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Comment by frakt0x90 | Hacker News Reader

The urinal and gas station ones are right up the street from me and I don't visit either of those facilities anymore for that reason.

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My corner gas station just rolled out new machines that start playing advertisements on the LCD screens as soon as the pump starts dispensing gas. It made me irrationally angry. One, that I have to deal with even more mental pollution in my daily life. And two, that the person who created this business model realized that pump-goers are quite literally a captive audience and that's the best way to force someone to watch an ad.

I complained to the manager and I've never been back. Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.

Most of the gas pumps with ads I’ve seen are the kind with 4 arrow buttons on either side. If you push the 2nd button down on the right side, it’ll mute the audio, and you can go back to listening to traffic and breathing fumes in peace.

https://imgur.com/a/D7ZIR

Phew. The last thing I wanted to associate with the sweet sweet gas fumes was an ad.

Let me get mildly intoxicated in relative peace, thank you.

Unfortunately, some gas stations have already disabled the mute button; in my personal experience, Speedway was the first in doing that. It's only a matter of time 'til all stations do that.

Better fix: switch to an EV!

Now you get to listen to ads for 15mn instead if 2!

Spend $40k to avoid some ads at a gas station? I hate ads but come on...

Plus you're ignoring how privacy invasive most EVs are, especially Tesla. They track everything you do.

Buy a Chevy Bolt or a Hyundai/Kia, pretty easy to remove the modem from those.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but most new gas cars are the same. New Toyotas have it, GM has had it for quite a while with OnStar, Ford probably has it, and if I bothered to dig more, almost all of them have it somewhere, cellular modem included.

It's an industry problem at this point, and I really think some day we will have a mass terrorist disaster where some psychotic hacker group would hack all the badly secured cars everywhere, link into the CAN bus (because that is a GREAT idea for some braindead synergistic middle manager reasons) and cause run-away accelerations simultaneously everywhere on some clock script, killing millions and destroying trillions.

I'm 50/50 hoping someone makes a popular movie about that, to scare governments world wide to force cars to have a fucking no network mode and no connections to the CAN bus and terrified if it would inspire said teenage psychopaths to do so...

You could stand there and be the captive audience you complain about, or you could choose to do something more productive with your life. Take the time it takes to fill up your tank to clean the windows, check the oil level in your car, check the air pressure in your tires, or just inspect the tires for wear patterns, etc.

Where I live you need to hold a trigger on the nozzle. You can't wander off and do something else.

That's what a tube of chapstick is for. My dad's been doing that for >50yrs, and I have continued the tradition at gas stations that remove the trigger lock.

> Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.

I'm so looking forward to home EV charging.

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