How are ads for less relevant products better? If the user tracking data is used only for showing ads and doesn't leak I would guess 99% of people would care about getting tracked.

They wouldn't be less relevant.

If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I'd see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.

I would prefer to see ads for things that I want rather then see ads for stuff I couldn't care less about. If I get convinced to buy useful things it's a win/win.

That could an opt in option, but the rest of us don’t want it. Google (or whatever ad company replaces it (Addled?) could give you the chance to opt in to ads and leave the rest of us alone. I’m fine with seeing ads about hunting when I’m on a gun sales website or local restaurants if I’m looking at recipes on Epicurious, just stop following me around, creeper (google)

If you and enough others find such fine-tuned recommendations helpful then they would continue to exist without intrusive advertising. There are entire magazines full of ads that people pay for.

This seems like Stockholm syndrome.

The vision in "Brave New World" seems so unrealistic and far fetched that for me to treat it as any sort of warning or deep insight.

I don't think it's meant to be taken that literally... it's still very useful in a thought-provoking wya, especially the first third or so of the book

Those scholar use a particularly racist definition.

Been only to one but it had decent food that you could eat ever day.

The couple I've been to were pretty rich; I don't think you'd actually want to go there every day. Example: a dish at Chez Panisse which had an inordinate amount of duck fat. Delicious, but...

The desktop OS are all pretty bad so I wouldn't want to use that as an inspiration for anything.

I'm very happy with my Linux desktop.

I mostly live in the Plasma desktop, Konsole and Firefox. And life is good.

What are you missing?

Bad in what way? Most people who aren’t power users barely leave the browser.

I mean, define bad.

Certainly they're much more complex. More susceptible to malware, too.

But they're also much more powerful. I can get tasks done 10x as fast. They're much more open, too. They have well-defined interfaces for most things, which means I can automate tasks. Can't do that on a phone.

Does it have a horrible brand reputation? The tech savy people complaining about the account review procedures are not the mainstream consumer.

Yes, I do think it does have a horrible rep for the layman.

Yes it does.

A lot of psychology is vaguely science flavoured. You have them making a bunch of surveys and the making super broad claims based on this.

I think you’ll find that if you actually read the papers themselves, they don’t make nearly as broad of claims as they’re purported to in media or the public consciousness.

It's normal and expected that people won't care much what happens in 50 or 500 years. You will possibly be dead and it's too far away to reliably predict the consequence of event in that time span.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — Greek Proverb

Despite the tagline in various points of history, we seem to have in fact not grown great, especially not great again.

If you could make such a rice it would be awesome.