What if we could have free public transportation in exchange for an advertisement bombardment? That actually sounds like a great idea (to me). Sure getting on a metro train would make you dizzy and overwhelmed. But we would actually have a metro train!
You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
441–450 of 633 posts
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute.…
Is you best argument "what about cars"? Scooters are a problem because they go fast among pedestrians. Cars usually don't, and when they donit is usually labelled terrorism. I think a good comparison is a bike: Bikers usually stay either on the road or on a bike path. When they go in pedestrian zones, their rather bad manouverability make bikers go slow or get off. Just one week ago I was hit by a scooter going over…
I don’t know about your country but in my country 500 people a week are killed or seriously injured by cars.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#443I cycle to work on an ebike. About 25 km each way. One of the major issues is the lack of proper infrastructure and awful attitude by drivers, in particular service drivers. Advertisement company vans are a prime example. There are rolling advertisement posters in most bus stop shelters. These drivers will park up on the footpath blocking pedestrians and those using the bus to update the advertisements, often in the…
I don't know where I heard it, but there was a story about a hammer-wielding bicycle gang that smashed up cars that weren't friendly to bicycles. Sort of like https://abc7ny.com/bikers-attack-car-bmw-attacked-flatiron-n.... When the police won't enforce the laws then I guess groups emerge that take matters into their own hands.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute.…
this might not be the best site to start that particular argument on because you will find a lot of people who would sign exactly what you're trying to say sarcastically, namely that cars are a menace to urban life and cities that get rid of them should be applauded. And if you've never been annoyed by scooters you are lucky, because when that craze started in my city not only were people driving them like maniacs, t…
s/scooters/cars in your last paragraph describes the vast majority of cities in the U.K
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#445I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent i…
Junk mail is particularly frustrating because companies are generating so much paper waste only for someone to deliver it to your door, and you to put it directly in the bin. No, Dominoes, I don't give a fuck about your shit pizza, and sending junk through my letterbox 5 days a week isn't going to change my mind. I wish it was banned outright.
Sports Illustrated recently started sending me their full monthly magazine with my name on it, without a subscription. It also goes straight into the trash.
(For anyone thinking once a month doesn't sound too bad: Sports Illustrated has so many pages it stacks up to almost a centimeter thick)
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly. This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and…
> they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say:
> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio
And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.
If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute.…
> if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. I love whataboutism. I’m very fascinated to know how you live in such a fashion that you purchase food and other products that sustain your life that in no way utilize roadways. Or are you just virtue signaling and personally contribute to this road traffic you hate so much and is the real “problem” by purchasing…
The road outside my house was there on the oldest deeds I have, from 1830. Was that built for cars? What about the roads in town that were mentioned in writings in the 1400s?
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#448I can’t stand ads on government property, particularly in spaces where I am captive. The best example is public transportation. There are ads all over the station and then ads all over the interior (and exterior) of the train/bus during your ride. Why should I be subjected to this private noise while taking public transportation? Some city needs to stand up and fix this. Allow me to get where I am going in peace.
Would you pay higher taxes to avoid those ads? I think it's hard when our public transportation is chronically underfunded. Politicians and voters see corporate (advertising) funding as less onerous that citizen (taxes) funding.
In London adverts bring in less than 10% of the firebox revenue. Rather than spend £2.30 on a journey charge £2.50 and you’re set.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#449i had mediated reality ads blocker via wearable a/r goggles in grad school in 2003.
fig1 is an any billboard ads replaced with a xterm to show inbox or whatever.
it worked well in labs and constrained environment. didn’t work IRL.
should work today IRL with 1k lines of code with modern hardware + algos/models.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#450But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. There is no analogy to interstitial pages with ads like in Forbes some time ago with the button Continue to your article: it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and sho…
But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboa…
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. … Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
-- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements.
Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting.
I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry.
My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.