[dottjt]

Quite literally last week I was randomly watching The Today Show (mainstream Australian breakfast television) and I couldn't believe what I just saw within the space of 5 minutes.

It was the build up to the AFL grand final and there was a presenter on a football field with kids kicking footballs in the background.

Anyway, he introduces the segment and it turns out it's a paid promotion for Shell. The show then cuts to a 2 minute promotional video for Shell fuel.

Once the promo ends, he tells the kids that whoever kicks a goal gets a $1000 petrol voucher, as he waves a stack of these petrol vouchers in front of the camera.

I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.

[gray_-_wolf]

> I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.

Try watching some documentaries about Tiananmen Square or Uyghurs. I am curious if this statement will still hold.

[Etheryte]

Someone has a problem? I will bring my problem!

[gray_-_wolf]

I don't have a problem with people having problems. I have plenty of problems. What I do not like is putting absolute statements like "never seen anything more disgusting". That usually just means you are not looking hard enough.

But, the fact that I have a problem with this relativization of everything does not mean I think problems people do not consider "the most disgusting" should not be tackled.

Look at my country for example. Corruption in local government affects me more that what is going on in China. I can also fight it more that what is going on in China. And, in the end, I care about it more in the "daily on my mind" sense of the word. That does not mean I should label it as being objectively worse or "most disgusting ever".

[chambored]

I think they were just speaking hyperbolically…

[ruszki]

Hopefully, that’s the case. However, the past decade seems to show us, that if something seems hyperbolic, it’s usually rather serious at the moment. When I was hyperbolic any time in my life, I simply lied even to myself at that given moment, and I believed in that lie until my self-correction didn’t kick in seconds or minutes later. But it’s quite difficult to interpret the current political climate, if most people has such self-correction.

[flir]

Isn't that how you get regexes?

[malfist]

Oh yeah? My problem is bigger that your problem!

[salawat]

Y'all keep making a fuss about being part of the problem, and I assure you, I will stop this thread and become the whole problem. Do not tempt me.

[benrutter]

I guess the difference is it happening in your country. As much as I think Tiananmen Square was an atrocity, my feelings about it would be immeasurably stronger if it happened in the UK (where I am from).

[andix]

Can those vouchers also be used for charging your EV? Shell is operating a lot of chargers already.

[averageRoyalty]

Shell does not operate any EV chargers in Australia.

[thaumasiotes]

> I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.

The US government runs a prominent advertising campaign on the theme "if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother".

[slashdev]

"if you let your baby sleep with you, you are a bad mother" that leads to a number of accidental suffocations. I think that’s pretty reasonable to educate the public about that.

[Tade0]

That's mostly an urban legend and the vast majority of such cases happen when the parent is not sober and essentially knocked out unconscious.

I mean, infants are typically warmer than adults and they wriggle around a lot - it's hard enough to sleep next to them, much less within suffocation distance.

[anotherhue]

Literally 18 hours ago on this very site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37796452

> they got into a weird position between a very very drowsy mum and some cushions and we didn't notice.

> parent is not sober and essentially knocked out unconscious.

Parent of newborn sleep deprivation is extreme.

[bathtub365]

If the combination of drinking and sleeping beside your infant leads to a higher chance of suffocating them you can ask people to stop drinking, stop sleeping beside their infant, or both. History has shown us that people won’t stop drinking so I think recommending the other potential solution makes sense.

[kozzz]

Drinking and obesity

[gardenhedge]

So we have advice from the government or your HN comment to go on. There needs to be more substance to your claims

[neurostimulant]

Asian countries have low SIDS despite infants commonly sleeping with their mothers.

[Tade0]

To quote our pediatrician: "do you believe in UFOs? That's roughly in the same ballpark in terms of connection with reality".

This part of the reply to my SO's question about this. Later he explained that it's mainly drunk/high people who suffocate their children like that.

You only need a sufficiently wide bed and separate covers for the parents - that's it.

[slashdev]

> mainly drunk/high people who suffocate their children like that.

That's a lot of people!

> You only need a sufficiently wide bed and separate covers for the parents

Why even take the risk.

[mstipetic]

Oh come on

[roland35]

Not sure what sudden infant death syndrome has to do with gasoline??

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Not with gasoline, but with disgusting ads.

[geraldyo]

I hate it when ads try to stop me from accidentally killing my baby

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Sorry, I misunderstood the parent was talking about sleeping in the same room which is shunned by many. Sleeping in the same bed is a completely different story and I hope nobody is doing that.

[bko]

I would love a petrol voucher. 90% of Australians have a car so it would be useful to pretty much anyone's family. It's also a somewhat inelastic good, meaning if I gave you a petrol voucher you probably wouldn't considerably change your driving habits. Maybe you would use it to go on an extra family trip, which yes gasoline bad, but it's not exactly conspicuous consumption. It would just give you some extra money in your pocket. I would much prefer that to something like a vacation voucher or a new car or some useless stuff that I wouldn't pay my own money for.

[dottjt]

The petrol voucher isn't the primary issue. It's using children to sell the petrol voucher.

[salawat]

We're fine with letting Microsoft use them to sell Windows and Office licenses though (through schooling)? Or Google to acclimatize them cloud-first computing + having their data hoovered (also through schooling)?

Let's be real here, if you object to youth directed marketing you should have been up in arms loooooong before now. Fact is targeting kids has been basic corporate strategy 101 for decades.

Tobacco in media. Coke/Pepsi. Cool cars, women, selling kids on "the Police are the good guys". In fact, your opinions about what is appropriate to shoehorn into children's formative years tends to say volumes more about what you are about than about anything else.

That being said, I agree the gas vouchers telegraph a blatant desperation move.

[Gigachad]

Microsoft office isn’t destroying the planet.

[seaparter]

The whataboutism is strong in this thread…

[averageRoyalty]

> petrol > vacation

Pick a lane ;).

[markjonsona989]

> I don't get easily offended, but I've honestly never seen anything more disgusting in my entire life.

That's a pretty bold statement to make. I don't know what kind of isolated world you live in if you think that a Shell ad is the most disgusting thing you ever saw in your life, but I can give you a hundred examples off the top of my head.

One example that might be related to this subject are working conditions in a lithium mine and the purification process. If people knew the price we pay to drive EVs I'm convinced they would stick with oil. Just because it all happens in China and it doesn't affect us directly, doesn't mean it's any less disgusting.

I am also getting seriously tired of this constant need for censorship which is a contradiction in an open-market economy. You should compete, not sabotage. Instead of looking for ways to ban Shell ads on TV, why doesn't the EV industry offer vouchers too?

[dottjt]

I get your point, but I think it's relative to the society which it takes place. Corruption in China? If anything, it's to be expected. It's a literal part of how their political system operates. Corruption in a liberal democracy? Much less acceptable. Of course, that's just one point of view.

As for your comment about EVs, I don't necessarily disagree. My main outrage is that they used children to sell oil.

As for your comment on competition, how can you expect to compete against big oil without regulation, possibly the biggest most powerful industry in the world? The problem is that there is nothing better than oil for what it does, which extends to the other problem that open markets don't care about externalities or planetary boundaries. Which is where people need to come in and put restrictions.

I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?

[markjonsona989]

I wasn't talking about corruption in China. I was implying that we outsource the "disgusting" part of producing lithium batteries to get a ready-made product that we can use. In the same way you see a steak in a supermarket rather than years of force-feeding cattle with antibiotics and steroids, you see a Tesla Model 3 driving on the road. You don't see what it takes to produce the "stuff" that powers your car.

I'm not quite sure I get your counter-point to competition. We already heavily regulate the oil industry and subsidise EVs. We tax fossil fuels, we tax ICE cars, we favour EVs in city centres and we even brought in a law to completely ban purchasing new ICE vehicles by year X. If your product is so great, it shouldn't need government intervention to promote it; and Musk's Tesla company is a great example of that.

My original comment addressed the illusion that most Westerns live in and downvoting just proves that. Service-based economies seem to be removed from reality and don't understand the "disgusting" things that have to take place in order for them to function. Like someone said in another thread, if you're really concerned about morals then you will probably have to throw your entire PC out the window.

EDIT: > I'm curious, but would you have been against the breaking up of Standard Oil back in the day?

Sorry I am not aware of that so can't comment.

[indigo0086]

You'll never get what you need for EVs without child labor or extremely unhealthy work conditions. Roughnecks and engineers happily go to work to drill for the oil that runs society

[dottjt]

That's one very specific example, to a few very specific countries at best.

On the contrary, oil is what's primarily funding the invasion of Ukraine. Think of all the people being killed as a result of that conflict. Or for the civil wars that oil ends up creating i.e. Sudan.

I think ultimately the point is that the 3rd world always loses in the end. They're the ones who suffer most from the ambitions of Western nations, irrespective of their intentions.