Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

The most enviable part of Star Trek isn't warp speed or teleporters; it's the complete lack of advertisements shown to the characters.

Moreover, there isn't a technological barrier to an ad-free life like the other technologies. We just haven't the collective social will to make it happen. In some sad way it feels even more impossible than FTL.

View on HN

It's totally possible. My computer blocks ads, and the city I live in bans billboards and requires things like an evergreen hedge to block commercial parking lots from being visible from an arterial (the required greenery scales with the lot, so you can generally see names on the front faces of small strip malls, but big-box stores are completely hidden). The signs businesses are allowed to have are there to help you find where to turn, and have things like size restrictions and aesthetic requirements.

That's great to hear that your city bans billboards, which I believe to be a safety hazard for drivers on the road.

May I ask which city it is?

Generally speaking from what I've seen, the "nice part" of any suburban metro across the US has such a ban in place. Chatgpt can give lists for specific regions.

But I'm asking you specifically what your city is that has this feature?

To give an example, Dublin, OH is like this. There are many restrictions on signs/advertisements and it’s quite nice. I grew up there so it felt normal but I’ve had friends who have visited comment on it. Some have complained (mostly joking) about how all the buildings all look similar, the McDonalds is a nice brick building with a relatively small sign [0] which looks similar to the bank next door [1] but for whatever is “lost” in boundless creativity is gained in the lack of eye sores IMHO.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/wFod1vA58Fr2VWu66

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/xduhC7S7UBTPFwt67

Thanks for sharing your experience and that Dublin Ohio is doing this. And thank you for the Google maps links as well! Super useful.

The second most enviable is locally hosting "Computer"

The entirety of the future Starfleet on our current timeline gets bricked whenever us-east-1 goes offline

I acknowledge that like prostitution advertisement isn't going to ever go away completely, and I acknowledge that also like prostitute it's a better world where we legalize and regulate advertisement over a world where we didn't but with that said it's really dismaying that vanguard of our industrial and technological capability as a species is built on advertisement.

Will that always be the case? Or will the people who work at these organizations finally realize that they're only making the world a worse place every time they integrate advertisements into their business model?

I heard Picard's got a pretty lucrative sponsorship deal with Lipton - he's busy stacking that gold-pressed latinum to fund his retirement on a French vineyard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com