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Comment by krolden | Hacker News Reader

Ive been doing some IT work at a cell phone store in a very low income area. There is a large number of people coming in to buy new phones or get their old ones repaired and many of them (especially the older ones) HATE that they need to have a smartphone. I hear at least one person a day complain about how they cant just have a normal land line anymore and need to have a smartphone to participate in society.

Also they REALLY dont like hearing about how the phone they have now is obsolete and theres no way to get parts for it, or its just too far gone and they'll need to buy a new phone. I feel for all of these people as I totally agree with them.

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I wonder how they'd react if I started bitching about having to have a car to participate in society.

I’d posit it’s quickly getting easier to live without a car than without a smartphone in the US.

Plus, even if you live in an area where a car is required you have the option to opt out and move (housing crisis aside), which isn’t an option to avoid smartphone requirements.

well, you could always move somewhere very rural with poor cellphone reception.

The people complaining about smart phones and the people who created the car-obsessed society are substantially the same people.

There must be few people still alive who created the car-obsessed society.

I don’t think I could argue with the assertion that it was created for them and not by them, but there are plenty of Boomers around.

The Ford Mustang was introduced 18 years after the end of World War 2.

If you think it's only boomers who like car-centric infrastructure, I have bad news for you.

Yeah, this sentiment covers for sure all of Gen X and Elder Millennials. If the back half of Millennials all turn 30 and it’s the same story we can pretty confidently say that it’s not really a generational thing.

I would love to ditch my car but it’s impossible in my city and I have no power to change it. I could move I guess but choosing lack of car over my friends and family feels a bit drastic.

That doesn’t cover all of GenX.

But yes, getting old sucks and walking takes some discipline.

> walking takes some discipline

and it also requires you to fully buy in to the city-centric lifestyle. Whether you like it or not there will always be a lot of people that don't want to live in an urban center or even a small town. For them, personal transportation is non-negotiable. Even people who live within walkable towns or cities will often prefer to have a car so that they can access other locations and services whenever they feel like it without having to rent or limit themselves to places accessible by mass transit. Cars just aren't going away, nor should we wish them to. I'm all for building more walkable and human scale environments, I enjoy them as much as the next person but I also want those places connected by good roads so that I can access, or leave, any of them freely.

And then someone before, the bicycle, and horse and mule, wait i don't think you're point is coherent.

Some of the most bicycle-obsessed people that I know are clearly boomers

Do you have a source on this made up factoid that just shows you are prone to age discrimination?

1960's and early 70's car culture (prior to the oil shock), the early 80's identity crisis as (automotive) manufacturing moved overseas.

I honestly doubt anyone who complains today about needing to carry a cell phone was in any way directly responsible for the decisions of automobile manufacturers, lobbyists, and marketing firms that brought us the car-obsessed culture we have.

That's not a source.

The people who created the car-obsessed society died long ago. These people would be my parents' & grand-parents' generations. I'm in my 60s.

And before you ask, I hate having to have a smartphone. It is required to VPN into work, or to do so many things. I changed grocery stores rather than let them use my cellphone for the "loyalty" card.

I also hate living in a state where public transit is useless.

TL;DR - something about "get off my lawn" and "old man yells at cloud".

It may sound odd, but you are not bolstering your argument here. The parent is arguing for a way to ensure that participation in society is not bound by one's ability arrange for unrelated physical objects other than cash and ID to participate. And that is before we even get to how much having a car and cell phone governs one's life in US. Not everyone believes it is a good societal structure.

Note that I am not arguing one way or another, but outright dismissal is not an appropriate counter argument.

Oh I'm not saying either is good. I'm saying that the shoe is on the other foot now.

Yeah, the minimum you need to participate in US society is SSN, driver’s license number, working cell phone number, credit/debit card, health insurance, car, car insurance, proof of citizenship, permanent address, internet connection and W2 or equivalent.

I’ve needed all of these sans the car to interact with just government services in my state.

Public Transit (from local buses to inter-city trains) should be high quality and frequent.

That is reality in a lot of the world including Europe, China, and South America.

I agree with the sentiment of not generally needing to have a car and fortunately that is the case in most of the world (except the USA)

In part of Europe, China, and South America.

More and more public transit is requiring a smartphone or an elaborate and complicated setup with contact cards. It’s getting annoying.

Touch a piece of plastic when you start, toich again when you end. It’s not exactly complicated. You can buy the plastic for cash, or use the one almost everyone has in their wallet, or use a phone.

It's really not at all. In Japan, you just buy a debit card and swipe that every time you enter or exit a station. When it gets low, you stop at a vending machine and put more cash on it. It doesn't get any simpler, and it's totally anonymous.

You underestimate how difficult to buy a correct ticket

Public Transit isn't the (only) alternative to cars.

Compact layouts that enable walking or biking are another alternative.

Yeah I’m sure the older people who don’t want cellphones are going to love biking and walking everywhere.

I’m sure they will too! And I’m not being facetious in saying it.

Walkable, bikeable cities are human cities.

(And they’re also the kind of cities that mobility aids like scooters can thrive in.)

Walkable cities are much more accessible to elderly people (many of whom cannot drive) than car-only cities.

That’s one of the main reasons that elderly people from the suburbs often move to retirement communities which are designed at pedestrian scale.

Not necessarily everywhere, but they are probably perfectly happy to walk 10-15 minutes for groceries and such. The daily neccessities.

Daily necessities and daily excercise. For some of these people it's the part of the day they look most forward to.

Walking to a store everyday to buy only their daily necessities would end up costing them a lot more than if they were buying a bunch of what they need in bulk, and nobody ( especially an elderly person) is going to walk home carrying around their items in bulk sizes.

Even for people lucky enough to live in those rare areas where you can walk to a grocery store, it's extremely useful to have access to a car you can fill up with large items.

Do you seriously think it's easier for a 80-year-old to hop in a car to go somewhere than walk 10 minutes to the store in a more compact city or take the bus?

Plus, look at the Netherlands, geriatric people who've biked their whole lives and maintained good physical shape have no problem continuing to bike.

maybe they need motorcycle? this can prevent they can't ride bicycle.

Motorcycles are extremely heavy and take a certain amount of physical strength to operate.

For elderly people who have trouble pedaling, the answer is an e-bike.

Sadly, there are plenty of places in Europe that don't have frequent high quality public transport.

There are many places where bus comes every half an hour, and there are on average 1-2 passengers on it. I think in those towns it would be cheaper for local council to just pay for Uber service for everyone who needs public transportation. No need to buy expensive buses, maintain bus stops, stations and depots, pay drivers and administrators salaries and pensions etc.

> There are many places where bus comes every half an hour, and there are on average 1-2 passengers on it

Well, no surprise there are so few passengers: the bus comes every half an hour! Make it once every two hours, and there will be no passengers at all.

"Every half an hour" is an option for the desperate. Also, that bus is probably stuck with cars when there's heavy traffic, while being slower than cars when there isn't. And it does not go exactly where you want to be. Would _you_ use such a bus service if you weren't forced to due to circumstances?

The answer for shitty public transport offering should not be eliminating public transport offering.

Well, it depends. Public transport only really makes sense when you have enough density.

If you have the typical North American rules that make density illegal, even the best public transport won't safe you. In fact, it might be throwing good money after bad money.

The local council can just give poor people money, then they can pay Uber (or buy bread or beer, if they need it more).

"public transport riders" != "poor people", unless your bus service is specifically designed to be miserable.

Yes? I never said otherwise.

I just don't think non-poor people need subsidised Uber-rides nor any other handouts from the local council.

For clarity: the context was for local councils to give money to Uber instead of running a bus service. Which is plausible idea. I just don't think you need to be so specific: give people money, so they can buy goods and services they deem most beneficial (including Uber rides).

Now going one step further: only give the money to poor people. Welfare for rich people is a bit silly.

I'm all for giving more money to poor people, but how is that related to public transport? "Let's sell for scrap metal what's left of our public transit system and give the proceedings to the poor" would be a mad proposition.

I'm a regular user of public transport. I don't own a car, don't have a drivers license and call taxi/uber maybe once or twice per year. I am lucky enough to live in a place where that's not just possible, but easy, easier than driving a car. And I'm not poor. I can afford a car, just don't want to have one.

Public transport is not a handout to the poor, it is a service which makes life better for everyone. If yours is so bad only poor people would use it - maybe it's time to fix it.

For what it's worth, I never owned a car in my life.

(I currently live in Singapore, which has excellent public transport.)

My suggestion was conditional: if a city has already decided that Uber is better than public transport, then they should still not give Uber money. But instead, give the money to poor people.

However: public transport only really makes sense when you have enough density.

If you have the typical North American rules that make density illegal, even the best public transport won't safe you. In fact, it might be throwing good money after bad money.

I don't say that density needs to become before public transport. Just the opposite: you need to put transportation in place before people come. But you also need to make density legal before you think about public transport.

> I just don't think non-poor people need subsidised Uber-rides

I agree, if you're going to provide financial assistance it should go to those in need, but I don't think non-poor people need or want to be saddled with an added expense to replace the public transpiration services they already have and use.

I think there does come a point where a community can decide their public transportation costs more to operate than it's worth, but unless it's consistently losing massive amounts of money it's probably not worth it to take a valuable resource from the public just to save a bit of money. Especially if that community has any desire to grow.

> I agree, if you're going to provide financial assistance it should go to those in need, but I don't think non-poor people need or want to be saddled with an added expense to replace the public transpiration services they already have and use.

In places where public transport works and is used, I agree.

I've made it to my late 30s only owning a car for maybe 2 or 3 of those years. I've never felt the desire, my mom always commented it was odd back when I was a teenager... But I digress, it is very possible and it's easier than ever. I grew up on the rural west coast, moved inland to an agricultural area. Never living in a proper city by most metrics. Certainly I've missed some opportunities along the way, c'est la vie, but it is easier than ever and I'm meeting more and more people like me as time goes on. I also don't have a photo ID as a general rule, but that's a whole different can of worms and in some cases much more limiting than living car free. Most people seem to create their own hurdles or embiggen real ones that they do face, certainly I do in my own ways so don't take that as a judgement just an observation. Choosing to go carless is not half the hurdle many people perceive it to be.

> I've made it to my late 30s only owning a car for maybe 2 or 3 of those years.

Similar. I spent part of my teen years in a children's home in the U.S. -- it turns out that even though the state may go in for a [driving] learning permit (pre-req for a driving license), it won't sign off for the license to drive. So I never got a license until older and dropped it later.

I'm definitely healthier for all the walking I still do :)

Hopefully they'll react as if you were an irrational pedant, because I have been participating in society without a car my entire adult life just fine.

Very few of these people drive.

You can walk, you can't verbally authenticate

Sometimes you can.

Especially in small towns where people know each other.

That used to kinda be the norm.

I have a personal rule.

If I can't walk there within an hour, or the bus itself takes more than an hour to get there; I won't even apply to the job. My method of thinking on this is that people with their own vehicle won't go much further than an hour away anyways, so why would I with a bike, my own two feet; or transit for that matter.

It's not like the people they are hiring with vehicles are going to get there much faster if they own a vehicle taking the same amount of time. The only time this won't be true is if they live so close they really should be walking instead to save money.

Tell that to some of my past prospective employers.

It's getting so bad, that some insist on being able to drive to work even if you live within 15 minutes walking distance.

"But what about bad weather?" They ask.

"I'll dress appropriately." I reply.

3 days later: Phone rings.

"We're sorry, but we decided to go with someone better suited for the job."

The job... was at a restaurant, as a cook. Cooks... don't need to be able to drive to work... usually. (There are maybe some jobs where driving would be ideal, or necessary, but let's be real here. Most don't need to be able to drive.)

I’m guessing “the bus was late” is a common excuse used by those who are frequently late to work. The issue here is that they mindlessly apply a filter of if you drive to work you pass if you don’t you fail. Employees with attendance issues can still use plenty of dumb excuses. A car itself provides several: car broke down, traffic was bad, snowy roads. Those issues don’t apply to someone who can walk in. Unfortunately not being a driver is not a protected class in the US.

Is traffic not a thing? Or a full parking lot?

It's that, and more. It's also that they want to be able to rely on being able to call you in at any moments notice without any potential for excuses like "Well, it's going to take an hour to get there, because of the bus." or "I can't come in right now due to the weather on such short notice."

Quite frankly, I think the entire restaurant industry (in Canada) needs to be audited for multiple reasons. Tax evasion, disobeying the law in regards to discrimination, etc. (Canadian laws) There may be some innocent owners caught in the crossfire, but if they truly are innocent in this case; they should be fine and worry free. It's not a line of logic I like to use in many things, but in this case it really is true.

I think far more common (in the fast food & retail industry) is the manager calling you up: "X called out sick, we need you to come in to do their shift, starting in 45 minutes." If the person lacks a car, then "I can't, buses don't run today" or "it will take me 90 minutes to get in by bus today".

I once worked where I lacked a car. There were 3 buses going there in the morning. The next bus going there left downtown Denver at 4pm. Between 0545 and 1600 there was no bus service to that destination. Missing the 0430, 0505 or 0545 buses meant missing work that day. When I finally managed to get a car (legal problems), I got a new job within a month.

We can agree that “cancel all of your plans for your day off on 45 minute’s notice” might be considered an abuse of power, right?

Not the person you replied to, but yes.

But the problem is that most people are spineless and don't use the proper channels of authority that oversee these sorts of things to ensure that employers are held to proper standards. Heck, here in Canada we have a tribunal system to deal with human rights abuses, even in the workplace; not just societal. And it gets underfunded due to be under utilized due to the very lack of backbone I speak of. What I am saying right now is right from the horses mouth no less.

Yes, that means it's all our fault. People are afraid of losing their jobs, and so they do nothing; and so they get away with more than they should.

To be clear though for those on the other side of the fence.

I'm the employee who will usually say "yeah, sure boss. Just maybe give me some time to get down there, or cover my cab fare so I can get there faster."

Heck, one employer literally drove down to get me just to get the shift covered without any lost time.

But recently I've been getting flak from employers for even that sort of thing. (Getting a cab, or taking the bus I mean.)

So, I don't care anymore. We have rules for a reason, and you all can follow them, or uphold them. Which ever may be the case for whoever is reading this.

> But the problem is that most people are spineless and don't use the proper channels of authority that oversee these sorts of things to ensure that employers are held to proper standards.

In the US there is no authority that oversees these sorts of things. It's perfectly legal to make insane demands on an hourly employee's time. Hourly employees are lucky if they can get a set schedule and don't have to constantly check to see what days/hours they'll work because those hours can be changed at any time without notice. They can be expected to come in at any time to cover for other employees and fired if they aren't making themselves always available at the drop of a hat.

There are very few regulations preventing employers from abusing their staff and those only cover the most egregious abuses. Walmart (the largest private employer in the country) for example has been caught for things like refusing to pay workers for hours that they worked, for locking workers inside of buildings and refusing to let them leave, child-labor violations, knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, and serious OSHA violations that endangered the lives and safety of their employees. While they do get the occasional light slap on the wrist for violating what few protections workers have (often only after repeatedly violating them) even the largest and easiest target gets away with all kinds of abuses not covered under law.

Companies and entire industries spend massive amounts of money on bribing politicians so they can continue to exploit workers and even manipulate the workers themselves to be so anti-regulation and anti-union that they'll fight against efforts to improve the conditions that they themselves suffer under.

Workers being exploited in the US are not uncaring or spineless. They're just working against a system that has been carefully designed and refined over centuries to keep them powerless. We're starting to see some pushes for change though. There's been an increase in efforts to unionize, but just talking about unionizing can get you fired and laws have been changed so that unions don't always have the power they used to. In the meantime, folks still have to pay rent and eat, so they're forced to suffer under exploitative practices.

While I suppose that most people will be considering this topic under American rules and regulations; please note I mentioned Canada in my comment. That said, I accept that USA has all sorts of things to work out and get fixed. BUT, Don't look north for inspiration. It's not exactly better up here, cause the employers up here (except for the few good ones) take inspiration from your bad employers all down south of our border.

Let's just say that we have it just as bad in slightly different ways. The only saving grace for us Canadians (IMHO) is that we still have stuff like the old common law stuff in effect. (of which many of our citizenry is not aware of its actual legal standing, and so they don't make use of any of it.) {Also the libertarian free-man-of-the-land types make erroneous use of some of this stuff, which doesn't help either.}

I state it as such, because when I brought this all up with a lawyer to see if I had a case at all; he was surprised I even knew about some of the old common law stuff that employers legally are supposed to be obeying. This has to do with things like wrongful dismissal for example, where an employee has decided to say no to a bad boss, and gets fired for it. A lot of our current laws state that's already illegal as well depending on the situation; but even those old laws had details in them pertaining to things like severance pay. Long story short; some employers know about this, and will pay out extra weeks even under probationary period because it could land them in court if they don't.

So it is better up here in some ways; but that kind of stuff will probably never be enacted down there, because it would mean accepting that ol Britain was right about a few things.

A better comparison would be the government refusing to talk with you unless you can prove that own a car from one specific brand that they like.

I know plenty of people without a car and some without a driving license. Far more than those without a smartphone.

They'd probably agree with you. Having to pay to maintain a car (probably an awful one that has lots of problems) just to get anything done is distinctly bad part of being poor in America.

That's because when they were young a 'normal land line' was the state of the art tech. Why were they fine using state of the art tech then? I guess older people at the time found it confusing and the people complaining to you probably thought they should get with the times.

It's the same stuff just in a cycle.

Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago; depending on when you define its invention it came at some point between 1844 and 1877 [1] and it was widespread by the second world war. There was a huge portion of the last century in which "just" having a landline was a relatively constant, relatively well defined utility and (from the consumer's point of view) the technology was mature and did not change much between arguably 1950 and about 1990. The rotary dial pulse dialling system was patented in 1891; the telephone I grew up using (in the 1980s) used essentially the same technology and pulse dialling gradually replaced it over the course of several decades. Most of the innovation took place on the side of the exchange, and the average telephone user probably noticed little other than changes in billing and a slowly decreasing frequency of talking to an operator.

Cellphones are completely different. My "daily driver" smartphone, bought in 2017 for ~1/4 of my monthly salary, is obsolete and I have rooted it in order to continue to install security updates. This has locked me out of my Danish bank account.

My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works, even when the mains electricity is out, no technology change required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing

> Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago

And they were state-of-the-art until the late 1990s, when mass consumer mobile phones became a thing.

You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things.

Their generation developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it?

> My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works

Well it doesn't for much of society - that's the point.

> You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. > Their generated developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it?

My point is that, actually, no: nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone (the oldest person listed as being alive at the moment was born in 1904 – by which point there were ~3 m telephone subscribers in the US [1] https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/domain-knowledge/teleco...).

I think the point about being resistant to learning new skills is one thing, extreme poverty and the historically incredibly rapid widespread adoption of the smartphone is another. A smartphone from ten years ago is as good as useless for banking nowadays. If you're an 80 year old pensioner on a fixed income, it may well both be a significant proportion of your income, have taken a long time to learn to use and not exactly be understanding of your (statistically quite likely to be present) visual or fine manual dexterity difficulties, and I can very much imagine that you feel locked out of society for no good reason.

> nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone

I didn't claim that. I said it was the state-of-the-art until recently, and it was.

But I know what you mean.

(Except newer smart phones tend to have better support for accessibility as people realise it's more important.)

Depends on what you mean by “accessibility”… my 85-year-old aunt-in-law finds her iPhone 7 running iOS 15 to be far less accessible than her old iPhone 4 that probably stopped being updatable around iOS 7. All she wants to do is make phone calls, read texts and take pictures and view them in the order they were taken, and run those apps being foisted upon us. This is all becoming increasingly more difficult, and her careful notes that get her through her previous corner cases increasingly less helpful.

I am already dreading what fresh clever hell Apple is going to unleash upon her when she gets shoved off this one because enough “critical” apps won’t run on iOS 15 anymore.

My dad, early 70s, is still holding out with a flip phone (fortunately still available in 4G). His hands are quite useless on a touchscreen after 50+ years of concrete-oriented construction work, and I would LOVE to see Siri attempt to parse Deep East Texan.

Newer phones are better for accessibility if lower visual or aural capability or some types of movement capacity are your main limitations, but are worse for many others. Increasingly larger phones are an awful trend for my friend who has severe muscular dystrophy and limited strength and range of motion, and voice assistants are a cruel joke for her tiny little voice.

My dad is 80 and uses an Android all of the time - mostly by voice.

Does he have a deep east texan accent?

He was born and grew up in south GA and lived there all of his life.

>Depends on what you mean by “accessibility”… my 85-year-old aunt-in-law finds her iPhone 7 running iOS 15 to be far less accessible than her old iPhone 4 that probably stopped being updatable around iOS 7.

Yes, I've heard the exact same thing from my iPhone-using elderly mother and my sister. The answer is simple: stop spending thousands on new iPhones, and get an inexpensive budget-model Android instead. They're quite simple to use. But my suggestions always fall on deaf ears.

>have taken a long time to learn to use

And, of course, it's trendy to keep "modernizing" UIs, so how to use it or any given app probably changes a fair bit every year or two.

My still living parents grew up in a rural part of GA and very much remember a time when everyone didn’t have a landline.

They had T1 and ISDN at least since the 70s.

The landline is special because laws require a line-powered phone system that can survive outages. It's a minimal and reliable layer of infrastructure which still makes perfect sense for people with limited communications needs.

Laws can be changed. And laws should reflect the realities of society, not the other way round.

> or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things.

Is newer better? Should people be required to buy an array of fragile and expensive devices just to function? How many things should they be required to maintain and how complex should they be?

If newer is what there is, you can either get on and learn it, or spend your time complaining!

Personally, I find that people complaining about cellphones needing charge, cellphones needing replacement and poor cellphone reception have a point. You didn't have that with landlines.

Back in the day, one would carry coins and use a phone box when needed. Nowadays everyone gets to carry a cellphone and pay 40 dollars minimum every month for the privilege. Cellphones are a regression, and we haven't even talked about the privacy aspect.

There's legitimate concerns around having to use your phone for everything, given how easy it makes for corporations and governments to track you, and how you're locked into a continuous upgrade cycle, and inundated with notifications and apps vying for your attention.

No.

You can also dissent.

You can also resist.

And if newer is worse (for you), it's your obligation to do so.

> You can also dissent. You can also resist.

Covered by ‘complaining’.

Covered by using my battery-drained iPhone (which I only have because I was being paid money to have it) as a beer opener. It's not a very good beer opener but gets the point across really well. Socioeconomic pressure works both ways.

> Is newer better?

No, but we have to fill up those land fills and line those pockets somehow!

> You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things.

When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate.

Hell, even the thing where stuff sorts by "most recent access" makes learning impossible. How do you find older things? (the "search" function is contrary to how the brain works, brains are wired to find things by location which doesn't work if there isn't a location because stuff is always moved by the damn magic elves).

> When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate.

Tech companies have the same level of respect for their users as slaughterhouses do for cattle. We are living in The Jungle, except it’s techbro computer shit instead of meatpacking.

Cell phones are pretty old. “Sprint” was an acronym for “South Pacific Railway Internal Network Technologies.” Used by passengers on railways since the 1920s.

This isn't true at all. The name "Sprint" wasn't chosen until the 70s and the initial business was alternative long-distance carrier, not a railway cell phone.

See: https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2022/05/23/je...

They had the famous pin drop commercials!

I guess this is the person who posted recently about their very sad hobby of intentionally spreading misinformation on here and Wikipedia.

Mea culpa, searching for the actual original name “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications” pulls up a number of interesting stories about the origins of the company running telegraph lines along the rail tracks. Example: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra...

However I do not see anything resembling cell phone service happening until the 1970s.

Blame the obsolescence of your cell phone on the Android ecosystem and Google’s poor stewardship of Android.

Microsoft also licenses its operating system to third parties and you PCs can get updated by the end user without having to worry about the OEM. Microsoft Windows 7 which just went out of support in 2020 ran on my 2006 era Mac.

As far as phones, Apple released a security patch for the 2013 iPhone 5s less than four months ago.

They might have been state of the art, but they weren’t ubiquitous

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone...

1 in 20 households lacked a phone in 1990, 1 in 5 in 1960, and those number his regional variations.

> even when the mains electricity is out

My ex (and still one of my best friends!) was (is?) a first responder for the Pacific North-West (think oil-spills on mountains and other ecological problems). She was required to have a land-line. It was great that it would forward to a mobile, and lacking that, dump back to a battery-backed-up voice mail unit on-premises (possibly more).

OT: Her position seemed unique to me -- working for <whatever> $company, she would get alerted/activated for things in the Canada AND the U.S. And they would do the thing of "Where are You? ....... There's a heliport at X - we'll have a 'copter there in 15 minutes" and then I get to send her away clutch when I got home.

>Why were they fine using state of the art tech then?

Because they're not against "state of the art" or even the notion of "state of the art" things in general, they're against smartphones in particular.

People are also able to finding smartphones (and the requirement to have one for many aspects of dealing with the government and corporations) bothersome and annoying without having to (a) hate new technology in general, (b) have it be due to them being old.

Amazingly (I know right? Who would have thought!) this can be true even if some people back in the day disliked landlines.

It's almost like each technology is not just some magic miracle everybody should adopt with no downsides and all fun and games, but something that people can be pro or against it on a preference basis (in fact, some tech can also have bjective negative consequences and side-effects).

Case in point I always disliked smartphones, and they become a thing at the time I was a teenager. And I know kids who were born with them who hate them. So there's that.

FWIW my mom loves her smart phone. She would probably use this stuff. She does still have a land line too for actual phone use but uses the smart phone for other things.

However I won't use a smart phone for money or install an app for random things like a gym membership or a restaurant's menu. Never mind banking or medical stuff. It's really hard to verify what an app actually does under the hood and too many reports of even banking apps not getting SSL right and such. I know too much about how bad software development is security wise to trust any of this implicitly.

Thanks but no thanks.

If it was around when you were aged 0-20 it's like water to a fish, a natural part of the environment that you accept without thinking.

If it was invented when you were 20-40 it's new but you're willing to adopt it after some consideration.

If it was invented after you're 40 it's against the natural order of things and must be destroyed.

Well then, I really hope someone comes out with some nice AR kit within the next five years.

Also, for older people, new technology was dangerous. New farm equipment, new machines, etc. So they were brought up with the mentality of 'if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb'.

It's not that they are dumb or obtuse, in their world you have to understand the risk first, then you can use it. It's like the Japanese and baseball. In the USA it's balls then strikes, in Japan, it's strikes then balls. Older people think about strikes, younger people just think about balls.

I like this tidbit!

I think it is apt and we are collectively ignoring how dangerous new technology and technological trends are or can be because we can use them without understanding anything about them (I'd argue even their creators understand little about them).

if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb

This is actually pretty good advice for smartphones, too.

Okay, it won't hack off your leg, but it may affect your life profoundly and adversely in ways that are not obvious at first.

In several ways such as reliability and call quality, land lines from several years ago are a far superior technology to current cellphones.

Of course most landline calls today go through dubious VoIP links and poorly maintained copper infrastructure, which is why I qualify with "from several years ago."

Were it not for this, I would go back to the landline that I enjoyed until recently.

It regularly strikes me as absurd that quality was so much better on an old landline. It's an odd trade-off for which I would never have voted.

Even still, my main complaint is over the loss of minor things like pay-phones. I think I'll always bemoan the idea of a telephone number being associated with a person, rather than a location.

Quality on a PLain Old Telephone System is better, but quality of a zoom/teams/WhatsApp/etc voice call is better than POTS in my experience

I'm between 20 and 40. I'm a full time software developer. I've written software and firmware in my spare time. I've soldered MCUs and debugged them with an oscilloscope. I know better than 99% of people how my phone works. The issue is not that I am unwilling to learn new things. The issue is that cash has been functional as a method of payment for at least 3 thousand years, and the reasons being given for preventing it from being legal tender objectively do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no cycle. You're just wrong. Oh, and I use cash for 100% of the transactions that support it, because I know what's good for me.

It's not the same. Not even close. Those old Bell Telephone phones were military grade. That is they rare broke down. 100s of slam!!! hang ups and they didn't flinch.

But drop your mobile device and not only are you f'ed, you have to invest in getting it fixed. And until then you're a social outcast.

To say nothing of the "sorry, you MUST update or else."

Same stuff? Hardly.

Military grade is just a marketing term

payphones were a thing and they could receive phone calls, so even if you yourself couldn't afford a landline you could still give and take phone calls.

So now the state of the art is to let google/apple know where I go, when I sleep and sell this data to everyone? Great progress.

> It's the same stuff just in a cycle.

Older generations have not been asked to replace their expensive tech every 3 years. My grandparents bought one phone and one TV set and kept them for the rest of their lifes. Something is wrong with today's tech and not with the elderly people who are not able to adapt as fast as zoomers.

Your comparison is bad and you should know it.

If they'd be complaining about their mobile phone bill being higher than their landline bill, fine - but that's not the case.

I'm pretty sure the last land line phone my parents bought was under 100 bucks and it would still be working just fine 10 years later (that is in addition to the fact that we kinda transitioned from analog to ISDN around 2000, and then back). Compare to a new mobile phone every 3 years if you want security updates.

Why do they need to have one? I dislike phone reliance (both in myself and others) and have spent periods without one. I think I've settled on having one for certain conveniences, but it's perfectly possible not to (especially if one 'HATE's it so much).

There are restaurants with only digital menus, there are bars that only take electronic payments, gyms that only have a digital membership card, parking lots only payable via app, during covid there were countries that required quarantine apps on entry.

Sure you could say "just don't go to those places" but then you're slowly withdrawing from society as these things gain in ubiquity.

>Sure you could say "just don't go to those places" but then you're slowly withdrawing from society as these things gain in ubiquity.

conversely the only reason that these companies enforce such policies is because they get away with doing so and people participate.

I hate digital menus. I don't like being on my phone when I go out for dinner (unless I'm by myself) and looking at a nice menu was part of the experience.

Seoul has been 'modernizing' bus stops. The route information, which used to be printed on posters at 1200 dpi, is now visible on large screens at 300 dpi, but the graphics have not been updated. As a result it is very challenging to see the details of most routes.

Dang. Literally none of those things exist where I live in the US. In fact, there's a food truck that comes through every once in awhile that is still cash-only.

This is doubly annoying as a tourist or immigrant: no, I don't have a local phone number, I don't have a bank account here, and I don't want to install $APP that is ubiquitous in your country but controlled by $Evilcorp.

Examples from several different countries: getting around without rideshare/taxi hailing apps, 'self check-in' gyms, Covid-related QR codes to get into restaurants, stores that only take mobile payments, restaurants where the menu is only available by QR code.

> Sure you could say "just don't go to those places" but then you're slowly withdrawing from society as these things gain in ubiquity.

Not only, you are also casting a vote:

"I am very sorry, but I usually don't have my phone with me, seems like I need to bring my money to another business."

> Sure you could say "just don't go to those places" but then you're slowly withdrawing from society as these things gain in ubiquity.

I do say that, that all sounds crap and I don't want any of it even though I have a phone. (And it isn't my experience, I believe it exists but it's absolutely not hard to ignore.)

Again, if they all-caps-hate it so much...

> There are restaurants with only digital menus

I've walked out of places because of that.

SMS and app-based confirmation codes, phone number verification requirements, app-exclusive features, QR codes to see the menu, etc etc.

Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy in the ranter and general sympathy from HN code towards them.

"Normal Land Line" wasn't something that came from nature. It is a sophisticated technology invented by humans with the same User Interface flaws and Laggard-Ranting that every generation goes through.

When Mixed-Reality becomes popular, I'm sure there will be many complaining "why can't I just have simple smartphone" and there will probably some Gen Zers sympathizing with them and reminiscing about the simple days of smartphone.

Newsflash: Adaption and Evolution is the name of the game. I can understand if a disabled person complains inability to use gadgets(although smartphones have better accessibility features), but you can bet your bottom dollar, most of these people whine because they aren't curious about the world and stubbornly refuse to adapt and the rest of the world has to bend over backwards to accommodate them?

A phone book and a touchtone (or even rotary) phone is exponentially cheaper, simpler and easier to maintain than a smartphone.

Yes, it’s also exponentially more powerful, but it leaves a lot of people behind.

I'd be with you if these devices weren't hundreds of dollars with obsolescence lifetime treadmills measured in the ones of years and bound to a duopoly of corporate-controlled ecosystems that require opting in to onerous contract terms.

Just a few of those factors might not be so bad but with all of them it could become impossible to do legally-required things like buying car insurance without being effectively legally required to look at Google ads. Or renewing your passport without agreeing to a software EULA that forbids you from ever suing Apple for leaking your private data. All of this "it's just opting in to societal progress" crap is why Experian even ever had your data to leak[1] it in the first place, and why Google and Braze and every other tech company has it too.

0: https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png 1: https://threatpost.com/experian-api-leaks-american-credit-sc...

You can buy a pair of shoes and a smartphone for about the same amount of money (pick your number!) and they'll wear out in about the same amount of time.

I usually buy $20-$50 shoes, not a lot of new smartphones in that price range

And if you’re poor you can find workable shoes at a thrift store for a few bucks. Finding a workable cellphone cheap is more difficult.

that will be supported for security updates too

You can buy an unlocked Android phone for $50 unsubsidized.

There are plenty of places that offer cheap phones for the poor

https://www.reviews.org/mobile/how-to-get-free-government-ce...

If it doesn't get security updates, you really can't do online paying/banking with it.

That’s mostly true for any Android phone after a year or two - or sometimes never.

All Android phones have shitty long term support - even the Pixels.

Of course iPhones are a different story with Apple releasing a security update for the 2013 iPhone 5s as recently as June of this year. But I’m not going to suggest an iPhone as an alternative.

On the other hand, developing countries manage with $30 unsubsidized phones and people use them for banking.

> If it doesn't get security updates, you really can't do online paying/banking with it.

Maybe you shouldn't, but in terms of pure ability you perfectly well can. (And somewhat ironically, if you take matters into your own hands and update the OS yourself, quite a few banking apps will then refuse to run for "security reasons", while at the same time they're absolutely happy to run on an outdated OS version.)

You definitely can.

https://a.co/d/imNpbBS

Where are you buying shoes that they cost over 500$.

I purchased a pair of docs for about 300$, 10 years ago. Still wear them as my day to day shoes/boots.

Yes, the shoe-phone!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_phone

I'm happy to learn and adapt, the point is, I shouldn't have to. Any system which creates a history of who, was where, and when, aggregated in a single data source is incredibly dangerous and the primary reason I use cash transactions for everything. Cash has worked just fine as a form of legal tender for over 3000 years. I have a really hard time passing the reasons cited for deprecating it through Hanlon's razor.

A lot of things have worked out for thousands of years.

If you can use a computer, you can use a smartphone. It's just a form factor.

The amount of mental gymnastics some people go through to justify their irrational decisions is always mind-boggling --- and these are some of the smartest people

I'm a software dev, and I leave my phone at home as often as I can. I know how to use it. I've been contracted to write apps for both droid and iphone. Still I'd rather leave all tech at home. I'm not justifying it. I don't like being distracted.

I don't install apps because I 100% don't trust the devs who write apps. Or well I don't trust their bosses. Corners are cut and security and UX typically takes a back seat to "the funnel"

My gym (located right across the street from my house) requires me to check in via an app. I have no issues walking across the street and getting the clerk to manually do it for me. NO I didn't bring a phone to my workout.

Just subscribe to security advisory and similar and the "irrational decision" will suddenly become a completely rational one.

Your ignorance about other people's thought process doesn't imply they don't have a thought process.

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