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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money.

There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.

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Trees, dissipating sound instead of reflecting it, are even more effective.

How can dissipating be more effective than reflecting? Wouldn't you need multiple dense rows of trees to reach the efficacy of a single pane of sound-reflecting material?

Impedance matching (dissipation) converts more energy into heat while also reflecting and transmitting energy as sound waves.

Then build a sound barrier , no need for an advertisement on them. Or decorate it with art if you want to make them less ugly.

I highly doubt a billboard is thick or dense enough to effectively block freeway sound. It’s not like you have a seamless wall of billboards “protecting” a neighborhood

A solid, tall, wall of wood ... Like maybe a fence? Many small towns put up fences to keep highway noise out. The residents don't see the billboards, not from their side. Only the drivers ripping by notice them.

It'll block some. It's not generally big enough to be effective.

Found marketing director of an ad agency.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.[1]

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a joke, calm your knickers.

Do you know what's better on those surfaces than ads? Art. Or nothing.

This is some weird shilling for capitalism or weird devil's advocate tbh. Don't feel like you have to find solutions or positive sides to everything you see on the internet. Billboards are visual noise, road noise is audible noise, neither is desireable.

And I'm sure the rural landowners dont care a jot about the opinions of drivers flying past on the highway. Nobody is going to pay them to not put up ads.

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