I'm unfortunately very familiar with this town. It's an industrial wasteland with no real job market and drugs are rampant.

This story is unfortunately not at all surprising.

Thanks for your response! If you light events with broadcast cameras, I am the annoying video engineer behind the camera controls asking about flicker and color balance. I hope they keep making y'all's specialty bulbs. Looks like there's a big list of exceptions!

Condolences OP. Mine got bent recently too and it's not looking good...

Several cities, including Paris and Grenoble in France, São Paulo in Brazil, and Chennai in India have taken concrete steps in this direction. In São Paulo, ads are banned from certain parts of the city, and in Paris, they are prohibited near schools.

Several more cities are following suit, with a growing ad-free movement aiming to make cities a better place to live. ‘Adfree Cities,’ a UK-based nonprofit, is one such example. Cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, and Cardiff are part of its network, attempting to drastically reduce the amount of urban advertising

This is an excellent trend, and one that only lobbyists would fight against.

Since the online advert bubble seems to be bursting, I'm going to take that as a glimmer of hope. And until then, VPN maximus, ads be gone!

I wish more people understood that rural life is really freaking hard, especially if you don't already have connections.

the replacement will have switches for enabling / disabling the camera, microphone

DIY or have my dreams come true and there really is something like this on the market???

Wow... I'm new here so I'm still learning how all this works but I tried to apply to beehaw at first and they were having severe issues with their approval system so I either got denied or, most likely, got stuck in application purgatory.

Honestly, with how Lemmy is set up, it seems like it makes more sense to cater your instance to a more niche crowd than "all nice people" like beehaw was attempting to do.