes.

I started subscribing to a fairly large but local newspaper (as in, actual Sunday delivery) and I get a lot of weird looks but it is genuinely a mostly enjoyable experience. I tried to contact the newspaper to see if they could skip sending all of the extra junk adds (separate leaflet thankfully) but their support could literally not comprehend what I was talking about even after multiple reply emails. In their minds the only ads apparently are online.

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The newspaper makes a ton of money off of those inserts and agreements about them happen at the top of the org chart. Nobody you can reach has any power here. In addition, if their support was young enough they'd have no idea what you're talking about.

"That crazy guy who thinks there's a conspiracy to print off ads and put them in his mailbox called again today!"

Well I would imagine any individual old enough to rent and/or shop at bed bath and beyond would be fairly familiar with the concept of receiving print ads in the mail. Those Valpack things are pretty common where I live and they're essentially exactly the same as the newspaper inserts, just like 50 of em in a branded envelope

The Valpack envelops make me so sad. I just take them out of the mailbox and toss them into the recycling bin. Think of all the trees used, energy wasted, and chemicals used in making the ink that are now in the environment for absolutely no reason.

You can stop that one! https://www.valpak.com/coupons/show/mailinglistsuppression

Unrelated to my original post, but I have been on a quest to purge all the junk from my physical mail. It is a huge PITA, but in almost all cases you can email someone and eventually get them to stop.

The other big ones that cut a lot of junk are DMA choice for catalog opt out (https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php) and the pre screened credit card offer opt out (https://www.optoutprescreen.com/).

I'm trying to imagine your state of mind when you asked a newspaper to quit sending advertisements. Why not give the number of a good law firm specializing in bankruptcy also?

It reminds me of a guy who wanted to start a company that would "help" the USPS by allowing customers to filter out junk mail in order to improve overall postal service. Yeah, no. Junk is their core business, just like the news.

> After not having cable for 10+ years broadcast news

You mean cable news right? Broadcast news preceded cable news, when you got your news at 6PM during the prime time news slot or at 11PM during the late night news slot, and was broadcast over radio/TV waves rather than cabled into your house.

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