Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.
Some other communities to consider before posting:
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
.
view the rest of the comments
Legal monopoly, no, effective, yes. The US government has even sued them to that effect, alleging they have been using anti-competitor and unfair strategies to maintain its monopolistic power. It may not technically / legally yet be a monopoly, but that is not what an effective monopoly is.
Also yes I do feel you are not educated enough on the matter, as your example clearly shows. It is not "oh no, they know I am out of toilet paper" it is more about "they have location tracking, search habits, purchase history, and more, and now they model predictive algorithms on what variables they need to push to influence you in a specific way". They can extrapolate that some advertisement on your route caused you to speak about X, and the online ad Y afterward pushed you to searching the web for Z, which comes up with specific products or messaging they want you seeing. Now imagine all this data at scale with billions of people and billions of dollars of compute to crunch massive amounts of patterns they can use to push you and others.
It doesn't have to only be about purchases either, this same information can be used to get some political message in front of you, as well as misinformation that you may never properly vet the truth of to sway your decision making over tens, hundreds, thousands or more instances of this.
You can hide behind "But I have autonomy!" all you want, if it didn't work for them they wouldn't be doing it. You will never free yourself of it completely, but why not start reducing your data footprint by not letting your TV record your conversations and viewing habits? Every little snip of their web reduces your vulnerability to it, even if only a little.
But yes, I do agree with your last point. Not really part of this conversation though.
Your mansplaining every step of the conversation was not very cool bro. Nothing you said has been new information for me. I still disagree with you. Have a nice day.
lol, yeah that tends to happen when someone comes around claiming to understand what is happening yet displays the contrary. Good luck out there
No dude, that tends to happen when you’re a self righteous dick who thinks he’s smarter than everyone.
Can’t fathom anyone intelligent disagreeing with you. Have the day you deserve.
Nah not everyone