Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
I greatly despise all facial hair.
Swearing shouldn’t ever be censored.
We should build an A.I. overlord so that it replaces our current leadership like politicians and the entire market bussines specially the top, so that it can exploit resources in a reneuable way that is already possible right now but you know… lobying and fucking oil companies, and redistribute them to the population in a just way incluiding but not limited to food (nice food not rations), housing, medical services, psichological support (but the real one not the human resources bullshit), entertainment and internet access, and eventually be able to make custom orders like custom furniture, video game capable aparatus, modifing your house, travel and even swimmimg pools and ice cream. Besides i think our survival hinges on us making something about our leadership since there is at least one major problem that we need fixed that our current leadership is not gonna solve i.e. golbal warming, since they rather sell their souls and their people to the oil companies, and replacing them (even with a coup) is just gonna put more corruptible people that are gonna get bought out by some other straigth up cartoonishly evil entity, or they themselves turning into it or being overtrown by it, and destroying the entity would require a massive effort and thats not happening without mass destruction and even if it is destroyed another one will rise up from the chaos caused by the anti corporate war. So the sollution would be a singularity level A.I.
AI is to computer science what black magic is to science.
Seriously, what do you get after you’ve spent days and days to train a model? An inscrutable blob that may as well be proprietary software written for an alien CPU; studying it is damn near impossible, understanding how it works would require several lifespans, and yet it works, and we trust these models and use them to get solutions to problems that would normally be impossible to handle by computers using “real” computer science. And one day, this trust will bite us in the ass, not in the form of an “AI rebellion” but with every system that uses AI becoming unreliable because of situations outside its training.
I have quite a few. I don’t believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.
For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.
People will say “what would give someone the incentive to make new things?” Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades… one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
Another unpopular opinion is I’m pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.
I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We’re gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.
I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.
Corporations should only be allowed to exist as long as they’re doing more good for society than the damage they do. Businesses should either be a net positive or run by people who are individually and jointly liable.
Meritocracy in the US is almost entirely a myth, outside of a few sports.
Free will as it’s popularly understood doesn’t actually exist.
Most shoes are bad for us and cause injuries over the course of our lives .
The free will myth is especially damaging, as it steers people away from pragmatic solutions and towards blame and punitive policies.
Fully agree. Unfortunately we are a very small minority.
Free will is wholly incompatible with our modern understanding of physics but nobody will listen because they simply don’t like it.
Spaghetti sucks. Come eat my ass, italians
If you live in a city and have no backyard or similar, you should not be allowed to own a dog.
Consuming drugs should not be illegal. Doesnt matter what effect the drug has, punishing the consumer does no good for anyone.
Selling drugs can and should in some cases be illegal though
Smell your own fart is a kind of a pleasure
Cats are shit ass animals
Dogs are
I have witnessed far more dogs with shitty asses.
I don’t mind tankies that much.
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
YES this. We should start a community. I hate advertising, absolutely hate it, and do everything I can to avoid it. Pihole ✅, YouTube premium ✅, sponsorblock ✅, Firefox ✅, ublock origin ✅.
What else am I missing, I want it all blocked!
Are there people who genuinely enjoy ads?
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service? Do you want monopolys that never change because smaller business cant advertise with their stuff.
I don’t like 99% of advertising either, especially online, but there are some exceptions.
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service?
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, New International Version
EDIT: I’m not a Christian and I’m not trying to convert anyone to my faith (or lack thereof), I just think it’s a neat quote.
My point really is that you can generally talk about your products in some existing forum with reference to existing things. For example, if I wanted people to listen to my music, which
I have deluded myself into thinkingis a unique, previously unheard-of blend of genres, I would post links onto music forums and groups who are interested in recommendations of music adjacent to the type I produce. And that is how I actually spread my music on Reddit (although not as PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S) back when it was fresh. No ads, no wasting people’s time and internet. I only reached people who already expressed their interest to receive music like mine. I got a very small following, but I achieved my goal.Nothing is so unique that it belongs in no forum or is of interest to no existing community, yet simultaneously needs to be broadcast to the entire world. I have no problem with people sending me stuff they believe in to my email or other inbox, blow it up for all I care, but what I do take issue with is shoving that stuff into my web browsing experience or even sandwiched into the content I’m trying to watch.
How is you posting about your music on a forum not an ad? You saying you only reach people who might already be interested is just saying that you target your ads.
Do you consider it different because you’re an individual doing it manually?
—Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, New International Version
You’re quoting the fantasy book of a group of Bronze Age goatherders as an argument? Really?
Chill out, I’m an atheist. I just think it’s a pretty good quote. The argument is what follows.
It’s not really a very good quote. Advanced electronics, genetic engineering, quantum computing… there are a lot of things that are actually new.
I’m pretty sure ads don’t work on me. People tell me ‘ackshually they do, you just don’t notice.’ Nah, mate. They don’t. They just annoy me.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don’t have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the “rich uncle” of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That’s your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That’s what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I’m fine with that, but good luck.
Still end of the day the server bill has got to be paid.
I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
Basically what happened to the Internet as a whole.
I’m down voting you because I agree lol
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
I would argue that if there’s a product that nobody knows exist that’s not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don’t actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don’t need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don’t care about. I don’t care about the newest tech toys. I don’t care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don’t need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I’m drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn’t even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there’s a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You’re allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don’t ever want to hear from you again.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
For sure. I’m not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM’ed or emailed stuff. For example, I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
not unpopular!
If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time.
This literally won’t happen because you will never find my content without ads.