AlteredEgo

Is it? Maybe. I managed to install the apps I need from f-droid and use firefox but it felt more difficult than on PC - where you just need to install an adblocker in your browser.

Wow this is awesome. "land-based wind energy kites" are awesome too but this is very predictable. Although at what time of the day this would generate power would cycle with the moon so could be quite inconvenient too. But it would need a smaller battery to buffer since it's regular.

Hillarious! Just for a few seconds I wondered if this was real!

Don't worry, probably they are going to jail for protesting. Soon we won't have any more rabble disturbing the blissful zen of self extinction.

Under a new law, the protesters risk up to six months of jail time.

I'm living mostly ad-free due to adblockers everywhere (except android) but most people don't know, can't do it or are brainwashed to think it's amoral to block ads. If more people would catch on adblocking would be made illegal. And either way my personal choice doesn't change what content is produced and how society is influenced. Personal responsibility doesn't solve this just as it doesn't climate change. Because advertising clearly does work.

Sorry I don't have any great sources on this. It's rather speculation because how could you research this scientifically? Even if you could, an experiment like that would actually be unethical! And who would fund this, there is no way to talk in mainstream about advertising without running against massive financial interests. There are some search results but most of those articles look like mental garbage.

My guess is that because we're constantly being told what to consume our minds work quite differently from what they would without advertising.

Our minds constantly have to resist intrusive advertising and psychological manipulation which means we constantly have to switch between and adversarial mindset and whatever content we were watching / reading. Or we become obedient and just "let the advertising wash through us". And advertising constantly has to find new ways to activate our emotions.

Just as massive is the effect on content produced, there is a "natural selection" that any content that helps sell advertisement is more successful on the market. It's not just that you can't piss off your advertiser but that generally you want the consumer to be in a certain mood - or that content producers who do this naturally are more successful and grow.

Then there are privacy concerns which reduce humans to machines and creates a powerful system that can and is abused for political control (public relations).

How can any of that not have massive societal impacts, since it's being done on a massive scale and is near ubiquitous? How can anyone assume these effects are not incredibly bad?

You could have a country banning advertising that has a kind of "content tax" that is funded publicly and administered independent from the government through separate elections. And that has strict mandates and distributes the money to news papers, websites, movies and video creators dependent on views - similar to music rights agencies. But none of this is even talked about. We've completely lost the ability to even think seriously about how to improve our society. I believe in large part this is due to advertising.

PS: There is a film called "Branded (2012)" about the "horrors of advertising".

She looks subtly different

Constantly being brainwashed to consume is one of the great evils of our time. Consumerism is bad for mental health and the environment. But advertising also creates many biases in content creation.

When was the last time you heard anything about bad effects of advertising? Not just superficial "stupid ad" but as a massive corrosive force on society? That is how much freedom of speech we have.

I think this is just one guy not a corporation.

So what is the point of acquiring them if they just dismantle the company? Seems stupid unless it's funded by the CIA or something.

I think logically you need the same order of magnitude to remove CO2 from the atmosphere as you gained form burning the fossil fuels. But I'm not sure where the practical limit is.

The only solution that makes remotely sense is using large areas of the ocean where nothing grows anyway and have a fleet of hundreds of ships that seed out algae that grows, absorbs sunlight and CO2 and then rains down on the ocean floor to sequester the carbon. Otherwise we don't have the land, energy and resources and money to do any of this.

I guess this is part of the problem with NATO, you loose some independence and autonomy.