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That's exactly what I find so beautiful about such things. It's a functionally useless slab of metal put there ONLY for the purpose of stealing people's glances so that some other company can better extract money from those people. The amount of effort involved in getting all that metal and plastic and ink and etc. arranged in that way is far from trivial, and it's all in service of something that is basically wishful thinking on the part of the company, that it will have some marginal positive effect on the money they can extract from the public. It's a reflection of an immense amount of freedom and excess wealth in the society, which I find beautiful.
Yeah. Pompeii's collection of ads/graffiti arguably teaches modern archeologists just as much as the buildings themselves about the views, needs, wishes and messaging of their society.
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I'm upvoting you not because you've convinced me, but because I love reading things I disagree with so strongly defended so eloquently. Cheers!
I suppose you're actually swaying me a little bit. Although I wouldn't say "freedom" must necessarily include the idea that property rights in real estate extend indefinitely above it, even that idea would often be better than the common NIMBY status quo, and finding a good balance in between the two is hard.
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