[Hnrobert42]

I wonder about the folks who work for tobacco and industrial food conglomerates. Are they not aware of the part they play? Do they rationalize it somehow? Do they just not care? Did they end up there through mergers?

Cynical arguments are facile. I'm not interested in hearing that people are dumb or evil. I am genuinely curious how these companies attract talent.

[cm2012]

These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.

Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.

[Hnrobert42]

I agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad.

I also agree that people have choices.

I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.

[cm2012]

Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty.

Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.

And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.

[moritzwarhier]

Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world".

And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food".

I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat.

But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me.

Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".

[cm2012]

Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.

[moritzwarhier]

Of course!

But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited.

I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made.

I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.

[bondarchuk]

By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.

All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.

[cm2012]

My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself. Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.

In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.

Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.

This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.

People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.

However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.

[bondarchuk]

>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.

I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.

[cm2012]

How will the directories get their names out and compete if they're not allowed to promote themselves?

If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.

If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.

[actionfromafar]

Yes, but why do they choose it?

[mystraline]

> When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.

Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.

Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.

Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.

Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.

[vel0city]

I'm not against state-run groceries, one of the best grocers in this country is operated by the federal government. Food deserts are a problem, and we already have tools to solve them.

But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.

[SauntSolaire]

Food deserts are a methodologically fraught concept. The inclusion criteria are basically arbitrary; vary the distance or income thresholds by modest amounts, and the maps change drastically. It also buckets everyone living in a census tract to the geometric center of that tract, so that people living five minutes walk from a grocery store still count as living in a food desert. On top of that, they don't account for public (or private) transportation, using straight line distance as a proxy for time traveled.

The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.

Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].

For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.

All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24094

[bondarchuk]

idk about tobacco but the vast majority of normal people see no great problem with industrially produced food. By my reckoning if you say at a party you work for Unilever or something the most you'll get is an "oh that's cool I guess".

[ImaCake]

People are not (yet) aware what has been making everyone fat, but ozempic is making it harder to ignore that ultraprocessed foods are the culprit. So hopefully this will change.

[micromacrofoot]

A significant number of people just do not care, not only do they not care, they don't even consider whether or not they should care. It's easy to live your entire life disconnected from anyone that would care, for many people they don't even have to intentionally do it. From their perspective they're just doing their job, collecting a paycheck, and living their lives the same as anyone else.

Consider the half of the US population that doesn't vote, not only do they not vote... but most of the time it's not even a system that they think about at all. There are a number of people who barely even know who the candidates in any given election are. You can live your entire life within a very narrow line of sight.

[toasty228]

Same as the people on this every forum who work for meta, palantir, &co

[ptaffs]

This. And military contractors. And predatory financial companies including high-interest credit cards. US Health insurance. Oil and Gas. -- "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

[harrisi]

We exist in a world where the exchange of goods and services is inherently oppressive. Some people draw the line at working for Northrup Grumman, some at RJR, some at Meta, some at Starbucks, and some at the local farm. I'm not one to judge where the line should be - I'm not even sure if there is a moral or ethical line that exists in the system.

[breezybottom]

People who work at McDonalds generally aren't there because they turned down a high paying job at the UN.

[groundzeros2015]

McDonalds hate is forced. I bet they (corporate) do it because they grew up eating it and had a good time.

[jmyeet]

How? The banality of evil, cognitive dissonance and violence.

The "banality of evil" [1] is term coined by Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann who killed over a million Jews in the HOlocaust. She described Eichmann as an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who was (in his mind) advancing himself in the Nazi Party. The term has been exapnded to describe how disconnected most jobs are from their outcomes through complexity. You might be working on an AI feature that just identifies from external phone activity when someone is home or not. Sounds harmless right? What if you knew it was used by militaries to assassinate journalists while they were home so they got their families as well?

This also feeds into the concept of "social murder" [2].

Cognitive dissonance was best described by Upton Sinclair [3]:

> It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

Even if you, as a tobacco employee, realized the connection between what you were doing and selling more cigarettes, you'd find people rationalizing it by saying things like "I'm selling to willing buyers" or you'd couch it in terms of personal freedom.

Lastly, violence, specifically state violence. We (generally) have a skewed view of what constitutes "violence". We all understand that if you get attacked by someone in the street it's violence. Where it gets more contentious is for something like eviction. Many will say "well that's protecting somebody's asset". Others will argue that putting people out on the street, particularly in a wealthy country, is state violence [4].

I bring this up because we live in a society that doesn't guarantee basic necessities. So you need a job to pay for those things. Well, that's putting a proverbial gun to people's heads. If someone is selling tobacco, are you going to tell them they should risk homeless for that moral stance? Would you? I don't mean that as a provocation. It's a thought experiment. How much would you give up for a moral stance personally? What if it impacted your spouse? Your children? There was a time when certain jobs exempted you from the draft. What if you had one of those jobs and it was immoral? Would you go to Vietnam instead?

[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

[3]: https://rowansimpson.com/quotes/salary/

[4]: https://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/news/evictions-can-kill-...