Kaido
Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
- Feb 14, 2004
- 48,704
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I want as little sugar in my food as possible, besides that which naturally occurs in fruits and vegetables, but I am completely against banning something because someone else wants to be a control freak "for my own good".
Freedom means nothing if you can't exercise it. There should always be a free market that allows people to buy whatever they want.
Next they'll take your phone and computer away because it's not healthy to be using them all the time.
The only items that should be restricted are those that cause direct harm to OTHER people, like assault rifles, LED retrofit headlights, and XXL bikinis.
Stuff like social media is super addictive because of the psychological impact. Check out this story about the creator of the Facebook "Like" button's use of social media himself:
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster
But, that's the whole point! Companies like Apple purposely made phones bigger so that you have to use both hands, which creates greater engagement. Technology companies push every button they can find, because people are their real products:
Google Users - You're The Product, Not The Customer
The old adage goes that if you're not paying for a product, then by default you are the product. A perfect example of this is Google and its consumer services - search, YouTube Gmail etc. Google of course makes squillions of dollars serving up advertising to users of these free [...]
www.forbes.com
But, you're right...there are a lot of bad & dangerous things out there, and the government has to figure out where to draw the line for citizen protection without overstepping their bounds. The government sometimes has to step in to prevent excessive negative manipulation, like how we know that cigarettes cause cancer & other horrible stuff, but all that ended up doing was removing cigarette advertising (mostly aimed at kids) & put a little warning label on the packs themselves. Nearly 35 million Americans still smoke cigarettes, despite our knowledge of the health risks, lack of advertising, and warning labels. Alcohol, too - we kill about 10,000 people a year on American roads as a result of drunk driving, but the prohibition back in the day didn't exactly yield the desired results. These are some pretty difficult problems to solve, where our freedoms vs. consequences have to be put on the balancing scale...
