There's nothing wrong with marketing as a general concept. It's the type of targeting they use and the high level of detail they can use to focus that targeting virtually right down to a particular individual.

It's this targeting that allows advertisers to take advantage of people based on information they provide through natural interaction with the product. It's especially sinister with Facebook/social media because the product is full of emotional and personal details about the users. That's not something your TV could provide to them in the 90s.

Most people don't realize that the algorithm can determine what 'triggers' them, or that advertisers are able to hook onto those triggers. They may not recognize those triggers in themselves to begin with. It's far more complex than most people are able to understand (myself and you included, don't mistake my disdain for righteousness). They just like and share, pick their size, plug in their card number, and feel great about it. That's how it's designed.

Taking advantage of people through advertising is definitely not new. If you never watched 'The Century of the Self' I strongly recommend you check it out.

4 hours?! This is going to take all year to watch...

This guy condenses the entire 4 hours into a single minute.

I didn't watch them. Not only did I neither know nor care that they were going on, but the power went out for a few hours, and I have a sore throat so I went to bed at like 7:30 PM. Over the course of the evening, night, and morning I woke up a few times and there were some updates on my phone about the debate. Sounds like Trump was a troll as usual.

The only highlights that I know of so far are that at one point Trump kept interrupting Biden, ignoring moderation, and Biden got fed up and told Trump to shut up. I would like to know why the moderator didn't have any teeth though. I get that the moderator was a Fox News staffer so I guess that's not surprising, but you'd think a moderator would threaten a candidate speaking out of turn with some kind of penalty (and obviously follow through).

And at some point the moderator pointed out that Trump is calling for Biden to condemn "antifa" (which Biden correctly stated was an idea, not an organization or formal group), and the moderator asked Trump if he would then denounce white supremacists and militias. Biden also correctly pointed out that the FBI has identified white supremacists and militias as initiating violence at peaceful protests. And after some beating around the bush, Trump refused to do that. Instead he said something like, stand down, but stand ready.

I wrote in the other thread.

The national debate was an embarrassment.

And after he recovers from mild COVID-19 symptoms (as the majority of Americans do) under the watchful eye of a dedicated, talented medical team (as the majority of Americans don't) he'll boast that he's the strongest person ever and COVID-19 is no worse than a tiny tiny cold.

So yeah, I wish he'd never gotten it.

Maybe his advisors told him to fake it to cancel the next debate.

Trump won the last debate,watched by more people than the Trump/Clinton debate. Why would he bother debating Biden again?

Interrupting Biden was a tactic used by Trump to trigger his stuttering.

Kinda cheap.

In 2016, Trump's campaign kept a list of 3.5 million black voters (among 200 million in the database) that were marked for 'deterrence' and to convince them not to vote for Hillary.

Honestly, I've been seeing players in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) lately that play like bots, except bots the way you would have envisioned they should work if you learned of the idea today. They have a mechanical nature in that they'll spin around while perfectly smoothly raising their crosshair (diagonally across the screen) straight onto a target they shouldn't have known was there without changing their aiming vector and be perfect. Humans usually develop a reflex to "snap" onto target instead (to compensate for our reaction time, etc., because it's a race between players to see who can shoot sufficiently accurately the fastest). Yet these suspects aren't stupid when the objective is far away or unclear; they're intelligent in what they do and act just like people do. It's somewhat worrying that these might well be machines that are so good that they can reliably fool people. I'm already convinced that CS:GO (excepting maybe competitive in the highest ranks) is literally full of hackers (>50% chance of encountering one on any given public server; from what I can see the private server market really isn't there yet), but having bots that appear real and are effectively also hacking is next level. That would effectively ruin online gaming until we could reliable differentiate between people and bots again. Let alone the scary real world consequences of what that could mean for warfare, police states, etc.