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You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
481–490 of 633 posts
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#482Reminds me of this Banksy quote: 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. They have access to the most…
> 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. Funnily enough, you can say the same thing about Bansky's art: > An artist who defaced several works of famed graffiti artist Banksy has been charged with the cri…
Are you suggesting that Banksy's sins have some relevance to whether or not he's correct on this point?
If not, why/how are those sins relevant?
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads in the subway just shouldn't be a thing, period. You already pay for the ticket.
Unfortunately the ticket covers much less than the infrastructure cost. Then public spending covers some of it but ads are needed to fill the gap. Public money that would be spent to cover the ad revenue would not be spent elsewhere (in a hopefully useful way). I hate subway ads just as much as you, but wanted to make this reality check.
Good point, but I wonder what % of say, the NY MTA’s operating budget is funded with ads. I feel like these things are sold for way cheaper than they should be.
I think I remember reading that the naming rights for Citibike were sold for like 40 million dollars. Seems like an incredible bargain for literally thousands of mobile ads all over the city.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#484actually, Indon't currently, and I feelnbad about it
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument, most of the time, is just bad and not smart. "If you hate capitalism, why do you use iPads? etc." It's dreck and it should stop because it's rarely constructive. Sometimes it's a necessary tool. Sometimes people are experimenting. Sometimes people do actually sell out. The problem with this argument is that it tries to shut down the above questions. Details matter, and bad arguments like the above rare…
A few counterpoints I’ve heard over the years include: * The prevailing system will never be toppled by the conscious choice of the individual consumer. * No one person has the power to overturn capitalism, no matter how persistent. * There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
All these points are doing the stupid thing of presuming a clear controllable definition of capitalism; when in reality, no "ism" is a controllable unified entity.
People will always and forever make mutually beneficial trades, probably with money.
Now, will people also always have the opportunity to freely invest sums of money in imaginary chopped up pieces of a corporation without fear of financial liability should they cause a great deal of harm? Maybe not, because Gamestop is teaching us a lot of things.
Regardless of what happens, the dumb thing is presuming that these two things are both the exact same thing called "capitalism."
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This essay looks amazing. Can you please reference it?
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.
I’m sure it’s out there, but I had a similar idea to make an audio device plugin like soundflower to pipe audio through and automatically mute when it detects an ad. We really need an OpenWrt-like project for smart TVs so that you could run something like what you created to mute the sound and display art during ad breaks.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You can view this content if you also stare at these ads. If you don't want to see the ads then don't visit this webpage." Sounds like an exchange to me. Edit: aren't "donations" received by a for-profit also taxable? Edit2: items of value acquired by theft are taxable.
Yes, you are correct. I was still thinking of the content being "free", but it's not if you provide something to get it. Of course to actually impose income tax on these transactions would be nearly impossible. For the business, they would at least have expenses to deduct against the barter income, but for the private individual it would hobby income, with no deductions available. Also, how would FMV be established?…
Re: business expense deductions, I think businesses already handle those.
Re: taxing private individuals' micro attention "income", could be handled like "use" tax. I think my state allows me to list purchases I made online and shipped into my state so I can pay sales tax for them, or to take the "I don't know, just charge me the average amount" option. Maybe YouTube needs to send me a W2 each March which itemizes all the "work" I've done for them?
Re: fair market value, doesn't seem hard when there is an option to pay dollars for a service instead of watching ads, you just found out how much your attention is worth. Attention FMV could be standardized by the IRS like milage reimbursement (58.5 cents/mile in 2022) regardless of the exact cost of /your/ miles.
Edit: I'm not suggesting this would be good or easy but it would acknowledge that an entire industry is dodging taxes and degrading our quality of life. Also, were I king, this tax would be quite high (to reflect the harm to society) and would be the responsibility of the advertiser.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station.
Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all? Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me. > You'd just have more and more websites that block European users. Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
>Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear. This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
> This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.