punee

Alternatives like Diet Coke? But don't hesitate to put your money where your mouth is and buy Coke put options.

Let me get this straight.

Your contention is that if companies did not have to buy advertising to sell their products, they would subtract the advertising cost from their sales price?

You have a very unusual definition of being "fooled". Paying for something you can get for free is what most people would recognize as being a fool.

That companies decide to choose a different business model to offer for free what their competitors make you pay for is just innovation. It has zilch to do with being "honest" or "straight up".

Here's an interesting question: how come people buy bottled water when they could just drink tap water? I mean, shouldn't people be "fooled" by all the "free" water? How come the "straight up", "honest" water bottle company that sells its product at a price manages not to die? (Hint: it's not because they're not advertising).

That's because you're being unnecessarily obtuse. It's fairly obvious what the difference is between not being compelled by the government to give $500,000 you have earned, and being given $500,000 worth of taxpayer money.

You only need to read the second sentence of his post. It couldn't be any clearer.

Yes, the advertising industry is made up of magicians who make people desire things they don't want.

Why is it you don't believe THAT's the happy accident and byproduct, while diffusing information is the main mechanism?

If you'd ever tried to convince someone to buy something they don't want, you'd have a good idea about how likely that scenario is.

Have you ever bought something you didn't want?

Small companies sell better and cheaper products than big businesses, but somehow people have never heard about them, and that's because of "advertising". Sure, buddy. You keep telling yourself that.

/r/iamverysmart

You appear to have skipped the part where it is clearly explained that introverts are not necessarily shy. Admittedly, it's a common confusion.

[2002]

Your second point is the first thing I looked for.

"No mention of Goodyear welting? These guys probably don't know anything about shoemaking."

The second pet peeve is calling them "designer shoes". Men don't buy "designer shoes". "Designer shoes" are for women.

"Designer shoes" for men (i.e. shoes manufactured by companies who traditionally sell fashionable apparel) have a distinctly bad reputation among shoe enthusiasts, who see them as more expensive versions of cheap shoes, with subpar craftsmanship.

The reason is that HN has crappy typography and thus crappy legibility. I don't want to resize my browser window every 5 minutes to accommodate bad design choices.

Independent from what? I hear that rhetoric a lot in France from people who read Mediapart, an "independently funded" newspaper and website. Their slogan is something along the lines of "Only our readers can buy us."

I always found it quite ironic that their readership seems to feel like that guarantees impartiality.

On the subject of media bias, I suggest reading Matthew Gentzkow's work or even just a survey like this one: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/shleifer_cor...

TL;DR: Nope, ownership isn't the main factor in media bias.

"As important, Gentzkow and Shapiro [6] show that, after controlling for a newspaper’s audience, the identity of its owner does not affect its slant.1 Two newspapers with the same owner look no more similar in their slant than newspapers with different owners. Ownership regulation in the US and elsewhere is based on the premise a news outlet’s owner determines how it spins the news. Gentzkow and Shapiro produced the first large-scale test of this hypothesis, which showed that, contrary to the conventional wisdom and regulatory stance, demand is much more influential in shaping content than supply as proxied by ownership."

Is this in reference to people who are software engineers who work for big businesses that are mostly marketing, sales and advertising driven and who would not have a job if it weren't for what they're criticizing in this thread?

Yes. Creative people creating ads are paid billions in fees every year to make useless things. Businesses buying advertising are just that stupid. They love to spend money on useless things instead of useful ones. I mean, who doesn't?

You're absolutely right. I guess I was misled by the title that talks about the "water supply" when they really mean "the quality of water" or something along those lines.

"Worrying over fracking is like seeing an upper middle class family who are $6,000 in debt, and freaking out because one of their kids bought a gumball from a machine."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-do...

Maybe someone can correct me here, but that kind of approach seems ill-founded to me when after a couple examples, people are already talking about different things using the same terminology.

The article says "A list is a Functor". Now you're saying "Either is a Functor". But those two things don't have the same nature.

Maybe what the author meant "The [] list constructor is a Functor"?

I'm not sure what is gained by garbling abstractions and reducing them to a subset of their potential interpretations.

Yes, that's why every successful company in the world spends 0 dollar on marketing and advertising. Right? They're just that dumb. If only they knew their products could sell themselves!

Active funds incorporate new data in the market thereby making it more efficient, which benefits passive funds, no?

A critical assumption in that view is that the returns on actively and passively managed funds are independent. Are they, or are the passive funds freeriding on the work of the active funds?

"econometrics of rent control" brings here. The fairly consistent econ 101 conclusion about rent control is that it never works. If you're talking about another conclusion, what is it?

What makes you think I wasn't fooled? What makes you think that's not precisely why I wrote the comment after originally feeling misled? What makes you think that's not exactly what my comment attempted to convey?

I fail to see where there's any arrogance in my comment, very much unlike in your ridiculous white knight posturing. "Others" have not reported feeling slighted until now, thank you very much.

Whoa, look at this chart, it's almost like there's no active oil rigs at all!!! Whoops, looks like it's just a "data scientist" who conveniently picked the origin of the vertical axis to mislead readers. My bad.

> It is buying market share, without making anything with the money.

Erm. Yes, it's doing something with the money. Buying market share.

Yes, there can.

I think you're confusing "value to humanity" and nerd porn.

See chapter 34 here, for a hilarious takedown of that preposterous conception of advertising : http://prot-adar8-5773.s3.amazonaws.com/Reality-In-Advertisi...

Sorry, but the metric isn't vague, it's bullshit. You can't promise a conversion rate. Probably not even a conversion improvement, since the people you're targeting won't have enough traffic for testing. I'd stay away from making such claims if I were you. Making nice, clear landing pages with good copy is a good enough value proposition for people who suck at writing and/or building websites.

An expert copywriter would know he has to optimize for the "ADHD crowd" (which is about 80% of people on the internet), for example by mentioning he provides copy in at least one of the subheads, instead of keeping his head in the sand like you suggest.

You probably also want to revise your discount rate assumption.