Lemuel tried to warn them but they wouldn't listen and the Slovak parliament went ahead and voted for probably the most ridiculous law of the year: Zdenka Kramplova's (pictured) attempt to outlaw noisy adverts. There's a Slovak version of the story here.
The trouble is that Slovak television companies have realised that everyone goes and makes a cup of tea when the adverts come on or else falls asleep during the boring programmes and in order to get their attention the adverts are on average 3-6 decibels louder than the programmes. Sometimes the jump is quite a shock and irritating. You can see Ms. Kramplova's logic. I guess she imagined headlines about parliament finally responding to people's real concerns. Is it really necessary to point out that parliament should only address issues that only parliament can sort out and that this annoyance might be better dealt with by people bad-mouthing tv companies every chance they got or watching other channels or giving up on the ludicrous practice of surrendering control of their eyeballs in return for low-quality, lowest common denominator entertainment? Aparently there's even a technical fix, since TVs are available that automatically adjust channel volumes to an average level. Even Fico's government, which seldom misses an oppportunity to extend its meddlesome influence threw the proposal out. But no, law makers consider meddling in a pseudo-popular cause to be doing their job.
The law isn't even a decent piece of work. It includes no rules for measuring the "noisiness" of an advert and no penalties for breaking it.
Somewhere under this there are interesting discussions about the deal we make with media companies in return for giving up our privacy and agreeing to watch adverts, or the way the government tries to force itself into all relationships as an honest broker instead of empowering people to look after their own interests but I'm not sure I want to dignify Kramplova by associating her grab at the limelight with anything half-way relevant.
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