I think it's fine to be uncomfortable without your phone. It's understandable: they do so many useful things.
However, it turns out what this post is really about is work communication, not about the functionality of phones that enhance our lives.
When you're trying to get friends together, find a nice place to eat, and get directions to meet up, having a phone is far better than not having one. I wouldn't want to be without a phone during a car crash or medical emergency, either.
In contrast, when it comes to your employer's demands on you, the phone isn't so nice to have around, is it?
My suggestion is to set notification boundaries for work-based communication and always be looking for opportunities to leave employers that violate the boundaries in your life.
> I think it's fine to be uncomfortable without your phone. It's understandable: they do so many useful things.
The problem is that you can't take what's in your phone and have it somewhere else: for example a web-browser in a public space like a library or an internet cafe. If that were possible, then it would be less of a problem to leave your phone at home.
Just have a separate work phone and leave that at home. It's better for a lot of other reasons too regarding you controlling your phone instead of your employer.
I dont mind leaving my phone as long as I’m with my kids. I cant imagine something happening to them and I didnt know for x-amount of time because I decided to leave my phone.
Being forced to pay for council parking in the UK using a mobile app is completely astonishing to me, and leaving home without your mobile, or no data or a broken phone can cause you a world of difficulties.
I didn't agree to wanting to normalise the removal of parking meters and mandatory app usage just to park your car in a park or highsteet. I'm not sure where this motivation started.
at least individual spot meters were reduced to block meters so that there was less physical infrastructure to maintain.
in my city part of the motivation is data collection; rates are adjusted block by block based on the last quarter's occupancy relative to targets, and among other things the app nudges people towards slightly less optimal parking spots that are either cheaper or more available.
you can put a QR code on a metal sheet nailed to a post and call it a day. And at least where I live the app option is also accompanied by an SMS number to text payments to.
An actual payment terminal requires electricity, a network connection and maintenance. And it has to be rugged to deal with the outdoors environment. If it takes cash, it also needs to be fairly rugged to prevent people from making off with the cash, and the cash receiving bits need a fair bit of maintenance as well.
If you have to have a phone to pay for things like parking or for proof of vaccination status, then you have to carry a locator beacon that can be tracked, and your movements can be recorded. Who records them (Google, Apple, someone else) is irrelevant; the record can be requisitioned by your government or a Five Eyes partner at the touch of a few buttons. Your locator beacon comes with handy built-in cameras and microphones, and it probably has speech-to-text capability on chip if you have a recent model. Also it's reading your mail and texts and encrypted chats, and you browse the web on it, so it potentially knows a lot about you. Good thing you can trust it not to spy on you.
Turning off a spy-phone does nothing to prevent them from tracking you. You need to either take the battery out (impossible with most spy-phones) or use a faraday bag.
Was there literally no alternative? Round these parts you can pay in cash (with no change given). I've heard people complain they were forced to use the app when they just didn't have any cash.
(I have to be aware of the alternatives because I don't have a smartphone. It's not been an insurmountable problem yet.)
Some have extended to non-residential areas. One of the biggest parking apps says this:
Q: "I have no network coverage and need to park?"
A: "Move quickly to an area with better network coverage and complete your parking transaction with PayByPhone... Pay for your parking via other methods such as PayPoint or via the Pay & Display machine where available"
FYI 'Pay and Display' are the parking meters being removed, 'PayPoint' might be in SOME convenience stores/shops. But if you know London these can be 20-30 mins walk or none there are all at your parking destination. Good luck attending an appointment during work lunch times!
Tangentially - I’m always astonished at the lack of self-awareness of many municipal/utility service providers - they pretend like I’ve sought out their service and WANT to engage with them, when in fact I just want them to provide me the thing I need (or am obligated to do) with as little hassle as possible…
Similarly, I went out to dinner Friday and could not scan the QR code to view the menu because I decided to leave my phone in the car. I asked for a a physical menu and was told they literally do not have them anymore. Had to hunch over my friend's phone instead.
This is mostly regional in my experience in Atlanta: everyone moved back to paper/laminated menus ASAP, as soon as any concerns for covid on objects were alleviated. Only a few businesses took it as an opportunity to save the manager the workflow of needing to print out and prepare physical menus.
In the US, you already need a phone to charge an EV (of course, the EV has a cell modem anyway, and license plate tracking cameras are becoming ubiquitous too...)
My phone screen was cracked, I had to leave it with the repair place for an hour or two. It was glorious.
I leisurely strolled past shops, sat down to eat something without being distracted, and generally enjoyed being outside. I had to ask someone for the time.
I resolved to go without phones more often, as it made me feel connected to me environment more, with less stress and reduced absentmindedness.
Of course I never did and promptly returned to my 4+ hrs/day of phone time. I am not ashamed to admit I feel somewhat uncomfortable pooping without my phone.
You know, outdoors or near a window I'm pretty good at that. But I easily lose track of time when indoors, or at night. Especially if for some reason I wake up hours earlier than normal, I'll think it must be 12 or 1AM, only to see that it's barely 10.
pooping with phone now.
now and then i try pooping without it just in the interest of time. and saving my legs from falling asleep.
not often though. bad habit.
now I enjoy going for 1-2h walks waaay more cuz I can just listen to music and disconnect myself from the people around and focus on thinking about various stuff
Sure sitting at train and thinking about your life instead of spamming on HN is likely a good thing, but sometimes it's just awkward - depends who you sit with
You know we had ways to listen to music on the go in the pre-smartphone era, right? From Walkman, Discman over to mobile MP3 players etc.
I have feature phone I use to disconnect, it can play music plus I have a list of 10 close contacts that I can call in case of emergency (or 911 of course). There is no need for a smartphone to cover basic security needs.
I feel uncomfortable leaving without my phone, for one simple reason: I’m typically leaving with my pup, and if anything happens to either of us I want to be able to call for help. Pay phones are basically non-existent, people understandably don’t like to let strangers use their phone. It’s just a basic precaution.
I've definitely had this problem. There were times I lost my phone and had to get back home. No one would let me use their phone. It was not until I begged a gas station attendant to let me call someone I knew who could pick me up, that I was able to get home.
Only anecdata, but I’ve experienced it directly, and I’ve also helped other people out when I saw them experiencing the same. I’m a little surprised by this response to be honest?
My personal experience is that I have never had someone decline to let me use their phone. I believe people are default kind and interested in helping others, and it's hard to imagine that in a random sample of say, 5 people, none would let you use their phone for a few minutes.
I have had this same thought in the past. I came to the conclusions that it’s a psychological trick we’re playing on ourselves. The mitigation against such a low risk event is not worth the price we’re paying.
I mean, what price? It’s just a little extra weight in my pocket. I’m not using it while I walk my pup. It’s always on silent and I seldom notice the occasional buzz.
I lived to my mid-30s before I ever carried a mobile phone. In that time I do not recall ever needing to call 911 on a pay phone. How often has a mobile phone helped you in an emergency? For me, never. I think this is one of those easy-to-imagine-but-in-reality-rarely-happens justifications.
The local university here has these emergency call-for-help stations all over campus. They have a blue light on top so they are easy to find especially at night. A couple of years ago there was a little feature story in the newspaper about how they had never--not once--been used in a real emergency. But the university did not want to take them down because they provided a feeling of security.
> A couple of years ago there was a little feature story in the newspaper about how they had never--not once--been used in a real emergency. But the university did not want to take them down because they provided a feeling of security.
How many real emergencies occurred near one of these boxes?
Probably none, if they were never used. Again supporting the idea that they are better at creating a feeling of security than actually making any difference.
Maybe no emergencies occurred because of the presence of these emergency call stations. (At least those perpetrated by other people, i.e. assaults, thefts, etc.—I presume potential perpetrators would be discouraged by the presence of these call stations.)
Creating a feeling of security is as important as creating security—you need both.
Well not that I live in a bad neighborhood or anything like that, but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid.
If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swap out the SIM from the dumbphone to your smartphone if your threat model requires you to.
> but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid.
It would be nice to not live that way sometimes you know? There are places where people aren’t conditioned to feel that way.
You make it sound sinister like you’re expecting to be mugged, but I’ve called 911 on behalf of others by being the first to come across their roadside accident 2 different times in my life, and the first one wouldn’t have been able to call themselves due to injuries. Not having a phone would have meant leaving the scenes, driving to the next exit and finding a gas station or house, explaining there was an accident and pleading to use the phone, drawing out their time sitting injured on the roadside by several minutes before emergency services were even notified.
I’ve also been the first to report tree limbs blocking roads and a water main that burst to non-emergency lines, again expediting services to fix them and reducing inconvenience overall.
I’ve never felt like this was some conditioning of paranoia, only that I was enabled to help in ways that I wasn’t able to 20 years ago.
You could read his post as him living with constant threats of victimization (this is how I read your comment) but it applies equally well to medical emergencies. I happened to be in such a situation once and it was stressful enough with medical guidance on the phone and assurances that the ambulance was on its way
I will not risk to have to face such a situation alone or have to leave a person in distress just to call for help
I understand how annoying stalking on the HN forum must be — I have literally 1 question about YC application (it's NOT "Can you revise the whole thing?")
would be insanely forever grateful if you'd come down and talk to me
NB my email is in profile
Pre-phones, you had functional payphones, etc, around to summon help with. People were more likely to be understanding and to make a call for you if you knocked on their door.
I had to hike to a payphone a couple of times when I was stranded. That wouldn't work anymore.
To reach the level of security that I had as a teenager, I need a mobile phone.
There's places where a phone won't help you at all. On the other hand, just screaming will. Screaming, like not yelling, screaming. Helped me out exactly three weeks ago today, when I was getting coercively shepherded by supermarket guards, into the supermarket, because the cashier accused me of not paying. But they weren't interested in seeing my receipt. Just in harassing me. Fortunately Jessica at the Farmacias Manríquez (near Merced and José Miguel de la Barra in downtown Santiago) across the street heard me scream "I want you to call the real cops! You have no right to do this! Look at my receipt!" (in Spanish of course) and called my people, whom I couldn't reach because I left my phone at home. And they showed up, asked what the fuck, and I talked to the lawyer extensively about it, he agreed it was harassment and coercive threats.
Who knew, screaming calls attention? And I couldn't use a phone because my hands were full, I was carrying glass bottles home that way because I didn't want to pay for a plastic bag. If I dropped them, they would say since they accused me of stealing them that I destroyed the merchandise and was a thief for sure. And then taken me to the ground and beat me up, that's their job basically.
Yes but I disagree that they'd have broken the bottles had they put down a bag. I've had bottles in bags and not once did I break them by setting them down. They could've easily put the bottles down and called the police on their phone, if they brought it with them.
I didn't have a bag, that's what started it all. You don't get bags anymore in Chile[2]. The cashier, CE. NEWEN according to the receipt, accused me of not paying apparently in retaliation for my saying the plastic bag she offered was not worth the 57 cents the Walmart subsidiary charged for it (490 Chilean pesos)[1]. I decided to go without. Until her accusation that I didn't pay, I was carrying everything carefully in my arms.
So I was carrying two pint-sized cans of beer, a glass jar of olives, and a glass jar of anchovies all in my arms. Needed a surface if I was to set them down, in fact after being shepherded I set them down in an empty shopping cart before I could take out the receipt in my pocket, so my turn to make demands began.
[1] So this was the event that changed my attitude and just divulge on Hacker News.
[2] It's always minimal shit, one time it was over 1 cent in electricity, for which I offered to pay a dollar on the spot. Always minimal shit. Those plastic bags cost like 1.3 cents apiece, to make. Pure profit.
[3] And since this, I bring my own, which was the government's idea in not supplying bags any longer.
> Fortunately Jessica at the Farmacias Manríquez (near Merced and José Miguel de la Barra in downtown Santiago) across the street heard me scream "I want you to call the real cops! You have no right to do this! Look at my receipt!" (in Spanish of course) and called my people
Maybe social circles in south america are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones I have, but in an urban area it seems unlikely that there's going to be a random passer by that would know you well enough that they can "call your people"
> And I couldn't use a phone because my hands were full, I was carrying glass bottles home that way because I didn't want to pay for a plastic bag. If I dropped them, they would say since they accused me of stealing them that I destroyed the merchandise and was a thief for sure.
Why was slowly putting the bottles down and then getting out your phone not an option?
> Why was slowly putting the bottles down and then getting out your phone not an option?
It was not an option. I needed a counter to set them down, or drop the glass on the pavement.
The other factor was their verbal and physical impatience. They could have sent only two guards, that would have been fine, they sent four and there were two more a little farther away. That's excessive, that's coercive. They look pissed, so they practice their faces that's part of it, I've seen private security make faces before especially in "Fuck the Law" psych wards. It is tied to their expectation that their demands (not orders, that implies some real authority) be obeyed.
So if an interrogator has tortured a hundred people he will be at some point a coercion magician, need only make a gesture or hint to get people to see in him that in his mind he intends to torture the sufferer, because that was true for a hundred people before. People can see it easily. So these guys expected, because they had in fact ganged up four-on-one when feeling brave, in this case six-on-one because they were feeling cowardly, talking to a lawyer about it they definitely YES kick people on the floor, maleteo as it's called, suit-casing. That's a real thing they definitely do all the time when nobody's looking. So that experience is imprinted in their face, movements and attitude when they order me, impolitely, and refuse to look at a receipt, to come back into the supermarket. So by reflecting in their attitude the experience of coercion and beatings, they communicated to me, unarguably, but in a way they think leaves no proof, that I either did exactly what they said right away or they would attack me.
Maybe that explains the lack of choice...but really I think it was the food was meant to be eaten with special thanks given to GOD for it. Small feast. That was the real reason I couldn't drop it, so I couldn't duke it out either, hence screaming. Those guards can suck it, obviously if they need to gang up six-on-one they're worthless fighters. It would have been my first sevensome.
So in reply to the posters who said I could still have used a phone: I could not. I had an Apple iPhone of exactly the kind covered in the class-action lawsuit, of which there was one in Chile, and I was eligible for the payout, still am in fact, it's like 170 dollars. But I haven't.
So I left that one at home, and in fact one of the people who came grilled me over and over as we walked down Victoria Subercaseaux "why didn't you bring your phone?" "WHY DIDN'T YOU BRING YOUR PHONE?"
Well I told him I had a similar phone, just no radio, and was connecting to the Walmart subsidiary's wifi with it, explicitly ordering the guards for the password after the cashier, CE NEWEN according to the receipt, made her premeditated apology. But surprise, screaming worked. It actually worked better! It was much better for someone else to call on my behalf than for me to call myself. And secondly, too predictable, they can tear the phone out of your hands, these guards were in gang-up beating mode, so they would not have tolerated a phone, the obvious choice. Very impatient and there were six of them, apparently armed.
When I got home and received a call, the phone I was supposed to take, its battery died. So battery would have died calling people on my own behalf, when the battery dies unexpectedly, the battery meter acts weird, it's not like getting locked out, when it dies it's a brick, you can't call emergency services.
I couldn't slowly put anything on the ground, these guards were in Fuck the Law mode. Evidently, because they never had any interest in my receipt, or my testimony. Six, 6 guards, shepherding me coercively back to the Walmart subsidiary where they controlled all the cameras and knew the terrain, could make up any shit they wanted. And a lawyer that came, called Nacho, told me exactly that, these guys don't like calling police because they want that power for themselves.
The uniforms say SWAT on them, S-W-A-T, supposedly it's SWAT-branded private security apparel, nothing to do with American Special Weapons And Tactics like in the movies. Like Apple computer having nothing to do with apples, just a brandname, "nombre de fantasía", it's not like actual fruit. So they're trying to intimidate people with the power of the law, precisely so people don't dare defend themselves, to imply their victim will get accused resisting arrest.
I'm not really blaming you here, this attidue is very normal these days, but a mere 25 years ago, most people had no cell phone, no mobile phone, and never, ever suffered mishap as a result.
(Inconvenience is not what I call a mishap)
I grew up in the country, and a few times had to walk 20 miles home, due to a dead car. Being a rural area, after 10pm, I might see 1 or 2 cars the entire walk home (4 hours and a bit).
During the day, there were times my car broke down, or I ran out of gas, so knocking on doors (a mile or so usually awake) was a better choice.
Often, a kind person would have some gas.
Compare this to ... the city. If you can yell loudly, literally thousands of people can hear you.
25 years ago there was a pay phone in every gas station, and in denser areas in every corner market, bus terminal, grocery store, hotel, ..., not mentioning those installed directly along the street.
People also didn’t live under the expectation of being reachable 24/7.
Similarly, people used paper maps while driving which were cumbersome, but didn’t live under the expectation or the opportunity of traveling to new locations regularly.
By traveling to new places, I even just mean that Yelp and Google, coupled with GPS navigation, allow people to more regularly patronize new businesses in the localities they reside in. So it’s much more frequent to be driving to somewhere unfamiliar.
You are the one projecting here. I don’t feel like I’m personally under those expectations, but I definitely see that in other people’s lives. Try to use less inflammatory language on this forum.
Now instead of pay phones in gas stations, if you have an emergency virtually every other person you might meet can call 911 for you on the spot, without having to run off to find a pay phone.
There are mountain tops that have cell service now days (great line of sight!). People get lost in the woods pretty often.
Heck just having a compass + map that works offline can get people unstuck. How many lost person stories used to end with "and he died just a few miles from the nearest town"?
Of course that sentence is now relegated to history because because almost everyone has a GPS in their pocket!
I think the government should really make a big deal out of satellite messengers being cheap and available for all hikers.
What if they subsidized them so that you could make emergency calls with no monthly fee? I wonder how many lives they would save if it was so readily available people didn't think of leaving cell range without one?
25 years ago, the cars also didn't have much crash safety compared to today and they did survive without seatbelts and airbags in metal cages without crumple zones, too!*
Hell, 80 years ago planes took off without any electronics and with high explosives on board, were shot at and even returned!*
* except for those who did not
Sure, most people didn't die because of lacking safety nets. But some did and I don't think "it worked for most without" is a sufficient argument to ditch them.
>but a mere 25 years ago, most people had no cell phone, no mobile phone, and never, ever suffered mishap as a result.
But that just isn't true. Being able to use a mobile radio to summon emergency services earlier has statistically significant association with improved outcomes [0]. It isn't just about what happens to you, it's about what you can do for others you come across in emergencies. 25 years ago, I'd need to drive a minimum of 15-30 minutes to the nearest house and hope I was able to use their landline (or break in I guess?), or maybe there would be an open service station within that distance (often not). People died (still do) or suffer serious injury getting lost in the woods very close to home. I nearly did once in the 90s, cross country skiing and being foolish. I went out in the afternoon on a gray, gray overcast day, zero shadows, fresh snow, and as a skier since a child I felt overly confident and didn't take a normal fanny pack even with light (back then of course lamps were a lot crappier pre-LED), water or whatever. It got dark fast, by this point about 15°F, and I got completely, utterly confused. I knew I should be close and indeed reconstructing afterwards (finding my own tracks later in the week) I was within 1/2 mile or so. But it was a half mile through old forest without that clear trails. Fortunately I had had some outdoor training and recognized this was genuine trouble, I didn't try to go back in the woods but crossed a frozen swamp and broke for a farm field, and then from there to an actual house whose light I could see and use as a guide about a mile and a half away. Even if no one was home there'd at least be a road I could follow, fortunately there was someone and I could beg to use their landline and call a friend. But there were directions of travel I could have gone there with no one, and no road, for 6+ miles of mountainy forest. And if one succumbs to panic, it's easy to end up spending hours going in circles, or even without because sense of direction is hard with zero markers, no stars or the like. Or are fine, but fall and break a leg or something. This happens. People die. I and friends worked as First Responders and later mountain rescue volunteers of various levels. It's all well and good to say "well you should never do that" but humans are imperfect, even experienced ones. Having access to quite accurate near term weather forecasts alone is just massive, a boon a lot of us don't stop to appreciate.
Obviously, as tools cell phones have other risks. It's possible to get overconfident with them and take risks that negate the benefits. People have died due to silly things like literally stepping backwards over a cliff trying to get the perfect selfie. And there are other negative effects as this article talks about. Nevertheless, it's wrong to claim everything was fine back in "the good old days" when life expectancy was significantly lower [1]. You don't have to have a fancy smart phone to have a basic comms, GPS and map, but that doesn't negate how valuable those can be.
Have you actually lived in the time before cellphones?
I have a hard time imagining anyone not having been in a situation that was made dangerous by the lack of ability to communicate with others. Muggings, beatings, rapes, killings. Accidents, car crashes. Running out of gas, getting lost, losing your wallet. Being unable to reach family for an emergency when they're out.
Even meeting up with your friends was a pain in the ass.
The "connectedness" can be annoying or overwhelming, and the feeling of security when carrying a phone is probably overestimated in our heads, but before phones and cctvs any random moron could just kill you and get away with it if nobody was around. Some of the safety we feel is very real indeed.
It's a radio I can use to summon help. Why would I _ever_ want to be without that?
Turn the notifications off, or get something like Tasker that can turn them off and on for you on a schedule. Otherwise, keep it in your pocket. This device has no control over you that you don't allow it to have.
> It's a radio I can use to summon help. Why would I _ever_ want to be without that?
I think it's good for you to occasionally to know that you are on your own. Completely responsible on what you do. Be it on the nearby forest or in some more extreme situation. I am not sure the direction of (illusion of) ultrasafety where our society has been going is all good. Occasionally it's good to have the red pill instead of the blue. Keeps your mind clear.
On the other hand, people who don't have the "illusion of ultrasafety" seem to develop a habit of just accepting danger as part of life, to the point of actively speaking out against things like automatic detection for kids left in hot cars.
I think the "Blue pill" mindset is more useful overall. The red pill generally does nothing to build a safer world.
You... do understand that the "safest" world literally means you lying in a bombproof vat of fluid with all your sensory input produced virtually so that there is no way you can get into an accident that harms you physically?
A safe world is of course nice, i do not deny that. But I see higher goals for our society than that. And pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in is inherently not safe.
I can't honestly say I respect people for choosing the blue pill. However, I very much respect their right to make that choice. I'd also appreciate that blue pillers respected red pillers' right to make their choice and not try to prohibit and demean everything they think looks risky. (obviously, dichotomy is not this strong in the real world)
Only a tiny percentage of risks require any kind of disruptive measures like that. I suspect if it were plotted, there would be a very obvious point where 90% of safety gains happened in the first 10% of the disruptive projects.
Natural causes are a different matter, but external causes are often really easy to stop. Even murder seems to be partly preventable just by removing motives.
I don't think most blue pillers have much real disrespect for red pillers, except when it endangers the public, or stops attempts to make the general public safer.
There have been daredevils for a very long time, nobody is saying that we should ban space exploration or stunt performers Blue pillers like Jackass just as much as anyone else.
I think the "standard blue pill position" is more that there's already plenty of people who will want to be astronauts regardless of any discouragement, and we don't really need to try to make that kind of outlook the default target we should all aspire to, and in general, we should apply tech wherever possible to keep us safe.
Lots of things affect other people. House fires can kill a whole family even though only one was responsible for starting it. Mandatory smoke alarms do not majorly impact people's lives, and can prevent people from dying on account of someone else's actions.
If someone wants to, and has the economic means to go phoneless for a day as a personal challenge without getting fired, that's great, they should write an article about what they learned.
But every year kids get permanently injured for life on the football field. I think we should be careful not to create a culture that leads people to think that's "Just how life is", and suffer very preventable chronic pain or brain damage.
You are always on your own. We know from evidence that even in a city, if an extreme situation develops, you will almost certainly have to fend for yourself. Police have been known to turn their backs before putting themselves in certain danger and the ratio of police officers to citizens is something to actually ponder.
If you really thirst for that feeling of _onus_, then I can honestly suggest skydiving. You are extremely responsible for every little thing you do. Still, though, take your phone with you... you never know what might go wrong.
> This device has no control over you that you don't allow it to have.
I wish this were true. Phones leak data about users, which companies use to make profiles about you to serve you advertisements. Even if you block advertisements, the profile is still there. Companies are coming up with new ways to use this data. You can read more about that here:
A lot of them died, or suffered some horrible attack, unnecessarily. I don’t understand what the argument is here. We survived without antibiotics, but I sure wouldn’t like to have been seriously ill in a time without them.
Well, not to be contraversial, but you could also try living life without a 'threat model' assessment to live by. That sounds very close to living in fear, and that sounds miserable.
This "threat model" assessment doesn't come into play if your habit is to have it with you at all times. It's like how you have your wallet with you so you don't fear not being able to afford a trip home; you only really start having to assess these threats when you don't have your phone/wallet with you. The phone and wallet is thusly liberating you from such fear.
I liked that reflection. I’m lucky enough that my manager is very intentional in actively avoiding and mitigating any possible work related anything during the weekends.
When I get a call (as opposed to a slack message) it’s only because something is REALLY on fire.
This really allows me to disconnect completely from work with the assurance that in an extreme situation I could still be reached.
It’s also important to clarify what is considered important because honestly I get a call over the weekend to implement so “quick feature”, that would be a clear signal that it might be time to part ways with such company culture.
All I’m saying is, it starts with the individual marking the boundaries and then either talking the the manager or finding a place that respects those boundaries.
(I’m aware of some violations of boundaries from bosses that if they’d happen to me I’d likely seek for a restraining order!)
"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need."
So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death.
It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
Google has become blinded by metrics focused on giving people what an algorithm things most people want.
It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.
I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.
This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".
Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity. I have it and it sucks having your knees and elbows hurt for a week after eating a gluten rich pizza.
I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that doesn't actually mean it's unhealthy. It probably depends on everything else I'm eating, how much I'm burning off, maybe even something as fine-grained as how fast I drink it. You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that.
Anyway, sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I feel like people toss around things like "healthy diet" as if we're all supposed to know and agree what that means.
> You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that.
Eating bread every day is actually pretty common in some cultures and people don't even stop to think it's unhealthy because it's so commonplace, so even that varies.
The poster I was replying to said they had a gluten sensitivity, which is why I was saying he would probably find it an unhealthy part of his diet. I did not mean to imply that I think eating bread every day is unhealthy :)
I work with a guy who is a real, fully diagnosed celiac sufferer. The gluten-free fad has had serious consequences for him. Some restaurants don't take him seriously, claim gluten-free food when it isn't, and he gets seriously ill when that happens. He doesn't eat out so much any more because it's not worth the risk.
It absolutely increased availability. When my sibling was first diagnosed things like gluten free bread had to be ordered and shipped and were extremely expensive. Now they're available in many (mostly up-market) grocery stores, and while still expensive have come down in price a lot.
I’m currently on vacation and the hotel breakfast buffet has a gluten free bread option. Granted, it’s prepackaged toast, but I’d say it’s better than hungry.
There are plenty of foods that have never had gluten-containing ingredients, but have always been made in factories or contexts where they come into contact with gluten. Celiacs, and people with NCGS who have strong reactions, when given the option will usually avoid anything that hasn't been actively tested and confirmed gluten free. For things like a bag of rice, or produce, there isn't an option with that label for re-assurance, and then it's a gamble... the odds of a bag of rice containing gluten may be low, but with such big consequences it's still a gamble. So the proliferation of the GF label is useful. There have also been a ton of new products launched that are gluten free, so it's definitely not just a labeling thing.
A close friend of mine with celiac disease says it was a whole different world after 2014 or so. Like being on an alien planet and being in a familiar place.
In addition to celiac disease, which is not actually so rare - only about 3 times as rare as red hair - there is also Wheat Allergy, which is very real and detectable by measuring immune responses - and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS).
Most of the "health fad" people you're talking about would probably self-categorize themselves as NCGS, but that doesn't mean that everybody who is NCGS is part of a health fad. Double-blind "challenge" studies where people are unaware if what they are eating contains wheat/gluten have confirmed that for some people this is definitely real and not a made up fad.
I'm not denying the existence of people going gluten free for fad or orthorexia reasons, but be careful when you lump everyone who is gluten free for non-celiac reasons into that category.
Honestly I’m just surprised it’s so profitable to be so spammy that this stuff is persisting. That said, when I see shit results, I hardly ever bother to click on the second page any longer. Perhaps the seo spam taking up the near-but-not-top results are the biggest schmucks of all, since they are probably putting in at least a little money/effort to get there, I would imagine?
Little nitpick: "the algorithm" does not even find the things "most people wants"; it finds the things some executive or other decided it was the most convenient to find taking into account the needs of the corporation only. Yes, there is theoretically some way to return, up to some degree, what people would find useful; but the decisions are not made by the people fiddling with the algorithms. Those people have their hands tied and must follow the interests of someone who most of the time knows nothing about algorithms or people or the end product.
Google has become borderline unusable for finding something that's not popular that's more than a month or year old. Multiple times I have spent more than 5 to 10 minutes trying to find something I have read a few years or even a few months ago and it's next to impossible to find it, even with time gating the results Google just keeps returning popular search results over specificity. The long tail is just ignored in their current algo.
People are constantly saying these things about google and when I search for:
"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal"
I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.
It fails if you search for the incorrect quote; the last sentence should start "With" and not "Without". Checking competitors, Bing fails to find any variation of the quote, Yandex returns 5 results if you remove the incorrect word and quote it, but returns garbage otherwise. Considering the single-digit number of results for an apparently very obscure quote, and that it was incorrect, this does seem reasonable.
I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?
Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know
It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.
(I misunderstood your comment initially so corrected this sentence) The problem is that the sentence is typo'd so searching for the exact quote (not keywords) doesn't work correctly. For the record the actual quote is:
>With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need
When you Google that in quotes you get actual results from Google Books and Goodreads, while Bing/DuckDuckGo only returns an archive from a random blog that quotes it halfway down the page, and the new hot search engine Brave finds nothing. I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
> I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
But can you imagine the aggravation if Google chooses to do the opposite and 'helpfully' 'corrects' your quotes for you? Actually I am not sure I have to imagine...
Definitely hands off my quote searches, but one might hope that if you took out the quotation marks it would be able to pick up the correct quote. In fact it can if you change around certain words in the first sentence (Stories set in the Culture...). I think what's going on is that "without a terminal..." is not such a well known quote and has some pretty broadly applicable keywords (terminal...question...help), while combining the more unique set of keywords from "stories set in the culture...", which is a more well known quote, is more likely to lead the search engine to the quote even if you're missing one of the keywords in it due to a typo.
For me on duckduckgo, the first two results are this thread and the fourth is the story itself.
>There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.
>A terminal was safety.
>So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.
Our cell phones might sometimes be pretty useful devices, but they're not quite capable of that sort of thing yet.
Still, you can walk around and explore without using it, while still having it along in a pocket just in case you do the modern equivalent of fall off a cliff or get decapitated. Just better hope you have cell service and your battery is charged up if you do.
I got a smartphone 10 years ago after a trip where I got lost in an unfamiliar city at night. I did manage to navigate my way around by sense of direction and spotting buildings and river, and was just a little late to the party I was going to. But I thought something with maps would be more useful than a flip-phone if I ever got lost while traveling again.
A few years later, exploring randomly in the mountains a couple of states away with my wife, we pulled into a small town late one evening and got out our phones to look for a place to eat and a place to stay. No service, for either of us. So we just wandered around the town with our eyes open and asked people. Found a great restaurant and a nice quiet little bed and breakfast. Once again serendipity beat the cell phone.
What is more concerning is that kids who've grown up with them their entire lives just might not be able to handle that sort of thing. They might just freak out as much as if they had fallen off a cliff or something.
Disconnecting from work should be fine. That's a boundary most should have outside of high stakes life and death jobs. Even then, coverage by more than one person should be warranted, and paid for.
Personal phone? That's my lifeline to civilization if something bad happens. Also an AV capture device.
Are people not terrified at the 50% chance the entire society and environment we live in is being engineered to require us to carry tracking and surveillance devices on us 24/7 for sinister purposes down the road ?? I'd argue its even more than a 50% chance after what happened with Australia and Canada recently
I was on holiday once with my friends in Amsterdam. After a few too many drinks and committing a sin and having a wee in the canal (sorry! When a man's gotta go he's gotta go - as an aside what's it with bars, clubs & fast food chains there etc. charging to use the toilet?!) a guy came up to me and started talking to me, can't really remember what he said to me, all I remember is checking my pocket and my new OnePlus 3t phone had disappeared. Karma I suppose.
We had another leg of the holiday in Finland (Helsinki) and then back to Amsterdam again for another day before returning to the UK. It was painful where all my friends had their phones and could take pictures etc. and I couldn't.
I couldn't even borrow a friend's phone to check emails/Facebook etc. as I'm security conscious and have 2FA enabled on all my accounts, and use a password manager with generated passwords also. My less technically inclined friends called me an idiot.
Thankfully when I got back to the UK I was able to get a replacement SIM card the next day from the network provider's store and I had an older Android phone to use for the time being and was able to go through the Authy SMS recovery process to get my 2FA codes back.
I've taken to trying to have a spare blank SIM and old phone with me. The last time I activated a phone I was dumb and left the old one at home on an hour trip. I went through all my accounts and just barely got my stuff to activate on my new phone without my old one. Also pointed out flaws in my 2fa setup, but hey.
I've gotten used to having my phone on silent and most notifications turned off. I leave text and phone notifications on so I can see them on the lock screen when I decide to look at the phone.
For moments when I actually need to be aware of any communications or be in sync with family and friends, I can turn on the ringer or turn on specific notifications.
I think this has helped me get away from the constant distraction but keeps the utility of the phone near. It annoys me when, during conversations, people constantly check their phone and smart watch every few minutes because of the buzz in their pocket or their wrist.
I have also found going on weekend backpacking trips has weaned me off of the phone and technology in general. I would recommend it for those looking to take a break.
I don't think it's healthy or normal to feel uncomfortable without a
communications device. It's a sign of dependency. One should be able
to put it out of mind and focus on deep tasks, leisure, interpersonal
commitments and general real-life living without a neurotic impulse to
check and inhabit a digital world.
I don't have a smartphone (prefer a landline but keep an old Nokia
around too), so my life is more organised around emails and desktop
based communication. I recognised back in the 90s that it used to take
me hours to "decompress" from tech immersion. I would ruminate on what
messages I might be missing, and think through communications in my
mind in a quite obsessive way.
That was over 20 years ago. These days I'll go for a couple of days
without thinking about the internet. I can happily live without a
phone for a week or more no worries, and frequently do.
It's a long journey and there are constant pressures and temptations
to over-use again. I wrote a book about coping with that.
It probably sounds as if I'm talking like a cognitive behavioural
therapist. That's because I truly believe that smartphone use is fully
congruent with addictive behaviours - not just for a few people, as
was common thinking a few years ago, but for everybody, and as
mounting scientific evidence supports there are numerous genuine harms
both individual and societal [1]. In 2022 I no longer feel alone or
unusual in this regard, because I see the world is waking up to it.
The question then is how we raise awareness of this emerging threat to
mental wellbeing, and how we deal with it. Mobile technology certainly
has its uses, but we must balance that with social/technological
structures that give people ample space to control their own
technology, make space and abstain from it as desired. A truly
advanced technological society would meet this need. At present the
gushing convergence on smartphones as "necessary" panacea is
pathological in the extreme, and I am sure, simply fuelled by the
profits of the tech industry rather than any underlying "need".
Technology is becoming what is being _done_ to us.
[1] No I won't. Please have the good manners to Google for yourself
(or go back through my many well refernced posts here).
That's nice and all, but when I travel overseas having a universal translator with me is super cool.
Being able to order a safe reliable taxi in most major cities, also super cool.
If you don't want email on your phone, don't set it up. But having a map that redirects me around traffic accidents in real time saves me a lot of time.
I'm not going to argue against smartphones being horrible little dopamine boxes, because they are, but you can get a smartphone and set it up as a purely utilitarian device rather easily.
You're absolutely right kid. Sincerely. I look forward to the day when
the real utility shines through again. And I come from a time (as a
now well bearded computer nerd) when it was all utility and coolness.
But we're in some weird in-between days [1] where motivations have
gotten distorted, ideals have got lost, and the utility just isn't
enough any more to stave of the wrongness.
FWIW I'm an optimist and beleieve we'll make it through and take back
tech, but right now we need to take a long look at this.
[1] The fancy word is "interregnum" - a period "caught between two
times, one world that is already dead, and the other waiting to be
born."
> You're absolutely right kid. Sincerely. I look forward to the day when the real utility shines through again. And I come from a time (as a now well bearded computer nerd) when it was all utility and coolness.
Sure, my Palm was amazingly useful, a much better productivity tool than my smartphone is, minus the maps and real time data stuff.
Having a button dedicated to "pull up my todo list" is a life changer. I wish I could buy a smartphone that did that, or even just let my lock screen be taken over by my todo list.
Given modern tech, I wonder how thin a Palm like device could be made now days.
It used to be that pay phones were everywhere, but because of the plethora of cell phones, they have all been removed. So yes, it's a little unnerving to forget my phone at home.
Cell phone is how my daycare communicates with us. We've only had our daughter in daycare for 3 months now and already we've had (very)two minor medical issues they needed/wanted our input on. It's also the device I use to organize who is picking her up from daycare at the end of the day.
Yeah, I opted for a smaller phone this last upgrade (in what, four years) in hopes of using it less and being less noticeable in the pocket. Used to have this big screen phone with which I wouldn’t have much issue watching or reading stuff on. Now with a much smaller one, “not” having a huge screen to consume media on, making it less attractive to do so, and it’s been working pretty well I think. Couldn’t bring myself to go full dumbphone, er, feature? phone.
394 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadHowever, it turns out what this post is really about is work communication, not about the functionality of phones that enhance our lives.
When you're trying to get friends together, find a nice place to eat, and get directions to meet up, having a phone is far better than not having one. I wouldn't want to be without a phone during a car crash or medical emergency, either.
In contrast, when it comes to your employer's demands on you, the phone isn't so nice to have around, is it?
My suggestion is to set notification boundaries for work-based communication and always be looking for opportunities to leave employers that violate the boundaries in your life.
The problem is that you can't take what's in your phone and have it somewhere else: for example a web-browser in a public space like a library or an internet cafe. If that were possible, then it would be less of a problem to leave your phone at home.
If you're doing well in tech, then you have cash to enable options. One is, a dual sim phone, and your work sim goes off at 5pm.
The same goes for fetching work email. Off at 5pm.
Loads of apps to help with this.
Without dual sim, there are voip forwarders, a second phone, loads of options.
I didn't agree to wanting to normalise the removal of parking meters and mandatory app usage just to park your car in a park or highsteet. I'm not sure where this motivation started.
in my city part of the motivation is data collection; rates are adjusted block by block based on the last quarter's occupancy relative to targets, and among other things the app nudges people towards slightly less optimal parking spots that are either cheaper or more available.
An actual payment terminal requires electricity, a network connection and maintenance. And it has to be rugged to deal with the outdoors environment. If it takes cash, it also needs to be fairly rugged to prevent people from making off with the cash, and the cash receiving bits need a fair bit of maintenance as well.
(I have to be aware of the alternatives because I don't have a smartphone. It's not been an insurmountable problem yet.)
Some have extended to non-residential areas. One of the biggest parking apps says this:
Q: "I have no network coverage and need to park?"
A: "Move quickly to an area with better network coverage and complete your parking transaction with PayByPhone... Pay for your parking via other methods such as PayPoint or via the Pay & Display machine where available"
Reference: https://support.paybyphone.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/360010478...
FYI 'Pay and Display' are the parking meters being removed, 'PayPoint' might be in SOME convenience stores/shops. But if you know London these can be 20-30 mins walk or none there are all at your parking destination. Good luck attending an appointment during work lunch times!
Tangentially - I’m always astonished at the lack of self-awareness of many municipal/utility service providers - they pretend like I’ve sought out their service and WANT to engage with them, when in fact I just want them to provide me the thing I need (or am obligated to do) with as little hassle as possible…
I leisurely strolled past shops, sat down to eat something without being distracted, and generally enjoyed being outside. I had to ask someone for the time.
I resolved to go without phones more often, as it made me feel connected to me environment more, with less stress and reduced absentmindedness.
Of course I never did and promptly returned to my 4+ hrs/day of phone time. I am not ashamed to admit I feel somewhat uncomfortable pooping without my phone.
I found myself always pulling my phone out to check the time, then getting sucked in by notifications.
Now, I only use my watch to check the time, and find myself pulling my phone out way, way less in public.
I didn't use smartphone till very late 2021
now I enjoy going for 1-2h walks waaay more cuz I can just listen to music and disconnect myself from the people around and focus on thinking about various stuff
Sure sitting at train and thinking about your life instead of spamming on HN is likely a good thing, but sometimes it's just awkward - depends who you sit with
I have feature phone I use to disconnect, it can play music plus I have a list of 10 close contacts that I can call in case of emergency (or 911 of course). There is no need for a smartphone to cover basic security needs.
Sounds like you're projecting here. What's your data for this?
- sent from my iPhone
- Sent from my iPhone, on my porch
The local university here has these emergency call-for-help stations all over campus. They have a blue light on top so they are easy to find especially at night. A couple of years ago there was a little feature story in the newspaper about how they had never--not once--been used in a real emergency. But the university did not want to take them down because they provided a feeling of security.
How many real emergencies occurred near one of these boxes?
Creating a feeling of security is as important as creating security—you need both.
Haha
If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swap out the SIM from the dumbphone to your smartphone if your threat model requires you to.
It would be nice to not live that way sometimes you know? There are places where people aren’t conditioned to feel that way.
I’ve also been the first to report tree limbs blocking roads and a water main that burst to non-emergency lines, again expediting services to fix them and reducing inconvenience overall.
I’ve never felt like this was some conditioning of paranoia, only that I was enabled to help in ways that I wasn’t able to 20 years ago.
I will not risk to have to face such a situation alone or have to leave a person in distress just to call for help
would be insanely forever grateful if you'd come down and talk to me NB my email is in profile
I had to hike to a payphone a couple of times when I was stranded. That wouldn't work anymore.
To reach the level of security that I had as a teenager, I need a mobile phone.
Who knew, screaming calls attention? And I couldn't use a phone because my hands were full, I was carrying glass bottles home that way because I didn't want to pay for a plastic bag. If I dropped them, they would say since they accused me of stealing them that I destroyed the merchandise and was a thief for sure. And then taken me to the ground and beat me up, that's their job basically.
Thanks Jessica of Farmacias Manríquez!
So phones? Not always a big help.
Sorry, but you could have used a phone.
I don't understand how you came to this conclusion when you simultaneously say
> [Jessica] called my people, whom I couldn't reach because I left my phone at home
If you had a phone, you could've just...called them yourself.
I didn't have a bag, that's what started it all. You don't get bags anymore in Chile[2]. The cashier, CE. NEWEN according to the receipt, accused me of not paying apparently in retaliation for my saying the plastic bag she offered was not worth the 57 cents the Walmart subsidiary charged for it (490 Chilean pesos)[1]. I decided to go without. Until her accusation that I didn't pay, I was carrying everything carefully in my arms.
So I was carrying two pint-sized cans of beer, a glass jar of olives, and a glass jar of anchovies all in my arms. Needed a surface if I was to set them down, in fact after being shepherded I set them down in an empty shopping cart before I could take out the receipt in my pocket, so my turn to make demands began.
[1] So this was the event that changed my attitude and just divulge on Hacker News.
[2] It's always minimal shit, one time it was over 1 cent in electricity, for which I offered to pay a dollar on the spot. Always minimal shit. Those plastic bags cost like 1.3 cents apiece, to make. Pure profit.
[3] And since this, I bring my own, which was the government's idea in not supplying bags any longer.
> Fortunately Jessica at the Farmacias Manríquez (near Merced and José Miguel de la Barra in downtown Santiago) across the street heard me scream "I want you to call the real cops! You have no right to do this! Look at my receipt!" (in Spanish of course) and called my people
Maybe social circles in south america are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones I have, but in an urban area it seems unlikely that there's going to be a random passer by that would know you well enough that they can "call your people"
> And I couldn't use a phone because my hands were full, I was carrying glass bottles home that way because I didn't want to pay for a plastic bag. If I dropped them, they would say since they accused me of stealing them that I destroyed the merchandise and was a thief for sure.
Why was slowly putting the bottles down and then getting out your phone not an option?
It was not an option. I needed a counter to set them down, or drop the glass on the pavement.
The other factor was their verbal and physical impatience. They could have sent only two guards, that would have been fine, they sent four and there were two more a little farther away. That's excessive, that's coercive. They look pissed, so they practice their faces that's part of it, I've seen private security make faces before especially in "Fuck the Law" psych wards. It is tied to their expectation that their demands (not orders, that implies some real authority) be obeyed.
So if an interrogator has tortured a hundred people he will be at some point a coercion magician, need only make a gesture or hint to get people to see in him that in his mind he intends to torture the sufferer, because that was true for a hundred people before. People can see it easily. So these guys expected, because they had in fact ganged up four-on-one when feeling brave, in this case six-on-one because they were feeling cowardly, talking to a lawyer about it they definitely YES kick people on the floor, maleteo as it's called, suit-casing. That's a real thing they definitely do all the time when nobody's looking. So that experience is imprinted in their face, movements and attitude when they order me, impolitely, and refuse to look at a receipt, to come back into the supermarket. So by reflecting in their attitude the experience of coercion and beatings, they communicated to me, unarguably, but in a way they think leaves no proof, that I either did exactly what they said right away or they would attack me.
Maybe that explains the lack of choice...but really I think it was the food was meant to be eaten with special thanks given to GOD for it. Small feast. That was the real reason I couldn't drop it, so I couldn't duke it out either, hence screaming. Those guards can suck it, obviously if they need to gang up six-on-one they're worthless fighters. It would have been my first sevensome.
So I left that one at home, and in fact one of the people who came grilled me over and over as we walked down Victoria Subercaseaux "why didn't you bring your phone?" "WHY DIDN'T YOU BRING YOUR PHONE?"
Well I told him I had a similar phone, just no radio, and was connecting to the Walmart subsidiary's wifi with it, explicitly ordering the guards for the password after the cashier, CE NEWEN according to the receipt, made her premeditated apology. But surprise, screaming worked. It actually worked better! It was much better for someone else to call on my behalf than for me to call myself. And secondly, too predictable, they can tear the phone out of your hands, these guards were in gang-up beating mode, so they would not have tolerated a phone, the obvious choice. Very impatient and there were six of them, apparently armed.
When I got home and received a call, the phone I was supposed to take, its battery died. So battery would have died calling people on my own behalf, when the battery dies unexpectedly, the battery meter acts weird, it's not like getting locked out, when it dies it's a brick, you can't call emergency services.
I couldn't slowly put anything on the ground, these guards were in Fuck the Law mode. Evidently, because they never had any interest in my receipt, or my testimony. Six, 6 guards, shepherding me coercively back to the Walmart subsidiary where they controlled all the cameras and knew the terrain, could make up any shit they wanted. And a lawyer that came, called Nacho, told me exactly that, these guys don't like calling police because they want that power for themselves.
The uniforms say SWAT on them, S-W-A-T, supposedly it's SWAT-branded private security apparel, nothing to do with American Special Weapons And Tactics like in the movies. Like Apple computer having nothing to do with apples, just a brandname, "nombre de fantasía", it's not like actual fruit. So they're trying to intimidate people with the power of the law, precisely so people don't dare defend themselves, to imply their victim will get accused resisting arrest.
(Inconvenience is not what I call a mishap)
I grew up in the country, and a few times had to walk 20 miles home, due to a dead car. Being a rural area, after 10pm, I might see 1 or 2 cars the entire walk home (4 hours and a bit).
During the day, there were times my car broke down, or I ran out of gas, so knocking on doors (a mile or so usually awake) was a better choice.
Often, a kind person would have some gas.
Compare this to ... the city. If you can yell loudly, literally thousands of people can hear you.
Similarly, people used paper maps while driving which were cumbersome, but didn’t live under the expectation or the opportunity of traveling to new locations regularly.
Maybe a 100" TV would be about the same.
But sadly, it is harder to get paper maps now, for obvious reasons.
I don't know anyone who expects me to be available 24/7.
Most people I know text don't text back immediately either.
It's a you problem, not a societal one.
Set some fucking boundaries and start acting like an adult.
But my point was, there are other people around. Yell, bang on a house's door, go into the gas station, etc etc.
There are mountain tops that have cell service now days (great line of sight!). People get lost in the woods pretty often.
Heck just having a compass + map that works offline can get people unstuck. How many lost person stories used to end with "and he died just a few miles from the nearest town"?
Of course that sentence is now relegated to history because because almost everyone has a GPS in their pocket!
What if they subsidized them so that you could make emergency calls with no monthly fee? I wonder how many lives they would save if it was so readily available people didn't think of leaving cell range without one?
Hell, 80 years ago planes took off without any electronics and with high explosives on board, were shot at and even returned!*
* except for those who did not
Sure, most people didn't die because of lacking safety nets. But some did and I don't think "it worked for most without" is a sufficient argument to ditch them.
and roughly 1/3 of them will yell at you to shut up, half of the remaining will just silently wish it, with the remaining not noticing
But that just isn't true. Being able to use a mobile radio to summon emergency services earlier has statistically significant association with improved outcomes [0]. It isn't just about what happens to you, it's about what you can do for others you come across in emergencies. 25 years ago, I'd need to drive a minimum of 15-30 minutes to the nearest house and hope I was able to use their landline (or break in I guess?), or maybe there would be an open service station within that distance (often not). People died (still do) or suffer serious injury getting lost in the woods very close to home. I nearly did once in the 90s, cross country skiing and being foolish. I went out in the afternoon on a gray, gray overcast day, zero shadows, fresh snow, and as a skier since a child I felt overly confident and didn't take a normal fanny pack even with light (back then of course lamps were a lot crappier pre-LED), water or whatever. It got dark fast, by this point about 15°F, and I got completely, utterly confused. I knew I should be close and indeed reconstructing afterwards (finding my own tracks later in the week) I was within 1/2 mile or so. But it was a half mile through old forest without that clear trails. Fortunately I had had some outdoor training and recognized this was genuine trouble, I didn't try to go back in the woods but crossed a frozen swamp and broke for a farm field, and then from there to an actual house whose light I could see and use as a guide about a mile and a half away. Even if no one was home there'd at least be a road I could follow, fortunately there was someone and I could beg to use their landline and call a friend. But there were directions of travel I could have gone there with no one, and no road, for 6+ miles of mountainy forest. And if one succumbs to panic, it's easy to end up spending hours going in circles, or even without because sense of direction is hard with zero markers, no stars or the like. Or are fine, but fall and break a leg or something. This happens. People die. I and friends worked as First Responders and later mountain rescue volunteers of various levels. It's all well and good to say "well you should never do that" but humans are imperfect, even experienced ones. Having access to quite accurate near term weather forecasts alone is just massive, a boon a lot of us don't stop to appreciate.
Obviously, as tools cell phones have other risks. It's possible to get overconfident with them and take risks that negate the benefits. People have died due to silly things like literally stepping backwards over a cliff trying to get the perfect selfie. And there are other negative effects as this article talks about. Nevertheless, it's wrong to claim everything was fine back in "the good old days" when life expectancy was significantly lower [1]. You don't have to have a fancy smart phone to have a basic comms, GPS and map, but that doesn't negate how valuable those can be.
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0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22142669/
1: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...
For example, this thread is about someone in the city, taking a walk (eg, to the corner store or some such), and not feeling safe.
It's all about stats, likelyhood, etc.
I have a hard time imagining anyone not having been in a situation that was made dangerous by the lack of ability to communicate with others. Muggings, beatings, rapes, killings. Accidents, car crashes. Running out of gas, getting lost, losing your wallet. Being unable to reach family for an emergency when they're out.
Even meeting up with your friends was a pain in the ass.
The "connectedness" can be annoying or overwhelming, and the feeling of security when carrying a phone is probably overestimated in our heads, but before phones and cctvs any random moron could just kill you and get away with it if nobody was around. Some of the safety we feel is very real indeed.
Most of the stuff you mention above is not safer due to phones, only mere convenient.
For example, how is running out of gas dangerous? You just end up walking, or hitching a ride.
And if cell phones helped so much, wouldn't the stats show it?
never???
How do you possibly have enough information to know that?!
Turn the notifications off, or get something like Tasker that can turn them off and on for you on a schedule. Otherwise, keep it in your pocket. This device has no control over you that you don't allow it to have.
I think it's good for you to occasionally to know that you are on your own. Completely responsible on what you do. Be it on the nearby forest or in some more extreme situation. I am not sure the direction of (illusion of) ultrasafety where our society has been going is all good. Occasionally it's good to have the red pill instead of the blue. Keeps your mind clear.
I think the "Blue pill" mindset is more useful overall. The red pill generally does nothing to build a safer world.
A safe world is of course nice, i do not deny that. But I see higher goals for our society than that. And pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in is inherently not safe.
I can't honestly say I respect people for choosing the blue pill. However, I very much respect their right to make that choice. I'd also appreciate that blue pillers respected red pillers' right to make their choice and not try to prohibit and demean everything they think looks risky. (obviously, dichotomy is not this strong in the real world)
Natural causes are a different matter, but external causes are often really easy to stop. Even murder seems to be partly preventable just by removing motives.
I don't think most blue pillers have much real disrespect for red pillers, except when it endangers the public, or stops attempts to make the general public safer.
There have been daredevils for a very long time, nobody is saying that we should ban space exploration or stunt performers Blue pillers like Jackass just as much as anyone else.
I think the "standard blue pill position" is more that there's already plenty of people who will want to be astronauts regardless of any discouragement, and we don't really need to try to make that kind of outlook the default target we should all aspire to, and in general, we should apply tech wherever possible to keep us safe.
Lots of things affect other people. House fires can kill a whole family even though only one was responsible for starting it. Mandatory smoke alarms do not majorly impact people's lives, and can prevent people from dying on account of someone else's actions.
If someone wants to, and has the economic means to go phoneless for a day as a personal challenge without getting fired, that's great, they should write an article about what they learned.
But every year kids get permanently injured for life on the football field. I think we should be careful not to create a culture that leads people to think that's "Just how life is", and suffer very preventable chronic pain or brain damage.
If you really thirst for that feeling of _onus_, then I can honestly suggest skydiving. You are extremely responsible for every little thing you do. Still, though, take your phone with you... you never know what might go wrong.
I wish this were true. Phones leak data about users, which companies use to make profiles about you to serve you advertisements. Even if you block advertisements, the profile is still there. Companies are coming up with new ways to use this data. You can read more about that here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...
https://archive.ph/se3nT
When I get a call (as opposed to a slack message) it’s only because something is REALLY on fire.
This really allows me to disconnect completely from work with the assurance that in an extreme situation I could still be reached.
It’s also important to clarify what is considered important because honestly I get a call over the weekend to implement so “quick feature”, that would be a clear signal that it might be time to part ways with such company culture.
All I’m saying is, it starts with the individual marking the boundaries and then either talking the the manager or finding a place that respects those boundaries.
(I’m aware of some violations of boundaries from bosses that if they’d happen to me I’d likely seek for a restraining order!)
A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need."
--Iain M. Banks, in The Player of Games
It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.
I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.
This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".
Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that doesn't actually mean it's unhealthy. It probably depends on everything else I'm eating, how much I'm burning off, maybe even something as fine-grained as how fast I drink it. You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that.
Anyway, sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I feel like people toss around things like "healthy diet" as if we're all supposed to know and agree what that means.
Eating bread every day is actually pretty common in some cultures and people don't even stop to think it's unhealthy because it's so commonplace, so even that varies.
(I have a sibling with celiac disease).
I've noticed things that never had glueten in it, labeled "glueten-free" after the craze a few years ago.
Most of the "health fad" people you're talking about would probably self-categorize themselves as NCGS, but that doesn't mean that everybody who is NCGS is part of a health fad. Double-blind "challenge" studies where people are unaware if what they are eating contains wheat/gluten have confirmed that for some people this is definitely real and not a made up fad.
I'm not denying the existence of people going gluten free for fad or orthorexia reasons, but be careful when you lump everyone who is gluten free for non-celiac reasons into that category.
Nobody seems to care that the ads are worthless and make nobody any money.
"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal"
I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.
I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?
Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know
It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.
And since our written observations modify the behavior, an update: quoting the whole sentence now returns a single result - this page.
>With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need
When you Google that in quotes you get actual results from Google Books and Goodreads, while Bing/DuckDuckGo only returns an archive from a random blog that quotes it halfway down the page, and the new hot search engine Brave finds nothing. I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
But can you imagine the aggravation if Google chooses to do the opposite and 'helpfully' 'corrects' your quotes for you? Actually I am not sure I have to imagine...
>There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.
>A terminal was safety.
>So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.
Our cell phones might sometimes be pretty useful devices, but they're not quite capable of that sort of thing yet.
Still, you can walk around and explore without using it, while still having it along in a pocket just in case you do the modern equivalent of fall off a cliff or get decapitated. Just better hope you have cell service and your battery is charged up if you do.
I got a smartphone 10 years ago after a trip where I got lost in an unfamiliar city at night. I did manage to navigate my way around by sense of direction and spotting buildings and river, and was just a little late to the party I was going to. But I thought something with maps would be more useful than a flip-phone if I ever got lost while traveling again.
A few years later, exploring randomly in the mountains a couple of states away with my wife, we pulled into a small town late one evening and got out our phones to look for a place to eat and a place to stay. No service, for either of us. So we just wandered around the town with our eyes open and asked people. Found a great restaurant and a nice quiet little bed and breakfast. Once again serendipity beat the cell phone.
What is more concerning is that kids who've grown up with them their entire lives just might not be able to handle that sort of thing. They might just freak out as much as if they had fallen off a cliff or something.
You can just carry a cheap dumbphone and it works for texting people or emergency calls just fine.
Personal phone? That's my lifeline to civilization if something bad happens. Also an AV capture device.
1) couldn't get inside anywhere to charge it because he didn't have his covid vaccine card anywhere
2) couldn't scan a menu to order at the outdoor cafe we found in the mean time
it was amusing, it stopped being fun very quickly, but we figured it out. these two scenarios are obviously not as relevant any more
but its way beyond "addiction"
We had another leg of the holiday in Finland (Helsinki) and then back to Amsterdam again for another day before returning to the UK. It was painful where all my friends had their phones and could take pictures etc. and I couldn't.
I couldn't even borrow a friend's phone to check emails/Facebook etc. as I'm security conscious and have 2FA enabled on all my accounts, and use a password manager with generated passwords also. My less technically inclined friends called me an idiot.
Thankfully when I got back to the UK I was able to get a replacement SIM card the next day from the network provider's store and I had an older Android phone to use for the time being and was able to go through the Authy SMS recovery process to get my 2FA codes back.
For moments when I actually need to be aware of any communications or be in sync with family and friends, I can turn on the ringer or turn on specific notifications.
I think this has helped me get away from the constant distraction but keeps the utility of the phone near. It annoys me when, during conversations, people constantly check their phone and smart watch every few minutes because of the buzz in their pocket or their wrist.
I have also found going on weekend backpacking trips has weaned me off of the phone and technology in general. I would recommend it for those looking to take a break.
I don't have a smartphone (prefer a landline but keep an old Nokia around too), so my life is more organised around emails and desktop based communication. I recognised back in the 90s that it used to take me hours to "decompress" from tech immersion. I would ruminate on what messages I might be missing, and think through communications in my mind in a quite obsessive way.
That was over 20 years ago. These days I'll go for a couple of days without thinking about the internet. I can happily live without a phone for a week or more no worries, and frequently do.
It's a long journey and there are constant pressures and temptations to over-use again. I wrote a book about coping with that.
It probably sounds as if I'm talking like a cognitive behavioural therapist. That's because I truly believe that smartphone use is fully congruent with addictive behaviours - not just for a few people, as was common thinking a few years ago, but for everybody, and as mounting scientific evidence supports there are numerous genuine harms both individual and societal [1]. In 2022 I no longer feel alone or unusual in this regard, because I see the world is waking up to it.
The question then is how we raise awareness of this emerging threat to mental wellbeing, and how we deal with it. Mobile technology certainly has its uses, but we must balance that with social/technological structures that give people ample space to control their own technology, make space and abstain from it as desired. A truly advanced technological society would meet this need. At present the gushing convergence on smartphones as "necessary" panacea is pathological in the extreme, and I am sure, simply fuelled by the profits of the tech industry rather than any underlying "need". Technology is becoming what is being _done_ to us.
[1] No I won't. Please have the good manners to Google for yourself (or go back through my many well refernced posts here).
Being able to order a safe reliable taxi in most major cities, also super cool.
If you don't want email on your phone, don't set it up. But having a map that redirects me around traffic accidents in real time saves me a lot of time.
I'm not going to argue against smartphones being horrible little dopamine boxes, because they are, but you can get a smartphone and set it up as a purely utilitarian device rather easily.
You're absolutely right kid. Sincerely. I look forward to the day when the real utility shines through again. And I come from a time (as a now well bearded computer nerd) when it was all utility and coolness.
But we're in some weird in-between days [1] where motivations have gotten distorted, ideals have got lost, and the utility just isn't enough any more to stave of the wrongness.
FWIW I'm an optimist and beleieve we'll make it through and take back tech, but right now we need to take a long look at this.
[1] The fancy word is "interregnum" - a period "caught between two times, one world that is already dead, and the other waiting to be born."
Sure, my Palm was amazingly useful, a much better productivity tool than my smartphone is, minus the maps and real time data stuff.
Having a button dedicated to "pull up my todo list" is a life changer. I wish I could buy a smartphone that did that, or even just let my lock screen be taken over by my todo list.
Given modern tech, I wonder how thin a Palm like device could be made now days.
Who uses it as a phone these days anyway?
For many people it's their life's central information nexus and it's absolutely normal to get uncomfortable when leaving THAT at home.