“When we all have pocket telephones”
openculture.com
openculture.com
His primary example, his primary complaint, was a situation where he was at dinner with his wife and his own cell phone rang. A friend was calling him! On his phone, at dinner!
How incredibly, unimaginably rude could someone be? To call someone while he was in a public restaurant, at dinner with his wife! Can you imagine the audacity?
I remember thinking what a complete asshole this man must be. A friend called him while he was at a restaurant, the ringer went, it embarrassed him at this nice restaurant, and he went on a tear blaming everyone but himself.
Meanwhile, we now have people who get on the bus blaring music from their cell phones or hanging a portable bluetooth speaker from their backpacks while walking down the street, and people miss the idea that hey, the problem isn't the technology, it's that the technology enables inconsiderate, rude people to be inconsiderate and rude in new and exciting ways, as though boom boxes didn't exist before bluetooth speakers.
And someone doom scrolling while "spending time" with others might not actually want to be spending time with those people. In that case the ire should be directed to those people or obligations making them spend their limited time in a way they dislike.
Short of that, it is probably not an actual emergency and real human people in front of you should have your full respect and attention with a rare exception being when you are trapped, like on an airplane. If you are not trapped then just leave. Using a phone in front of someone for any reason not relevant to the current activity or conversation is just a passive aggressive insult.
Phones are like toilets. No one wants to watch you use one.
I also disagree that you owe anyone your attention. There are so many more situations where you are stuck being around people that are not you being literally trapped. This is even more true for kids who might not have full autonomy of where they spend their time.
But even when someone wants to spend time with you that doesn't mean that they owe you their attention. Certainly not their full attention for the entire time. Let people daydream a bit and let them check their phone once in a while. Remember that not everyone is the same as you. If get that offended by that then perhaps you're the problem.
> Using a phone in front of someone for any reason not relevant to the current activity or conversation is just a passive aggressive insult.
And sometimes a passive agressive insult is called for.
Also, I am pretty sure there are people who do want to watch you use a toilet.
I have had to resort to offering to buy dinner if people turn their phones off because they are so addicted to being constantly connected to every chat, meme, tiktok dance, and facebook political rant.
All the time I see entire friend groups or families sitting around tables at restaurants all on their phones ignoring each other. It is gross.
I am fine always being the person at the table pushing for the exact opposite of that, and maybe we can all tolerate the middle ground.
I've discovered that the fastest way of turning them off is with a mallet.
- Frederick Pohl
I've heard this misquoted as, "a good sci-fi predicts the automobile but a great one predicts traffic jams and parking lots," which I also appreciate.
He was clearly annoyed with the calls, but as a kid I was amused and a little jealous of the fact that in such a short time so many people wanted to get hold of him. I also remember signing up for all kind of email newsletters just to get more emails!
Have to admire the vision of this artist in an age when even land lines weren't in wide use!
Which reminds me of me in 1950s. I always tried to get seat by the window where the heat pipes run. My crystal set needed ground wire and the antenna could be hidden by the curtains.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
> In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.
In that case, the comic got things wrong too.
You'll be hard pressed to find people wearing those clothes these days, especially the nurse's headgear. Canes and briefcases are also rare, though I suspect that those rare few wearing a bowler hat might still use them.
Also, few people use a bell as their ringtone.
I have always used a bell ringtone, I like it because I find it less-invasive then all the other abstract modern ringtones that only give me alarm clock PTSS.
Unfortunately, Samsung removed the classing bell ringtone in their latest models :(
Plus, I know a lot of people who only have it on vibrate.
So we could easily advance past those points without touching them entirely.
The source book is a little better about the question. The major difference between Replicants and people is that people have empathy and Replicants don't. In the book there's a device that allows people to essentially get into this weird empathy group mind thing. It's been a hot minute since I read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" so forgive the details.
And that's what the Voight-Kampf device measures. That's what the questions are designed to test. It's why the first Replicant flips out on the turtle question. He can't process the need to flip over the turtle. He can't empathise with the turtle.
But he's kind of still a child. Which is a little understandable, because Replicants have a 3-year lifespan. They are babies. Toddlers. He flips out because he's throwing a tantrum. Roy Batty and Pris are closer to the end of their life, they've developed empathy, as any person would. That's what gets Deckard. He realizes Replicants are fully people and what we do to them is wrong. Batty was never the bad guy.
But that's all tangential. Blade Runner is set 37 years in the future. Which is now 3 years in the past. It was trying to guess when the relevant technology will be available. I think that's a better way of thinking about it. Science Fiction isn't trying to predict what will be available in X years, it's trying to predict in how many years X will be available.
I'm sure some people had the imagination when they first saw radios and how they were removing wires from some devices to think about what this meant for any device with wires.
It is now essential to be considered part of the society, to the point that someone who does not want to or cannot carry a cell phone is sneered at. Anecdotally, I was in the USA and during a few day lay-over, I wanted to get a hair cut. I was refused service at a hair cutting chain because I did not have a cell phone with me (it was in the hotel, did not want spam, would not get there and back on time, etc.). I offered credit card or cash, but was rejected, and explicitly told I have to have cell phone.
I am not angry, just sad.
As @nonrandomstring noted, "absurdity of reality is escaping parody".
This replaced keychain fobs with a barcode, which had none of these annoyances.
I want "app containers" on my phone to limit these apps and feed them fake data as needed.
Alternatively if you are rooted Xprivacy[0] does what you asked, allowing you to grant apps permissions but then feeding them fake data as configured.
No idea about iOS though.
EDIT: There seems to be an app called Insular[1] which also works like Xprivacy, but doesn't require root at all and comes with a couple of extra features like the ability to have multiple instances of an app installed. Haven't tried this one though and I have no idea if it even runs on newer versions of Android.
Insular seems to rely on the inbuilt managed profiles to "run as" another user. Seems straightforward. I'll try it out!
I want to: USE THE TICKETMASTER™ APP FOR MY TICKET, AND NOT HAVE ANY OTHER WAY TO HAVE IT—DEFINITELY NOT PDF.
So that: I CAN HAVE THE CONCERT EXPERIENCE OF THE FUTURE©
<Product Owner puts leans back from keyboard and breathes deeply>
"That's it. I've just written the perfect product brief."
<Stands and moves toward CEO's office>
They're not allowing that in general any longer. I wasn't allowed to log in to their site this summer without phone text verification.
However, I believe they still have a ticket printer for emergencies, such as when you show up at the window saying you broke your phone, but just happened to print a receipt before leaving.
Still prevents any sort of anonymous attendance.
See also essential software that cannot be purchased, only rented. Many of the most essential apps today are not paid for with money, occasionally people talk about how they want to pay for these apps (in exchange for better customer service, etc), but no, they don't want our money, our money is worth less than the data we give.
Someone at Google has said "people want to pay us money to have better support and be treated like customers instead of products", and the response was "no, not worth it". On a macro scale Google was not interested in the money of individuals.
Facebook / Meta is one of the richest companies in the world, and they didn't make their money by taking money from individuals.
Politicians aren't swayed by the donations of common people, but by the donation of wealthy special interest groups and wealthy individuals.
The poorest 50% of the United States controls 1.2% of the wealth. One day they'll look around and collectively ask "what can we do with our money?", and the answer will be "buy cheap consumer goods, pay rent, and not much else". More and more companies don't want the little money they have, instead they want their attention, their votes, and their time and labor. Going after their money alone just isn't worth it.
If they or their friends have the ability to vote someone will always be willing to for their data to have an advantage in swaying said votes.
Facebook events can do the same, but it does require you to have a Facebook account which is over the ethical line for me as I do not accept their terms of service. I always let community event organizers know this, and explain how to export events into a standard calendar format that can be emailed.
Also during covid scares the inconvenience of not having SMS and QR would have been insane.
I don't believe this.
I'm skeptical of the "chain" aspect - a chain is more likely to have hardware and support other methods - but a visitor may not know what is/isn't a chain anyway.
OR a particular employ is new or lazy and just didn't want to drag out the hardware. ;)
This happened when I was trying to park near a place to get my phone fixed!
Major stations will at best have a couple of ticket machines. All the other ones will have none.
No one else in my class nor in most other classes at school had a phone. So it was kind of cool. But still for many years the only thing I could do with the phone, since no one else had mobile phones yet, was to talk with my father XD It was a blue and black Siemens phone with an antenna. No games, no GPRS/WAP, no nothing other than phone call and SMS ability mainly.
I don't think I'm just projecting when I say we've pretty much reverted to that? As far as I can tell it's not 'cool' among schoolchildren any more either to have some song or joke sound or whatever.
The vast majority I hear (i.e. if it rings at all, not just vibrating!) I would say are 'simple'; it's the 'songs and joke sounds or whatever' that grate.
If we let them wire something into our brains, it's a lot easier to connect it to the happiness centres:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3984894/
If you can gain networked control of such a device, you could easily gain complete control of their motivations and disires. Much more strongly than with any drug.
Not only would you be able to make these people hand over everything of value to you (bypassing any needs to advertise), you could even make them WANT to work for you (and even go to war for you) with fanatical motivation and effort.
As for the dystopian applications, I would not be suprised if there are some dr Mengele wannabies in some dark corners of the world experimenting with how to control prison inmates or similar "disposable" people using such tech.
Can you say more about this?
I wonder what's feasible in the near future. I recall excitedly watching a Gabe Newell interview on BCI. Having struggled with major depression and anxiety, his speculation on using BCI to control sleep/mood/etc seemed like a mental panacea. Of course, with that level of control over one's brain, my delight about potential emotional stabilization feels akin to lionizing computers as a newfangled bookkeeping tool -- while true, it's comically myopic.
Here's a hard turn into wild speculation for ya: The Great Filter is either 1) endosymbiosis or 2) inventing BCI.
Not much beyond the article I linked above. I've been aware of such research for a few decades. It appears that inducing happiness is super easy. But also way more addictive than the hardest drugs. There term Wirehead was a term from SciFi (and later Cyperpunk) to describe someone addicted to such stimulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
Early use was limited by how to control the mood. Manual control would be impossible, since anyone with access to their own happiness would turn it up to max pretty much at once, with no ability to turn it back down. With it at max setting, people would simply stop functioning, not even able to eat, have sex, etc, so unsupervised it would probably be leathal pretty soon.
So for early application, one would have to set it at some constant offset, which probably had some downsides. (Possibly poor reaction to normal stimuli, I don't remember.)
Later on, maybe about 10 years ago, brain research and computer tech started to allow more sophisticated control of the level, where it would regulate the happiness-level in a way similar to how normal/healthy brains do. (The patiens would be treatment resistent MDS)
Still, the potential downsides are obviously immense, potentially making fentanyl, crack and meth seem like child's play.
A self regulated version as this would be so deadly that I think very few knowing its risks would dare use it. But one _could_ imagine people setting up arrangements where they grant the power to regulate the level, according to some principles.
For instance, let's say you're bored at work, and procastinating by reading HN, at a level that reduces your performance. Let's say that, instead of getting hold of ritalin or microdosing shrooms, you go to a shady lab that installs one of these things, and controls it remotely by lowering happiness just a bit when you're not doing what you "should" and rewards you slightly when coding (by monitoring your laptop), with additional rewards when pull requests are approved.
Now, imagine your manager (or a CPP rep, if you're in China) finding out, and bribes the lab to add some more "features" to your profile, including loyalty to her personally as well as a more aggressive level of rewards for workplace performance.
So this I guess would be the ultimate authoritarian end game, but from my perspective - what's the point. When you've got total control, what then? Like what's the next move... because anything else is just a rounding error to what you've already got.
Just missed it by vibrate-only mode.
In a world where all things are absurd, ipso facto nothing is absurd.
An interesting question becomes what remains? What are the solid relations that underpin our humanity?
Having a boss that tells you what to do? No, long since passed the point where I have to tell my boss what to do - it's called being the consultant in a clueless, inverted meritocracy.
People wanting to take your money? No. The insane conceit of a "cash-less society" has already created situations where you cannot physically force someone to take money from you.
I'm honestly struggling to see what is cast in stone. Even death and taxes are looking worried. <shakes fist at clouds>
Seems like the nihilists, the "nothing matters" crowd, and the neo-libertarians (chaos is good) have been having a bad streak lately.
Satire needs a point of sanity and order to stand on (and refer to as the way things should be, versus the bad version it mocks).
Your comment is like saying "CEOs saying the current market is bad for their industry, while ...still running companies?!"
It's not like the observation that a trade is being hurt (in this case, in the kind of disconnect between your job being pointing out absurdity as something that stands out and making it funny, and a society that seems to drown and revel in it) cannot be done by practitioners of said trade while they practice it...
Which was the point (and even made in jest)...
It's more like a crooner saying they're being put out of a job after rock n' roll or the Beatlemania, while still having gigs...
Yes, they might still get work and sell some records, but they have a harder time justifying their career, get smaller audiences, and people see them not that culturally or socially relevant anymore...
"It's a sad state of affairs when the most accurate political commentary is done by comedians, while the country is being governed by clowns." Such an apt description of the UK. And while that was said two governments (ie. less than a year) ago, it's only slightly less accurate now.
Wasn't the court jester the only telling the truth a trope hundreds of years ago?
Most comedians refuse to play shows on college campuses now (once a highly lucrative venue for them) because of the audience
The difference is now they’re not worth the trouble.
Seinfeld (not even who you think of as “anti-woke”) has a good take on it you could search for. https://ew.com/article/2015/06/08/jerry-seinfeld-politically...
>“I don’t play colleges.” Seinfeld says teens and college-aged kids don’t understand what it means to throw around certain politically-correct terms. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,'” he said. “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about”
The difference is that many in the Seinfeld generation (and other generations) think of "Racism" or "Sexism" as terrible evils that they must never commit.
While likely the "teens and college-aged kids" he's complaining about recognize that we all engage in some level of racism or sexism in our daily internal or external lives.
So, if someone accused Seinfeld of racism or sexism, his reaction might be to defend himself, and say, "No! How dare you!"
But if someone told one of the "woke kids" they were racist or sexist, their reaction would more likely be, "yeah, probably."
To Jerry, being "a racist" is synonymous with being a bad person. The "woke kids" recognize that we're all racist and sexist and prejudiced to some degree, and (hopefully) trying to be better about it.
[I'm not, and therefore have no opinion on this, but I wanted to know where you're getting your repository of knowledge of "most comedians" from and how to contextualize your knowledge in this matter. I'm asking in good faith.]
I'm British, middle aged, and yes I have worked in entertainments during my career.
So far I have heard (via media interviews or similar) John Cleese, Mark Thomas, Eddie Izzard, Stewart Lee, Frankie Boyle, Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris, Steve Coogan, Ian Hislop, and Armando Iannucci all say approximately the same thing in a more-or-less serious context.
Of course the "nothing is funny any more" trope is timeless. It doesn't need saying. However, these comics are also serious cultural analysts and they're identifying a genuine sea-change.
Cultural malaise often hides beneath the surface. One of the most frightening accounts of this, on a more international stage, is what Slavoj Zizek had to say on it; He said that in the former Yugoslavia, humour kept ethnic tensions at bay. The civil war was foreshadowed by a creeping political correctness and people "not finding things funny anymore".
If anything, sending arbitrary amounts of money to be spent on the interest to pay for the debt of corrupt and failed political ventures is not fair in any regard.
If taxes actually paid for government services, you might have a point, but they do not.
Today it's 37%. So it's really the other way around — taxes have never been as low as now in recent history.
But in the context of reality’s absurdity reaching escape velocity from parody, it seems fitting that the rich barely pay taxes anymore and are seeking immortality cures like Thiel does. Death and taxes are the postmodern libertarian’s greatest enemies.
"Average Total Federal Tax Rate (percent)" is lower for every percentile from 1979 to 2018.
Year 1979 2018
Lowest Quintile 9.3 0.0
Second Quintile 15.0 8.1
Middle Quintile 19.1 12.8
Fourth Quintile 21.7 16.7
Highest Quintile 27.1 24.4
All Quintiles 22.4 19.3
81st - 90th Percentiles 23.6 20.0
91st - 95th Percentiles 25.2 21.9
96th - 99th Percentiles 27.1 24.2
Top 1% 35.1 30.2
Year 1979 2018
Lowest Quintile -0.2 -12.0
Second Quintile 4.1 -2.1
Middle Quintile 7.4 2.2
Fourth Quintile 10.1 5.9
Highest Quintile 15.9 15.4
All Quintiles 11.1 9.4
81st - 90th Percentiles 12.3 9.0
91st - 95th Percentiles 14.1 11.4
96th - 99th Percentiles 16.8 15.5
Top 1% 22.6 23.5
Now, sure, there are state taxes, and sales taxes, and payroll taxes, and all sorts of other taxes.
Still, where do you get the numbers to back your statement that after 40+ years of Reaganism and unending legislative attempts to lower taxes, that the numbers now are higher than ever before?
This calculation does not consider the growth of expenditures specifically (as opposed to receipts) and similarly does not consider the growth of GDP (as opposed to inflation).
Even if all we look at is US federal income taxes, you don't include them all. Social security is a sum of 12.4% of your income (and it is regressive!). Medicare is 2.9%. These have gone up considerably since 1979 (8.1% total in 1979, 15.3% now)
Which is why I didn't. I specifically pointed out that there are other taxes.
My point was to get ekianjo to present data to support their claim.
Do you have better data?
Here is a graph from wikipedia that shows that taxes in the US are in total about as high as they have ever been (which was 2000). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Federal%... You can very clearly see that while Federal taxes are gradually decreasing, that is more than made up by Payroll taxes.
As nonameiguess already pointed out, your answer disputes ekianjo's claim, as the peak in your graph was 1999.
Let me quote my post for your convenience: "I don't know if taxes are higher now vs some point in history"
I did read your side. You believe I'm not arguing in good faith. I think that's a misinterpretation. I am not versed in the topic, and I don't pretend to be one. But the exchange was claim/counter-claim/counter-counter-claim without any citations, going nowhere.
While presenting wrong, or at least incomplete numbers, shifts it to one about presenting the actual numbers and what they mean, and if it's justified tax increases.
If that's that's bad faith tribalism, than so be it. But you'll notice the pointless exchange about "most taxes EVAR" has stopped.
The tribal point was that I got 2 responses saying 'technically we aren't at the absolute peak tax rate' based on the graph I posted. Instantly people wanted 'taxes aren't at an all time high' to win, and assume this is because their 'tribe' is the one that wants to raise taxes. If you look at the graph we are very nearly at the peak, and certainly from a historical perspective we are plateauing very near the peak. That's not arguing in good faith to chime in that OP was wrong because technically we are a smidgen below the all time high, and OP said 'all time high' rather than 'near the all time high', so they get an L and their side loses and we can just pretend there's no more detail than that.
It was easy to point out that the US had >100% ratio in the 1940s, due to WWII, without the consequences he postulated.
I then found it was a "tribal point" going around, that he was repeating without investigating.
This claim that taxes now are the highest ever felt like the same sort of "tribal point."
How does one challenge an seemingly wrong assertion without also being labelled "tribal"? Especially in a field so contentious as this where there are position papers upon position papers for- and against- just about every point you can think of.
FWIW, I think the premise is flawed. Rich people put their assets in trusts and foundations, which are not subject to the same taxes, and yet controlled by the them and their family.
(For example, "Patagonia Billionaire Who Gave Up Company Skirts $700 Million Tax Hit; Founder Yvon Chouinard structured the transfer of his firm in a way that keeps control within the family and avoids taxes." - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-15/patagonia... )
Because those savings aren't paid taxes, they don't show up in charts which summarize only those taxes paid.
So when "liberals in the US [talk about how] taxes are too low", I believe it also refers to the legal techniques rich people use to avoid paying taxes, including through laws which were specifically created for this purpose.
edit: was meant as reply to a different comment
My data is half-assed, certainly. Surely you should be more critical of someone presenting no data, yes?
Wait, so you only pay Federal taxes in the US? That's practical if you only cherry pick a part of the data.
I used this to ask for source data for the claim.
None of these people are making the same arguments to the poster who offered nothing but a claim. Because "of course it's true, everyone knows it". Well, everyone is quite capable of being wrong. As those self-same people will happily tell us when it's time to enact some very mild preventative measures for the health and safety of the country that the vast majority of health professionals recommend.
My argument is we itemized the bill. All of the individual items look lower. Because we broke them out. The whole number is about the same. I would argue that some are too low for our spend rate but that is a different argument.
https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/#richest-amer...
I don't know how you qualify that. I would qualify it as extreme. The fact that "most people are not companies" doesn't matter, what matters is where the wealth is.
You'd be very very surprised...
(Context: there was a recent HN post on radar software being restricted in the US partly due to ITAR)
Also, are you complaining that you cannot be mugged as easily?
I've heard them say that as long as I've been alive. I'm sure 3000 years ago traveling bards were saying the same things. There is a lot of comedic value from the statement, so of course any good one will use it from time to time. That doesn't mean it is true.
I've followed US political news since I was a kid. 2016 and onwards shit started getting really weird. Political satire from 2015 was no longer relevant by 2017ish not due the passage of time, but due to the fact that the events that followed are more ridiculous.
I imagine this has happened before. For example, my mom's generation always says 1968 was a crazy year in politics and culture. I imagine early 60s political satire looked tame by the late 60s. But I don't think political satire from 2008 looked ridiculous in 2014, for example.
Decades ago, acts like Monty Python or Allan Sherman were subversive; now they might still be kind of funny, but certainly not shocking. When you have generations that grew up on self-conscious irony, where the way to be cool was not to be seen caring about anything, it's harder to make comedy stick.
Politicians and religious figures may not be any more or less corrupt and out-of-touch than they always were, but now they can gain enough support to keep their jobs without anyone actually taking them seriously, and that's where the self-parody comes in.
I wouldn't say comedy is failing because the source material is too ridiculous, I would say it's failing because the audience is a tough crowd.
We are certainly a more ‘educated’ crowd living completely awash in content.
Absurdity will find a way .
that's not a recent phenomenon. It's a cultural debate that's been going on for decades, probably the most prominent figure is David Foster Wallace, the 'New Sincerity' genre as a response to detached irony and that sort of thing.
I just don't see many young people laughing these days.
More than I would like. Apparently there is a problem with my SSN and my warranty is about to expire.