That's an impressive false dichotomy and related straw man.
None of us are rational actors all of the time. The alternative is not necessarily behaving irrationally, but on autopilot. We've still got much to figure out, but there is evidence of marketing's influence. Otherwise, people wouldn't spend money on it.
People are free to disagree with me, but if they do so based on a false premise, their opinion is just as invalid as mine is if based on similarly false facts, and all I can do is attempt to work off the best available information.
"The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.
The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views."
My problem is not specifically with the products they sell. My problem is with them presenting the products they sell as nutritious, an intellectually dishonest position at best and outright fraud at worst. Their track record shows a long-term trend of their products becoming significantly less nutritious yet more economical to produce.
Surely as a pathological free-marketeer you agree that a functional free market depends on consumers having access to good information? Perhaps consumers would be willing to pay the extra few cents per bag of delicious corn chips if they knew doing so would go far to prevent further weight gain and chances of having a heart attack in the near-to-midterm. We'll never know.
Ah, you're one of those "free will" types who believes people are rational actors. Quaint.
While each person certainly bears personal responsibility for his actions, psychology hasn't given us the notion of the enabler for kicks. Social responsibility starts at the top.
I also take issue with your claims that people "want" corn so processed it retains zero nutritional value, fats so perverted the body can barely process them, and sugar that is heavily biased towards being stored as fat rather than burned that then creates a depressed insulin response and the near-instant desire for more. Their "food" is the equivalent to crack, heavily engineered to maximize appeal and shelf-life at the expense of its resemblance to genuine nutrition. Nobody benefited from the switch away from sucrose and unprocessed oils except their executives.
Also, while my wording is strong, your speculation on my emotional state says more about yours. What's got you defending the purveyors of food that have had a heavy hand in the worldwide increase in obesity, diabetes, and all sorts of other fun chronic conditions that we all pay for in the end?
I am not angry that they sell what they do. I am irritated that they sell what they do and pretend there's any nutritional value to it, and I am bitterly amused by you folks with no appreciation for the malleability of the average consumer's mind.
While these are important questions, it should be obvious from their past behavior that PepsiCo as an organization is not interested in any layman's definition of "nutrition."
High fructose corn syrup in EVERYTHING, food products that boil down to simple carbs, trans fats and salt, and beverages that are little more than sugar water with some caramel coloring. This is a company designed to maximize profit by exploiting the still-ingrained hunter-gatherer instincts in us all, and what of the externalities associated with a lifestyle of chugging soft drinks and pounding Cheetos and Fritos? Fuck it.
These guys deserve greater scrutiny than the tobacco companies, and to wail about their trials and tribulations attempting to engage a public that is becoming more health conscious after foisting products upon them that encourage obesity, high blood pressure, and compulsive consumption is the highest form of absurdity.
Grass always being greener and all that, there are days when I'd gladly trade mine for a quality joystick.
Garden Variety Narcissist
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Justifying his own shitty actions with the "everyone else does it" cliche while enabling his clients to avoid accepting responsibility for their own actions.
Talk about epitomizing everything wrong with the world these days.
I remember the unending quest to find a glass bottle with cap threads compatible with super soakers.
At the time, we didn't appreciate the shoddy construction of those water guns. If they hadn't immediately fallen apart when taken to functional limits, we probably would have managed to kill ourselves.
Did I typo something so badly I've ended up at epinions.com?
My other question is whether this is a case of paying CmdrTaco off or blackmailing him. Either Apple promised to fix his micropenis... or threatened to reveal it to a wider community.
Alright, you're ignoring my points on free will and personal responsibility so I'm done with polite discourse. You're an idiot.
People have been and will continue to be prone to acting emotionally/impulsively/stupidly. This is far from justification for silencing dissenting viewpoints, but is in fact the greatest reason for having vibrant discourse from many viewpoints: When populist jerkoffs like Hitler come to power, they lack the tools necessary to suppress opposing views. Remember his rules for propaganda? Of course you don't; you're a moron. One of his key tenets was that any lie if repeated often enough becomes truth. A monopoly on speech grants leaders monopoly on public opinion.
Now on to your asinine example of Bush. We already have laws in place to deal with deception from leaders that causes massive financial and personal harm to a nation: Treason laws. That Bush has yet to answer for his crimes is more a statement on the sad state of the American justice system than the dangers of unregulated speech.
Know what would have happened if we granted our leaders control over which speech is legal and which isn't? You and I would be political prisoners for questioning the veracity of statements made by Emperor Bush who convinced the nation of the necessity of granting him dictatorial powers due to the national security threat posed by an ethnicity of middle-eastern origin. Sound familiar?
Words can indeed manipulate people, which is why it's so important to have safeguards in place to allow a population to call their leaders out and prevent monopolization of discourse.
You are in fact the most dangerous sort of true believer: The kind who means well but has absolutely no handle on the unintended consequences of your views. I have no expectation of changing your viewpoint, but it is my hope that anyone who stumbles across our conversation is not swayed to your side of the slippery slope that is censorship.
Why wouldn't it be ok? Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
What they are not necessarily entitled to is acting on an opinion like you mention. However, we already have laws that punish people who commit acts of violence, and they even take intent into account such that someone acting on the opinions you mention with premeditation is removed from society for far longer than someone who has an impulsive lapse in judgment.
The first amendment doesn't mean shit if it doesn't protect unpopular speech. The whole set of arguments with regard to "hate speech" are patronizing bullshit that imply people don't possess free will and aren't responsible for their own actions. If someone goes out and kills someone because "the cleric told me to," they're obviously unwell in the first place and would find an excuse sooner or later. I would think a slashdotter would appreciate this point considering its similarity with "I killed that hooker because of GTA" type rationalizations.
Another egotistical prick who knows what's best for us and is all-too-willing to save us from ourselves.
Maybe once she saves us from looking at naked people and hearing mean comments we can move on to tackling other such pressing social ills like power-hungry sociopaths who systematically defraud an entire population of various liberties under the guise of protecting them.
Oh wait. Sorry, let me get back in line for my RFID chip and social reeducation. Did you guys SEE what happened on Cat the Midget Bounty Ghost Hunting Cake Survivor last night?
Your sig is all I need to read to know you're a complete faggot lol.
Slow Down Cowboy!
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All I really meant by that is incremental improvements in GPU performance hold significantly greater "value" than commensurate increases in CPU speed. A bottom barrel consumer computer is going to be able to handle anything a common consumer is going to throw at it except gaming. Even the lightest gaming is about impossible on the most common consumer-class (Intel) GPUs, and unfortunately Intel is still the graphics chip in the vast majority of consumer computers.
Now bottom-barrel will still mean "game capable."
Intel's and AMD's offerings at the same price point will likely offer a 10%-20% discrepancy in overall CPU performance that will favor Intel but nobody will ever notice, while at the same price point AMD will be able to offer graphical performance eclipsing Intel's by several fold.
AMD is going to eat Intel's lunch, and this will be good news for all of us as the continuously floating "average" performance developers can target increases, but I digress.
Short of buying out Nvidia I don't see Intel having a consumer's chance in America of competing with AMD in the value sector for the next few generations of chips.
CPUs have been "fast enough" for years, but GPUs have not. AMD is going to laugh all the way to the bank being able to offer a $50 package that can run The Sims.
I have yet to mess with either Chrome or Wave, so I don't even know if it's as heavily javascript based as I assume, but this seems like something Chrome's supposedly faster javascript engine would excel at... if my lazy assumptions are true.
No, at this point I have no idea what I or anyone else is arguing. I should have known better than to get involved in any internet conversation on something as subjective as economics lol.
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You must be new here.
That's an impressive false dichotomy and related straw man.
None of us are rational actors all of the time. The alternative is not necessarily behaving irrationally, but on autopilot. We've still got much to figure out, but there is evidence of marketing's influence. Otherwise, people wouldn't spend money on it.
People are free to disagree with me, but if they do so based on a false premise, their opinion is just as invalid as mine is if based on similarly false facts, and all I can do is attempt to work off the best available information.
I apologize if something about that offends you.
Posts like yours make me sad we can't at least do some sort of non-mod upvoting on slashdot.
They probably shouldn't.
There's increasing evidence that... well, there's just no point to arguing because people's internalized beliefs are fairly static.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/03/confirmation-bias-scientific-evidence
"The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.
The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views."
But that doesn't make the arguing less fun!
I believe you misunderstand.
My problem is not specifically with the products they sell. My problem is with them presenting the products they sell as nutritious, an intellectually dishonest position at best and outright fraud at worst. Their track record shows a long-term trend of their products becoming significantly less nutritious yet more economical to produce.
Surely as a pathological free-marketeer you agree that a functional free market depends on consumers having access to good information? Perhaps consumers would be willing to pay the extra few cents per bag of delicious corn chips if they knew doing so would go far to prevent further weight gain and chances of having a heart attack in the near-to-midterm. We'll never know.
Ah, you're one of those "free will" types who believes people are rational actors. Quaint.
While each person certainly bears personal responsibility for his actions, psychology hasn't given us the notion of the enabler for kicks. Social responsibility starts at the top.
I also take issue with your claims that people "want" corn so processed it retains zero nutritional value, fats so perverted the body can barely process them, and sugar that is heavily biased towards being stored as fat rather than burned that then creates a depressed insulin response and the near-instant desire for more. Their "food" is the equivalent to crack, heavily engineered to maximize appeal and shelf-life at the expense of its resemblance to genuine nutrition. Nobody benefited from the switch away from sucrose and unprocessed oils except their executives.
Also, while my wording is strong, your speculation on my emotional state says more about yours. What's got you defending the purveyors of food that have had a heavy hand in the worldwide increase in obesity, diabetes, and all sorts of other fun chronic conditions that we all pay for in the end?
I am not angry that they sell what they do. I am irritated that they sell what they do and pretend there's any nutritional value to it, and I am bitterly amused by you folks with no appreciation for the malleability of the average consumer's mind.
While these are important questions, it should be obvious from their past behavior that PepsiCo as an organization is not interested in any layman's definition of "nutrition."
High fructose corn syrup in EVERYTHING, food products that boil down to simple carbs, trans fats and salt, and beverages that are little more than sugar water with some caramel coloring. This is a company designed to maximize profit by exploiting the still-ingrained hunter-gatherer instincts in us all, and what of the externalities associated with a lifestyle of chugging soft drinks and pounding Cheetos and Fritos? Fuck it.
These guys deserve greater scrutiny than the tobacco companies, and to wail about their trials and tribulations attempting to engage a public that is becoming more health conscious after foisting products upon them that encourage obesity, high blood pressure, and compulsive consumption is the highest form of absurdity.
Grass always being greener and all that, there are days when I'd gladly trade mine for a quality joystick.
Justifying his own shitty actions with the "everyone else does it" cliche while enabling his clients to avoid accepting responsibility for their own actions.
Talk about epitomizing everything wrong with the world these days.
I remember the unending quest to find a glass bottle with cap threads compatible with super soakers.
At the time, we didn't appreciate the shoddy construction of those water guns. If they hadn't immediately fallen apart when taken to functional limits, we probably would have managed to kill ourselves.
Did I typo something so badly I've ended up at epinions.com?
My other question is whether this is a case of paying CmdrTaco off or blackmailing him. Either Apple promised to fix his micropenis... or threatened to reveal it to a wider community.
I suppose you could say kdawson is the Flash of /. editors. Ubiquitous, slow, and frustrating for many.
But not even Flash deserves that insult.
Alright, you're ignoring my points on free will and personal responsibility so I'm done with polite discourse. You're an idiot.
People have been and will continue to be prone to acting emotionally/impulsively/stupidly. This is far from justification for silencing dissenting viewpoints, but is in fact the greatest reason for having vibrant discourse from many viewpoints: When populist jerkoffs like Hitler come to power, they lack the tools necessary to suppress opposing views. Remember his rules for propaganda? Of course you don't; you're a moron. One of his key tenets was that any lie if repeated often enough becomes truth. A monopoly on speech grants leaders monopoly on public opinion.
Now on to your asinine example of Bush. We already have laws in place to deal with deception from leaders that causes massive financial and personal harm to a nation: Treason laws. That Bush has yet to answer for his crimes is more a statement on the sad state of the American justice system than the dangers of unregulated speech.
Know what would have happened if we granted our leaders control over which speech is legal and which isn't? You and I would be political prisoners for questioning the veracity of statements made by Emperor Bush who convinced the nation of the necessity of granting him dictatorial powers due to the national security threat posed by an ethnicity of middle-eastern origin. Sound familiar?
Words can indeed manipulate people, which is why it's so important to have safeguards in place to allow a population to call their leaders out and prevent monopolization of discourse.
You are in fact the most dangerous sort of true believer: The kind who means well but has absolutely no handle on the unintended consequences of your views. I have no expectation of changing your viewpoint, but it is my hope that anyone who stumbles across our conversation is not swayed to your side of the slippery slope that is censorship.
And won't someone think of the pirates? With every passing year, more lighthouses are constructed while pirates' numbers dwindle.
Why wouldn't it be ok? Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
What they are not necessarily entitled to is acting on an opinion like you mention. However, we already have laws that punish people who commit acts of violence, and they even take intent into account such that someone acting on the opinions you mention with premeditation is removed from society for far longer than someone who has an impulsive lapse in judgment.
The first amendment doesn't mean shit if it doesn't protect unpopular speech. The whole set of arguments with regard to "hate speech" are patronizing bullshit that imply people don't possess free will and aren't responsible for their own actions. If someone goes out and kills someone because "the cleric told me to," they're obviously unwell in the first place and would find an excuse sooner or later. I would think a slashdotter would appreciate this point considering its similarity with "I killed that hooker because of GTA" type rationalizations.
Another egotistical prick who knows what's best for us and is all-too-willing to save us from ourselves.
Maybe once she saves us from looking at naked people and hearing mean comments we can move on to tackling other such pressing social ills like power-hungry sociopaths who systematically defraud an entire population of various liberties under the guise of protecting them.
Oh wait. Sorry, let me get back in line for my RFID chip and social reeducation. Did you guys SEE what happened on Cat the Midget Bounty Ghost Hunting Cake Survivor last night?
They can trust the identity of deez nuts.
Go easy on me, moderators.
BP stockholder eh?
Link to your first post on this Slahsdot site you speak of?
I peed on mine and it went off.
Strangely, my girlfriend had the same reaction.
Lesson learned: Waterproof your sex bots.
Your sig is all I need to read to know you're a complete faggot lol.
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
It's been 15 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.
All I really meant by that is incremental improvements in GPU performance hold significantly greater "value" than commensurate increases in CPU speed. A bottom barrel consumer computer is going to be able to handle anything a common consumer is going to throw at it except gaming. Even the lightest gaming is about impossible on the most common consumer-class (Intel) GPUs, and unfortunately Intel is still the graphics chip in the vast majority of consumer computers.
Now bottom-barrel will still mean "game capable."
Intel's and AMD's offerings at the same price point will likely offer a 10%-20% discrepancy in overall CPU performance that will favor Intel but nobody will ever notice, while at the same price point AMD will be able to offer graphical performance eclipsing Intel's by several fold.
AMD is going to eat Intel's lunch, and this will be good news for all of us as the continuously floating "average" performance developers can target increases, but I digress.
Short of buying out Nvidia I don't see Intel having a consumer's chance in America of competing with AMD in the value sector for the next few generations of chips.
CPUs have been "fast enough" for years, but GPUs have not. AMD is going to laugh all the way to the bank being able to offer a $50 package that can run The Sims.
Have you tried it with Chrome?
I have yet to mess with either Chrome or Wave, so I don't even know if it's as heavily javascript based as I assume, but this seems like something Chrome's supposedly faster javascript engine would excel at... if my lazy assumptions are true.
No, at this point I have no idea what I or anyone else is arguing. I should have known better than to get involved in any internet conversation on something as subjective as economics lol.