Nenor
14 HN mentions · mentioned in 13 months, 2015–2025
1:03 · 485K views · Feb 8, 2014
A short, ironic Cadillac ELR 2014 commercial celebrating long working hours and the American dream, which has been widely mocked.
Cited critically as an example of US advertising that glorifies overwork and lack of holiday time.
14 comments from Hacker News
If we want to reduce the incidence of distress in people and families, we need approach all these issues with compassion and an open mind. The open mind means considering various possibilities, while still being rational. Yes, one theory is that everything “just happens to be” innate from birth, and unchangeable, and we simply discover it later. This essentialist type of theory may in fact be the best one for extreme cases of any condition. But we have to be very careful applying essentialism across the board — is it true for even mild, increasinly widespread cases? Could we also not investigate the factors upstream of the issue? Not just before birth, but also in the environment, in the socialization, culture, economics, etc. And if we find factors that heavily seem to affect it, should we not consider trying to fix the problems upstream such that the “disorders” downstream become reduced in many cases? In the case of gender dysphoria, and to a lesser extent of depression being caused by serotonin, is too politically charged to start with. Many extremely creative people we know were born biologically male - the Wachowskis, Justine who made redbean, etc. transitioned their identity. They are adults who make a decision to live in ways they feel are more authentic to themselves amid the current culture and technology and that is their choice, as it should be. But we have to be careful not to therefore say there are no major issues in society upstream of millions of people who a
What's toxic is the system, for both men and women. A lot of the modern feminists and redpillers are anti-marriage, and advocate for men and women to never get married, for various reasons. Usually both gender warriors claim it's an oppressive institution. Meanwhile people have less children, and neglect their children, while corporations have them climbing the corporate ladder: this video I was there at Sheryl Sandberg's event when released her book "Lean In", about how women can do better climbing the corporate ladder. The culture now teaches kids to find life's meaning in something that will soon be automated by AI anyway. We'll have to figure out other ways of connecting again, spend time with our kids instead of sending them to government schools, take care of our parents instead of sticking them in nursing homes, etc. The problems are upstream (social networks, microplastics, factory farms, sugar, etc.) causing record teenage sadness, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, etc. The current solutions in USA are mostly medication downstream: amphetamines for kids with ADHD, SSRI inhibitors for depression, ozempic for diabetes, vaccines for a coronavirus that mostly affected people with diabetes / obesity (a real persistent epidemic that is hardly addressed at its root cause). This is what you should be worried about, in my opinion: [LINK] And the reason that boys end up looking to redpillers, blackpillers, MRAs, and guys the Tates etc. is because the system failed them. Dating sucks
Didnt a lot of studies finally come out by 2022 showing that SSRIs are not actually effective for most people, no more than a placebo? And the whole link between serotonin and depression was spurious… 2021: [LINK] 2022: [LINK] 2023: [LINK] In any case, I believe that ADHD, Depression and many other “umbrella” psychiatric diagnoses are being overdiagnosed, much like “hysteria” was for hundreds of years (eg 1 in 4 middle-aged women is on antidepressants now, and the opioid epidemic in men was largely exacerbated by the pharma industry, as has the overdiagnosis of ADHD prescribing amphetamines to kids). To be fair, the actual incidence of phychiatric conditions from ADHD to autism to depression has increased, as well as autoimmune disorders, diabetes etc. although not as much as the pharma industry wants us to believe. It could very well be the result of upstream changes in nutrition (eg wild increases in sugars like fructose across the board, antibiotic overuse on factory farms, buildup of microplastics everywhere etc.), and to a large degree society (including loneliness, dating, relationships, work, etc) and medicating them downstream (eg with amphetamines or opioids) is just a bandaid. Late stage capitalism has had a direct role in exacerbating this. For example, the tech industry (which many on HN are involved in) has redefined dating, relationships, job searches, political discourse, and much more. All of these affect how people interact. A seminal book even back in 2001 w
Corporations, just like governments, engage in pervasive propaganda, from impressionable school years all the way to adulthood. Edward Burnays said propaganda got a bad name after WW1, so they renamed it to "PR". It's how corporations got women to smoke, too: [LINK] How they control the crowd, featuring Edward Burnays and his uncle Freud (whose theories became famous ironically because of his nephew): [LINK] How the corporate world market to kids: [LINK] They marketed it to Black youth: [LINK] They marketed it to teen girls: [LINK] Sometimes the mask comes off and they do it too openly: this video The for-profit model of news corporations and social networks has led more and more adults to become perpetually angry and tribal politically: [LINK] There is even a term for what they resort to in order to please shareholders: surveillance capitalism: [LINK] I was at the event in NYC when Sheryl Sandberg unveiled her book, "Lean In": [LINK] Make no mistake. YCombinator and shareholder capitalism leads to this inevitably. Corporations have to please shareholders forever. And there is more and more push for inclusivity and part of that means adapting people from traditional roles (e.g. women homemakers) into types of work that benefit the market. As both sexes flooded the labor pool, wages got depressed, and marriage declined. People are distracted into being e.g. gender warriors (Red Pill vs Feminism) rather than realizing they are all being exploited by a for-profit capitalist system
This is what happens in capitalism. There's profit to be made educating the masses, and setting yourself up for social capital and intellectual capital by being a thought leader . In fact, these centrally controlled Big Tech platforms share this profit with influencers who help get eyeballs and engagement . On the startup side, venture capitalists encourage startups to fail fast and remove friction aka propping up money-losing economics, so they can have an IPO to wall street stockholders. After which the company must extract rents from its ecosystem and report every quarter to its shareholder class how well it's doing that. At every level, the system is designed to extract money from the masses of people. Whether it's "I will teach you how to flip a house" in the real estate bubble, to "I will teach you how to do AI stuff". The entire system optimizes for that. People might say "what, are you advocating communism"? Well, the alternative doesn't have to be that. It can be a universal basic income providing a floor to people, financed by pigovian taxes on fossil fuels (already done in Alaska for decades), plastic pollution, tolls for congestion of roads, etc. While at the same time subsidizing open source software. If the government did these two things, it would massively improve society. As the UBI would grow, we would not have so much need for labor unions, minimum wage laws, etc. to protect workers. People would spend time with their own families, learn new things, practic