The OSX way of handling software (folders that you simply run from the programs folder, iirc) is simply better than the way Linux does things. Or windows, for that matter. The former is hell, like the guy I knew who simply copied entire programs into one big directory on his hard drive back in the days of DOS, and the latter is almost sane, but ends up throwing files and settings all over hell and back. With the method OSX uses, everything is in a simple, easy to use, self-contained folder. Program management hasn't been that simple on the PC since MS-DOS.
It's not as good as it sounds. Basically, you get in and they toss drunks at you. "I love you man!" "I served in 'nam and saw all my buddies die, one by one!" "Why did Veronica leave me?"
Sir, I demand the article in a peer reviewed journal which covers these findings. Porn is originates from and is most prevelant in societies in the first world, where the death rate is ridiculously low. Other countries without internet access, however, are filled with pain and strife and suffering.
Thus, I dispute your conclusions, and require evidence of your assertions.
I didn't want to say anything, but yes, I do enjoy killing babies. Are you happy now?
I believe that to kill any baby that isn't from my bloodline will increase the proportion of babies coming from my bloodline, thus increasing the number of people with my bloodline in the world. Because I think that my bloodline is objectively superior to other bloodlines, that children born of it will be more capable of living happy and productive lives, it is thus ethical to say that the world will be much happier over the long run if I kill a few billion babies, and that under the ethical principle of preference utilitarianism, which states that one ought to strive to make the largest number of people happy, it is ethical and thus makes me happy to kill babies.
But downloading MOVIES? There's no way you can justify THAT!
My only question in response to your post would be "Are interfaces today really all that complicated?"
My landlady hasn't touched a computer in over a decade, but I hooked up a little PC to the internet for her, and she can happily look up what she wants and check her e-mail.
My brother doesn't even have a high school education, but he can run up torrents, install games, and use whatever software he wants without a word of hassle.
My sister isn't even literate enough to form a single sentence without massive grammar and spelling mistakes, yet somehow she can still manage to use her computer to shotgun me with proof of that on IM.
See, the thing is, I don't think things are too hard. Anyone who wants to figure out most software can. Sure, there's more advanced things that take some work, but you know what? Some tasks are just advanced, and actually require some thought to get working. From that point, it's up to the user to decide he or she wants to do it. A lot of people say they "can't" drive a standard. It doesn't mean that driving a standard is too complex, just that they don't want to figure it out.
Bollocks. Learning basic PC security is the same as learning to drive defensively, not to pick up creepy hitchhikers, and not to drive around bad neighbourhoods at 3am. It's unbelievably easy to keep yourself from getting infected by a worm or virus or spyware, stop your startup menu from getting clogged by a thousand ram-hogging entires, and all that other junk.
Empirical proof? The only people who ever call me for tech support are the people who don't follow basic common sense on-line. Modern consumer-level OSes patch themselves and have a built-in firewall, so that excuse is out the door, the latest IE is reasonably safe if you stick to trustworthy sites(It used to have a nasty habit of installing spyware on some free hosting sites, but it's gotten saner with respect to security), so that's no longer an issue, Outlook is locked down like a vise as it should be, so that's not a problem either! a defrag and a spyware check and that sort of stuff can easily be written off as "things that get done when I take my PC to the mechanic", so you've got no arguement.
Simply put, computers are complicated devices with a million functions, so they can be hard to use until the patterns become intuitive. You don't need to be a computer technician to use one though.
Unfortunately, my argument doesn't have legs, but not for the reasons stated.
The problem is is that my trouble is with people who become their ideology despite their own real wishes. "I am a conservative or a liberal therefore I must be against or for issue X, not because I have a strong personal opinion independantly regarding this issue, but because I am a conservative or a liberal, or a Democrat or a Republican, and that's what a conservative, liberal, Democrat, or Republican believes. If I decide to 'go against the grain' and disagree with the party too many times, I'm either to believe in the other ideology, including the things about it I disagree with now, or I am to create an imaginary demarcation within the party or ideology which allows the dissonance between my disagreement with the party or ideology and my stated total devotion to the philosophy of the party or ideology(the 'small c conservative'). I never should have gotten caught up in linguistic semantics, I should have instead just stated that groupthink of this kind is distasteful.
You were right to disagree, but not for the non-sequitur reason you presented. To demonstrate why, consider the sentence: "Some groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, express hatred towards certain races. You should try not even to notice a person's race. To notice a persons race is the first step towards forming negative connotations based on race. The concept of race should be ignored altogether, and we should just consider other homo-sapiens as simply human, which I do." isn't paradoxial for the same reason my earlier comment wasn't. It isn't the neutral point of view observer stating the groups well-known agenda who is singling out the race, it's the group themselves. Similarly, the Republican party has a well known and publicised strategy which looks towards certain groups of people, such as the "freedom-moms" demographic they claim exists which they also claim to target, as well as the southern demographic I mentioned. As I mentioned, this is based on fact, and this image from wikipedia shows the recent and dramatic switch between states which voted for one party over the other over the course of the nation's history. Editorials I've read have indicated that this shift was due to a change in strategy by the republican party in an effort to change their strategy with regard to ceertain demographics. Ironically, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People claim to be 'a conservative' or 'a liberal', thus they vote for the party which claims to pander to their ideology, ignoring both that neither party actually follows the philosophies implied by the words 'conservative' or 'liberal' or 'democrat' or 'republican'.
According to Wikipedia,, they were originally termed with respect to their alleigances, but the modern definition refers to nations with a low UN Human Development Index, not any particular political affiliation.
It is not ethical to buy music from artists represented by RIAA member companies, by any rational ethic.
When you pay for RIAA represented talent, you're paying for a bunch of entitled drug addicted leeches with degrees from party schools, lawsuits against grandmothers for downloading music they couldn't possibly want to listen to, and an entire industry built around the artist paying for everything and receiving a glorified loan in return, while being paid a pittiance for anything any sales outside the top fraction of a percent.
I stopped downloading illegal music altogether many many years ago. I replaced it by downloading to people who actually want me listening to their music. Is it harder to find good music? Sure. Can I sleep at night knowing I'm paying an artist directly for their work? Like a baby.
According to the department of energy, the two largest exporters of oil to the United States in the world are Canada and Mexico, with a combined total of just over 3 million barrels for the month of October 2006, and Russia isn't even in the top 15. In terms of total petroleum, Russia is the 9th largest importer, with between 381 and 530 thousand barrels per month. Compare this to Canada and Mexico, which combined export over 3.7 million barrels of petroleum in total. The top five importers of petroleum to the US each export more than 1 million barrels a month.
If Russia is making big money on oil, it's because of markets other than the United States. In the American market, they're a tiny player.
The demographics the Republican party has aimed at have shifted dramatically over time. Lincon freed the slaves and lead the north to victory. Bush tried to get an anti-gay constitutional amendment passed to please his core demographic in the south. No, I'm not making a value judgment about whether people from one area or another are more moral or just or intelligent or whatever assertion might be inferred from that statement, it's just a pair of facts which, as long as they're true, serve to illustrate my initial conclusion. As a result of the demographic shift over time, I think the core values the party claims to have (and tries to demonstrate in their public media image) to get themselves elected have also changed.
The best thing to do is to realize that anyone trying to pigeon-hole you into a label like that is trying to use you. Myself, I have this lovely thing I call a brain. It's a large thing, it's sort of a pain because I always need to find a helmet before I get on a motorcycle because it gets all cranky if something hits my head too hard, and sometimes it gets me into trouble, and sometimes it even makes people dislike me because I have put thought into something and come to a conclusion they don't like or don't agree with, but it has this amazing ability: It allows me to look at a situation, and not only decide which side of an issue I'm on, it allows me to decide that both sides are full of shit and there's a more logical conclusion, or even that something being argued isn't worth arguing or giving thought to in the first place.
I know it's kind of a tangent from what you were talking about, but I get frustrated every time I see people trying to make distinctions between the subgroups of some group or another they're claiming affiliation with. You're not a small R republican or a small C conservative, you're a human with a brain.
You know, back in my first year of college, I used to get dinged for units a lot. Then I realized that the world made more sense once you started thinking in terms of units.
[number of powerful weapons] != [money spent]/[number of people] != [quality of life]
To put it into plain words, big guns and bombs don't make for economic development and they don't make for a high quality of life. All big guns and bombs do is kill people, and in the era of communism when they were built, they suck away even more of an already weak economy, causing famines that killed thousands, or millions.
There's the thing, by recognising that they're arbitrary and meaningless, you're effectively nihilist. "My values are valueless and meaningless and I've chosen them arbitrarily based on nothing in particular"
To be fair, those dialogs are "Our records indicate that your copy of Windows has been activated the maximum number of times. Purchase another copy of windows or you can't use your PC anymore."
I like to think of it as "Driving legitimate users to piracy", rather than "new revenue generation dialogues with end users"
Oh, Microsoft. It's funny that you don't even pretend to want customers anymore.
I'd go so far as to say you don't even need the cheap router, since the XP firewall seems to do a good job of closing the most dangerous ports. I've been running for quite a while without a router, and I've found that as long as you cover your ass with respect to the big things, the little things don't tend to hit.
Canada has been encountering massive shifts in their voting patterns in the past few years. The Liberal party of Canada has had a lot of its seats removed, with the Conservative Party of Canada holding a tonne of new seats. At the same time, the New Democratic Party is gaining seats due to the perception that their handling of being a competent balance of power in a minority government. The Bloc Quebecois are mostly holding their seats, they've got a pretty strong grip on Quebec, and all the major parties are trying to get in on their area.
Thing is, we have organizations like the FTC so we don't have to worry about whether Viral marketing is an issue. It's the same as food processing. It came about becasuse companies were putting dangerous goods out for sale. Do we get rid of them now because they're doing their jobs and thousands aren't dying of food poisoning? Workplace health and safety's mere existence has stopped a lot of companies from trying to replicate the conditions documented in The Jungle, the book which documented the deplorable conditions in the plants for workers and for food safety.
I'm not going to pretend there isn't pork in a lot of places, but your reaction looks to me like a simple unthinking "We need less government so we can focus on the issues of today", forgetting that the issues of yesterday were solved with the solutions of yesterday.
To be honest, I've come to realize that all values are arbitrarily chosen, and my statements reflect this. I'm not saying "companies ought not to lie" for any reason that can be reduced to a tangible first principle, because the first principle will always be arbitrarily chosen and from there you can't keep asking "why" until you reach a point where the moralist or ethicist has to go "No reason, I just decided it should be this way".
If you were to arbitrarily choose a first principle such as "Financial transactions ought to be transparent and free from intentional deception from any party because neither party would want to be deceived and this can protect both parties from each other, thus increasing the overall happiness in the world for the most people thus fulfilling the goals of preference utilitarianism", then it's easy to say from there that neither customers nor companies ought to be allowed to engage in any deceptive practices. On the other hand, Reaganomics uses the opposite sort of arguement, "Large companies ought to have greater freedom and financial security at any cost because then the largest amount of money can be sent to people who are in a position to fund large projects and by paying workers, redistribute the money more effectively and lower unemployment, thus satisfying the goals of preference utilitarianism", then the opposite is true, and by being decieved, the deceptive practice helps distributive justice by taking money from people from people who can afford luxury products, and further distributing it to more people.
I'm struggling with the idea at the moment, and I've got a sort of holding pattern in place, where I'm a nihilist who sees that nihilism doesn't have anything in it's description advocating any ethic at all, exactly because there is no common value, meaning, or sense. As a result, I've defined an arbitrary set of values based upon arbitrarily defined first principles. In this case, truth is one of my most important values, so when I say with conviction that someone ought not to be allowed to pay another person to deceive people into believing that they're giving an unaffiliated and unendorsed positive opinion of a product, it's based on that arbitrary value. Also, in this case, unlike a human, a large commercial entity has the ability to commit this unethical behaviour throughout entire countries with limits only set by their marketing budget.
And the reason we have scientifically validatable limits like the blood alcohol level is that if we used teleological ethics in such matters, an arbitrary judgement call on the part of the officer would be needed. This is a major issue because it's truly arbitrary. If the cop is in a good mood, maybe the drunk gets off, "Aw, you can drive". If he's in a bad mood, maybe someone who has had no alcohol can be charged with drunk driving and convicted, because the test is arbitrary. The same happens here. If we say "You can't lie or decieve as a company", then it's easy to enforce and relatively easy to judge. If the result is based entirely on whether the lie is considered harmful or malicious, then you get situations where the tobacco company is hit with massive fines for their lobbying efforts, but everyone else in the world, regardless of what they're doing, is allowed to continue to use deceptive tactics to get laws changed in their favour. Since just judging whether something is the truth is difficult at times, telling if it's the truth AND that it's caused appreciable harm to someone so it's worth pursuing is nearly impossible.
Don't worry so much. It'll go on a killing rampage and you'll discover a super cute but ultimately dark and depressed girl with superpowers or a giant mech who will defeat the monster (With your help, because you'll have a mysterious gift for either catalyzing her superpower or driving her mech(No, neither of those were euphamisms for sex, though from a literary point of view they come close a few times), and you'll slowly fall in love. Then the writers will realize they're in the middle of episode 11 and concoct some red herring to end the series in a show and a half and you'll feel ultimately empty despite everything that's happened, because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The OSX way of handling software (folders that you simply run from the programs folder, iirc) is simply better than the way Linux does things. Or windows, for that matter. The former is hell, like the guy I knew who simply copied entire programs into one big directory on his hard drive back in the days of DOS, and the latter is almost sane, but ends up throwing files and settings all over hell and back. With the method OSX uses, everything is in a simple, easy to use, self-contained folder. Program management hasn't been that simple on the PC since MS-DOS.
Msys and Cygwin both run just fine on my PC. I don't know what you're doing differently.
It's not as good as it sounds. Basically, you get in and they toss drunks at you. "I love you man!" "I served in 'nam and saw all my buddies die, one by one!" "Why did Veronica leave me?"
Not pleasant at all.
I propose we bomb the moon.
Sir, I demand the article in a peer reviewed journal which covers these findings. Porn is originates from and is most prevelant in societies in the first world, where the death rate is ridiculously low. Other countries without internet access, however, are filled with pain and strife and suffering.
Thus, I dispute your conclusions, and require evidence of your assertions.
I didn't want to say anything, but yes, I do enjoy killing babies. Are you happy now?
I believe that to kill any baby that isn't from my bloodline will increase the proportion of babies coming from my bloodline, thus increasing the number of people with my bloodline in the world. Because I think that my bloodline is objectively superior to other bloodlines, that children born of it will be more capable of living happy and productive lives, it is thus ethical to say that the world will be much happier over the long run if I kill a few billion babies, and that under the ethical principle of preference utilitarianism, which states that one ought to strive to make the largest number of people happy, it is ethical and thus makes me happy to kill babies.
But downloading MOVIES? There's no way you can justify THAT!
My only question in response to your post would be "Are interfaces today really all that complicated?"
My landlady hasn't touched a computer in over a decade, but I hooked up a little PC to the internet for her, and she can happily look up what she wants and check her e-mail.
My brother doesn't even have a high school education, but he can run up torrents, install games, and use whatever software he wants without a word of hassle.
My sister isn't even literate enough to form a single sentence without massive grammar and spelling mistakes, yet somehow she can still manage to use her computer to shotgun me with proof of that on IM.
See, the thing is, I don't think things are too hard. Anyone who wants to figure out most software can. Sure, there's more advanced things that take some work, but you know what? Some tasks are just advanced, and actually require some thought to get working. From that point, it's up to the user to decide he or she wants to do it. A lot of people say they "can't" drive a standard. It doesn't mean that driving a standard is too complex, just that they don't want to figure it out.
Bollocks. Learning basic PC security is the same as learning to drive defensively, not to pick up creepy hitchhikers, and not to drive around bad neighbourhoods at 3am. It's unbelievably easy to keep yourself from getting infected by a worm or virus or spyware, stop your startup menu from getting clogged by a thousand ram-hogging entires, and all that other junk.
Empirical proof? The only people who ever call me for tech support are the people who don't follow basic common sense on-line. Modern consumer-level OSes patch themselves and have a built-in firewall, so that excuse is out the door, the latest IE is reasonably safe if you stick to trustworthy sites(It used to have a nasty habit of installing spyware on some free hosting sites, but it's gotten saner with respect to security), so that's no longer an issue, Outlook is locked down like a vise as it should be, so that's not a problem either! a defrag and a spyware check and that sort of stuff can easily be written off as "things that get done when I take my PC to the mechanic", so you've got no arguement.
Simply put, computers are complicated devices with a million functions, so they can be hard to use until the patterns become intuitive. You don't need to be a computer technician to use one though.
It would be hypocritical if I presented opinions that weren't, after all that arm waving. :)
Unfortunately, my argument doesn't have legs, but not for the reasons stated.
The problem is is that my trouble is with people who become their ideology despite their own real wishes. "I am a conservative or a liberal therefore I must be against or for issue X, not because I have a strong personal opinion independantly regarding this issue, but because I am a conservative or a liberal, or a Democrat or a Republican, and that's what a conservative, liberal, Democrat, or Republican believes. If I decide to 'go against the grain' and disagree with the party too many times, I'm either to believe in the other ideology, including the things about it I disagree with now, or I am to create an imaginary demarcation within the party or ideology which allows the dissonance between my disagreement with the party or ideology and my stated total devotion to the philosophy of the party or ideology(the 'small c conservative'). I never should have gotten caught up in linguistic semantics, I should have instead just stated that groupthink of this kind is distasteful.
You were right to disagree, but not for the non-sequitur reason you presented. To demonstrate why, consider the sentence: "Some groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, express hatred towards certain races. You should try not even to notice a person's race. To notice a persons race is the first step towards forming negative connotations based on race. The concept of race should be ignored altogether, and we should just consider other homo-sapiens as simply human, which I do." isn't paradoxial for the same reason my earlier comment wasn't. It isn't the neutral point of view observer stating the groups well-known agenda who is singling out the race, it's the group themselves. Similarly, the Republican party has a well known and publicised strategy which looks towards certain groups of people, such as the "freedom-moms" demographic they claim exists which they also claim to target, as well as the southern demographic I mentioned. As I mentioned, this is based on fact, and this image from wikipedia shows the recent and dramatic switch between states which voted for one party over the other over the course of the nation's history. Editorials I've read have indicated that this shift was due to a change in strategy by the republican party in an effort to change their strategy with regard to ceertain demographics. Ironically, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People claim to be 'a conservative' or 'a liberal', thus they vote for the party which claims to pander to their ideology, ignoring both that neither party actually follows the philosophies implied by the words 'conservative' or 'liberal' or 'democrat' or 'republican'.
The snake oil salesman does not suddenly become ethical when you admit that people really ought to know that they're lying.
Actually, you've misunderstood what I've read. Epically.
I never said I was or was not part of the demographic the Republican Party is generally accepted to try to target.
Your reply is a non-sequitor.
According to Wikipedia,, they were originally termed with respect to their alleigances, but the modern definition refers to nations with a low UN Human Development Index, not any particular political affiliation.
It is not ethical to buy music from artists represented by RIAA member companies, by any rational ethic.
When you pay for RIAA represented talent, you're paying for a bunch of entitled drug addicted leeches with degrees from party schools, lawsuits against grandmothers for downloading music they couldn't possibly want to listen to, and an entire industry built around the artist paying for everything and receiving a glorified loan in return, while being paid a pittiance for anything any sales outside the top fraction of a percent.
I stopped downloading illegal music altogether many many years ago. I replaced it by downloading to people who actually want me listening to their music. Is it harder to find good music? Sure. Can I sleep at night knowing I'm paying an artist directly for their work? Like a baby.
According to the department of energy, the two largest exporters of oil to the United States in the world are Canada and Mexico, with a combined total of just over 3 million barrels for the month of October 2006, and Russia isn't even in the top 15. In terms of total petroleum, Russia is the 9th largest importer, with between 381 and 530 thousand barrels per month. Compare this to Canada and Mexico, which combined export over 3.7 million barrels of petroleum in total. The top five importers of petroleum to the US each export more than 1 million barrels a month.
If Russia is making big money on oil, it's because of markets other than the United States. In the American market, they're a tiny player.
Department of Energy report, 15 top exporters of oil to the United States up to October 2006
The demographics the Republican party has aimed at have shifted dramatically over time. Lincon freed the slaves and lead the north to victory. Bush tried to get an anti-gay constitutional amendment passed to please his core demographic in the south. No, I'm not making a value judgment about whether people from one area or another are more moral or just or intelligent or whatever assertion might be inferred from that statement, it's just a pair of facts which, as long as they're true, serve to illustrate my initial conclusion. As a result of the demographic shift over time, I think the core values the party claims to have (and tries to demonstrate in their public media image) to get themselves elected have also changed.
The best thing to do is to realize that anyone trying to pigeon-hole you into a label like that is trying to use you. Myself, I have this lovely thing I call a brain. It's a large thing, it's sort of a pain because I always need to find a helmet before I get on a motorcycle because it gets all cranky if something hits my head too hard, and sometimes it gets me into trouble, and sometimes it even makes people dislike me because I have put thought into something and come to a conclusion they don't like or don't agree with, but it has this amazing ability: It allows me to look at a situation, and not only decide which side of an issue I'm on, it allows me to decide that both sides are full of shit and there's a more logical conclusion, or even that something being argued isn't worth arguing or giving thought to in the first place.
I know it's kind of a tangent from what you were talking about, but I get frustrated every time I see people trying to make distinctions between the subgroups of some group or another they're claiming affiliation with. You're not a small R republican or a small C conservative, you're a human with a brain.
Probably.
You know, back in my first year of college, I used to get dinged for units a lot. Then I realized that the world made more sense once you started thinking in terms of units.
[number of powerful weapons] != [money spent]/[number of people] != [quality of life]
To put it into plain words, big guns and bombs don't make for economic development and they don't make for a high quality of life. All big guns and bombs do is kill people, and in the era of communism when they were built, they suck away even more of an already weak economy, causing famines that killed thousands, or millions.
There's the thing, by recognising that they're arbitrary and meaningless, you're effectively nihilist. "My values are valueless and meaningless and I've chosen them arbitrarily based on nothing in particular"
To be fair, those dialogs are "Our records indicate that your copy of Windows has been activated the maximum number of times. Purchase another copy of windows or you can't use your PC anymore."
I like to think of it as "Driving legitimate users to piracy", rather than "new revenue generation dialogues with end users"
Oh, Microsoft. It's funny that you don't even pretend to want customers anymore.
If the jump from using firefox in windows to using firefox in linux is so troublesome, I think you've got problems that won't be fixed by any CD...
FSF fails for preaching to the choir.
I'd go so far as to say you don't even need the cheap router, since the XP firewall seems to do a good job of closing the most dangerous ports. I've been running for quite a while without a router, and I've found that as long as you cover your ass with respect to the big things, the little things don't tend to hit.
This is a falsifiable theory.
Canada has been encountering massive shifts in their voting patterns in the past few years. The Liberal party of Canada has had a lot of its seats removed, with the Conservative Party of Canada holding a tonne of new seats. At the same time, the New Democratic Party is gaining seats due to the perception that their handling of being a competent balance of power in a minority government. The Bloc Quebecois are mostly holding their seats, they've got a pretty strong grip on Quebec, and all the major parties are trying to get in on their area.
Thing is, we have organizations like the FTC so we don't have to worry about whether Viral marketing is an issue. It's the same as food processing. It came about becasuse companies were putting dangerous goods out for sale. Do we get rid of them now because they're doing their jobs and thousands aren't dying of food poisoning? Workplace health and safety's mere existence has stopped a lot of companies from trying to replicate the conditions documented in The Jungle, the book which documented the deplorable conditions in the plants for workers and for food safety.
I'm not going to pretend there isn't pork in a lot of places, but your reaction looks to me like a simple unthinking "We need less government so we can focus on the issues of today", forgetting that the issues of yesterday were solved with the solutions of yesterday.
To be honest, I've come to realize that all values are arbitrarily chosen, and my statements reflect this. I'm not saying "companies ought not to lie" for any reason that can be reduced to a tangible first principle, because the first principle will always be arbitrarily chosen and from there you can't keep asking "why" until you reach a point where the moralist or ethicist has to go "No reason, I just decided it should be this way".
If you were to arbitrarily choose a first principle such as "Financial transactions ought to be transparent and free from intentional deception from any party because neither party would want to be deceived and this can protect both parties from each other, thus increasing the overall happiness in the world for the most people thus fulfilling the goals of preference utilitarianism", then it's easy to say from there that neither customers nor companies ought to be allowed to engage in any deceptive practices. On the other hand, Reaganomics uses the opposite sort of arguement, "Large companies ought to have greater freedom and financial security at any cost because then the largest amount of money can be sent to people who are in a position to fund large projects and by paying workers, redistribute the money more effectively and lower unemployment, thus satisfying the goals of preference utilitarianism", then the opposite is true, and by being decieved, the deceptive practice helps distributive justice by taking money from people from people who can afford luxury products, and further distributing it to more people.
I'm struggling with the idea at the moment, and I've got a sort of holding pattern in place, where I'm a nihilist who sees that nihilism doesn't have anything in it's description advocating any ethic at all, exactly because there is no common value, meaning, or sense. As a result, I've defined an arbitrary set of values based upon arbitrarily defined first principles. In this case, truth is one of my most important values, so when I say with conviction that someone ought not to be allowed to pay another person to deceive people into believing that they're giving an unaffiliated and unendorsed positive opinion of a product, it's based on that arbitrary value. Also, in this case, unlike a human, a large commercial entity has the ability to commit this unethical behaviour throughout entire countries with limits only set by their marketing budget.
And the reason we have scientifically validatable limits like the blood alcohol level is that if we used teleological ethics in such matters, an arbitrary judgement call on the part of the officer would be needed. This is a major issue because it's truly arbitrary. If the cop is in a good mood, maybe the drunk gets off, "Aw, you can drive". If he's in a bad mood, maybe someone who has had no alcohol can be charged with drunk driving and convicted, because the test is arbitrary. The same happens here. If we say "You can't lie or decieve as a company", then it's easy to enforce and relatively easy to judge. If the result is based entirely on whether the lie is considered harmful or malicious, then you get situations where the tobacco company is hit with massive fines for their lobbying efforts, but everyone else in the world, regardless of what they're doing, is allowed to continue to use deceptive tactics to get laws changed in their favour. Since just judging whether something is the truth is difficult at times, telling if it's the truth AND that it's caused appreciable harm to someone so it's worth pursuing is nearly impossible.
Don't worry so much. It'll go on a killing rampage and you'll discover a super cute but ultimately dark and depressed girl with superpowers or a giant mech who will defeat the monster (With your help, because you'll have a mysterious gift for either catalyzing her superpower or driving her mech(No, neither of those were euphamisms for sex, though from a literary point of view they come close a few times), and you'll slowly fall in love. Then the writers will realize they're in the middle of episode 11 and concoct some red herring to end the series in a show and a half and you'll feel ultimately empty despite everything that's happened, because of it.