The city of Cracow in Poland banned billboards (and other visual advertising quite aggressively) about 2 years ago. Great outcomes. There are still some workarounds that companies do to put this s..t out in the public (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Now, when I visit another city when there's no such ban I cannot stand this visual garbage.
This should be banned everywhere.
On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.
Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):
It's corruption. On paper it's probably construction or renovation and there is some fraudulent deal between inspection department in city hall and marketing agency. Fuck you, Coca Cola.
When travelling through Poland then the contrast of visual pollution by billboards and other advertisements has been very big, between for example Estonia, Latvia, the nordic countries and Poland.
In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.
Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
> Driving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.
Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
>We think its part of slavic culture or something.
It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.
The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
Up here in Lithuania we used to make fun of your billboards 20 years ago. But now it's getting worse and worse here too. While you seem to have rebounded from the lowest point.
This is so wonderful. One instantly goes from feeling like a consumption robot to feeling human, just from looking at the pics. I wish this was everywhere.
A true classic. It looked extra cheesy when he advertised for Huawei.
The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.
> (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.
There put scaffold up just to hang advertising?!? That is so incredibly expensive, how can it be worth it? I had recently some shutters installed at my home (second floor) and the most expensive part was the scaffold…
Mixed blessing of the coming AR (augmented reality) adscape is that virtual ads projected into our eyeballs will be cheaper and more targeted/effective than meatspace billboards.
AR “metaverse” stuff did not take off on the last hype cycle, and even Apple's VR headset does not sell. If AR is “coming,” it is coming rather slowly.
And now only rich corporations have the money to show off their big signs.
Lots of smaller companies had to hide theirs, but ones like IKEA or MAKRO
did manage to evade it, and will probably continue to evade it happily. Also
some billboards are now empty, and are still covering up the tree line, because nobody wants to spend another cent giving the amount of money everyone had to pay up for this.
I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.
It is sad to see the correct reply grayed out.
This kind of regulation is known to breed corruption & abuse, tilting the field heavily towards the highest spenders. Can only be enacted when ideology trumps well established knowledge & experience.
Grenoble also banned all ads in 2014 and put in a lot of trees. It is truly an audacious move, yet completely rational. My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces. Add car sharing, better public transportation, urban agriculture, community gardens and parks: soon you'll have an efficient paradise of a city.
Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.
The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work
I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)
0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.
Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
> If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first.
No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.
So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.
You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.
People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the fastest but the others are still treated as first class citizens.
In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning.
I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
> Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.
Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.
> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
They don't want to walk because cars make walking less pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly harder for everyone else.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?
Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
I understand, but your points aren't really relevant for a number of reasons:
First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.
Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.
The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.
I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.
Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.
For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.
Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.
> My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces.
Some individuals, particularly those with disabilities or mobility issues, may find it challenging
It's not that simple. Your car increases your freedom, but everybody else's cars decrease it. As a resident who does not have a car, cars impede my freedom to bike and jaywalk, they are unsightly and reduce visibility, they take up space that could be used for bike lanes, greenery, benches or terraces. It would be far more pleasant if there were far less of them.
I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.
Are those residents paying for the total cost of that parking? The space consumed, the opportunity costs averted, the safety cost of more cars driving through dense areas with pedestrians and cyclists?
If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities, and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.
1. I see kids in public transit all the time, including kids around age 10 taking trams by themselves. It’s also common to see groups of kids out on bikes or in a park. It’s more independence, not less.
2. I’ve seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well. Plus, isn’t it better for the disabled if it’s easy for them to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-bodied people?
3. If you’re in the countryside, you can still drive when you need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city you’d like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be considered when looking for a place to live
4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do, see the answer above for those in the countryside, that applies too
We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars can be the exception rather than the rule, though
Your dream sounds like a nightmare. I can only imagine what it would be like for the very elderly or anybody on crutches.
Cars are very convenient and rapidly developing countries more populous than any European country have been embracing them as their economies grow richer for a reason.
It's actually better. Because disabled parking is still a thing.
Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But that's a small price to pay.
Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the people who actually need to drives ability to do so.
Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the people who have more to gain from using good public transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on streets filled with living kids.
Hawaii also has a billboard ban. It was really jarring moving back to Illinois after getting used to not having them. It seems pretty clear that the negative impact of billboards far outweigh the benefits so I'm always hoping more places outlaw them.
There is a ban on billboards in Marin County (on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco).
Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
The benefits of billboards are a zero sum game, it's absurdly easy for the benefits of a ban to outweigh them.
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
Yes travelling can really create a sense of what you have, or lack.
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.
This pretty much mirrors my experience: I live in Washington, and when I drive down the freeway, I see nothing but trees and mountains. When I go back to Minnesota to visit family, I'm bombarded with billboards -- often political or religious content. I don't miss that at all.
One of the nice side effects of hosting the Olympics was the ban on new advertising billboards in the downtown core of Atlanta. There are a few old signs that were grandfathered in but it's close to impossible to get new billboards added. One of the nice side effects of having a tornado rip through downtown a decade later was that it destroyed some of the grandfathered in billboards which the city did not allow to be replaced despite crying from the billboard companies.
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.
That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.
Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.
Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)
It used to be true that near the FL/GA border you'd see billboards advertising "TOPLESS DANCERS" for 50 miles on either side of the fine establishment buying these billboards. The sheer number of them was almost a parody of billboards in a way.
Various localities have similar bans. I'm aware of at least one with strict signage controls, shopping centers generally have an directory near the entrance(s) and that's about it other than the signage on the stores themselves.
My old office was decorated with a picture of an art installation which was a house painted entirely white, even the palm trees. Someplace east LA. But in front there was a bus with a huge Marvel whatever advert pasted on the side passing by.
I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look. I think marketing has a net negative effect. I also think that maybe you cannot eliminate all marketing but you can easily eliminate most of it just by controlling the spending of big companies, so it's possible. I have no ethical problems with eliminating it, as I consider it a form of manipulation and falsehood spreading, and anyway I don't consider companies have a right to free speech, or any real rights for that matter.
So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business. You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you. How do you propose they find out?
A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion.
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case
Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.
Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.
In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.
You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
A lot of marketing is not falsehood spreading. It’s literally just trying to get the word to potential customers that a thing exists that might be useful to them. Most b2b marketing is like that.
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
This is just so wide of the mark in my experience, especially B2B where the sales and marketing tactics are just, well, awful.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
Well, if you try to run your own business of any type, you suddenly realize why there's need for marketing. Things don't sell themselves. Nobody beats a path to your door even with the best of mousetraps.
... because your competitiors are using ads to manipulate your potential customers into buying from them instead of you. Do you think people would just stop eating because restaurants/grocery stores were not allowed to advertise?
I don't think so. For me the real test is whether or not someone is giving me a monetary incentive. The very act of having to pay someone to say something increases the probability of it being a lie
The difference is that people come to the comment section here to read opinions on the subject of the article. People don't go on a highway drive just to learn about what lawyers and and casinos are available. I'm sure you can also understand the difference between a catalogue listing on-topic producs and unprompted signage.
I kind of wonder how far you want to go with these sorts of things.
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
> I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
I live in the greater Johannesburg area of South Africa, the area I'm in is probably amongst the very highest economic contributors of the country, and while sitting still in traffic there is no where one can look without some advert being in view, it's dystopian and depressing.
Even worse though, there is this amazingly fancy huge electronic billboard and then all around it (like most streets here) everything is, if not messy from litter, just generally scruffy, unkept plants / grass, weeds growing on the verge of the road, streets not swept, etc.
Technically, the depressing mess is the fault of the local government which is generally incompetent, but considering that they already charge these billboard companies for the rights to show these adverts there, they could just make another part of the deal for the rights is that the billboard companies are obligated to ensure that part of the road is kept neat.
It wouldn't be the primary reason for the brain drain here, but definitely just one more reason that people give up on the country.
(The reasons why skilled middle-class people are fleeing include: Crime, corruption, constant load shedding (it's been better as of late, but it remains to be seen if it's gone for good), we pay a significant amount of income tax, and then also 15% VAT on practically everything (on top of the import fees for most things). Despite the amount of taxes the middle class pays, government education, healthcare and policing are not to be relied on, so we also need to pay for private versions of those too. The bottom line is we get terrible value for money for the taxes we pay.
I consider my taxes to be largely charity to the majority of the population which is in poverty and don't pay taxes, so I do feel absolutely aggrieved with the apathy, incompetence or corruption of our government which results in very little of that money being used where it should be.)
Ehhhh.... Why can't the government keep the road neat? Isn't that the government's job?
The problem with including a stipulation in the contract, for the private company to keep it neat, is its hard to objectively monitor (Unlike say the money paid for advertising), which will therefore 100% become a way to extort the private companies.
The optimal solution will just be 'pay off the government inspectors & spend as little on actually keeping it neat as possible'.
People need to understand a government policies is like a software program, its not trivial to just 'add a feature'. An extremely corrupt government, is like hardware that flips bits randomly all the time, so please don't make it do even more things.
SA has massive brain drain but still better than many countries producing talent by many metrics.
I've looked at the visa process before and it looked as if getting PR is nightmarishly difficult compared to other talent seeking nations like Taiwan or Australia. I don't understand it.
If you issued liberal visas and an ak47 to fend off the carjackers id think hard about getting on the next flight.
Truly a breathtaking beautiful country and I hope things look up for you soon.
Companies are still waiting for augmented reality to become a thing so that they can correct this problem and place ads on every available surface within your field of view no matter where you are.
I don’t really watch sports, but whenever I catch sight of a football game on TV, I’m amazed at how colorful and vibrant on field ads are, almost as if they were computer graphic generated or something.
They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).
Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:
In soccer they actual are. the ads are injected to the sideboards beside the playing field, so that if you watch the same game on different channels, they have different ads depending on their avg viewers.
I don't watch football, but in hockey they project digital ads onto the ice and parts of the plexiglass around the rink during the broadcasts that aren't there IRL. They are often vibrant and look out of place, it's quite possible that's what you were seeing.
They are typically superimposed yes. It's extraordinarily easy with football, the field is essentially a premade green screen with completely standardized index points (the yard markers). What's funny is what happens when it starts snowing on the field, which is not rare with the NFL's schedule.
You should checkout F1. they now have e-ink on the side of the cars and the ads are dynamic and catch your eye. I would be curious to find out if it's some exotic type of e-ink tech they use to keep it lightweight (as in .. as light as a decal or paint)
One of the many reasons AR will probably never go anywhere. It has some pretty neat applications, but then a ton of horribly dystopic ways to monetize it. And greed all but guarantees that the latter will drown out the former. Kind of like what happened to VR where anti-competitive exclusivity deals, profit motivated pricing (as opposed to a loss leader market to drive adoption) and all this other sort of nonsense went a long way towards killing the ecosystem before it even got off the ground. It was a like bait and switch, but they forgot the bait.
Once the tech is worth it we'll have uBlock, Ad Nauseum, and eventually Vanced apps. I'll help friends and family, but sadly have learned my lesson about helping the general public utilize such things.
Really? Seems like ad funded “free” tech products have been the most successful in gaining wide adoption. I’d argue the opportunity for greed in AR makes it more likely to go lots of places, although we may not like them in the long run.
That would require brain implants or implanted lenses or some such, and no one would ever leave that platform open enough to be constantly tracked, and constantly barraged by it. Who would do that to themselves?!
And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay for things, and no one would force people to have a device to even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
(I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be able to pay for things)
mcmcmc: Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable, just that ads would be inescapable in AR. I’d imagine high tech contact lenses would be a preferable approach to a seamless interface for most people who aren’t born with this stuff already at mass adoption.
Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
I want the opposite. Someone needs to make AR glasses that selectively look for ads and remove them in real time. I would pay $$$ for such a feature. It doesn't even seem impossible with current technology either. Image recognition has gotten really good.
Something I like to do, to keep my personal space a tiny bit more ad-free:
when on a flight, bus-ride or similar, where you have ads placed right in front of your eyes (mounted on the back of the seat in front of you), it's usually possible to slide the cardboard with the printed ad out, sideways, simply flip it and put it back. Enjoy a nice, calming, white rectangle for the rest of your trip.
Readit News
Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):
https://www.businessinsider.in/thumb/msid-70660934,width-640...
In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.
Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
We think its part of slavic culture or something.
I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.
Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
A relevant meme that is on point: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvoPf6OWYAMC0Sd.jpg
It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.
The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
Totally agree. Particularly vexed by New York letting Sidewalk Labs put these billboards across our streets [1].
[1] https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u...
https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/ridiculous-electron...
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11sbctl/krak%C3%B3w...
The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.
Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.
I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.
I find it extremely hard to believe that someone would personally want to see more ads.
Do you believe physical advertisements represent that some sort of specific political system is in place?
Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.
For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.
I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)
0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.
Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.
So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.
You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.
People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.
Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.
> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
edit: Meant twice, not half.
Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?
Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.
Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.
The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.
I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.
Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.
For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.
Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.
So less freedom for residents?
I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.
If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities, and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.
Dead Comment
Fortunately the mayors of cities in the Netherlands don't have their head up their ass so far they cant see beyond their own needs.
GL in your public transport utopia if you have kids, are disabled, live in the countryside, have to travel for work, and many other reasons.
Not everyone lives in a big city you know?
2. I’ve seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well. Plus, isn’t it better for the disabled if it’s easy for them to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-bodied people?
3. If you’re in the countryside, you can still drive when you need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city you’d like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be considered when looking for a place to live
4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do, see the answer above for those in the countryside, that applies too
We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars can be the exception rather than the rule, though
They even said mayors of "cities". Not mayors of villages, mayors of towns, mayors of rural areas.
I'm a low-vision US citizen, and our piss-poor public transit here is a massive problem for me.
Cars are very convenient and rapidly developing countries more populous than any European country have been embracing them as their economies grow richer for a reason.
Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But that's a small price to pay.
Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the people who actually need to drives ability to do so.
Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the people who have more to gain from using good public transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on streets filled with living kids.
Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
They are incredibly obnoxious. I’m surprised if they don’t case car crashes.
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
I was shocked by the number of "One call, that's all" accident attorney billboards in LA and FL when I drove through them several years ago.
Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.
That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040
Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.
Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)
Dead Comment
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but that's not impossible.
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
Please consider that your worldview may be warped.
Marketing for a certain idea, world view. Some may agree, others won’t.
That’s what we do as species. We talk, we collaborate, we argue, we market.
Deleted Comment
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
Even worse though, there is this amazingly fancy huge electronic billboard and then all around it (like most streets here) everything is, if not messy from litter, just generally scruffy, unkept plants / grass, weeds growing on the verge of the road, streets not swept, etc.
Technically, the depressing mess is the fault of the local government which is generally incompetent, but considering that they already charge these billboard companies for the rights to show these adverts there, they could just make another part of the deal for the rights is that the billboard companies are obligated to ensure that part of the road is kept neat.
It wouldn't be the primary reason for the brain drain here, but definitely just one more reason that people give up on the country.
(The reasons why skilled middle-class people are fleeing include: Crime, corruption, constant load shedding (it's been better as of late, but it remains to be seen if it's gone for good), we pay a significant amount of income tax, and then also 15% VAT on practically everything (on top of the import fees for most things). Despite the amount of taxes the middle class pays, government education, healthcare and policing are not to be relied on, so we also need to pay for private versions of those too. The bottom line is we get terrible value for money for the taxes we pay.
I consider my taxes to be largely charity to the majority of the population which is in poverty and don't pay taxes, so I do feel absolutely aggrieved with the apathy, incompetence or corruption of our government which results in very little of that money being used where it should be.)
The problem with including a stipulation in the contract, for the private company to keep it neat, is its hard to objectively monitor (Unlike say the money paid for advertising), which will therefore 100% become a way to extort the private companies.
The optimal solution will just be 'pay off the government inspectors & spend as little on actually keeping it neat as possible'.
People need to understand a government policies is like a software program, its not trivial to just 'add a feature'. An extremely corrupt government, is like hardware that flips bits randomly all the time, so please don't make it do even more things.
I've looked at the visa process before and it looked as if getting PR is nightmarishly difficult compared to other talent seeking nations like Taiwan or Australia. I don't understand it.
If you issued liberal visas and an ak47 to fend off the carjackers id think hard about getting on the next flight.
Truly a breathtaking beautiful country and I hope things look up for you soon.
- https://www.uniqfeed.com/our-solutions/football/
- https://supponor.com/
They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).
Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/uf0re1/d...
There are far more clever and profitable ways to monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.
I very much doubt a modern company would take an approach this dumb when they could likely make much more money doing something much more subtle.
And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay for things, and no one would force people to have a device to even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
(I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be able to pay for things)
mcmcmc: Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
Good lord!
Where on earth do you live where this dystopia is commonplace?
One goes to a restaurant to relax. I'd be puzzled to say the least if the restaurant owners sought fit to try and sell me crap during a meal.