Adverts generally annoy me, and YouTube has been getting toxic with them over the last few years. Adverts at the beginning, then they introduced adverts at the end, and just to really piss you off, adverts in the middle so that when you're 5 minutes into The Perfect Kiss (12" version) by New Order, it decides to interrupt the song to play some adverts. I'm aware this is howling my rage pointlessly into the void, but I want to get it off my chest.
However, there's a particular kind of YouTube advert that really annoys me. They're very long, look pretty professional, and are invariably selling you snake oil with pseudoscience, set up as a narrative that goes "Heroic inventor wants to do good and horrifies major corporations by creating amazing thing that will undercut them."
The last one I encountered is alleged to be a device that heats up rooms using 90% less energy. Now, I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure the main cause of inefficiency in energy conversion... is heat creation. Like a lightbulb gets hot, when you ideally just want it to create light (and why LEDs are massively more efficient than tungsten filament and halogen bulbs). Work a fan, it has friction, which creates heat. I can see literally no way that a heater can create heat that much more efficiently: best it could do is be better at making the heat circulate faster, or have feedback controls that reduce its output to when desired temperature is reached.
There was one about some Japanese doctor who made these things you stick on your feet overnight and it sucks out body toxins. See the proof: it's turned black in the morning, and that black colour must be your toxins! Then there's one that's some nonsense about drinking water before going to bed and losing 2 pounds in weight overnight or something.
These are utter trash for the gullible, and I am pretty sure that on TV they would be struck down by advertising standards agencies.
However, there's a particular kind of YouTube advert that really annoys me. They're very long, look pretty professional, and are invariably selling you snake oil with pseudoscience, set up as a narrative that goes "Heroic inventor wants to do good and horrifies major corporations by creating amazing thing that will undercut them."
The last one I encountered is alleged to be a device that heats up rooms using 90% less energy. Now, I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure the main cause of inefficiency in energy conversion... is heat creation. Like a lightbulb gets hot, when you ideally just want it to create light (and why LEDs are massively more efficient than tungsten filament and halogen bulbs). Work a fan, it has friction, which creates heat. I can see literally no way that a heater can create heat that much more efficiently: best it could do is be better at making the heat circulate faster, or have feedback controls that reduce its output to when desired temperature is reached.
There was one about some Japanese doctor who made these things you stick on your feet overnight and it sucks out body toxins. See the proof: it's turned black in the morning, and that black colour must be your toxins! Then there's one that's some nonsense about drinking water before going to bed and losing 2 pounds in weight overnight or something.
These are utter trash for the gullible, and I am pretty sure that on TV they would be struck down by advertising standards agencies.
