What a nuclear waste of a website. What a shame.
Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
191–200 of 428 posts
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#192As an individual, I'd welcome no advertisements everywhere. I think ads were abused long enough. It's just a leech on the human life.
I don't think 0 advertisements is feasible - some level of advertising is necessary for businesses to communicate. Shops ought to be able to have signs.
I think banning outdoor advertisements is a great idea, though, because people don't opt in to seeing billboards.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#193As an individual, I'd welcome no advertisements everywhere. I think ads were abused long enough. It's just a leech on the human life.
Most public advertisement is for consumption goods - food, clothes, tech gadgets etc.
1. People have mostly fixed amounts of money for these products. So the role of ads is to influence which brands/products people spend their money on. 10-20% of the cost of coke/pepsi cans is just the cost of ads that are used to influence you buy one of two almost identical products.
2. Ads total waste of society's productive power as ad spend has little correlation with the actual quality of the product. It is not helping you find the "best" product, only make products attractive to you.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all of the city of São Paulo is covered in gang graffiti, buildings covered in these rune-like tags from top to bottom. It is extremely ugly, and of course also unsettling since it is a signal on who runs the city.
Actually it is the opposite, it is a scream from those who don't really have a voice in the city. Really recommend watching the documentary PIXO, you can find the full doc in YouTube with english subtitles. [edit: suggesting the documentary]
Having lived in São Paulo most of my life, I'd like to corroborate this. The groups tagging buildings generally have nothing to do with (other) crimes. The only unsettling part was the time I saw that that the wall below my 6th floor bedroom window had been tagged overnight
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#195I am all for cleaning up the advertisement everywhere. That said, I am not sure the article convinced me with the conclusions drawn. > Despite the forebodings, São Paulo’s economy didn’t run aground ... All those advertising business are now defunct. That is a significant impact to those companies and 20,000 employees. It is disingenuous to write "20,000 people would lose jobs", then flip and say the entire city "eco…
> That is a significant impact to those companies and 20,000 employees.
I would rather that we don't pay people to perform harmful activities.
I understand that it is awful to lose your job but I think we should target that rather than keep them working harmful jobs just so that they can live an acceptable live. If we had high quality social safety nets than it would be an inconvenience but manageable. I would rather pay these people to have a comfortable life or find a new job.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
One key difference is the scale. You can think of a billboard as really bad graffiti that’s shoved in your face to manipulate you. Graffiti is ugly too (not to be confused with urban art) and should always be removed. Generating money for the government isn’t something to be concerned with in this context, and most likely a billboard doesn’t generate enough money for the government versus the drain it has on the publ…
> Greco-Roman architecture Neoclassicism is much more than “Greco-Roman architecture” (whatever that even means..) (Hagia-Sophia?). Greek and Roman public buildings were pretty awful in almost every objective measure compared to any of the best (or even better than average) buildings designed in the 19th/20th century. Unfortunately the person who wrote that document seems to have a very poor understanding of both arc…
> whatever that even means.
It's a pretty common term to describe this style of architecture. Maybe it's not the preferred one but it has good explanatory power (like Greek and Roman) that people understand.
> Let say so.. but even then you must realize that these buildings serve extremely different purposes?
Sure, but that would provide explanatory power for the Notre Dame Cathedral and it's function, but wouldn't provide explanatory power for the design of Boston City Hall. If you redesigned Notre Dame Cathedral in brutalist style architecture, it would fail in its purpose. Whereas if you designed Boston City Hall in French Gothic style (or whatever you wanted to call it) it would just be a very nice looking office building. [1]
[1] I believe this building functions as a city hall though I could be mistaken, you can find other examples as well if you wanted to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Quentin,_Aisne
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#197This is awesome. Discovering this kind of post is exactly why I read HN and not other "news" sources. Agree with others that the "empty" billboard frames look off. But much better than attention-seeking adverts. Wish more cities would pass this kind of law. Billboards are such an eyesore especially the pointless political ads we are forced to see.
> Agree with others that the "empty" billboard frames look off
This is also a temporary cost. Yes, the existing relics are unattractive but over time they will be removed and not replaced.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#198> Seven years on, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and South America’s most important city remains free of visual clutter and eye sore that plagues the majority of cities around the world. Unfortunately it suffers greatly - to a ridiculous level, in some places - from that ugliest kind of grafitti, convoluted "tags" made in single-stroke black ink I'm not sure if that is the case everywhere but in Brazil people…
I kind of love pichação style. It looked really ugly to me at first, but then grew on me as I saw more of it. It feels alien and cryptic and uncomfortable to me as a Westerner. I understand being sick of it if you live there, but as a tourist, it felt special. Local graffiti styles have become so homogenized in the U.S. At one point, script styles were much more local. NY and Philly especially. Eventually, everyone s…
Graffiti can be beautiful, but it's a problem if it's on buildings that don't want it.
Where I live, stores are constantly fighting a battle against graffiti. They'll paint their walls, and people will graffiti them with ugly tags. People have graffitied over murals, which is just insane. One building had a huge piece of plywood on the wall as a spot where people could make street art. That worked for a few months until someone tagged the whole rest of the building too.
It's not like they're "fighting the man" or anything. These are all locally owned small businesses who are just trying to keep doing their thing.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#199Some additions: Stores also cannot use their full façade for advertising. Branding colors and details are OK, but logos cannot be too large (don't know the exact rule). The law is picky. Some stores cheat by having a glass façade, and using LEDs inside that glass. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/CLdUD1C Since this law was adopted, there's been an increase in full building graffiti, which is not banned. Now 10 years la…
> Since this law was adopted, there's been an increase in full building graffiti And good art makes people come inside. Not advertisement indeed.
And what about advertisement that is good art?
Some ads are artistically very good and only the context causes us to react negatively, we don't appreciate it fully because we know it is here to influence us.
It is the same idea with graffiti. Some of it is really good, but we won't appreciate it if we tie it to vandalism and criminality.
Re: Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all of the city of São Paulo is covered in gang graffiti, buildings covered in these rune-like tags from top to bottom. It is extremely ugly, and of course also unsettling since it is a signal on who runs the city.
Actually it is the opposite, it is a scream from those who don't really have a voice in the city. Really recommend watching the documentary PIXO, you can find the full doc in YouTube with english subtitles. [edit: suggesting the documentary]
> Actually it is the opposite, it is a scream from those who don't really have a voice in the city.
It is most certainly not. This romanticizing of criminals and vandals is not any kind of compassion. Who would like their neighborhood or home turned into a hell scape?
Edit: To those who downvoted my comment, go look up some pictures of how these neighborhoods look when they are all covered in tags. Ask yourself if you would want to live there? But of course it's easy to be such a benevolent and tolerant hacker, when you don't have to live it yourself...