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Notes -
I like some things about this idea of making advertising illegal. It's good to notice that there's something wrong here. That the amount of effort we put into saturating the mind of the median consumer with the names of brands just seems excessive. Amazon, Walmart, State Farm, Verizon, L’Oréal, DraftKings, etc - if it's been more than 10 minutes since you've seen one of those words, that's an inefficiency and the invisible hand's working to correct it. Why should so many competent people spend their 9/5 in marketing ensuring normal people purchase more makeup or clothing or food or parlays that doesn't particularly improve their lives? I get the concept of advertising as presenting consumers with information they might not have so they can make better purchase, but we've clearly gone beyond that.
On the other hand, the problem here isn't really advertising. It's not like DraftKings or running up credit card debt by shopping would disappear if we banned ads. It'd happen less, but only somewhat less. The problems people identify with advertising, I would argue, are really problems with the things being advertised, and in general with modern culture or whatever. Advertising by itself serves a useful purpose, connecting people selling things to people buying them. If something's broken in there, advertising will be broken too, but banning advertising doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Also, I mostly agree with FiveHour's post.
I think I uncomplicatedly support a law of the form "you must allow ad-blockers, not circumvent them, and provide the option to disable ads in native apps where ad-blockers don't work" though, because though uBlock gets everything in a browser they still do waste my time sometimes.
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