Paleo Retiree writes:

That’s a snapshot of a departure/arrival screen in a California airport. How do you feel about the fact that an ad is taking up the right-hand quarter of the screen?

A few days before flying to California I needed to go to the post office to tell them to forward my mail. Here’s what the single sheet of paper I needed to fill out looked like:

Simple, eh? Now here’s the envelope, full of advertising material, that it came buried in:

Do you love having to wade your way through mountains of ads to perform even minor chores? How do you feel about the fact that so many of our official bureaucracies — or at least their communications with us — are now ad-sponsored? Is a country that is nothing but a big marketplace really much of a country at all?

But on second thought maybe it’s all OK, because occasionally one of the commercial messages we’re drowning in is for an indisputably worthy cause:

Commerce — and diversity — uber alles, baby.

Related

• Why does the fact that ads are showing up in so many absurd new places irk me so? Maybe it’s partly a function of age. Fun to learn that the syndrome has its own name, and even has its own Wikipedia entry.
• Does America have no class — no class at all — about where we’re willing to tolerate ads?
• Fabrizio confesses that he likes and enjoys stereotypes.