Just buy things you really need, and always ask yourself what you're willing to give up in exchange.

How is this a new trend? It's been going on for while.

HotIgneous Intruder: Phil Moskowitz: And none of you shiatheads have seen the endgame here? I wish you all a giant fark yourself.

What?
You mean where none of us has any money and are starving and the 0.001%ers have all the wealth and canned ham?

Yeah, yeah. So the capitalists won.
Next year, we eat them for Christmas.

/Fifty dollar gift card for Amazon, bought eight books for Kindle, including a couple of .99-centers (One was Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all six volumes, was ninety-five cents for Kindle. oh yeah.)

That's pretty cool, will probably get that for the flight home.

Yankees Team Gynecologist: This is bad in a lot of ways, but even with all the Google/Facebook shiat, I still say we as consumers are better off today than we were 20 years ago.

I would agree. Now people can scan a barcode in the the store and price compare without doing any real work. People can pop a quick question on their Facebook profile before making a large purchase (like an appliance) and get feedback from the 100-200 people in their vast friend lists. Some of whom might actually know a thing or two about the subject in great detail. Hell, in the case of appliances I sometimes find myself on a random forum for repairmen and I can see what they say about longevity of a particular line.

LasersHurt: How much do you have to suck to have an ad "make you" buy something? I don't care how tailored the ads are, have some self control.

It's not that they make you buy things. Marketing is a subtle art of association. Well-crafted marketing doesn't suddenly turn you into a true believer, it just alters your behavior such that you evoke a certain brand name when contemplating a product. There's a preponderance of evidence that behavior really does change through nothing more sinister than brand exposure. Doctors were prescribing drugs for which they possessed paraphernalia (pens, pads, hats, etc.) at a 3-1 ratio over alternatives, and that's with minimal exposure. Your brain actually responds differently to visual and auditory stimuli surrounding a product you've previously seen advertising for to one you've not. And some of it can be very subtle. Disney gives away scads of preemie diapers, receiving blankets, stocking caps, and the like to pediatric departments, so that the first two things your baby sees upon birth are mama and Disney-branded products.

Human beings are pattern recognition machines, not impartial arbiters of intrinsic truth and value. This makes us susceptible to manipulation by those very patterns we're hard-wired to recognize, and then to alternately avoid or appreciate. Ignoring this factor is just another form of willful blindness, just like believing that what the pitchman says is true.

simplicimus: How is this a new trend? It's been going on for while.

Yep, it's been a major trend for over fifteen years. Now it's getting more of a push because this is about one industry selling snakeoil to another industry, not about selling products to consumers.

The Big Brother version of this is old news, and we don't have the tech yet (or, at least, if we do, it's classified) to make new and magical things happen with it. So this is just business BS, not even advertising BS.

You can all relax, for now.

mavexe: lordargent: I work in analytics, so I'm really getting a kick.

/Got moved into BI about 3 years ago, and it's picked up ridiculously since then. Analyzing everything from the shipping performance of suppliers, how much overtime departments are doing, how long servers stay up, and how well the SMT lines are running.

Out of curiosity, what were you doing before that? I hear BI and I think databases.....

/DB developer

I'm not the guy you asked, but I got into BI about 3 years ago too. I started working for a consulting firm that did some BI work, custom .NET development, and SharePoint integration 5 years ago. Not too long after I hired in the company started moving toward BI only and as of 3 years ago that's all they do now.

Pretty much everybody still around from the 'original' crew when we went full BI were previous .NET developers that had heavy backgrounds in working with relational databases to support their apps. Only one was previously a DBA, but he had a lot of BI experience by the time we picked him up. He was more of an architect than anything else, mentoring the rest of us.