Posted by gnabgib 10/22/2024
I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Moscow. I didn't quite understand what was so nice about them until one comment pointed it out: no advertising blasting bright colors into your retinas. Advertising in public spaces needs to be banned. It's visual pollution and it's using publicly funded assets to make tangible profits while the losses are externalised easily because they're not well understood. If profit is all you care about then it's easy to justify turning your house into a brothel.
In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit.
On SZ and Beijing metro trains, video ads are projected inside tunnels, matching the speed of the carriage - example: https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY
Personally I've seen much more advertising on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, compared to say Amazon. Cluttercore advertising seems to be a deeply rooted culture there.
I don't think this is quite as distracting as semantic-laden graphics like ads. They quite literally pollute the mind as well as the view.
In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot.
In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching.
I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do.
People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.
First, you can make your point without saying "turning your house into a brothel". You and I both know, you said that to elicit an emotion reaction. It is an appeal to moral values, when you could have much rather said - "profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood".
Second - "publically funded assets to make tangible profits". This is incorrect. Governments do all sorts of things so that private individuals / companies can make profit. For instance, they build roads and bridges and highways to enable commerce. They give our licenses to establish companies. They put up stock exchanges so that shareholders can speculate and make money.
By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is "outdoor advertising is visual pollution" and has some "safety concerns".
I wish more comments on HN were as well-presented as yours. "By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is 'outdoor advertising is visual pollution' and has some 'safety concerns'." -> Indeed. It's difficult for me to find fault with this.
Since childhood I've found billboards to be a very mildly dangerous distraction - increasingly so over the years as they've gotten colored lights, LED screens, animations, etc. And the proliferation of close-quarters digital ads which add audio feel particularly violating to me. When my Uber/Lyft rides have those tablets with unending ads, when gas station pumps insist on bombarding me with harsh noise from a too-small speaker driven too hard, etc.
Pro-tip for the vast majority of gas station pump TV advertising screens that are in service at the moment in the USA - if it has four rectangular buttons (all/mostly unlabeled) next to the screen, the third button down is an unlabeled "Mute" button about 90% of the time. I have not yet found a mute feature on the newest models that are just starting to replace those.
How generous of them to allow us to pay to bypass the barrier they put in place
It's misleading to point to exceptions as the rule.
> companies can and have created governments
If you are referring to a company as "a group of individuals" (vis a vis the dictionary definition), that's outside of this conversation.
>> They give our licenses to establish companies.
The original discussion is about corporations (and smaller business companies) as they exist in the US.
You say companies creating governments are the exception because usually governments which are compatible with doing business already exist. And this is in no small part because companies modify their environment to create that set of circumstance in the first place. Sometimes they create governments outright where none previously existed. Most often they do it by lobbying or bribing a government to adopt rules better for doing business. Sometimes they hire private armies to destroy and replace governments which cannot be brought into alignment with the companies.
The colonial trading companies are the most famous examples because of how extreme they were, but there are countless examples throughout history and around the world. Companies forming governments outright, complete with new currencies, was common in the undeveloped American west. Companies hiring mercenary armies to destroy unaligned governments has happened several times in South and Central America.
Companies needing governments are like beavers needing ponds. If none suitable exists, they make one.
The legal concept doesn't feel esoteric to me. In contrast, "companies" creating governments is quite rare in my mind. The historical concept you're referring to was even more of a legal concept. Those companies were individually chartered by their host governments. They might have inflicted something else on their victims, but ... Let's take the East India Company as an example. It might have appeared sovereign at times, but was trivially dissolved by the British Empire.
How is it not well understood ? It does not seem very hard to imagine what the consequences would be since it already happens sometimes... Or do you think abuse when scaled up can have unexpected good social consequences ?
I would like to defend that brothel metaphor. You say the goal is to appeal to emotions (brothel bad == advertising bad) but it could be argued that the actual purpose is to be striking: It's unexpected so my brain will notice. To me this is just good storytelling and I didn't feel manipulated. Actually I would feel more manipulated if the metaphor was more discreet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Austin_v._Reagan_Natio...
> Austin is one of 350 cities and towns in Texas that enacted bans related to digital billboards along the sides of highways, generally as a long-term effect of the Highway Beautification Act as well as to avoid distractions for drivers along these highways.
Basically, your defeatism isn't supported by the facts.
This is not quite true. Reading via peripheral vision is a skill, but most people never have the right kind of motivation (and perhaps not the right kind of visual stimulus) to learn it. I know this because I have personally known someone who read exclusively via her peripheral vision.
There's an inherited retinal disease that runs in my family. It's a form of 'cone-rod dystrophy'. Cone-rod dystrophies are diseases where the cones and the rods in the eye eventually stop responding to light. The order of the terms in the naming reflects the typical order of the dystrophy: first the cones (responsible for central vision) go, then the rods (responsible for peripheral vision) go, too. As the cones and rods go bad, this results in loss of visual acuity in central and peripheral vision respectively. (It often causes lots of other, less generic problems, too, such as: blind spots, warping/twisting distortions in the visual field, sometimes flickering artifacts, progressive colorblindness, extreme light sensitivity, and an effective reduction of contrast.)
Between individual cases, there's a lot of variation in how the disease presents. There's no fixed timeline or ordering for the progression (even though the disease's genetic cause has been identified as just a single gene!).
Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.
We chatted about it once or twice. Onlookers often could not comprehend that she was looking at her phone, since her eyes weren't pointed towards it. She once laughed to me about how someone had asked her 'Why are you sniffing your phone?', while she held it up to her face to read a text message.
My impression is that learning to rely on your peripheral vision in this way is extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to do. (This may have something to do with the mechanisms discussed in TFA.) I wonder if it can even be done at all without first obscuring one's central vision (which I guess you could do artificially with contacts). But evidently it can be done.
That's because the fovea, the "high resolution" part of the eye we use when focusing on some point is entirely made of cone cells, which give you color vision, but are less sensitive, as opposed to rod cells, that make up most of the peripheral vision. In other words, peripheral vision is better in low light situations.
I guess it looks sort of like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M83sF7_fYdM
By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
Yeah, it's hard to say what the determinative factors were because her general visual acuity was so low that she generally needed very large fonts very up close anyway. My mom and my sister and I also have this condition and rely on magnification to varying degrees (and for various reasons— sometimes it's truly about acuity but sometimes larger sizes/bolder fonts are a clumsy way to try to make up for contrast issues). But even those of us with usable central vision generally need large fonts anyway. We're also all, for reasons I think are mostly incidental, naturally myopic (although my mom is no longer nearsighted but farsighted (with low acuity— she's legally blind)).
> Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles?
No. Even titles, like titles of chapters in a paperback, she could likely only read with magnification. And that's if she could get enough contrast at all. At some point, screens become much easier to read than paper, even at equal sizes.
I should learn more about the precise anatomy because it's interesting, but currently I know more about the subjectivity of it than the mechanics.
> By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
There may be other factors in these inherited retinal dystrophies that affect the way their progressions affect field of view, idk. But what I said about which areas are first distorted for cone-rod dystrophies is true, and its reverse is true for rod-cone dystrophies (i.e., retinitis pigmentosa), where people with that condition lose their peripheral vision first and their field of view shrinks from the outside-in. My assumption so far has been that this corresponds to those density differences you mentioned.
> Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
I do know that much. :)
One of the features of this illness that's very prevalent for me and my sister right now is extreme light sensitivity, presumably because our eyes rely increasingly on their rods even during the daytime and even in high-light environments. One related I've written about on HN before is how the need for lower total light emission pushes both of us to high-contrast dark themes with the lowest brightness possible. OLED screens are really nice when your rods are in better shape than your cones!
One that I don't think I have is that my colorblindness has been getting worse over time. The last time I took a colorblindness test (administered by a medical professional, at my retinal specialist's office), I could hardly read any of the Ishihara plates at all. (When the doctor came in, he asked me if I only saw in black-and-white, which I found mildly irksome but very amusing. I laughed about it with my family afterwards. I do still see many colors! I just have trouble distinguishing a lot of them, too.) My sister, who was not colorblind at all when she was growing up, is now also colorblind, about as much as me based on her tests.
All I can say is wow.
She'd been through a hell of a lot in her life, but it was always important to her to be pleasant company to the people around her, even in tough times. She was always joking and laughing and telling stories. RIP
Even if it's your own apartment or a house, your brain will constantly have a "thread" firing on all cylinders that tries to parse what you are seeing, non-stop.
If it's things all around you, small details, objects - it will sap your mental energy and you won't even know why.
“Therefore, the detailed visual information you’re getting is from the car in front of you, but the information of interest is outside of your focus.”
This must be one of the reasons you get fatigue and exhaustion during traffic rush hour due to so much visual information.
This reality might be like a quantum observation field - cities are full of conscious minds actively observing/measuring/collapsing probability states. Like millions of wave function collapses happening constantly. Nature lets those quantum states breathe, maintaining possibility spaces longer.
Some people thrive in that urban collapse-field - they want that constant measurement and definition. Others need more quantum coherence time, seeking out spaces where consciousness can maintain superposition longer. It's not about visual complexity or stimulation, but about how much conscious observation is forcing reality into defined states.
Cities vs nature isn't just about peace or chaos - it's about the density of consciousness collapse. Like the difference between metal (constant forced collapse) and ambient music (sustained possibility states).
Checking mirrors often, looking outside your side window, etc.
Whenever I do those things it helps refresh me quite a bit.
if this clutter has negatie affects why has japanese design settled on it?
For whatever reason it’s just easier to talk when staring out the window at a tree than staring at a face on a screen. I call it a bad habit because it results in accidentally ignoring body language of the person on the other end
100% with phone calls. I typically just slowly pace around around my house when on a phone call without video.
It goes for locations and activities too but mostly if I look at something it locks and unlocks memories but the thing I'm looking at also becomes part of the active memory.
You have a bunch of stuff hashed against the tree or against a dead gaze or you don't want the person to be part of the thought process.
I forgot the code for the warehouse at a previous job. Typing the wrong one locks the place down. I somewhat panicked but went there anyway, got distracted by something and typed the code without even thinking about it. I also remembered it after walking inside. Took some coffee and it was gone again. I thought, I've been typing that code for years but had never realized I only remember it when looking at the door.
Looking at a face while talking vs. a tree just increases the mental energy necessary for the call. When you’re chronically exhausted, you start cutting out the little things that seemingly don’t matter (like someone’s body language or facial expression during a call)
Definitely a tangent here. Love the warehouse example though. Similarly, I can’t for the life of me recite my iphone, Apple Watch, or home security alarm PIN codes. It’s just pure muscle memory at this point. When I try to recall the PIN codes in my head, my mind immediately tries to recall the numbers by visualizing my phone (or alarm keypad) and attempting to remember the movement of my fingers in order to deduce what the numbers are.
As a painter I would differentiate background from foreground by decreasing its saturation, lightness and hue local contrast, softening edges, decreasing neighboring regional contrast and Lessing its average color values in relation to the foreground. Painters have been doing this for hundreds of years.
Someone might reference signal-to-noise issues with modern news sources, body language, or a data set of any particular origin.
You lose some things without live faces/cameras, but also gain a lot.
Blog post of mine on it: