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From Slashdot News Story | White House Issues New Gas Mileage Standards

Re:Smaller engines would be a good start. (Score:5, Interesting)

by Dirtside (91468) on Friday April 02, @11:20PM (#31712616)
Journal

It wasn’t always so. Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau very eloquently expressed a thriftiness that was uniquely American. It went hand in hand with self-reliance. When I see the over-fed, demanding, soft, food-stamp using Americans of 2010 who are claiming to champion a return to “every man for himself”, I wonder how long they would last if any one of them were to actually be expected to pull their own not inconsiderable weight.

It’s become obvious to me lately that advertising is a big culprit here. For the last sixty years, Madison Avenue and friends have been refining ways to convince us to do things that aren’t in our best interests: buy more than we can afford, buy things that we don’t need, buy, buy, BUY!

Advertising is corrosive. It sells an idea of a world where everything has a simple solution. Buy our product, and life will be BETTER! Even if you’re smart and assume that advertising is always lying to you, being exposed to lies for years on end will start to make you believe them, or at least believe the normative view they come from.

My friends’ kids, and my older son’s friends are frequently obsessed with this cartoon character or that. Ours aren’t. Why? We don’t have TV. We haven’t for about three years now, and so our son isn’t getting exposed to constant advertising that exhorts him to eat shitty fake food at shitty fast-food chains, or to harass us to buy character-branded toys. All the video we watch, we watch on our computers after he’s in bed. (And it’s all ad-free; I don’t really want to see ads any more than I want him to. In fact, I’d happily pay $2-3 per episode for the few shows we watch, if it meant no ads.)

A huge problem with “free” TV (that is, ad-supported TV) is that there’s a cost associated with watching ads. As I said, it promotes a false worldview; even if the ad is relatively accurate, its sole purpose is to get you to spend money on something that you may not actually have any real need for. And the advertisers don’t care if you spend money you don’t have, or spend money on a product you don’t need instead of saving for retirement, or your kids’ education.

Okay, okay, I could go on for hours. Rant over.

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