Having your product out in the world with a brand name on it is a form of advertising, and it works really well because people don't recognize it as such.

Some people do recognize it, which is why they'll do stuff like de-badge their cars, to avoid being an agent of the "my friend has one" or "I saw one" form of advertising. My grandparents found this terrifyingly insidious and tried to be cognizant of and reject it whenever possible. Now we all wear logos without a second thought.

>3) I was at the store a while back, browsing around (of my own volition), and learned about them

Manufacturers jockey with retailers for prominent shelf space (or shelf space at all) as part of their advertising efforts.

Similarly, a storefront with signage in a heavily (foot) trafficked area is one of the most expensive (per impression) ad placements that money can buy.

Yes, many people lived and died in an era when there was no time for economic activity beyond extracting dinner from local fauna or the land. The process by which they first learned about and acquired farm implements, giving them the time to do other things, is called advertising.

This is nonsensical.

You can only buy something if you know that it exists for sale and where.

The process by which you acquire this information is, by definition, advertising.

Approximately the only people who can bash advertising without hypocrisy are subsistence farmers. The rest of us are paid to satisfy artificially inseminated needs. Perhaps our specific industries and employers use classier, higher-quality, and more subtle forms of advertisement, but in a truly ad-free world, we'd not spend money on anything but staying fed, warm, and reproductive.

If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?

Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better.

The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives).

So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.

The answer, as it always has been, is sprawl. We can't sprawl with cars anymore: land is too valuable to park on. So we're bidding with our time: moving to further-out transit stops, walking farther to the stations, tolerating increasing crowding on the trains (losing the ability to work and read). People who nominally make $50+/hour are spending 2, 3 hours a day commuting from their $2500/mo apartments.

I don't mind being a passthrough for the transfer of wealth between tech investors and real estate investors. I am growing increasingly resentful about the hours of my life that I'll never get back, shuttling back and forth from where housing is affordable.

I could technically live close to work, but not with an emergency fund. Maybe with roommates, but that's even worse.

Basic 2-bedroom condos in the general vicinity of an East Bay BART stop seem to run $700-900k; SF proper with any hope of a short walk or bike ride to downtown, $1.3 - $2 million. There are $500k houses, but they're in Richmond.

I think to be $500k, a condo would have to be far from transit in the East Bay, but such places are mostly single family homes.

What you can't find is screen resolution, quality of the keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, battery life, and general polish ("marketing") along with the other specs, while still costing less.