Breaking Bad started fairly quickly, getting to the point of the show basically all within the span of the first episode. But the context is a bit different. Breaking Bad’s pilot was filmed to be shopped around, and so was meant to basically tell a complete enough story to encapsulate the entire premise.

Pluribus is a show that was picked up just from the reputation of its creator. Apple TV greenlit multiple seasons before filming had even begun, the premise was kept secret all the way up to the premiere of the first episode, and so it has the liberty of being able to take its time getting to the point.

Better Call Saul, on the other hand, was similarly slow at first. And they spent way too much time in the first season trying to fit in as many Breaking Bad callbacks as they could before it really started going anywhere. But it was excellent when it came into its own.

No no, just that there are some shortcomings with certain approaches that might still impact a company’s ability to reasonably reach customers.

But it’s just something that they’ll have to figure out, not something those of us who are sick and tired of the ad spam should have to just accept as necessary.

I’m with you all the way.

But in reality most advertising money is spent by companies like Coca Cola, that we all already know. And they know that too, which means they know for a fact that continuing to spend money on advertising pays off.

This is something I found myself recognizing not too long ago. Why would a company like Coca-Cola, already the dominant force in the soft drinks market, need to spend so much money on advertising? It’s not to attract new customers, but to drown out their competition. If you have big players like Coke continuing to spend millions on each ad buy, smaller competitors get priced out and their message is lost in the signal noise.

If you’re selling me a new brand of cheese give me a discount at the store and I’ll try it.

Sometimes it can’t be that cut and dry though. E.g. even at a discount, there is no way a good pack of aged cheddar will be as cheap as the orange-colored plastic called Kraft Singles. Someone who has only ever eaten Kraft Singles won’t know what they’re missing and will just keep buying the cheaper option they know.

The vendor would need to first make folks aware of the difference in quality to convince people to buy. But this is one thing I think stores like Costco get right, at least. There are always people offering free samples of their product. Let the product speak for itself, for free, with no obligation to buy if you don’t like it.

If you’re selling me an expensive technical piece of equipment send review stuff to various people and organisations that test them.

This is also not foolproof because I’ve heard of reviewers being cut off from free products to review if they don’t give a positive rating. There are a lot of “sponsored reviews” as well which are, in fairness, usually disclosed, but they’re something you have to sift through to find less-biased takes.

This is my preference, but even then today I have to look at every recommendation with scrutiny.Astroturfing is only getting worse and worse.

It’s hard to rely on someone I know to have purchased something I need in the past, or trust that their selection criteria are exactly the same as mine, so I have to go online and look deeper. But then when I go online, I have to accept that a lot of what I find will be fake users posting fake experiences to promote the product they want to sell, so I just end up trying to find as broad a sample as I can and trust my gut.

For sunk cost, I think the post could have illustrated this one more accurately as “You were raised a boy,” which I think encapsulates the parental investment that makes it a sunk cost. That’s how I had initially read it, at least.

I think the false dichotomy angle could also be expanded by factoring in intersex people who are similarly forced into AMAB/AFAB boxes despite biologically not fitting neatly into those categories, basically that the labels male and female themselves are a false dichotomy. Sorta blurs into the next point re: chromosomes, but I think it still captures two different ideas (Biologically male and biologically female are not accurate categories, and chromosomes are not indicative of gender identity).

And I think even the ad hominem aspect could be blurred a little bit to still make sense, if read in the sense of, like, “You’re a man, you can’t understand what it means to be a woman, therefore you’re not allowed to call yourself one.”

I did not factor you in this “we” you describe, I specifically mentioned I wasn’t. This “we” tribalism is a simulated and false perception, that’s the point I’m getting at.

Are you actually responding to me or are you just talking around me to make a point?

It’s a timeless classic for sure.

But you don’t achieve wisdom by cloistering yourself apart from the out-group to create a neo-intelligentsia that treats theory as scripture and prioritizes only the aesthetics of revolution while ignoring the plight of the uneducated masses as a lost cause. That is the idea I am critical of (not you per se, but the behavior I’ve seen from a lot of others around the fediverse who care more about tribalism based on nothing more than the instance someone calls home).

I’m just here for a forum, not a soapbox.

In your quoted text, Mao is fighting those members of the communist party that shirked their duties and looked at themselves as above the masses, a small but relevant issue within the CPC at the time.

That is the analogy I was looking to make, yes.