That’s so accurate, but landlords have jacked up rent so cities are little luxury zones for the rich only so only they can enjoy the few cool things about cyberpunk while I’m stuck living like a medieval peasant in bumfuck nowhere Ohio.
The pumps have little screens on the that play adds and yell at you. They used to just use speakers to play the adds to the whole complex, but now they're right in your face. There's lots of surveillance, too, since they want to be able to prosecute you if you somehow manage to get gas without paying. It makes sabotaging the screens complicated.
Also from what I've seen online some of the gas pumps have switched from conventional speakers to DML panel speakers so you can't destroy the speaker cones.
One of my favoirte "you've got to be fucking kidding me" contradictions in modern life is a 50 foot by 10 foot billboard next to the high way screaming "don't look at your phone pay attention to the road!" On a road lined with brightly colored bullboards. Hell, some are giant animated screens now.
Everything about cars is treated with this insane level of ease and casualness that nothing else with their level of danger gets, I guess simply because they’re for common civilian use?
Forklift drivers are held to a much higher standard than car drivers, despite forklifts being much less dangerous
only because they haven't found a way to offload all the externalities of drunk speeding forklift drivers onto the public and the government yet.
its an insane libertarian thought experiment and not in any way realistic, but if capital owners that built cars, or roads, or whatever, any capitalist really, was liable for all the damage caused by drivers and maintenance incurred by rampant car dependency, and couldn't offload it, suddenly they'd care a lot more about this shit
Exactly, these aren't just annoying, they're dangerous for people with hearing impairments who already have trouble processing the sounds of the world around them.
I just press every button, starting on the right. Mute is usually the 2nd or 3rd from the top.
I’m sure forcefully subjecting people to advertisements when they explicitly and repeatedly try to shut them up is a great way for a company to make a positive impression
Actively spitting on my face with that even while the money I'm planning to pay them counter ticks up. Can't you settle for the $70 cash I'm about to hand you??
We don't have many surviving examples but Pompeii walls were pretty full of it too and not really better than today considering differences in development level.
those showed up around me a few years ago but now they seem to have mostly stopped, seems like pissing off 100% of their customers every single time they show up may have had unintended consequences over time
Yeah, the one by me started doing them around 2019 or so and stopped about a year back. They were loud as fuck too and I'd hear them echoing off the buildings across the street.
They still do ads but it's silent slideshows of food and products that are on sale in the gas station store. Still shitty but kind of an improvement I guess?
That's not something I even begrudge them for. Telling me I can go inside to get a soda and snacks in an unobtrusive way is just a sensible thing for a gas station to do. It's about the same as the decals they have on their windows to advertise that shit
I've never seen a better advertisement for electric cars in my life.
Where I used to be, charging stations all demanded their own individual bazinga apps, which made it so you needed multiple bazinga apps and all their consequent surveillance and advertising clutter on your phone just to charge anywhere outside of your routine.
Play around with the buttons. If there are multiple buttons available, press and hold them all down at the same time for a few seconds. I've noticed it sometimes mutes or turns off the ads.