As an abstract concept, a company is a collection of individuals who have formed an agreement to perform certain actions with the intention of profit (profit may or may not be the core purpose of company though; eg the quote "Profit is like oxygen. You need it to survive, but if you think that oxygen is the purpose of your life then you’re missing something").

A sole proprietor pushing his services is the simplest example of being paid for advertising that is also clearly free speech. Where would you draw this line?

A person shouting about their wares at a market (iow a sole propietor advertising their products through direct to customer advertising in a shopping area) is different than a multi-million ad designed and produced by dozens of people including professional social engineers that have studied psychology at the worlds top universities all so widget Co. can sell more widgets.

I don't have a problem with people barking about their products when I'm at a market. But I do have problems with just about everything about modern corporate advertising. Merely listing every individual aspect I take offense too would take hours.

I draw the line at the point where anything is exchanged, given, or recieved, tangible or otherwise, to allow someone/something/some co, to display, demonstrate, brand, or otherwise make known anything through an intermediary.

To clarify. Having generic, unobtrusive signs pointing to food courts around a sports Arena where one can purchase food, that may or may not be served in branded containers is acceptable. Neon signs, or banners, or full advertisements on big screens, etc advertising some company that is not doing any business directly with the attendants at said Arena is unpalatable to me. Likewise, selling refreshments with branding foranything besides the establishment selling the item, or the company that manufactured the item is ridiculous.

I still think there are some problems with your definition, and I'm thinking strictly from a legal point of view. There's so much manipulation that can happen from a sole proprietorship that wouldn't be allowed by your definition, simply based upon the quantity of sales (which is fine, if you think that's an acceptable demarcation line, but it will still lead to lots of cases where large companies are legally treated differently, which, in and of itself does happen, but any new text added to a given law will simply pad the lining of lawyers pockets whose job it is to argue over the minutae of each word).

But if I pepper a market crowd with my family members all randomly talking about how amazing the food/widgets/whatever over at Bob's Widget Stand are, so that over hearing bystanders can hear is a form a psychological manipulation that may fall into a gray area.

Ultimately, each time you say "this is fine, this isn't", you're adding an exception and branching logic that will be argued about ad infinitum.

Laws, like lines of code, have a technical debt to them, except the lines of law are likely to impact more people generally, enough so to ruin lives and industries (which can happen with code, of course, but code doesn't have the same global application to every member of society backed up with the use of force).

I'm not saying that reaching an acceptable compromise is unachievable, but conceptually, it's a lot more involved than simply laying out the broad strokes, with tons of ramifications, implicit and otherwise, that have to be considered.

Large companies should have a harder time advertising than smaller ones. The truly great companies will spread by word of mouth alone. Unscrupulous and destructive companies will find it much harder to get a footing when they can't manipulate people into buying their trash.

In re to your example. If you were to pay your family members (in any way) that would be wrong in my book. If your family does this out of the goodness of their hearts then so be it. It's their unpaid labor. I fully realize that no solution will stop every avenue of abuse. However, seeding crowds with people up selling your widgets only works for so long. you'll never be able to reach scale with those methods because eventually the irs will audit you or your family members and even though you wouldn't go down for illegal advertising you would go down for not paying taxes. Or you'd find that having enough family family members to seed every crowd is getting you unwanted attention, or is just too darn expensive.

By banning all advertisements except advertising in person, at the location of sale and for only items sold at that location there would be very little room for manipulation. Obviously the time share/used car methods would still work, but I haven't ever seen a way to make that profitable with low margin items, where many consumers get fleeced by huge ad budgets.

Basically, I think everything but shouting about your products from your shop should be illegal. I can see concessions made for websites that don't sell anything, and charge transparent/flat fees for listing their info in a web directory that is intentionally bland. However, writing legislation for that would be a whole lot harder to draft than what I've already stated.

I realize my desires are unrealistic. That being said, advertisings days of doing whatever creepy crap they want to without punishment are numbered. Either the industry will reform itself (unlikely, it's too easy to delude oneself when pulling $500k for selling fidget spinners) or, eventually, some people are going to be nailed to the walls of Congress as examples.

Okay, I can see your point about wanting to curb the abuses, but how do you accomplish that without removing the positives?

For instance, I find that the advertising done by Facebook and Instagram very effective for me. The advertising tends to cater to niche things I have actually gotten real use from (in my case, it's soundkits containing midi files, and/or software musical instruments).

I've purchased many of these and have been quite happy with both the offerings and the purchases.

Sometimes these are by small companies (one to two man shops, or 10 people companies), and sometimes well known large companies.

Under your thinking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this sort of thing would be illegal.

Word of mouth wouldn't work for me in cases like this, since it's particularly directed towards things I like, but I don't have very many friends in the music producer community (learning it for less than a year), and it seems in my case, I've really only been "scammed" once, which was easily disputed and rectified via PayPal.

Now, I've been scammed before, online and off, with shady advertising, but this current model greatly benefits me.

If I'm correct in assuming that you're against this sort of advertising, is there a substitute that would work, while still bringing the benefits to both sides?

Because it appears to me that anything will have it's abuses and negative forms, but it really comes down to, is the advertising to blame, or the malignant folks who abuse it?

Likewise, I love Apple products, and wish for them to generate more revenue (ostensibly, more resources for them to improve said products and create new ones). I neither work for Apple nor have any vested financial interest in saying so (no stock in the company, no relatives that work for them, and zero way that their increased revenues in any way impacts my bank account or the bank account of anyone I know). Is my promotion of them, which in some ways feeds my ego (for making such wise purchasing decisions) and makes my life easier via a larger user base to compare notes with, find support, etc, considered free speech, or advertising?

Also, related to ultrarunner's point, is it not possible to freely promote something that is both in my interest financially and in the best interest of my audience? Isn't that in fact the ideal scenario, mutually beneficial arrangements where everyone benefits via aligned incentives?

I think you're both right here. From the outside, it seems like most people don't consider the morality of their actions, but I believe it's a matter of degrees and instances. For instance, I've been told by many in my social circle that I tend to think more deeply than most about the morality, direct or implied, of my actions/beliefs, than the average person, but when I speak to people, there's always some code they're holding themselves to, even if they don't articulate it as such, but then there are also people who will have sex with anything in sight, but will engage in extreme handwringing over every food choice and environmental impact. Even if someone isn't weighing the morality of their own actions, they're acutely aware of how others' actions comply or contradict their moral code. Practically everyone has some common moral code that they abide by, while ignoring other parts because of convenience, desire, etc. People who are highly morally consistent tend to be seen as ascetics, extremists, idealogues, or the like.

Like intelligence, moral IQ is a spectrum that probably most don't consciously think about until a conundrum comes up, but that generally centers around a mean, and spans multiple areas that overlap across cultures and generations and behaviors.

Wouldn't also a better metric be the size of the corporation proportionate to the size of population? I'm thinking of the big banking families were equivalents of the modern day corporation in pooled resources and infrastructure, and social dependence. Privately held, sure, so not 100% the same, but it seems like humans end up with similar concentrated power structures, and even breaking them up, we kinda find our way back to the same type of abstractions, just a bit more sophisticated, but with the same fundamental motivations.

Global population has increased ~10x, but Walmart is sitting at 2.3 million employees and Macdonald’s has 1.5 million so picking ~100k as the benchmark seems reasonable.

Yeah, this article is pretty representative of a general trend to say alot without actually saying anything intelligible.

Should Michael Jordan have been paid equally as high as a baseball player as he was when he was on the Bulls? Same person, same intelligence, same measurable traits.

I think the “buy into” aspect is possibly buying into the importance of it all. In the current climate, it’s a charged issue, because for one side it’s a matter of respect, dignity, and honoring a persons agency, and for the other it’s about coercive speech and toeing closer to coercive thought.

And then there’s the the third side that can perhaps see that both sides have valid points, except that none of it matters in the long run. If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman, blue as red, 50 as 1,000, depending on a person’s internal emotional state, then whatever we choose to say is as valid as anything else.

And if one person refuses to comply with social niceties, it doesn’t necessarily indicate anything other than, at worst, said person is a dick.

So I think right now, it’s a social crusade for both parties, and not everyone wants to get sucked into feeling passionate about everyone else's fights. And that doesn’t mean you’re choosing sides.

But somehow, less than 100% virtue signaling in either direction means you’re implicitly supporting “them”.

But, my approach is, when dealing with people, I’m not going to be a dick, and I’ll happily call them a preferred pronoun, within reason, even though it’s really not that important to me. But I’m also not going to go out of my way to try to fix everyone who is a dick either, even when it is something important to me.

>If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman

Based on this statement, I don't quite think you understand what being transgender actually is. It's not people asking to be called the opposite gender, it's people asking to be called the gender that they actually are, and have been their entire lives, but who had the vast misfortune of being born into the wrong body. There is not a 1:1 correlation between the body's sex and the mind's sex; usually they match up, but sometimes they don't. Gender dysphoria has severely negative outcomes for mental health and well-being, and no one chooses it willingly.

Oh, I’m also not claiming anyone is choosing gender dysphoria, but they are choosing their responses to it. I’m sure there are ways to superficially suppress the mental side just as we can superficially suppress the physical side. One is, in this day and age seen as preferable, and the other is a seen as caving into social norms, and denying your true self. But why is perception, one that is not shared or independently validated to be true or measurable in any way the one to follow?

I’m not saying these are easy questions or that I even understand the experience. But simply that there are many people who view themselves or others in a way that contradicts quantitative facts, but there isn’t a large social movement to have the world at large support that perception.

But as I said originally, inasmuch as it doesn’t require anyone to do anything and doesn’t have a cost to anyone else, what do I care?

Is mental gender something that can be as quantitatively determined as physical gender? And what is a male or female brain apart from the accompanying biology? What makes it uniquely male vs female?

Everything on there sounds pretty interesting, especially if it can deliver the goods :) I signed up to be notified, but is there a rough idea of when you’re planning to launch?

The path of my career took a rather unorthodox route, so I can see both sides of the argument here. I’m a graphic design dropout (completed two different tech schools and took art, fashion marketing, business and philosophy courses at a local community college, before going to a proper university at 21, completed a year, moved home when my father got cancer and started freelancing) who never intended to become a developer, but a developer I am (have built and managed a large-ish team of other developers and designers [~60 or so globally] and have done fairly well for myself). I can see the value of a university education, but can also see the validity of those who go a different route (whether by choice or circumstance).

What I thoroughly enjoyed about college was the depth of study with dedicated time to go into foundational principles, and meeting and working with people far more talented than I am. But would I pay for that privilege if I had to foot the bill? Probably not, or I’d choose much more frugally.

I get the feeling from a lot of the “school is unnecessary” arguments here is that to some degree we fashion ourselves as Good Will Hunting’s who can make it just fine. And there probably are actually quite a few here.

There’s a quote I love, “Money makes happy people happier and unhappy people unhappier”. I feel like the same could be said about a college education. A passionate learner will find it rewarding in ways that the average student wouldn’t, or even a bored student may squander but feel entitled to a position in life because they got a degree, but I think a passionate and humble learner will probably end up doing well no matter the route they take.

For me, the reason I even got into developing was because, ultimately, it's the act of creation and building that I enjoy, and both design and software engineering allow me to accomplish that in a way I find rewarding.

I've known folks who graduated with either a BA in graphic design or a BS in computer science, and with some of them, my self learning, both on a fundamental principle learning level and on an execution level surpasses them. But of course, I know many who are passionate about their field and just blow me out of the water. And I've known autodidacts that also blow me out of the water creatively and on a skill level. So I believe ultimately, the final mix is really a result of raw talent, hard work, and a passion for what you're learning.

I also think some of the "you must get a degree" arguments miss the value of just pure, raw dogged persistence. I've had people with masters degrees in CS tell me I'm a genius simply because I banged my head against a problem until it cracked (the problem, and my head to some degree ;). I don't say that egotistically, because I know that had I had a more formal and dedicated education, those problems would have probably resulted in less time with me banging my head against them, and the scope of problems I could apply that persistence to would be greater. But if you choose to go for a shorter route, you will have to work harder in the end, both to compensate in the eyes of those hiring, and doing your own study and learning to actually get to the level you want, and even then, being self taught really only gets you so far.

Ultimately, it really comes down to, what do you want out of this life?

I honestly can't see myself being content with only doing software engineering or design. That's both a strength and a definite weakness that I am constantly battling with.

There are some other soft aspects not really mentioned in this article or the comments that I do feel you miss when you're self taught.

One for sure is that not having a degree feeds into Imposter Syndrome. You can honestly far exceed others with dedicated degrees but no passion, yet some part of you and your experience will eat away at those accomplishments (of course, this could be purely personal, but anecdotally, I've heard it from other self-starters).

Another is that there is a danger, until you get amongst people who knock your socks off, that you'll feed into your own Dunning-Kruger effect. It's incredibly easy to absorb knowledge on your own and assume you're God's gift to insert skill here until you are surrounded by people who excel in ways that you don't and struggle in ways that you don't. But the autodidact is very often surrounded by people who aren't in their chosen field and so it's very easy to seem far more competent. I would say that this definitely is addressed by learning on the job, provided you luck out and learn on the job from truly brilliant people.

These things are definitely not solved by having a degree (I think the internet and open source have really been a boon to many in addressing the second downside as well).

The other soft skills mentioned in the article are just flat out not true inherently. I've known people with varying levels of degrees who are atrocious communicators and their spelling and writing skills are ridiculously bad, and had them literally use the fact that they have a degree as a proof that they're a-ok in those regards. Being able to communicate clearly, being able to communicate expectations and meet deadlines and promises (or summing it up, clarity of communication and integrity) are things that most colleges definitely don't require in order to pass.

Like the other comments here, this is all purely anecdotal and going off of my own experience, so if I could sum it up in a way of how would I advise a family member to go forward, in general terms? I'd tell them to get the degree, hands down, if that's an option for them.

But there are so many other factors that for them specifically, I may recommend skipping the degree altogether and get to work on building something they love.

I honestly think there is value in either course that you don't get with the other.

Hegelian synthesis point: I usually am at my desk, with my phone, and I use the messages app on my computer to do both iMessage and SMS. It’s honestly great to be able to hop between both, as for some conversations, a hardware full size keyboard is ideal.

Though, count yourself lucky that people respond to your texts in around 5 minutes. Mine are shots into the darkness, and maybe I’ll get a text at some point today.

Unless someone needs something, then response time seems drastically shorter :|