Due to journo's lazyness headline became misleading: in Belarus votes are not really counted anymore. Like literally, numbers are taken out of thin air. So it's not like "referendum approves" anything - it's Lukashenka decides
Headline is misleading, and should be corrected. Not being American I went to look for the context, and the issue is about selection of books for educational system. Not about banning. Whether it is a successful way to shape better students is a interesting question to discuss. But fact is that all taxpayer-funded education all over the world includes selection of books for pupils.
Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns).
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Well, not every roof over a busstop bench needs to look the same. With ads it does. Plant (different!) trees inplace of the billboards. Or (god forbid) just let your local graffiti-guy spray there...
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
> ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance
If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.
> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.
For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful. Second: ok, replace ads with landscaping. One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
> For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful.
Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.
> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.
Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.
It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).
I doubt there was a global women poll on this issue. And strongly suspect even if existed it wouldn't show that majority of women even care. You are welcome to change my mind
Your stance looks self-contradictory. An introduced change either brings enhancement, or not. In the latter case you wouldn't expect anybody to be excited. It means one only gets dopamine boost when getting closer to a goal set, i.e. the feedback works absolutely right. If after a bunch of such changes one arrives at "barely working" it indicates poorly defined goal, and/or lack of underlying knowledge. And has nothing to do with length of compilation. Actually, that's what we can expect from beginners, right? With quicker feedback they, most likely, will have a chance to absorb knowledge quicker.
It's really easy to avoid intrusive ads these days: don't waste any time on TV, sign out of social platforms, use Brave, or any browser with adblocking - you're 99% done with it. As for more subtle kinds of advertising, banning it would require killing media, publishing, entertainment, and even large swaths of education.
When you criticize you have to concentrate on what you see as wrong (i.e. weakest points) unless you plan to write a full review of review, so "cherrypicking" sounds rather unwarranted here.
I found that between "I already have it digital", and "I will have it digital once I get to a scanner with a paper-feeder" the distance is too big to my liking. Also it's easier to name/annotate my handwriting (to make it searcheable) right after I finished scribing, then to sort out a whole notebook later. That said, I can imagine a paper-fed scanner to be well enough solution for many people, who already have an easy access to it.
Web browsing on e-ink is widely known to be barely usable, and not what e-readers are made to do. So usage of "even" word is hard to explain here really.
I admitted I didn't have any experience using e-readers before, so please forgive my ignorance. But in defence of me and all the other ignorant buyers, when a device is sold with the argument that it is a fully functional Android device, one might suspect that you'd be able to run some apps on it without too many problems.
This is from the Boox site itself:
> The book is based on the Android 10.0 operating system, which allows third-party applications to be installed on the device and significantly expands the scope of its application
Marketing texts happen to be misleading more often than not. But this exact excerpt you cited looks innocent to me. "Significantly" is subjective, of course, but other than that it's correct.
