theknown99

I was replying to the parent, who suggested a cure for all cancer cannot come soon enough - I'm not so convinced we should be aiming for immortality.

Point taken though...

I appreciate your arguments, but why then is the world population graph basically linearly increasing since the 60s? It's not slowing down.

Remember when they said we'd run out of coal in the year 2000? Or that the ice caps would have melted by 2012?

There is no solution I can see, and that's worrying. While we're all running around curing diseases, solving global warming etc, the thing that will kill off our species is our own "success".

35 is too young, and I really do feel for anyone in that situation.

But cancer when you're over 60? That's basically just dying of old age...

IMHO we should focus on quality of life. Not quantity.

Without sounding unfeeling, do we really want to add to the overcrowding and population explosion problem that much?

Earth is full. Our population has doubled in the short time I've been alive. Doesn't that scare the shit out of anyone else?

Imagine what would happen if you suddenly cured all forms of cancer. People would live even longer. Population would shoot up. Lack of housing, lack of jobs. More pensioners...

edit: Downvote brigade... why am I wrong? What's going to save us from our own 'success'? How many more billion people can the planet take?

Political correctness is such a depressing drain on the world. Leave it how it is. It's fine.

Reminds me of when they tried to rename Manholes to "Personnel Access Units" to avoid offending women.

If you're offended that something is named a 'manhole', you probably have too much time on your hands.

He didn't "invent" JSON.

JSON is a subset of javascript which already existed. He just coined the phrases 'json' and wrote it down.

> unless you work in a truly remarkable place men considerably outnumber women.

That in no way points to inequality. It points to the fact that men and women want different things, and have different strengths and weaknesses.

The idea that there aren't as many women in IT as men because of some sort of discrimination is laughable.

You can still be an outlier in terms of the population as a whole. With all due respect, perhaps you're in a bubble.

Do you watch American Idol? Do you read celebrity gossip magazines? Do you play bingo or the lottery? Do you watch Fox news? Do you buy a newspaper? Do you click on ads?

Millions and millions of people do all of the above - they are not outliers.

On your previous point "How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.", we have this problem all the time outside of advertising with general information. Look at the average news story on Reddit. It's probably biased, probably a half truth, probably out of context, probably only half the facts of the story. Everything is biased and needs careful inspection before you can take it at face value.

However, there are obvious ways to do this. For example, I "trust" Lego. That means if they advertise a new awesome Batman Lego Arkham Asylum set, I'll know it's going to be quality, and awesome, and I'll buy it. If however it's some new unheard of company, I'd probably want to go examine it in a toy shop before I buy it.

I'm not trying to convince you that advertising is useful, I don't think you'll change your mind. But hopefully you'll see that you're not in a majority, and the majority think advertising is useful.

Advertising shows you things you might want to buy. It's useful. if you have money to buy such things.

Who wouldn't want to see adverts for cool gadgets, toys, houses, suits, holidays, etc?

> What was your last product you did not hear about before and bought after seeing an ad?

Probably buy something each week that I saw previously advertised somewhere.

The last thing was probably some pig electric fencing that was advertised in a pig magazine last week.

You're an outlier. Perhaps you're just so determined to be against advertising you can't see the value in it. Without advertising, how would we know what products exist?