The 2005 Sony Bravia ad

It encourages consumerism for the sake of consumerism and enables excessive e-waste. Sony has put forth plenty of effort since then to convince you that you've needed yet another new and shiny TV to replace the Bravia, and will continue to do the same.

I truly don't understand the idea of praising a commercial that exists solely to sell you something we could probably, reasonably, be making and selling a lot less of. We only keep going "because growth". When's enough? This is gross.

Edit: And after watching the video, it's extra jarring to me to feel the warm fuzzies it gives you, and then realize, "It's not asking me to be a good person or do something that's gonna match the feeling this commercial is giving me, it just wants me to buy something it's gonna want me to replace eventually". Ick. Get the fuck out of my emotions like that.

OP is not talking about this ad in particular being cancer.

He's talking about a couple million roadside billboards, ads on busses, ads in TV services you pay for, drug companies spending more on advertising than R&D, political machines driven by 24 hours news cycles that are funded from ragebait, social media companies that have us literally addicted to our screens due to their advertising-based revenue models. It goes on... ad infinitum indeed.

It's a fucking cancer and it truly is the root of so many of our problems and we are running out of time to start thinking clearly about the damage the industrial advertising complex causes.

Not sure if I'd call the relentless assault on my attention to convince me to purchase things "happy", but to each their own.

Yes. Then again, there’s Banksy’s take:

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. (…)

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...

>It's ok to be happy from time to time :)

I'm perfectly fine doing that without 2005 Sony Bravia advertisement tyvm.

If you want to broaden the word "advertising" in such a dramatic way then I suppose it is your right as a human being to make up your own idiosyncratic dialect, but I think most of us see a pretty clear difference between advertising which is pushed on you whether you want it or not, and information which you go seek out when you want to know about it.

> Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.

Unabated capitalism has more poverty than capitalism with social programs. Social programs save people from poverty.

Also, capitalism can exist without advertising.

Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.

You meant the EXACT opposite, right? :)

>Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.

Bleak reminder that I will never jive with the general vibes of HN and the VC trash types polluting the world for a tax write-off.

Could be. Although that was well after I stopped watching television, so if it didn't appear as an online ad, I wouldn't have seen it no matter what.

Seems cool enough to me that it should have been done independent of selling TVs. I don't think it is wasteful, and to the extent it was destructive, it was well worth it.

We should encourage and welcome more of this, not less. How it is funded does not diminish this, IMO.

I feel like the current generation will be remembered in the history as "the generation of sad fucks". It's incredibly difficult to escape the overwhelming sense of doom, but sometimes I have moments when I watch the sunset and think "this is cool", or listen to the music and feel comfy.

Yep, exactly. God forbid you express any positivity about the weather, the place you live, anything connected to any government/company/nonprofit, any public or historical figure, et cetera. I am lucky to have a large social network where I mostly don't have to watch my words, but this is spreading like a virus through society.

There are a few causes here. One is that everything - absolutely everything - is severely problematic. Another is that people now scrutinize the minor differences among their friends and try to evangelize them. When everything is a life or death issue, you really should fight for the right thing. And the problem is that many things really are life or death matters. People really are dying in horrific ways in the Middle East, and plastics really are filling our oceans, and politicians do often embolden people to kill members of the out-group. The modern internet and social media gives us the most extreme and attention-grabbing examples of any of that, neatly cut and cropped into heartwrenching short-format video. MLK and a fuzzy blanket and a kitten are all positive things, but in an instant the modern internet can fill you in on countless reasons that they are problematic. I mean come on, most fuzzy blankets shed microplastics like mad, cats devastate our ecosystems and MLK has countless words written about his wrongs [1]. If you're positive about fuzzy blankets, kittens or MLK then you're probably naïve at best and a member of the wrong group at worst.

I think the solution is twofold: one, strongly limit the type and amount of internet use, and two, try to be positive. To be positive in these modern times is a revolutionary act. Positivity and happiness are contagious.

[1] https://archive.ph/oKKcC - The New Yorker: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability. I linked this article because, while it is generally positive on MLK, it gives a good rundown of the various issues people have with him.

Suppose you lived in a village where there was no outside news. You'd learn of about two murders and a dozen deadly accidents in your lifetime. Imagine how safer you'd feel compared to a villager who's getting outside news beamed to her face every hour of the day.

I'm not advocating isolation, but our primitive minds are not able to really understand that what is projected in front of us is not the same as what happens in front of us. I don't know how anyone could solve that.

And how can you support funding this beautiful park proposal when there are children starving in ${country}??

I can’t remember where I heard this, but it was someone questioning joy and frivolity in a time of war. And the answer back was that people need to remember what they are fighting for otherwise what’s the point?

If you don’t allow yourself joy until the problems are gone, there will never be joy and the problems will multiply for lack of it.

> and this colors the overall mood of society.

Would thousands of colored balls careening down streets bouncing off objects and each other and damaging things in their path be an okay metaphor for this?

I hadn’t thought of it in this way. Interesting point.

Yeah I'm not sure what they meant by 2008... After 9/11, things werent optimistic.

Coming up to YEAR 2000, the future felt here. I remember watching the TV shows in preparation for YEAR 2000. Then the future never really happened like predicted. We didn't wear silver suits in 2001.

I do mean after those things. Globally nobody cares about most of these after the initial shock. There were definitely long periods of good in between those events.

Yeah, it's good economically in the sense that it's still near top of market, due to having a large-ish existing economy (even if aspects of said economy seem fundamentally whack).

As in: if you want something at decent quality you can pretty much get it pretty easily with a bunch of options (assuming you can afford it).

Caveat - not necessarily the top of everything for all markets is available, but overall stuff is still around -- even as some things are disappearing from the area.

In contrast, other places are just poor, and you "cannot" find as large a variety of lots of goods and services, I imagine. But I could be wrong -- I'll check my assumptions. Thanks.

Because you meet tons of talented engineers whenever you go for lunch, and they just need to cross the street and walk in to ask for a job.

Because you're around a ton of people who are interested in the same thing as you are. Caveat: If you're not interested in the things SF engineers are interested in, that means you're surrounded by masses of incredibly boring - to you - folks :)

Because that introduction you need to make things pop is super-easy compared to other places.

Doesn't mean you _have_ to start in SF, but for certain classes of ventures, it's the place that makes it the easiest.

I visited lisbon last year and was kind of shocked how similar to SF it was, weather, hills, general feel - that it has its own golden gate bridge really just sealed it.

Vancouver, IMO, is a far better developed city than Seattle. Vastly better transit, denser, more walkable neighbourhoods, and just overall very thoughtfully developed.

It’s just an enormous shame it’s become grossly unaffordable— on an income adjusted basis, it’s more expensive than the Bay Area. That, and the weather, although the summers are perfect IMO.

Seattle weather keeps strangers away. And drives sunglasses sales.

Seattle is awesome and the people are the friendliest I've encountered in the USA. Feels Canadian.

The weather kills me, though. The weather is too British.

You’re conveniently leaving out how pretentious and insufferable many Seattleites are…

It has been far and wide the least welcoming, interesting, and lackluster food city I’ve ever lived in.

Also, the coffee scene there is worse than SF, Chicago, LA..rare stop for bands and musicians touring, and unpleasant transit.

The only people I know who are genuinely happy there are people who moved from Florida, and wealthy white families with young children who moved there (from California) “because taxes and better education”.

Don’t even get me started on the lack of diversity and casual racism.

SF is far from perfect, but Seattle isn’t even in the conversation for places I’d ever recommend someone leaving SF to shortlist.

Ah, Bellevue, for when you want to feel like you live inside of a shopping mall.

The problem is not "1080p vs 4K on YouTube" but using YouTube at all for quality video. It's always been bad on YouTube, but videos like this make it extra obvious. For example, this shot: https://i.imgur.com/NRT0AOW.jpeg even in 4K it looks horrible, because of the compression YouTube does even to 4K.

I've tried finding some better version (not on YouTube) but been unable to, maybe it is lost to the passage of time.

Something's a bit wrong with the colour on that though - it looks really oversaturated.

Tagging onto this, curious if anyone has preferred AI-based 1080 -> 4k+ upscale workflows.