* Population growth in the first world is stable, low, or even negative.
A quick google search shows that whilst population was pretty stable in UK in the 80s, since then it's been steadily rising. Growth is now 0.75% a year.
There is no solution I can see, and that's worrying. While we're all running around curing diseases, solving global warming etc, the thing that will kill off our species is our own "success".
Without sounding unfeeling, do we really want to add to the overcrowding and population explosion problem that much?
Earth is full. Our population has doubled in the short time I've been alive. Doesn't that scare the shit out of anyone else?
Imagine what would happen if you suddenly cured all forms of cancer. People would live even longer. Population would shoot up. Lack of housing, lack of jobs. More pensioners...
edit: Downvote brigade... why am I wrong? What's going to save us from our own 'success'? How many more billion people can the planet take?
You can still be an outlier in terms of the population as a whole. With all due respect, perhaps you're in a bubble.
Do you watch American Idol? Do you read celebrity gossip magazines? Do you play bingo or the lottery? Do you watch Fox news? Do you buy a newspaper? Do you click on ads?
Millions and millions of people do all of the above - they are not outliers.
On your previous point "How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.", we have this problem all the time outside of advertising with general information. Look at the average news story on Reddit. It's probably biased, probably a half truth, probably out of context, probably only half the facts of the story. Everything is biased and needs careful inspection before you can take it at face value.
However, there are obvious ways to do this. For example, I "trust" Lego. That means if they advertise a new awesome Batman Lego Arkham Asylum set, I'll know it's going to be quality, and awesome, and I'll buy it. If however it's some new unheard of company, I'd probably want to go examine it in a toy shop before I buy it.
I'm not trying to convince you that advertising is useful, I don't think you'll change your mind. But hopefully you'll see that you're not in a majority, and the majority think advertising is useful.
> What was your last product you did not hear about before and bought after seeing an ad?
Probably buy something each week that I saw previously advertised somewhere.
The last thing was probably some pig electric fencing that was advertised in a pig magazine last week.
You're an outlier. Perhaps you're just so determined to be against advertising you can't see the value in it.
Without advertising, how would we know what products exist?
IMHO, the type of person who installs adblock isn't the type of person you can sell things to easily. They're decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate, probably not particularly rich, etc.
So it's not just a matter of convincing their userbase to stop blocking ads, you'd need to tell their current userbase to go away, and invite a better userbase to come and click on ads.
Reddit created this problem by fostering a culture of anti advertising early on.
Reddit should probably just become some non-profit foundation like wikipedia and show begging adverts.
Point taken though...