'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The new smartphone app.. Not so much. It looks more like some MBA types managed to solve "what is the cheapest thing we can get away with, lawfully?"As a result, the use case flow (IE the only way you can operate it..) of the app, goes as follows:
1 close the app 2 launch the app and sign in 3 do ONE action 4 enjoy the result of the action 5 repeat from 1..
You might wonder why that is.. Well, that is because your software is not allowed to display any errors - because that might indicate there were bugs.. So instead, whenever an error happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation... forever. So, technically, there are no errors, no bugs.. "IT IS JUST TAKING TOO LONG TO RESPOND". (spoiler: it will NEVER respond, because hidden behind the screen, is a series of unhandled web api errors..)
But again, as an "internal" employee, I have seen our management claim all this is a huge success (client paid/pays).
Back to using it: When I have to interact with my doctor, I write the texts on my PC, and mail them to myself. Then I cut/paste them from gmail into this wonderful app.
> who is even "the user" here?
The doctors and their patients. If it's as bad as it sounds, it actively degrades the ability of doctors to provide care, so it quite literally hurts actual people.
A crucial part of this approach is to let your doctor know exactly why you're leaving. If they're losing business over it, they'll look for alternatives. And if the EHR company loses money, they'll look to make changes, too.
What recourse does an individual have if they live in a rural area with 1 or 3 doctors that all use the same hostile software?
Should they suffer because they don't have money or the ability to go else where?
Those that do should organize to make their displeasure known. Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs rather than compete assholes.
If they live somewhere with 1 doc they should vote with their feet by leaving before the town finishes dying around them.
Is this what you're seriously arguing? That people should be forced to have a worse quality life, die earlier; all because they committed the crime of not living in a metropolis?
Do you not see how people read this as completely heartless and devoid of empathy towards their fellow man?
The idea that my neighbors and I are gunna go picket the only person within 20 miles that can write a prescription is ludicrous.
Literally already the case and more so care isn't cheaper unlike land so your lesser dollars buys lesser care and no realistic access to specialists
It's not some coincidence that just about every company in every sector is screwing over more and more people. This is all extremely calculated. We've decided that making the most money is all that matters and we're seeing the inevitable results of that choice everywhere around us. If shareholders got richer by providing people with quality healthcare and well designed websites and the freedom to use or not use mobile technology we'd already have those things. No one cares how shitty they make our lives or even how many of us they kill as long as they keep the ability to stuff more money into their pockets this quarter than they did last quarter. The people doing this shit to us aren't incompetent. What we want from them isn't what they're optimizing for. Maybe you haven't noticed the massive amount of consolidation in every industry going on, but consider that voting with your wallet gets harder over time. Consider how many companies you're personally giving your money to right now while wishing you had an alternative that better met your needs. Voting with your wallet is not a real option. The fattest wallet will always win.
And thus it's questionable whenever voting with wallet would work. It works in healthy, free and competitive markets with rational actors, and we probably aren't looking at one.
And he was well aware that I'm a guy whose mental illness can mostly be traced to escaping into screens since the first Family Cathode Ray of 1974 and Clarke Monolith of 1968
The second part is the more interesting question to me:
Appropriate reactions would seem to include:
- finding a new doctor/practice/provider. Super hard in practice as they seem to be geographical monopolies a la the cable networks
- providing appropriately hostile feedback to your current doctors — but this is likely only to garner empathy as the docs have little say over this
- stop using smartphones and claim hardship — not sure how this would pan out. Probably not well?
- channeling Luigi and murdering the people responsible for our ongoing dystopia
This is why so many people are content to let the world burn. It ain’t for us anymore anyway.
If you see other options I’d be happy to hear them?
My 95 year-old mother can't use apps on her iphone because she can't figure out the navigation and various modes. Because of this her phone usage is limited to answering incoming calls, making calls to the six icons we've preset on her home screen, receiving texts and replying to the last text she received (because it's still on the screen). Anything else is iffy. And she's not cognitively impaired. She's actually quite sharp for her age and lives on her own within an assisted care community.
Blind people are. At least, insofar as we still have the ADA.
One thing these companies are doing is charging blind people extra. Phrase it that way and you can maybe move some policy levers.
Of course one thing is nobody wants to sue someone because they don't understand something, because they think it means arguing they are stupid.
Feeling helpless is the moment you loose.
This is what happens when you let the bean counters and MBAs a quarter turn around the world with no on-the-ground experience or institutional knowledge make decisions from their spreadsheets to "optimize out inefficiencies".
Let's call it what it is: strip mining.
No, if anything, people buying and running multiple offices are exactly in the business of optimizing the last few percentage points of efficiency and that include amortizing better software across all these offices to make them run with fewer humans in the loop. Causing more people to talk to more humans is NOT what they do.
The issue is lack of care, incompetence, stupidity - exactly the things that will get you fired from these operations. Eventually.
The problem is "eventually". Unfortunately it will take too long for that to happen, compared to the rest of our lives.
Local government politics work. State politics even kinda work.
The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.
To quote George Carlin: “If voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it”.
Trump lost in 2024 but took the win because his cronies disqualified enough voters in enough states to win.
So, please, spare me. We’re up to violence already. You’re just well behind the times unfortunately.
Would be really curious to see how this could be proven or at the very least convincingly induced.
Can you provide a source for that data for a specific swing state of your choice?
I would see a point in saying voting is pointless, because no matter who you vote for, all end up on the payroll of the people doing enshitification. But not because your side always loose. Because this then won't likely change when you turn to violence - your side will be still the smaller one and we tried the whole voting thing, to not have all arguments solved with bloodshed.
>So, please, spare me. We’re up to violence already. You’re just well behind the times unfortunately.
There have been nut-jobs saying this and inflicting violence since the beginning of the country. Then there are people who actually affect change. Pick a side.
If you create a technically better app for the users, people still won't be able to use it unless you also are chosen by those higher up, and since there's likely already a strong existing relationship between the executives at the existing company and at the medical compan(ies), that means creating a competitor also will require building a lot of social capital with the decision makers, taking them to dinner and on golf trips, and so on.
It will take years of your life, millions of dollars (since a 1-man company will never be seen as legitimate enough to provide a medical app, you'll need a large company with many employees), and the chance of success is minimal.
I don't see how this is an "appropriate" response to a bad app.
I wish we lived in a world where all these APIs were open, regulated, and everybody could compete on the implementation on both sides... One day, if capitalism survive technofeudalism...
I see the "democrat" and "republic" checkboxes, but I don't see the magical third "Good apps, and also health insurance companies have to cover medical claims without questioning whether my doctor is competent, denying each claim once, and requiring 3 months of arguing on a phone"
I've been voting, and as far as I can tell every option I have ever been able to vote for has been fully in support of crappy apps and crappy healthcare.
Get off your ass and start a ballot measure. If you want to literally vote for a direct regulation that’s the way to do it.
Alternatively, start talking to state legislators and get them to support a bill doing it.
It's not. Unlike voting, it has a nonzero chance of improving the app situation.
In this situation, instead of anything on the list above, I recommend going to press/Twitter and stressing the angle that this bullshit actually ruins people's lives permanently (or kills them prematurely).
for hundreds of years our government and the corporations who bribe them have worked to limit the influence of the average person on the laws and regulations that we live under. After seeing our broken two party system, the gerrymandering and voter suppression, the open bribery, the lack of integrity or accountability, the inability/unwillingness of congress to do their job, and the growing list of laws and policies most Americans support and problems we want solutions for that get ignored time and time again while laws are being passed to appease corporations and industries, I really don't blame people for thinking that their ballot box is not the solution to their problems.
When people feel they don't have a way within the system to get the things they need they'll look for ways to get them outside of the system. Our government used at least put in the effort to give the appearance that working within the system could be successful, but these days they barely bother to do that.
Personally I still like to hold onto hope that voting can make a difference, especially at the local level, but it's a hard sell these days and getting harder all the time.
This is basically what I do now. When someone tells me to install their app or give them my cell phone number I tell them that I don't have a cell phone. Sometimes I do it while holding a cell phone in my hand.
I've told employers that if they make using an app a requirement they'll need to buy me a cell phone.
If people really push on why I won't use an app I'll tell them all about how my buying a phone doesn't make me the owner of one since multiple people at multiple companies have privileged access to the device I paid for far beyond my own level of access which enables them to access/add/remove/modify files and settings at any time and for any reason without my permission or even without making me aware that they've done it. Why would I use a system controlled by an unknown number of others who are only interested in enriching themselves to keep highly personal information like my medical history or banking information? Cell phones are inherently insecure and adversarial devices designed to collect and leak our private information while stealing our attention.
- Switch to paper mail notices
(Here, health insurance "improving" their web site - again - to a useless two-factor auth that loops indefinitely.)
The general public are currently being trained with administrative assistant/clerical skills in order to do this labor for companies unable to support a workforce.
Your card transactions are now your responsibility, not a cashier's. Your menu ordering is in your hands from the cloud, not a waitress you can harass. Your vehicle's vital functions, safety mechanisms, and accessories are all on you, in motion or at rest. All your paperwork is cloud-assisted but you're the secretary and they're going paperless so you'd better have a nice printer, too.
Your mobile apps are living rent-free in your home/pocket and you've got limited authority over their resource usage, especially if a coin miner or botnet is part of your package deal.
Currently I'm struggling with my ISP because apparently the providers in USA are segregating/unbundling Mobile Wireless service and moving toward stricter metering/throttling of data and bandwidth, so it would seem that this Mandatory Smartphone also demands an Unlimited 5G plan to match.
I would if I'm by myself but if I'm out with friends I'm not comfortable making everyone leave.
> It's usually an indicator that there are other terrible cuts in service and quality going on as well.
I've seen no such correlation.
Most I see restaurants switching to card only, pay in app. I can seem some benefits from them.
* they don't need cash to make change * they have no money to be robbed * employees can't pocket any money
Most of my friends like going cashless so they see it as a benefit too.
But then they should also display them publicly outside/inside, and/or have a bunch of tablets ready for visitors to use.
(This fall under the general pattern of "make it their pain")
It's just about the most cynical dining experience I've ever had the misfortune of enduring.
I also stopped signing anything in the waiting room.
If you were correct, you could get cosmetic surgery for free and with no prerequisites, assuming it wouldn’t harm you.
What would you call it if you were required to work—paid or otherwise—under threat of criminal punishment?
I've heard the arguments, so if you're thinking you're going to win an argument with me about whether this means anything or not, you're not; but supplemental information about why what's printed on our money doesn't mean it's legally money to pay a debt to a doctor, go for it.
First, in a non-urgent situation, you’re going to be asked about payment prior to service, and they may refuse to treat you if you can’t pay.
Second, in an emergency situation where you’re unable to provide affirmative assent, you’ll be liable for costs under the doctrine of quantum meruit (quasi-contract). If you don’t pay, the provider can sue you, in which case, the court may force you to pay on their terms.
The question was, “why shouldn’t doctors be required to treat patients?” It wasn’t, “should doctors treat some patients regardless of ability to pay?” There’s a big difference between these. The first is about compelled behavior; the second is about voluntary behavior.
There’s an analogy in the legal world in the U.S.: while lawyers aren’t required to take cases for free, there’s a time-honored tradition of reserving some time to take some cases for free (aka pro bono).
The amazing stupid part is when I have to sign in at the actual doctor's office.
They have an iPad which does some sort of remote/citrix setup, resulting in a frustrating experience that is full of lag where you interface with what might be their actual EMR system.
So apps, and even websites, have just become ways to market and push to users. It's not about functionality or enabling the user.
Another, maybe smallish, manifestation of this that I've seen is that devs, UX, and everyone involved is so downright hostile to direct "links". Devs because it forces them to think about what stupid react/angular router they want to use, devops has to do URL-rewrites, PMs are worried about the "additional scope", and UX folks' brains absolutely explode that there is no "flow" to the entity (it just pops up, omg). Instead you, as the user, are forced to click through the search UI or to type the right thing, to trigger the flow or whatever, before you get to that entity you want. You can't just create it as a link, and thereby enabling users to have "emergent" behavior of sharing links or emailing them, etc.
This is only really true with stable, high speed internet connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially not on mobile devices
Hello fellow Canadian
Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases, you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single revolution. So it still seems unnecessary.
Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you could alter my statement to "if I see a spinner, I interpret it as incompetence".
Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can.
I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates.
But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.
One would think this is the case. I agree it should be.
> That’s bizarre.
Unfortunately, it's not. It's normal operation.
The whole point of app is to gather your info from the phone and to send you tons of notifications.
And don't forget mandatory updates, when you open an app and cannot use it without updating to the latest crappy version.
Plenty could exist as a web app.
The obvious answer is because asynchronous workflows are brittle, and require intervention from the end user to correct if they break
Then most end users aren't going to care to fix it when it breaks, or be able to fix it when it breaks for a variety of reasons
Because "[driver] doesn't know where to go till it confirms the upload"
Recall the driver can’t continue without an address.
There's some strong "Seeing Like a State" vibes here. I'm pretty sure these apps are intentionally designed as tools to force the users (here, drivers) into a specific flow, a flow that minimizes complexity for the vendor, reality be damned.
Another way to look at it: the job of the driver side of a delivery (or taxi) app isn't to be useful to the driver; the job is to be a remote control with which the business can control the driver like they were an automaton.
I don’t see how this benefits anyone.
This is one reason that package delivery drivers often will say that they've attempted delivery when they at best drove past the delivery point. Marking the delivery as attempted gets them off the hook for that delivery, and they can finish their shift that much faster.
Having a broken app that forces the driver to 100% complete every delivery before moving to the next one thus costs the company relatively little, but saves some complexity, missing proof of delivery, etc.
In any case, if the network is down, a spinner is a lie. It's pretending to be working on something when it's not. It should show an error at least.
When a customer shows up saying something went wrong with the delivery, the CSRs will need evidence and if the driver did their job then they can be exonerated.
The logistics are a bit more complex than a restaurant where customers are eating at tables in the same building.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is at all
If you drive away from the delivery before that photo is uploaded, then you risk not having the proof that you delivered the package successfully
That is actually worse for the driver than having to wait for the upload so they can retry immediately
Nobody cares about quality anymore.
They require a mobile phone number now. If I give them one, they'll enforce SMS as a login path.
I live in an area with excellent cell service, except for a few miles around my house. I'm not going to try to log in, while buying something, then drive down the road and wait for the SMS.
Sheer stupid.
uploading to server (xx%)...OK
waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes.
It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.
But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.
I’m sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical, incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of terrible and dumb things without creating universal truths about programmers.
Of course marketing people do a valuable job in terms of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap between producers and customers. But - just like engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people who work in that industry who make things worse for everyone else. By contrast, I can't think of any society that is suffering because they don't have enough advertising.
If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.
Except, marketing too is a market for lemons. Scammy marketing outcompetes good marketing. Simple as that.
Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer trust, and either get regulated out of existence or collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile, companies that invest in clear, honest positioning, strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value consistently outperform in the long run. Apple, Patagonia, and Tesla aren’t winning because they spam pop-ups.
If marketing were purely a race to the bottom, all successful brands would look like clickbait farms. They don’t.
If that's your metric, I can confirm the GP's statement, at least when it comes to online marketing people. Increasingly, I can not find the right products and services online.
Now of course if the spinner is merely cosmetic and doesn't represent any actual work going on, that can be a problem especially if the process you're waiting for dies.
Server in Australia?
For most CRUD apps
Sometimes wheels within wheels can slow down even modern computers.
The reason is that the app's backend (and many of the servers on which it depends) can be hosted on the lowest-tier-dogshit-shared-hosting plan. I would love to have a better backend server, but we are a nonprofit, and can't afford better. This app would be a lot faster, with a more robust backend.
But error handling/reporting is a true art, and should never be an afterthought. In my experience, I need to start thinking about error management, as soon as I start planning.
In my experience, the best error handling is to not have errors, and, quite often, good UX is the answer to that. If the user doesn't do something that might cause agita, then they don't get an error.
This so much. If your site is so slow that it can load what is usually a video file (non-SVG animated graphics) before it can load the text on the page, then you have failed at making a website
Looking at Discourse® here, and iirc Google AMP did something similar except it was a blank page for 8 seconds (until it hit a timeout) if you blocked their tracking
I frequently put spinners just in the individual components that need loading. I tend to use them more for large data loads that will hang around awhile, so I have to do fewer round trip transactions. Loading a list of a customer's last 1000 transactions? I'm going to bring on all that data at once, not keep calling the server as you try to scroll through it.
I want user actions to have an INSTANT consequence, not 150ms latency. So even if not a spinner, that button needs to gray out and something should affirm that they tapped it.
Also, spinners are very useful for me in tracking down bugs. When a few customers report stuck spinners in the same day, I can almost immediately determine if some particular action is failing or whether it's a server issue. Even better, they can send screenshots helping me isolate the problem. If no stuck spinner and the app just freezes, they reload it and forget what exactly they did to trigger an error. And endpoints do go down, nothing has 100% uptime. I want to FEEL how long a call is taking on a heavy operation on a busy day.
This means it takes a full second to load most websites or apps, and this is further compounded by slow server code, daisy-chained sequential calls, living further away from the undersea cables, and bad infrastructure.
Am I missing a detail of terminology here? By "loading spinner" I meant it in opposition to "do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open." I didn't mean to suggest any particular indicator of a pending network request, only that there should be an indicator.
> do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open
This is what I was talking about. A pattern I see is papering over this deficiency with a massive “spinner”. Barely noticeable for the devs accessing the app on 127.0.0.1 on fancy machines - so frustrating for everyone else.
Absolutely agree indication of activity is important. Especially so considering how buggy many of these web apps are.
For example, I've worked on add-ons to other software. But it's cloud and you gotta make certain calls back to your "host" app. Said host app responds to most calls in more than the 150ms they claim is the max. Because of what guarantees our plugin makes to the user and despite us caching whatever we can we need to make multiple such calls to make our guarantees... well guarantees.
So what can we do? Of course we show spinners while we make those necessary calls and make absolutely everything we can get away with async.
But we can't get away from things potentially taking more than a second when something isn't in cache, the host app is slower than usual and under 150ms is impossible for anything that doesn't just hit our own database.
For this reason, they are mostly useless. Even worse than useless if errors aren't even propagated to the user.
Slow server calls and daisy chained sequential operations are both people doing a bad job. My last job had backend calls that took over 1s to do basic CRUD on a low traffic service (bouncing around a dozen micro services on the backend). That should never happen.
I emailed IT About it and they replied "try restarting your machine"
I then produced a video of the process for them.
I am 99.9% certain its just a poorly written SQL query, but no one responsible knows where that code is.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
I can't decide if I'm disappointed or relieved
What happens is they hire some contracting firm and they go "whole thing will have to be redone" so they get more work, and that's how you end up with a "solution" like this. Basically the software equivalent of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq6WME576ZE
We can opine all we want about how things should work, but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want other than development cost/non-customer concerns.
It’s very hard to tell users they should feel differently than they do, no matter the technical or philosophical high ground.
if people commenting from web dekstop perspective I can see that point, but from mobile?? where hardware processing power and network is sometimes unreliable???
huft
I imagine there is some data on this, but it goes against my observations of me and my circle.
I have maybe 4 apps that I use heavily and another 10 that I use when I have to. I actively avoid installing another app when the web version is sufficient. I don't need the weekly updates to clog up my storage. I don't need notifications going off at all hours. And I don't need creepy unfathomable permissions requests.
Is there some 500ms delay if I click a button on the web version? Maybe. Honestly, I'm not so busy to have noticed.
Your friends are probably tech savvy. That means your browser is well configured (or configured at all), running an ad blocker and on a modern machine. You probably value the privacy attributes of using a browser, versus most of the population than will trade privacy for convenience.
User feedback was loud and clear: many users see web apps as cost savings efforts that are inferior products and only exist so a lazy / cheap company doesn’t have to invest in native.
Remember that permissions and notifications can also be a problem in web apps; that’s one thing the “make web apps as good as native” crowd has gotten us.
No way / at most, HIGHLY context dependant. Facebook/Insta/social media slug of the year? Yes, probably app is desired.
My bank? Maybe, at a strech, if it's good.
My local doctor? The real estate agent im trying to rent a house from? Amazon/AliExpress/Shopee? A movie theatre? My council street parking system? My university? Fuck no i dont want your shitty apps on my device.
I went to college early enough in the smartphone era that they didn't have an app as a freshman but did by senior year... I don't miss it.
Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply a matter of care these days (and not hardware/bad middleware) that determines how smooth something feels.
https://x.com/mysk_co/status/1754978973417672794
I didn't keep up with how this ended, but they clearly do not care for the feature.
The problem is that the vast majority of the apps that we're talking about here - the ones that replace websites - are little more than a web app repackaged in the app store. So it still has all the downsides of a web app UX-wise, while also working around any privacy settings that would have applied in the browser.
In reality, you want to push everything to an app that you can or one day want to monetize. Web is to be avoided except to advertise the app. I hate it with a passion. Easily my least favorite shift over the 2010's. We advanced past flash to make proper use of HTML5, and can now start blur the lines with aspects like Webassembly and PWAs, but corporate is angry that the WWW never properly optimized itself to monetize easily.
I complained, they played dumb, but eventually they came up with "the website is a convenience". I stopped using it.
The app was much worse.
A couple years later, other people must have complained
https://www.classaction.org/news/kaiser-permanente-shares-we...
https://www.classaction.org/news/data-breach-lawsuit-says-ka...
I believe the same thing happens with apps and websites provided by other health care providers, but nobody investigates and nobody cares.
Gotta love how everyone copies the nasty things Apple does (hi beach ball of death), but not the good things Apple does.
My UK bank (Barclays) won’t let me install their app on my US iPhone (i.e. my phone that uses a US based iCloud account). Tesco won’t let me use their loyalty app. I can’t install an app that’ll let me order Starbucks or McDonalds in the UK (I only have access to the US versions of these apps). I can’t watch Star Trek because the US paramount plus app detects I’m in the UK and I can’t install the UK version.
I could switch to a UK iCloud account but then when I’m in the states everything falls apart the other way round.
As for using the apps themselves, you might run into issues depending on what restrictions they have - IP address, SMS verification, etc.
sure but that is the case on iphone too, at least you are not blocked by the phone manufacturer to download the app you need.
[1]: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/launching-your-own-...
Netflix? Sure UK NHS? Not so much.
I hope they manage to change things.
If it’s only two countries, you can sign in and out of the App Store only with two regions. This is how I maintained a Japan and US region account on the same device. The thing that sucks is changing between accounts for updates, but it does work to some degree.
I can't install the app for my new Amex card because my Google account was opened in Canada and I live in Germany now.
And it keeps getting worse every year. I'm worried that eventually my American and Canadian banking apps will stop working...
The internet was supposed to make this shit simpler.
In fairness, that specific case is probably intentional. They have quite limited train capacity as all passenger air travel was forced to switch to trains/busses, and I suspect they're trying to save it for locals. It is annoying though; I've been to Ukraine quite a few times recently and have used that app myself.
It was a major pain, and to make it worse I got fined €130 by Ausfinag for not paying tolls, but I couldn’t install their app and I bought the wrong sticker at the gas station because as it turns out there are a bunch of special areas with additional tolls above the base toll. I tried my best to comply but the system is totally user hostile.
Of course a system like Germany where you don't have any tolls is even easier but compared to France or Italy where you constantly have to pull over for toll stops and end up paying a multiple more for most trips I think this is pretty great
What gets me is that I bought the Vignette but didn’t know there was an additional toll and a 130€ fine seems pretty large for the infraction severity. I would be more OK if the police pulled me over and gave me the ticket, but the cameras just scanned my license plate and sent me an automated fine. If the system was trying to enforce compliance instead of punishing me they could have just sent me a bill for the toll I didn’t pay (which was a few €).
As an aside, I think it's insane that banking apps almost always have 2FA via SMS, which is known to be less secure than a TOTP authenticator, whereas my Nintendo account has TOTP 2FA, and passkey support. Heaven forbid I want more security options for my banking than for my videogames.
Well, the trend froze up very fast and is in full reverse nowadays, I am in my early 50s and I believe me and my children's life will such more and more, be even more difiicult by the reverse of intents towards a more unified humanity. The law and all working with law will remain a big fucking barrier even if the representatives the people choose to form their life (politicians) would magicly become nice and selfless and efficient, they fight hard to do business the same shitty way as 100s of years ago, all differenty in all puny geographic regions, in as much diverse as possible, as incompetible with each other as possible. And several happily collaborate as it is a fix income to do unoptimal and fragmented way, happily waste our resources providing services in this muddy water.
But most app developers don't even enforce it. I had UK bank apps installed through my "German" Google account.
Note: I have an iPhone. It sucks. Same issue. I have bank accounts in other countries. The app needs an update. To install the update I have to switch countries on my account which instantly voids any and all subscriptions through Apple. It's insane.
It's even more crazy that every single Apple employee I know has this issue but for whatever reason it's not fixed.
The McDonald's UK app is also restricted to the UK: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds.... which is daft, why wouldn't they want tourists and visitors?
Searching "<city> transport app" with large cities, the first restricted example I found is for Sheffield, which is limited to the UK: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yorcard.ts... . (It's the official app, the contact email ends .gov.uk.)
An example in the article, of paying for on-street parking, is also blocked for tourists: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paybyphone...
I'm not going to bother registering an additional Google account when I visit Sheffield then want to take the tram to McDonald's.
(By "restricted" I mean Google Play reports "This app is not available for your device" which is a current phone registered in Denmark.)
Maybe we should ask all banks to publish their apps via F-Droid build service so the build hashes on both the Play Store and its mirrors can be checked for third-party modification.
Expecting my bank to listen to suggestions about publishing hashes for F-Droid users is not realistic, so assuming that they would never do this, how would I verify the app outside of the Play Store?
It is still an insane situation, though.
[0] LloydsTSB had the same restriction on app store
I have a US and an Aus Apple Account, and I switch the account on App Store to get apps that are region locked.
Regarding the article, there are many cheap smartphones (<100eur) so I wonder if it isn't just fear of the new that stops people using them. I keep a smartphone around 4-5 years and my 10 year old phone still works ok. If people just don't want to change or learn new things, I would found that much more worrying...
But you know what that also means? That the same resources used for the ramps are not used to help someone that maybe starves to death somewhere else. I can't say I know which of the two I would choose, but I will not imply that the ones making a choice think "some are lesser than us".
Probably you will say "we can do both", "why choose", or something similar. But practically, all resources I know seem to be finite (time, energy, people). If you have infinite resources that I am not aware of, please fix all the problems.
This falls apart when you realize this isn't just a consistent percentage of the population. It's a large portion of the population at different portions of their lives. It's something like 90% of adults will be disabled in their lives.
How many times have you lost your phone, or broken it without an immediately available backup?
I don't remember the exact percentage, but it was much higher than I would have expected the mean to be.
Requireing purchase of a private companies product, and accommpanying service, to access merdical or government services should be illegal...
Apple or goggle don't speak for me...
> "Poor?" said Cordelia, bewildered. "No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?"
> "It's not, of course," answered Vorkosigan.
> "Then how can anybody get their schooling?"
> "They don't."
> Cordelia stared. "I don't understand. How do they get their jobs?"
> "A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other, mostly." Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. "Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?"
> "Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but... no comconsoles?"
> Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?" he said in wonder.
> "It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to information shall not be abridged.' "
-- Shards of Honor (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold
In the 39 years since this was published, I would have hoped our real society would have advanced a bit more in that direction.
In the US there is a specific government program called "Lifeline" that provides cell phone service to low income people, https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons... (whether it gets DOGEd remains to be seen...) And where I live there are a bunch of programs that provide free cell phones to homeless people.
It's not a panacea because lots of homeless people have other problems that make it difficult to keep a cell phone and not lose it. But that's really a separate issue - not having access is really not much of a barrier for the homeless, at least in the US.
For example:
1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating.
3. Duolingo is worse than language classes.
4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
5. Etc
It really makes me frustrated as someone who builds software and generally thinks it improves the world…
I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if I get back early).
> 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than having to find a printer.
Duolingo isn't really a replacement for classes (which are obviously a magnitude or few more expensive) but self learnings books, tapes and such (IMHO it's mostly inferior to those too but not by a such high degree).
Can't disagree about Tinder/etc. though.
It used to be even better in the sense that you'd only start and then end parking without having to pre select a time. But I think too many people, me included, forgot to end the parking when taking off and paid way more than they actually parked for.
But they don't because they make more money by profiting from people who forget to "clock out" when they are done parking.
They could at least start with adding proper CarPlay and Android Auto support so you can just end the parking from the infotainment. But I think there can be at most a single engineer working on this app if at all. Up until a couple months ago it didn't even have the option for a persistent notification to remind you that you had an ongoing parking...
> But they don't because they make more money by profiting from people who forget to "clock out" when they are done parking.
fwiw, at least in this case, the app that profited from you not clocking out got shut down and bought out by the app that asks you to pre-set your parking time. Which I guess is still not great, but at least somewhat of a step up.
I assume they’re contracted out to the lowest bidder.
In my city the payment schedule on the app significantly lags the meters/official rates. Fine when prices go up, but pretty annoying to app-users when the app charges more than the official parking rates. Maybe if they get their merchant account sanctioned for too many chargebacks someone will take notice.
Here in Nashville, they sold out our public street parking to a private company. Now instead of coins in a meter for the time you want, you have to buy at least an hour for $1.75 (or more), pay by scanning a QR code (which is misprinted on the signs) unless you're in one of the spots where there's a working pay machine, and it now is enforced 24/7 instead of having holidays and weekends off (IIRC it was also free after 6, which was great). Also they had two hour limits where you can't simply move your car, you have to park somewhere they don't check for an indeterminate amount of time. How is any of this an improvement unless you get a cut of the money?
(1) via machine: insert my card into the machine, get ticket, leave
(2) via app: spend 10 minutes registering an account, email, password, phone number, wants verification via email or phone number, wants me to register my credit card and the agree to them selling all my data.
IF on the other hand, they just made it use some kind of common e-cash and no registration, no tracking, no account, I'd be 100% for it.
For places where I don't expect to return (or only rarely), sure, having to do an app is annoying. But for places where you expect to use it often enough, it can be a time-saver, after the initial time cost of setup.
I have seen meters that have smaller increments, like sub-10-minutes, but when the increments cost something like 50 cents, it's hard to really care that much.
It's easy to lose a random piece of paper. Whereas people are generally extremely aware of where their phone is at all times.
My ID is in my wallet. A sheet of paper doesn't fit in my wallet. So I have to put the folded paper in a pocket, where it might fall out when I take out my gloves, or I forget if I put it in my backpack, and in which pocket, etc.
A sheet of paper is extra. My phone isn't. And I sure as heck don't bring a phone with low charge to the airport... when I know I'm probably going to be using it for hours... and I've got my charger with me anyways in case I somehow did.
Also, some people do keep their ID on their phones, either directly on the back of the case (I've seen it more on young women, maybe because lack of pockets) or with something like a magnetic wallet
Its been a while since I've heard any issues with it. I prefer the physical card still.
I have never ever in my life lost my ID or my phone. I have lost paper boarding passes on several occasions.
The failure modes of a phone don't really matter; if the phone fails for some reason (still has never happened to me), I can always ask a gate agent to print me a boarding pass.
I just like not having to keep track of an extra thing. Travel is already often stressful; having one fewer thing to keep on me and avoid losing is nice.
I think of it as multitasking. A paper ticket means I can focus on reading etc on device, while the ticket can serve its purpose. I keep all pertinent materials in a pouch in front of me however so not hard to find.
It's one less thing to worry about when I just want to get on the plane. My paper ticket isn't going to lock before I get to the gate, or not be bright enough. I won't have to "play" with my ticket to keep it active and proper for the scanner.
That's not a thing. They're literally just cameras looking for a QR code.
And unlocking your phone and adjusting brightness is pretty effortless, I dunno. I already do those things lots of times a day.
Then you print a boarding pass at the kiosk? But I've cracked a phone once in ten years, it's not really something I'm worried about.
And paper isn't reliable. For most people, you're much more likely to lose a random sheet of paper than for your phone to suddenly permanently stop working.
Those kiosks are gone from many airports. You're going to have to wait in line to get anything printed. And if you fly Ryanair it will cost you over 50 euro.
Some airlines in Europe check both the boarding pass and the passport/identity card at the boarding gate, to ensure people haven't swapped boarding passes within the airport. I think I see this on flights outside the EU, but I'm not sure.
It takes time to look up a passenger on a computer.
The plane will be delayed if they have to do that for everyone while boarding.
I'm just speculating but if they can simply do a name+DOB-based lookup at a counter, it seems to me like the boarding pass thing might just be for historic reasons where people would feel weird if they are suddenly tracked based on personal details instead of a ticket
And yet for me one time earlier this year said QR code on my Graphene OS phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but refused to scan at the gate, leading to mayhem as the crew couldn't figure out for nearly an hour why the number of people sitting on the plane wasn't equal to the number of people who they registered as boarding.
I think I held up an entire flight for nearly an hour because the QR code on my Graphene OS Android phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but didn't scan at all at the gate. They ended up letting me on the flight without properly registering that I boarded in their system. That triggered some crazy security hold that prevented the crew from obtaining permission to pull back from the gate.
> boarding passes at home before they leave for the airport
It’s been years I’ve heard or seen anyone doing it. Even my parents in their 70s get theirs at the airport.
I just don't want to have to worry about my device being available during boarding nor do I want to have to stop at a kiosk.
Just print at home, go through security and scan at the gate.
I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the airport from home, your battery is charged.
And if your phone somehow breaks on the way, you print at a kiosk.
It seems far more likely that I'd lose a random piece of paper on the way to the airport than lose my phone...
I live in a major US city and get hit up for cash by the homeless sometimes. When I explain I do not have a cellphone to them when they ask for money through some cash app. They look bewildered. Just 20 years ago I was the only one carrying around such a device for IT reasons. Now I am putting limits on my digital life, and it makes me socially "weird".
Almost nobody carries around small cash or change anymore.
And social services provide the homeless and those in poverty with free smartphones, since they're far more effective at ensuring communications with social services.
So how is the world weird? It all seems quite rational and reasonable to me.
Everything else, I can either use a digital wallet for, or an instant bank transfer (Which I've been given to understand are a bit more of a hassle in the US)
I'd basically never expect to be without a device for an extended period of time, specially not in an airport
I am aware of the single point of failure though, so I do take particular care of not running out of battery, keeping an accesible spare, and some cash around for emergencies I just never use it
Most people get pretty bored going to the airport, in line at the airport, waiting for boarding, waiting to take off, during the flight.
A smartphone loaded with books and magazine articles and podcasts seems pretty essential by this point for nearly everyone.
Not to mention loved ones who want to reach you by text or phone...
But I will call it unusual, because the vast majority of people will have their phone in their pocket or purse while at the airport.
You're assuming the phone works and the internet connection works and the app works and the service behind it responsive. That's a lot of trust in thousands of moving parts.
Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it basically 100% fail-proof.
While I always use the paper boarding pass, I do also check the boarding pass on the app out of curiosity. Easily like half the time on the American Airlines app, when I'm at the gate about to board and click on show boarding pass, the app hangs for many minutes and never responds. I'm always glad I have the paper boarding pass in my pocket instead.
At check-in (24 hours before my flight), I add the boarding pass to Google Wallet. From that point, displaying it doesn't require an internet connection, or having to rely on the airline's often-shitty app.
Yes, the phone has to not be broken, but that's a pretty low bar: in my 15 years of owning smartphones, my phone has been broken and unusable for perhaps a grand total of a few days of time (so under 0.01% of the time). Yes, Google Wallet has to be functioning, but that particular app being broken would be an unusual, surprising occurrence.
And if by 0.01% chance, I can't get the boarding pass off my phone for some reason, I can always go to the check-in desk or kiosk or gate and ask them to print me one.
> Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it basically 100% fail-proof.
I've never lost a phone before, but I have lost paper boarding passes on more than one occasion.
The point is that the mobile boarding pass is a nice convenience (especially with the auto-updating gate number on it), but the ability to get a paper boarding pass printed is never far away if the mobile one fails. So why not just use the mobile one, and save some paper, and the need to keep track of one more item?
I was about to respond, "No way this is true. I don't believe you." But then I found an article claiming that yes, indeed you can be fleeced like this for simply showing up and asking for your boarding pass. Unreal.
https://www.the-independent.com/travel/news-and-advice/check...
Low-cost airlines charge a fee for printing boarding passes at the airport.
Do you also print out directions from Mapquest before you leave home?
But I've never had a problem with a screen capture of a boarding pass, and I've found the Apple wallet to work as well. The airport kiosks are good for printing out the pass when you check in, or even for just printing if you checked in on-line 24 hours prior.
But at the automatic gates to security, and at the boarding gate, I think the majority of people having trouble scanning their boarding pass are using a phone. For those elderly people who can't scan a paper boarding pass, the staff can immediately help — but they're much less able to help scan a barcode on a phone, which might be set too dim, be turning to landscape mode, etc.
I prefer to use mobile boarding passes so I don't have to waste paper, and don't have to keep track of yet one more thing while traveling. (I'm already bringing my phone, so I have to keep track of that regardless.)
And who has printers at home anymore?
My wife and I fly quite often and mostly Delta - over a dozen times a year. Very few people still use paper tickets.
What are you printing off and mailing so often?
Any documents you I don’t want to read on my phone, I read on my iPad.
I didn't have a printer until a few years ago (my now-wife really wanted one, so we got one). I do appreciate having it when I need it (easier than going to FedEx office), but I still very rarely have to print something out. I do really like that the printer has a built-in scanner; I've used that much more often than to print something.
> Most people just have the paper passes. They are guaranteed to work.
I've definitely had paper boarding passes that just wouldn't scan (probably from a faling airport kiosk printer), or a pass that had torn and even holding it together just right, it still wouldn't work.
I don't think I've ever had a mobile boarding pass that wouldn't scan, though of course there are other things that can go wrong, like the phone itself not working, which isn't a failure mode of paper passes.
But whatever, if my more-convenient, non-paper-wasting mobile pass doesn't work for some reason, I'll just go to the gate agent and ask them to print me one.
Just last week I flew back home from SFO. I needed to change the flight at the last minute. The app failed to update with the new flight. The airline had removed all the boarding pass kiosks from that airport and only seemed to have luggage drop service. I asked an airport employee how I could get a boarding pass printed, and he pointed to a poorly-marked lane with a sign about "special accommodations" or something, like I was blind. I waited in that line for about 20 minutes along with people who were trying to check their bags. Eventually I got to someone who seemed really put out that I hadn't checked in yet and that they'd need to push a few more buttons on their computer to do that for me.
It's never crossed my mind that an airline app exists and I would never consider installing one. If they don't want to provide self-service kiosks or a working website, I guess they'll have to have more demand for agents. Same with banks: there's no check deposits through their website, so I go in person when I need to do that. Installing an app is just not even on my radar to consider.
I'd also never rely on a gate number from my phone anyway knowing that it could be out of date. I'd have to verify with a departure board or sign at the gate anyway, so I'm just going to start there.
Most people I know also don't even have a printer at home. (I didn't either, until a few years ago.)
Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a boarding pass would have anything to do with it?
There's an electronic solution strictly better than the app, for when you have no printer handy: just give the user the goddamned PDF! Works everywhere, works offline, can be printed if needed, and the user can manage, send or back it up however they like.
It's a simple solution that works.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Apple Wallet (and Apple Pay) are actually one of my favorite smartphone features. The built-in Wallet (speaking for iOS here) has a few advantages over a folder of PDFs:
- The QR code is always fairly big without having to pan and zoom a PDF file
- The display brightness is automatically increased to make reading the QR code easier
- The Wallet syncs with my Apple Watch (where passes use a different, optimized layout) giving me backup if something where to happen to my phone during boarding
- Passes can be updated by the airline (e.g. gate changes)
- Passes automatically expire, I don’t have to cleanup myself. (There’s archive in case I need an old one)
- Passes can be shown on your lock screen during the boarding time for easier access
- Passes can be multilingual, adapting to your phone’s language
If I’m sitting at a restaurant or a bar I should get up every 20 minutes to see if something has changed?
Should I also print out MapQuest directions before I go somewhere and wait for the paper boy to deliver the newspaper to get the news?
And it’s literally a mile from one end of the airport to the other. Is it somehow better to look on a board than just look on a phone?
And then you also get notifications when the flight changes so drastically that I need to completely change my flight plans. Just this past weekend we were suppose to fly MCO - MSP - LAS and flight changes meant we were going to misd our layover.
Luckily we were notified as soon as the change happen and we were able to make a change to MCO - ATL - LAS and get two of the last seats.
The same happen on the way back. It was LAS - MSP - MCO and we were able to change it to LAS - LAX - MCO.
Things always change when you fly a lot. The sooner you know about those changes the better.
That’s what I usually do. It’s not that much of an effort to look at the screen right at the gate you’re sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I‘ve been to ATL twice, it’s not that bad.
What are you going to do when something happens to your phone …
Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.
So yeah… yeah? That’s exactly what you supposed to be doing.
And you somehow think that’s more efficient? Do you also think polling is more efficient than web hooks and push notifications? Why would I do that?
And the restaurants are usually not right at the gate you’re sitting at. Well in our case we are usually sitting in the lounge…
> What are you going to do when something happens to your phone
Well, I personally would take out my cellular equipped iPad on the rare occasions that I was flying by myself and I would still get text notifications on my cellular equipped watch or depend on my wife having her phone, cellular equipped iPad or Watch.
If all that failed yes I would have to get a paper ticket - which you can do at the gate.
How often do you actually fly? My wife and I have been flying over a dozen times a year post Covid.
I was in ATL either flying in, out or through ATL over 25x last year alone.
> Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.
I personally had my first phone in my pocket in 1995. Never once in 30 years has anything “happened to my phone”.
Re push vs pull… which one do you prefer more? Kafka or MQTT? On a more serious note… pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket. So the act of taking it out of the pocket is a pull action.
There are no screens and announcements at the lounge? You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no? What’s more important than getting to your destination?
That’s just it, even if I didn’t have lounge access, I would be hanging out at a restaurant or a bar that isn’t near the gate. I would have to be constantly looking on the board with all of the flights. ATL has 192 gates spread across seven concourses and two terminals.
> pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket
Of course I have an alarm set for when I need to start heading toward my gate. But gate changes and when it’s time to board are both push notifications to both my phone and my watch.
> There are no screens and announcements at the lounge
2100 flights take off per day from ATL. That’s over 100 flights an hour - I think there are at least 6 hours a day where no flights take off. They explicitly say they don’t make announcements.
This goes back to do you really want to be searching for your flight on a board with that many flights?
> You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no
If you either get to the airport early to avoid rush hour or have a long layover, you probably will end up having a meal or drinks while you wait. We had a four hour layover at LAX last week.
I liked this, as finding the single 12:34 flight was much quicker than looking at the 4+ flights all with "12:30" at another airport, where on the display each line is rotating between multiple flight numbers, airlines and languages.
Personally, even if I'm using an app I still look at the screens to check. A notification might not have been sent, or my phone might have dropped off the airport wifi leaving me with no connection, or roaming might have stopped working.
I'm mentally handicapped (my mind is apparently somewhere on a spectrum) and technology allows me to limit human interaction- which causes me physical discomfort. I realise normal people love to talk to the lady at McDonald's, they probably live for that shit.
Uh... look at the big departures board, duh. I don't see why it's weird to want to use an indisputably more convenient method (auto-updating pass on my phone) for the common case, but still be able to fall back to a less-convenient method (departures board) if the uncommon case comes up.
And no big deal if I need a paper boarding pass. I can just walk over to the gate, show them my ID, and ask them to print me one.
It's not that deep, just a skeuomorphic name for somewhere where you'd keep importants/valuables for quick access, credit/debit cards, boarding passes, concert tickets
Not unlike keeping a folded up copy of a pass in a physical wallet (Which may not be universal, but I would have guessed not that uncommon either)
Since I use my phone to pay for things, book rides between places and basically existing in general I also keep a power bank on my person and a spare phone in my house
But if I'm not confident on availability I also keep alternatives, I've not used physical money in months (Other than local bus fares), but I do keep some cash on my person, as well as the physical cards that I use virtually on my phone and copies of boarding passes when necessary, not that I've needed any of them recently, I just like covering my bases, it's not a binary situation, I'd also like to keep spares if my only copy was physical
I generally just get the mobile pass and put it in Google Wallet. If I ever run into a situation where my phone is lost/broken/battery-drained, I'll just go up to the check-in desk or a kiosk and get my boarding pass printed. No big deal.
Maybe it's better these days, but back when I used to use online apps/sites to pay for parking in private lots, 4/5 times I still got a "ticket." I never had to pay the fine with money, only with time.
I think it really was the 4th time I decided to stop using those apps entirely.
Sometimes I wonder if the devs behind these apps and processes feel embarrassed by the results. I would be, even if the failures weren't my fault.
And once the gate or departure time changes, your printed boarding pass will start lying to you.
Only when I checked the time and wondered why we weren't boarding yet, and opened the app did I notice that the gate changed.
Even afterwards the one stored in Apple Wallet did not update. I even tried to do the pull-to-refresh. Eventually I pulled to refresh, and that worked.
An unreliable boarding pass in Apple Wallet is worse than a paper boarding pass.
With the paper one I know I need to check the screens etc. With the Apple the app implies that you no longer have to do this.
And you get used to it. You stop doing the things you did before. That muscle memory disappears. Not dissimilar to driving with GPS, or programming with AI.
> I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if I get back early).
Yeah... nothing more I love than having to scan a QR code to get an app from someone I don't know, then go through the signup process, then input a buncha personal information into an app... instead of just dropping 10 quarters into a metal stick and walking away for the next two hours.
> > 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
> Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than having to find a printer.
Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you should be finding your printer. They're not gold bars. They're not expensive.
Quality of execution obviously matters. I find EasyPark (Swedish company, used all over the place) a lot better than the usual parking meters. Plus I can use it in several cities with different currencies (in my case Euros and Czech Koruna), saving me from carrying more change.
We have the technology.
True. I does suck when travelling. Locally I find it much more convenient though.
> dropping 10 quarters
You're always carrying a bag full of coins wherever you go? And even if I did I'd end up overpaying/underpaying half of the time.
> Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you should be finding your printer.
So I should waste space with a huge device that I use <10 times per year?
I mean I could bring it over from the other room or the attic or wherever it's lying around but why would I waste time and mental energy each time I'm travelling having to keep track of some piece of paper that I mustn't lose? Seems rather pointless...
Cheap Android phones aren't expensive either and can provide a lot more than a printer for most people these days.
The desk at my AirBnB doesn't seem to have one.
> They're not gold bars. They're not expensive.
If someone has an alternate solution to owning a printer that works for them, whats it to you? Owning a printer so you can print half of the boarding passes you need every time you fly seems excessive to me
I can't remember the last time I had any quarters on me, let alone 10. Coins are annoying to carry around, and I don't drive enough or park in paid lots/areas enough to expect that I'll remember to ensure that I always have change in my car.
> Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you should be finding your printer.
While I do have a printer now (at my wife's request), I went a good 20 years without one, and was fine with that.
> They're not expensive.
That's a weird take. Even if the printer itself isn't that expensive, keeping it fed with ink/toner can be. Not to mention they're just annoying pieces of hardware, with usually-shitty software, that take up precious desk real-estate.
> I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if I get back early).
Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this. Combined with contactless card payment and that's peak parking experience.
Except having the actual barrier is expensive. The license plate reader is cheaper, so they'll do that instead, and if it malfunctions, hope you don't mind paying for a full day of parking!
US here (you are presumably elsewhere given that you said "car park"), but I can't remember ever seeing a parking garage that had a parking app. All of them are like you describe, with pay-on-exit.
I mainly see parking apps for street parking (where pay-on-exit can't work), and sometimes more basic parking lots where there isn't room for the entry/exit gate and hardware, or lots where it's bare-bones enough that the owner certainly isn't going to spring for the expense of installing something like that.
Pay for the exact time, or if you forget, pay the full time period you’re legally allowed to park.
Instead, on my city’s app I must select a car (despite having only one), select a zone (despite GPS), and then manually enter my card (despite it being my account default). Every time.
Basically the flow for me is open the app, and hit how long I want to park for. And then the app will let me know when my parking is running out and I can add time on my phone without going back to the car.
In my experiece, apps have increased costs around 50% and some even try to add monthly subscription.
...or show the document they sent you rather than printing it?
As someone who never installed these wallets (maybe I'm missing out), what's the problem they solve?
You can just print at the airport at the check-in machines.
I never even bother checking-in in advance of arriving at the airport. I theorize that they assign bad seats to early checkins to incentivize people to pay to choose a different seats. I have at various times been assigned to upgraded seats (not upgraded class, but e.g. emergency row, bulkhead, etc.) when checking in at the airport.
I have been to airports a non-trivial amount of times where there were lines even at the self-service kiosks.
> I theorize that they assign bad seats to early checkins
Oof, I would never fly an airline or buy a fare class that didn't let me choose a seat immediately, at time of booking.
Anyway, this theory of yours needs some evidence... doesn't really pass the smell test for me.
I mean, that just seems like an expensive way to pay for seat selection.
e.g. Checking a route I fly frequently for an arbitrary date, it’s $232 (with seat selection in the $20 range) as the base fare rate, or $386 for the cheapest fare that includes seat selection. (With some other bonuses that don’t have any value to me, e.g. checked bags and a better cancellation policy.)
But they are worse than mid-2000s tech. I used to have a tag with an lcd timer that I loaded up with cash periodically. When I parked in a metered space in the city, I just turn the thing on and hang it on my driver window. It was synced with the parking schedule, so the timer wouldn’t run until metered parking started and stopped at the end of metered parking. Parking enforcement simply had to look at the tag to make sure it was on and had a positive value. When I came back, I just shut the thing off—I paid for exactly what I used, always. Great UX: turn on thing, hang in window, remove, turn off thing, plug into computer to add money every few months.
Compare to now where there’s An App that requires multiple taps to tell it which street your on, which car, oh look it forgot your credit card and they don’t take Apple Pay, time to enter all that data in again… oh yeah, also you have to overbuy parking and they charge transaction fees every time if you try to buy exact and add time later.
Also, now parking enforcement has to key in everyone’s license plates to figure out if they’re legal or not (no automated plate readers—they’re illegal in this state). Apart from being annoying, now that data is conveniently harvested.
And what wrong with Tinder? It is great if you are hot or a woman. And if you are not - well, nobody never cared anyway.
If we trust those historical charts statistically over 70-80% of all people used to meet their partners though friends, work, school or family before the 2000s (work slowly replacing family since the 50s). Going out with random people you just met and had no other connection with was relatively rare.
> I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if I get back early).
The last time I tried parking in downtown Salt Lake City the city's app wouldn't even install on my phone, complaining about being built for an older Android version. Fortunately the web site still worked. Sort of. I had to try a couple of different browsers before I found one that functioned with the site.
When riding Caltrain I get charged for the maximum amount I could possibly pay (all stops) when I board. Then when I get off at my stop I tap again and get refunded for all the stops I ended up not getting to. It works fine. Seems a meter could be a "tap in/tap out" thing. If it's 5 hours until it's free to park, put a hold for 5 hours of time. If you get back in 2 hours, release the hold and only charge for 2 hours when you tap out.
It's even possible to do this with cash. Imagine a machine that calculates your change and spits out bills and/or coins. Oh wait, yeah, we've had that technology since around 1959. It would just need to print out a ticket with a bar code or something to authenticate that you're the one who paid in the first place. Did you lose your ticket? Sorry, looks like you're paying for the rest of the day. But that's still a lot cheaper than a citation.
I suspect it's not "pay max/get refund" because municipalities can't stop milking those sweet sweet citations from people who fail to correctly guess how much time they'll need up front.
Not the appS for parking in your location. ( I say apps because I would have to register to two apps and those don't cover 100% of districts)
But where I live, the parking apps are buggy and resource hungry (could be just another bug)
We can still buy 15 min / 30 min ,60 min tickets. The problem is each district has its own tickets :/
I still prefer the tickets. At least I know with certainty if I can park or not (depending on my having of tickets or not)
But usually there is a private parking lot around the corner. Which is another argument agaisnt installing yet another app.
Now I don’t trust it. Googling the flight number brings in the updated gate. Not the apple wallet boarding pass though.
I’m not, not anymore.
> Why do you need your phone to tell you what's posted on numerous displays that you walk past?
Convenience.
Other folks here were talking about how their devices did not update in a timely fashion. They had to force refresh several times to get a response. Meanwhile the gate screens have a single job and update within seconds.
Case in point - Toronto Parking Authority (Green P)'s app forces you to keep a balance and refill in multiples of $20 CAD, whereas street parking meters can charge your credit card in any increment as necessary (e.g. $1.25).
Also, the app forces you to disclose your phone number as an account identifier; you have no option to sign up by email or username. https://mobilepay.greenp.com/faq/i-have-a-new-phone-number-w...
The culture of designing user-hostile apps is wild.
Generally, yes, (it may have improved since I left but the Chicago one was a nightmare a few years back) however the best experience I've ever had was in Nashville (don't recall the company name).
I signed up via the web (no app) and then the parking lot has cameras/sensors that detect my plate. Any parking lot owned by that company is now accessible to me in the city. I can just pull in, it detects me (notifying me my "session" has started), and then charges my card on file when I pull out (either in an hour, or even the next day).
As with a lot of things, there are often examples of well-executed solutions at the fringes, they're just not deployed at a large enough scale to cancel out the other negative examples. Software can improve a lot, but it's down to the team/individuals involved to care enough to do it right (and not be distracted by other incentives).
The customers for these apps are the parking lot operators and they love the apps.
> 2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating.
It is now, it definitely wasn't when it first came out. Prime example of enshittification, but not an example of what you're conveying.
> 3. Duolingo is worse than language classes.
This one I feel has the most merit, but still not a lot. What % of Duolingo users would've actually taken classes were it not for these apps? Also, some people don't learn well from classes (I'm one of them). Not that that makes Duolingo any better, but despite its pretenses it's squarely aimed at extremely shallow, casual, surface-level learning that might be useful on a holiday. And people don't take classes for that.
> 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
In what way? Admittedly I've only used the apps of 2 airlines, but they worked fine.
It was a lot less convenient let me tell you.
So everyone wins here, except us: the app company gets to make a killing on compulsory payment processing, and City of Long Beach gets to continue to pull in parking revenue without worrying about whether their payment machines still work—a broken machine is not an excuse because you can still pay with the app because everyone has a smartphone with an up-to-date OS and functioning cell service with appropriate bandwidth, right? I’m sure I could have complained to the city and gotten my +/-dollar back, but I didn’t have time just to do so for the principle of the thing.
It should be illegal to have that sort of setup... if the lowest-common-denominator form of payment is broken, then it should be free.
I had a frustrating experience with this. We were staying in a small town and the casino had a ferry to cross the river, which would save 20 minutes driving and be kind of neat. I'm guessing they had issues with the staff collecting payments, so they had switched to a parking app to pay for it. You pay for the ferry as a "parking lot" and it should all work fine.
Signs at the road to it say to pay before proceeding, so I do. After driving all the way up, it turns out the ferry wasn't running (they neglected to close the gate at the start of the road). The parking app was tied into a pair of license plate readers on the boat, but since I couldn't drive past the "exit", they never considered my "parking" to end and it racked up a charge over two days. Of course, the "parking" starts without my car being detected going on to the boat.
Fortunately, I got a refund, but it required jumping through a bunch of hoops. If we paid the way it used to be done this wouldn't be possible at all!
>Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
Delta's app is pretty good. I really like the peace of mind from being able to see where my bags are, including when they get put on the conveyor.
So if the parking thing is broken and I don't have my phone with me I can't go to the doctor today?
Cool. If a meter was broken I could just go to another spot with a working meter.
In Laguna beach they had $1 coin machines to get around the "ten quarters" thing, and this was 20 years ago!
Whenever I fly business class for an international trip, I always check in at the counter. It's just as fast, but getting that boarding pass printing on cardstock and tucked into the photo page of my passport feels so quaint and charming.
Having waited in several check-in counter lines because the airline's app insists that a human needs to check my travel documents before giving me a boarding pass, no, it is so not just as fast. Even for business class. Even if there is no line, I can tap through a mobile app check-in flow (in the comfort of my own home!) faster than a check-in agent will usually verify my identity and print a boarding pass. Regardless, I'd rather not add that kind of variability into the airport process, and have to pad my arrival time even more.
> getting that boarding pass printing on cardstock and tucked into the photo page of my passport feels so quaint and charming.
This made me smile :)
The only annoying part is when the app gets battery killed with terrible reception in the airport and then takes 2 minutes to show you the boarding pass it already downloaded.
women, and a small pool of men, use Tinder to efficiently find hookups. IRL speed dating is actually a much bigger pain in the ass for that purpose. it's "uber for nookie"
No improvement - displacement vector towards the positive half space of life quality - is implied, except for those selling it.
I generally agree, but I’ve had a great experience with one of those. I just wish they all did the same streamlined thing this one particular app I used did.
The QR code I had to scan actually ran an App Clip instead of taking me to a website. Everything was done in one screen: enter plate, parking stall number, hours. My physical interaction with it was just scrolling a little and hitting a button. Done. Wonderful.
Most parking solitions are a shitshow though. Multiple screens (seriously, why?!), having to create an account, not handling payment via Apple Pay so I have to enter my credit card manually. Having to enter the parking location manually (how come it’s not a parameter in the QR code URL?). I’d really like to know what happens at the companies that develop those. It’s borderline criminal how bad they are.
I had come to this conclusion long ago i.e. computers/software are now majorly being oriented towards purely money-making (for certain vested interests) rather than doing any good for people/society or the world in general. The original idealism is long gone.
Ehhhhh. In the case where it's a one-off, yes, because I'm not going to install an app and give it my payment details if I only expect to rarely park in a particular place.
But, for example, in downtown Truckee, California, I always use the parking app, especially in the winter, so I don't have to futz with a machine out in the cold while my fingers are freezing. I pay from inside the warmth of my car, or inside the building I'm going to. Even in the summer, it's nice to be able to pay while I'm walking to my destination, rather than stand there staring at a machine, waiting for it to charge my credit card.
It's also great to be able to "feed the meter" from my table at the restaurant if end up there longer than I expected, and the time has run out.
> Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
To each their own, I guess. In general I prefer not to waste paper for one-time use things, and when I'm traveling I already have my phone, and not having to keep track of more things is a plus. I do worry about situations where I could lose or break my phone (though I could lose a printed boarding pass too) or its battery runs out, but if that happens I can still go to the check-in counter or a kiosk and get a boarding pass printed, so I'm really no worse off than if I didn't have the mobile app in the first place.
I don't know about Tinder specifically, but from what I've heard apps seem to be where most people meet nowadays - you'll find normal people mixed in with the weirdos. Meanwhile real-life speed dating is where the really desperate people go and is mostly weirdos.
1. Parking Kitty is much much easier than fussing with grafitti-ed, vandalized, unserviced parking machines.
2. Speak for yourself, Tinder is a great rebound app; vastly more productive than the limited pools at speed dating (which was big in like, 1998?)
3. True. But I don't have time for language classes. Anecdote but Duolingo brought my French language skills back to life, but probably because I already had them.
4. Do you travel much? Apps are far, far superior to any mechanism. Let's say your flight is cancelled due to weather. You can (a) call the 800 number and wait in a phone queue, (b) go to the desk and wait in a physical queue, which is challenging if you are in a country that is not your native language, or (c) log into the app to make changes instead of waiting for a person. Have you ever wanted to change your seat, or upgrade? You have the same three choices. Yeah, apps are hands-down light-years ahead of alternatives when you travel frequently.
Here in NL, parking apps show predictions of available parking spaces and some even allow reservation: you book a timeslot and enter your license plate, and on arrival the gates open automatically when it recognizes your license plate. No more fiddling with tickets, no queueing at the payment console.
For on-street parking, the apps usually allow two ways of parking registration: either you enter the location where you're parked (via manual lookup or phone GPS location), or you scan a QR code displayed on road signs. I'd call this one a solid win.
4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
The train service here has this reminder in various locations: "If you use your phone to store/buy your ticket, you are responsible for keeping it charged. If your phone drains empty, you don't have a valid ticket and will be fined." I wouldn't want to be in the situation where I need to transfer after a long-haul flight and find my phone empty. For me, paper always beats battery for longevity of important documents.
There are at least three different apps for parking around me: RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.
I went to East London recently to visit the Velodrome, and discovered yet another one: Evology.
It's always great fun, standing around in the car park trying to wrangle your cards whilst creating yet another account to pay for 30 minutes of parking.
Then, of course, there's the 50/50 chance that my iPhone has decided to offload the parking app you need because you haven't used it in the last month or so.
And occasionally RingGo will decide to log me out, and when I go to log back in for some reason the last password I have in my password manager doesn't work, so now I also have to reset my password.
Agreed, paying for parking has turned into a total farce.
They sell the debt at lower price to companies specialized in debt collection, the longer you wait then to pay them the more they are allowed to collect from you.
If you try not to pay at all, they put you in court against lawyer working for the company whose only job is to collect debt, so he knows his job pretty well and the bonus is that you end up having to pay the lawyer fee.
Of course you could still refuse to pay that, get cops to show up at your house and then you have to shoot to get them to leave.
At some point of course you would think it's a bit much for a parking ticket.
If you don't like it, just don't use it, like everyone else does.
Mostly nothing will happen except daily phone calls for years plus the hit to credit score.
And cops aren't showing up unless aforementioned judgment happened, you ignored it, and the court eventually authorized physical seizure of your property to recover funds.
An individual may not be able to do much in all circumstances, but a lot of people might.
For example, he cannot access his bank account via his desktop anymore. He have to go to his agency in person.
Well we all did that for years so it's just annoying, because he still have the possibility to do it and it's his choice.
But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ? When will it be mandatory to get a smartphone for his bank app, just to have access to his money ?
And it's just an example...
If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for everything, if there's even a branch still open close to you.
Can't even buy bus tickets without an app (tracks your journey with GPS of course), without paying more, even at ticket machines in the busses.
This hasn't been my experience at all in the US. If you need something in-person, going to the bank is the best option since they don't charge fees like a random ATM does.
There may be an online-only bank somewhere in the USA that's app-only, but I wouldn't know. Every bank I've ever encountered has a very functional web site.
The problem here seems to be that people want the free accounts and low fees of app only banks, but still want the costly things they got rid of that make those possible like branches.
I've had my banking app installed on an old Samsung phone running lineageos. I only powered it on when I had to do online banking. At some point I needed to update the app and they started checking for rooted devices, so it wouldn't work anymore. Now I've installed it on a much newer android device that I also use for a lot of other crap and sketchy stuff I don't want on my main phone. Also it's powered on all the time. Whether that's really more secure than what I did before is questionable.
I think the issue is that it is becoming tougher than it was prior to the existence of smartphones for those without them.
Some people might insist that a government monopoly would be worse but here in the UK I've noticed that government web sites are usually less crap than web sites created by the private sector.
We can't afford to have people doing bullshit jobs at bank branches anymore- unemployment is too low.
Limits that in the past 2 decades (of scaling) the people who built these Platforms didn't have to think about. Now they do. And they are coming under serious pressure because they have built out more Supply than there is Demand.
For example, we got the explosive growth of Netflix. Everyone sees that and piles into streaming. When growth slows in one country they immediately move into another and they keep growing until they run out of countries to expand into. So Netflix has been in India (a country advertised as having zillions of consumers) for nearly 10 years now but they haven't found more than 25 million paying subscribers. Learning takes time. And everyone is learning there are limits to growth based purely on the online model.
> haven't found more than 25 million subscribers
There is a metric ton of demand for steaming services in India.. just that amazon prime and hotstar.com took most of the market. Most of this is due to pricing:
Prime: 999 INR/year Netflix: 650 INR/month
Recently they've tried segmenting.. by packaging a single-device 720p-only plan along with the telecom plans, and I'd bet that's the majority of their customer base today since people get it for free. They also have a deal with samsung and other companies that make mid-range phones which most people in india own to have netflix pre-installed. So this + the telecom plans is the way they count them as users.
To be fair, amazon packages theirs with the 1-day delivery service on amazon.in, so it's a bit of an unfair advantage there. But even if you compare with hotstar, they charge 1499/year, which is about 1/6th of netflix's price.
Again to be fair, live cricket streaming is _huge_ here, and people get hotstar for that anyways, so a bit of an unfair advantage again.
Even twitch managed to make price cuts here. I bet netflix can as well. I doubt regional content production is actually a problem for somebody like netflix.
Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?
If the bank had no office it wouldn’t be cheaper.
I prefer using laptops and I prefer doing my banking on my laptop. I'm online a lot. I do have a smartphone, usually an older one, for calls, messaging, playing music and taking photos. I even have an old Samsung tablet, for reading ebooks.
It should be possible to do your banking from a laptop.
I just don't want apps on my phone, because they will track me, I don't like using apps on the phone in general, and banking apps in particular because the bank wants to control what I can and can't do with my own phone. Want a rooted phone? No banking for you.
So, to clarify, there are banks that have their full business value accessible only through mobile, and as a person needing banking but doesn't have access to mobile, I can make an informed decision and not be their customer. But when I create a bank account in a physical office, and then the office gets closed in favour of an alegedly much more accessible mobile application, I feel like there should be some measure protecting me from that. Do you find that unreasonable?
For something so core and critical to society (banking), I don’t think it’s reasonable to leave it up to the private sector and say “well, if some people get left behind—ho hum, thems the breaks”
If we’re talking about a florist, then sure. The market wants what it wants and if you’re not in the majority it kinda sucks. Not great, but probably not a place for government intervention. Banking, though? There should be accessibility guidelines and standards, absolutely.
To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles. This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.
Think twice, the obvious solution doesn't always turn out to be the most optimal one.
Just because unanimity is never achieved in respect of some philosophical idea doesn't mean it's not worthy of consideration and or it's never put into practice. Utilitarianism has been the subject of much study and debate and it's been widely practiced over several hundred years.
I'm well aware of the debates over utilitarianism and its ethics, any why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do. That ought to have been obvious by my use of the word 'consensuses'.
BTW, I could have made the same argument from a different philosophical perspective but the previous commentator specifically invited a utilitarian-type response by the words he used. That said, no matter what philosophical argument I'd have used someone would have found fault with it.
My main point still stands, which is that obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones. Note, I've deliberately not used the word 'best' for the above reasons.
Since you appear to enjoy a little bit of philosophical discussion, let's break down what you ackshually said:
> To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles.
The "beginning" of ethics hardly begins with Bentham or Mill or even the Enlightenment. Utility is quite a modern concept in ethics. The question of what is "the good" is presupposed in any system of value. "The greatest good for the greatest number" is perhaps one of the more perverse interpretations of human good on record.
> This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.
The majority of modern states and cities were most emphatically NOT "founded" on utilitarian models. Most states predate any notion of such post-hoc rationalizations. Cities were largely founded as commercial centers along trade routes or ports, or sometimes intentionally as colonies. States were largely the results of conquest by militarized groups that were certainly NOT utilitarian. Quite the contrary. In the bronze age, they would have simply been warrior bands centered around family/tribal bonds and vassal/suzerainty relationships founded on violence. By the time of the great early empires around the Mediterranean, formal structures of militarism and class privileges won through violence were the organizing forms of society, not "give-and-take" consensus gathering (unless you mean one group giving up the fight and the other either enslaving them or killing them outright).
Maybe you could have argued they are founded on something like Hobbesian social contract theory (certainly not Rousseau's version) but that, too, would suffer from being simply "not true in fact."
The main point that "obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones" suffers from being trivial, condescending, and a non sequitur. The commenter didn't offer a solution as such, but raised the obvious question of why they should have to pay for someone else's choices. Utilitarianism is the worst of all philosophical answers because it entails the most absurdities.
…an(d) why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do.
I'm aware of those issues and omissions for brevity's sake. Also, I would point out that what I said was a passing comment on HN and not meant for a paper in a learned philosophical journal.
BTW, in case you didn't notice, I never mentioned whether I was for or against utilitarianism specifically because discussion about it inevitability ends in arguments that usually remain unresolved. That it was just an example ought to have been obvious.
It would be informative to compare the syllabus content at your philosophy school versus that of mine.
As you say, not relevant to you, but do you think mathematicians generally have some kind of affinity for Utilitarian ethics?
A number would say that ethics and morality are subjective and not objective and thus an attempt to apply a utilitarian metric or measure of "good" along with a (partial?) ordering such as "greatest good" is a doomed endeavour.
Few would deny that from this, that would follow (for some specific values of this 'n that).
There's nothing wrong with that, sometimes it's one's best tutor.
I'm not a mathematician but I've studied mathematics in conjunction with my bread-and-butter subjects science and engineering. It's thus fair to say the analytical philosophers and their ilk have had a strong influence on my thinking—Frege, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore—I can even see my copy of Principia Ethica on the bookshelf on the other side of the room from where I'm sitting.
(BTW, In my world I cannot see any relevant connection between number theory (as mathematicians understand it) and ethics.)
The analytical strand of philosophy is particularly significant for me as formal logic has a direct bearing on some of my technical work (they're closely related). It also led to me electing to take HPS.
Philosophy is a remarkably broad church and its analytical strand is only one section, and in no way do I consider myself pigeonholed to just one or two of its strands; Being and Nothingness, The Social Contract, Leviathan, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (the) Republic are just a few titles from the large compulsory corpus from which I was trained.
I will not delve further into utilitarianism given what I've already said except to say I have neither the talent of Shakespeare nor am I an APL programmer, so it would be impossible for me to present my rather convoluted views on the matter in a short HN post without some part being misinterpreted. To do it linguistic justice and present a watertight case that precisely and accurately explains my view I'd likely require a dozen pages of typed text, and clearly that's not possible on HN.
That's not a copout, it's just fact. Moreover, philosophy taught me long ago that précising and brevity can easily lead to misunderstandings unless one's words are very carefully chosen. I was reminded of that again earlier today when you came on the attack.
I took your handle as a reference to Hilbert. Was it not? Although it might be difficult to a mind shaped very much by analytic philosophy, I do think there is "value", or at least entertainment value, in esoteric number theory (numerology or number magic) in relation to ethical systems. The ancients took it seriously and they were a lot smarter than I am. There is even a vein of mysticism in Wittgenstein. And what is infinity or the continuum? Very strange places to spend much time. Have driven some mad. Plus it's fun to consider the significance of a number. Often there are esoteric attributes attached to familiar and unfamiliar numbers that will blow your mind. Not just the puzzling oddities involving primes or transposed operations, but relating to ethics and metaphysics. If you really want to tempt madness, read up on some of the ancient Pythagorean or Kabbalah number magic. There be dragons of insanity there.
I use those terms in the philosophical sense as distinct from the nonsensical shouting that we witness all too often on Social Media and elsewhere on the Web. That we often do not listen carefully and take time to analyze what others are saying is the cause of much of the world's ills.
I've always prized debates as I've learned so much from having taken part in them. And It's a great shame that these days formal debating seems to have gone out of fashion.
If one cannot explain or logically support one's propositions during a debate (or when trying to teach a subject) then one doesn't fully understand the matter at hand. What's also important to recognize is that there are times during a debate when a protagonist first becomes aware of fallacies and weaknesses in his/her own case and that realization can occur without his/her opponent being aware of the fact.
It's an interesting phenomenon which I've experienced albeit not for quite some while. Moreover, when I've become aware that I've been wrong under such circumstances then learning turned out to be a sharper and more positive experience than other forms of learning (trouble is that these days there's little opportunity to partake in such debates as few are prepared spend the time to take them seriously).
The reason I mention that scenario here is to show that as I'm a bit of a veteran of such discussions and that I'm used to opponents 'clobbering' me during disagreements. If I were to be offended by such criticisms in philosophical debates then I'd have quit long ago.
However, what I do find disconcerting is when I've not chosen my words carefully enough for whatever reason (usually brevity) and what comes out ends up either sounding wrong or that I'm misinterpreted. My earlier comment would likely fall into that class.
I try to avoid misunderstandings by being prolix, that is I'll restate a point using different phraseology but at times even that doesn't work. I'm often surprised how some readers even misinterpret the most straightforward of statements. [Note: I'm not referring to you in the following.] And that just happened yesterday with another of my comments when someone deliberately misquoted what I said. Clearly hide has no bounds when one's actual words are deliberately misquoted just below what one has actually written. I'm curious about the logic that underpins such strange thinking.
(I suppose one shouldn't be a bit surprised these days when the leader of the free world sets quintessential examples for all to follow. By uttering blatant and outrageous lies with a deadpan expression that'd put masters of the art like Buster Keaton to shame then it's little wonder that many are bound to emulate his practice.)
I'm unaware of any correlation between the large decline in the study of liberal arts subjects in recent decades and many of the antics we're witness in politics these days but I'd not be surprised by one iota if something of note were to be found.
Philosophy often comes under that wing which implies that fewer people are studying the subject (well, at lest so on a per capita basis), and I'd posit that's not an ideal situation by any stretch. I'd suggest that skills that philosophy teaches such as the ability to help people think logically and to examine issues from multiple perspectives and to do so from factual evidence are in very short supply at a time when the world desperately needs them.
We need aeridite people who can speak with authority on important world affairs such as Russell and the remarkable historian A.J.P. Taylor used to do, they had the ability to mesmerize just about anyone who'd listen to them. Even those who'd disagreed with their arguments and or worldviews couldn't counterattack with simplistic counterarguments without looking ill-equipped and or not in command of the facts.
It's here philosophy comes to the fore in that it educates from multiple perspectives, whether it's teaching argument (such as Socrates' wonderful demolition of Thrasymachus' stance on justice) or teaching works of great thinkers whose views on matters differ wildly from one another actually forces one to consider philosophical notions from different viewpoints. Hobbes' worldview differs widely from say Locke's, Berkeley's immaterialism is a forerunner to later works on perception, and so on.
The matter of mysticism, esoteric number theory and such, to my mind comes under metaphysics—whose definition I well remember as 'above and beyond physics', which is about as short and as apt as any definition gets. You're right, my mind endeavors to make sense of the world from an analytical perspective, like Descartes's cogito, ergo sum I have to begin my worldview somewhere and it more or less ends with my 'sense data' (like Russell banging his hand on his table to 'prove' it was there). Unlike Descartes, I don't move up the thought chain and attempt to prove God exists—after all, philosophy once taught me where Descartes's logic fell apart.
That said, I remain agnostic about most metaphysical matters but in no way do I criticize others who hold stronger views—whether they come under the purview of traditional religions or say esoteric number theory. Frankly, I don't know enough about them (except, perhaps some religious training I learned as a child). If pushed however, I reckon I'd likely agree with the saying:
"That there are more things in heaven and on earth than man will ever dream of."
OK, let me roll the metaphysical ball a little further. You correctly took my handle as a reference to that Hilbert although it's a pretty common name. Why is that relevant here? If your knowledge extends as far as mathematical Hilbert spaces and QM then you'd know that much of our knowledge (and perception) of the actual QM world only exists through mathematical analogy. Whilst, we've managed some truly remarkable feats with QM such as being able to measure alpha, the fine structure constant, to an accuracy of about 10 decimal places and use such figures to produce some remarkable engineering, we've only gotten there by cleaver trickery. Our mathematics is not up to the job, we're constantly dodging infinities in QFT and so on. Simply, what actually happens and goes on down there in the quantum realm is anyone's guess. For all intents and purposes the real quantum world may as well be metaphysical.
BTW, Being and Nothingness and No Exit (Huis clos) and related material were on the syllabus, so one had to wade through the Book. That's now quite some time ago but I don't recall it being anything other than tedious (perhaps, that was down to the translation).
Given the outrageous political behavior we're witnessing in the world today I reckon No Exit paints a remarkably apt metaphor.
Relatedly, the "saying" you referenced is actually a slight misquote from Shakespeare's Hamlet that changes the meaning significantly. It comes from a scene where Hamlet is rejecting his schoolmate Horatio's dependence on naturalist/rationalist explanations for the supernatural appearance of old King Hamlet's ghost. Significantly, they were both students in philosophy! The complete quote is "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
As time is running out to post here there are few points I wish to mention.
Your last reply left some issues dangling and it's clear my comments have left you with an inaccurate view about my position about several matters. Note the problem mainly rests with me for shortcutting explanations, also forums such as HN make it difficult to put complex arguments let alone have them resolve cleanly.
Second thoughts made me post this late comment. Earlier, just after your post, I made three separate attempts at replying but aborted them because of their excessive length. Each time I had to shorten what could easily pass as a multipart blog and before it was finished it'd become clear it was too long and would have bombed out if I'd tried to post it—and that's after I'd deleted the largest part which was about mathematics† and its relationship to/overlap with philosophy. (Editing comment so that it's difficult to misinterpret its contents and still keep it short and succinct is difficult—at least it is for me.)
You're probably asking why I would commit so much effort to reply to a comment. There are many reasons and I can't mention them all but I've extracted and précised a few from the longer draft. Perhaps the most significant reason is that whenever I've made a general comment that lacks detail or references there are always those who either misinterpret the message or use its limitations to lever their contrary position.
There's nothing wrong with protagonists leveraging their propositions but in any discussion it makes sense to put one's points as clear and as succinctly as possible. With mathematics and science/technology putting one's case is comparatively straightforward as equations and accepted facts (scientific evidence/the scientific method) provide a solid framework from which to state one's case. In physics, whilst opinions often differ wildly and despite controversies such as the relevance of the Scientific Method and Popper's Falsifiability/Refutability rage on, consensus is often reached even if it takes decades. There comes the realization the properties of nature are immutable, Nature doesn't give a damn about physicists' opinions. Physicists can't argue when Nature says m(e) = ~9.10938371393×10^−31 kg. In the end it's no-contest, Nature's position always wins out.
On the orher hand, things are rather different with philosophy for multiple reasons. With philosophy a wide and diverse range of opinions are to be expected due to its inherent nature and structure. In short, philosophical concepts are usually founded on earlier frameworks which of themselves have no universally-accepted 'truths'. Moreover, with philosophy, linguistics, semantics and even its epistemological underpinnings—the theory of knowledge—continue to be subject of argument. In Principia Ethica G.E. Moore questions the foundations of ethics. One can't put a measure on "good", similarly, one can't explain or convey a sense of "yellow" to someone who's been blind from birth. In his books Language, Truth, and Logic and The Problem of Knowledge A. J. Ayer continues in a similar vein to the effect that sentences about ethics and ethical constructs are more emotional than propositional.
And these issues are still being debated. Simply, if one can't anchor and measure a "notion" or "concept" then one's pretty well stuffed to define it as an axiom. That's not to say we should give up worrying about ethics, as you'd know we don't. You'd also note that arguments about these matters get very messy.
It's clear my roots are anchored in the analytical tradition. And from what you've mentioned, the factors that have shaped your philosophical views are based more on metaphysical lines, thus I doubt you and I would ever fully agree on certain topics. There's nothing wrong with that and it's to be expected. That's how philosophy works in practice and it's always worked that way (except perhaps in some parts of analytical philosophy such as formal logic which is more akin to mathematics).
That there's a wide divergence of opinion over philosophical matters is an important aspect of philosophy as it shapes the way the discipline is conducted in practice, it's also a weakness. I've had to omit detailed discussion about that here but it has an important bearing on these comments. Human factors shape one's worldview and here our worldviews are different—they've not only shaped what we've commented upon but also they've influenced the emphasis we've placed on what we've said.
Some HN stories are such that comments have a clearly defined focus and that attracts those of a certain ilk, they pinpoint and confine comments to within narrow bands. In those situations I'll do likewise. However, that's not the situation with most stories on HN it's why I assume a general audience, I thus take the position that participants hold a broad spectrum of views—from those with little or no understanding of the issues through to experts and professionals.
The quandry is how best to respond, there's always the dilemma of how to best pitch my post, and my usual solution is to write to the LCD on grounds that everybody will understand what I've written.
I'm mindful to keep comments short and at a high-level (thus they lack rigor). That's the intention but all too frequently I'll get bogged down in detail. Also, short and simple replies sans detail come with the advantage that they'll capture more readers (very few ever read long posts, I know from experience).
Unfortunately, the shortcomings of a simplistic, overly-general comment invites criticism from the cognoscente. Here, I'm reminded of the parable Try to please all and you'll please none. Moreover, commenting on political and philosophical topics is to enter a minefield, one cops it from all directions—broad sweeping generalizations are criticized for having no depth, more involved comments (especially those without strong supporting evidence) attract those with contrary views who attack the lack of rigor, and long detailed analyzes are rarely read.
Essentially, when discussing these topics one can't win. I'll use your posts to illustrate the problem.
I'll start with how utilitarianism entered the discussion, The HN story wasn't directly about philosophy but rather "The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised", which raised a valid social concern that a section of society would be disadvantaged if apps predominated and "…all the brick and mortar close."
The retort to that was "Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?", which is both a valid argument and an-all-too-common response from those who don't think they've a social obligation and responsibly to help pay for or support society's disadvantaged (this is far from an isolated example).
My response implied the matter was of ethical concern and that social responsibility was an issue, thus one would need to examine the history and I said many (but not all) issues could be found in utilitarian concepts (which is fact). My comment was of a general nature and in keeping with the granularity of the story and that's when things came off the rails. Your attack on my general comment about utilitarianism sidetracked the key issue. I'm not deliberately singling you out for criticism but I'd contend that what happened here is typical and a commonplace problem on the web and social media.
Whether I was precicely correct or not in my comment about utilitarianism oughtn't have been an issue because its intention was clear—that about social responsibly and that its history that goes back several hundred years is important for context.
BTW, as I alluded to in my subsequent post, I was well aware utilitarian principles are hotly contested. What i didn't point out was that the curriculum that I'd studied under spent an inordinate amount time on utilitarianism (too much in my opinion), thus I'm reasonably acquainted with its issues and variations/derivatives. One matter I should have mentioned is that when putting a measure on utilitarianism and valuing its worth in the context of political philosophy one finds large differences of opinion exist between populations (especially so in past decades). Where I live, there was a time when almost every utility was run by government and the majority of the population would have been aghast if it had not been the situation (perhaps that's why our curriculum covered it in such detail). For obvious reasons, utilitarian concepts hold much less sway in the US. ...
It's important for me to stress that I make a clear distinction between the way I comment on HN where I usually take a more flexible position and present a less dogmatic view than I would in a paper or technical report (or when partaking in a formal debate) where structure, accuracy, presentation and demeanor of the written word or what's said are important. Here, gravitas also matters.
Again, that brings me back to the other point you raised about about Book-I of The Republic and why I said what I did. First, the subject matter—that of justice—is important and it needs highlighting. Second, very few on HN are interested in the fine minutiae (points of argument) in the Socrates/Thrasymachus debate) let alone why a person who conducts a modern analysis of Book-I would likely come to different conclusions to those of Plato's contemporaries (clearly philosophical thought has developed and matured over the intervening two millennia, so too the way we analyze and document philosophical concepts).
In a strict reading of Book-I I'd essentially agree with you but there's just too much to discuss to detail it here, although I'd mention that Socrates (Plato) doesn't give a proper definition of justice and admits to being not able to do so. To my mind, Socrates takes a similar position with Justice that's somewhat akin to the well-known quote about porn "I can't describe it but I know it when I see it". Your point about Callicles and justice is well taken, between his and other writings by Plato and others we are nevertheless able to gleen a much more nuanced view of what Ancient Greeks thought about Justice.
My view is we should focus the public's attention on the noble aspects of what Plato was trying to achieve in Book-I and not the points that are only of interest to philosophers and logicians. And I reckon that's damn easy—almost everyone can understand that Justice isn't Thrasymachus' notion of every man for himself and that Justice serve a much bigger more noble purpose. (Similarly, other philosophical concepts must be understood to before they're useful. The public has no difficulty in understanding the concept the greatest good for the greatest number but it couldn't give a damn about the minutiae of utilitarian theory. So let's use it.)
I'd contend the sentiment, import and values expressed by Plato in Book-I are essentially timeless; with some concessions to differences in societal/cultural norms and such, a modern reader's understanding and take on Plato's intention wouldn't be that different to that held by Ancient Athenians. This is what actually matters, and it's why I emphasize it over the minutiae.
I'd back that assertion by virtue of the enormous influence and sway that Greek philosophy still has on Western thought. That this is still true is really quite remarkable given the intervening two millennia. More to point, the reason why The Republic has endured for around 2400 years and that it's still a key document in the philosophical corpus is because across those millennia many have considered what Plato says is important enough to ensure its preservation.
That doesn't necessarily mean everybody agrees with Plato, nor that everything he says is accurate and or logical by modern standards. Nor do we consider or accept the political framework in which the work was written was above reproach, in Ancient Athens slavery was a given, nowadays—at least for most of us—it's an abomination.
On the matter of disagreement, I'd refer you to Karl Popper's work The Open Society and its Enemies—Volume I Plato wherein he indicts Plato on multiple accounts. The Book's title alone tells us of Popper's distaste for Plato's political philosophy.
But put all that aside for a moment, The Republic, especially Book-I, is a sheer delight to read. The way Plato manipulates and plays with the text is both engaging and entertaining, and the translatior of my copy, Benjamin Jowett, is a very skillful and accomplished writer. Unfortunately, I can't speak for literal accuracy of the translation. (I consider not having studied Ancient Greek a major deficit in my education.)
Re: "…a slight misquote from Shakespeare's Hamlet…"
It wasn't my intension to quote the Bard verbatim, you'll note I did not attribute it and that was intentional. The reason is that whilst there's little doubt that the origin of what I quoted rests with the Bard there are other versions similar to mine where the wording has been changed deliberately. Scientists and techies deemed it necessary to remove references to "Horatio" and thus to Hamlet to make the quote more general (more applicable to science). This site is a messy unedited jumble of quotes but the gist of its message is clear: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/12/25/universe/
Quo vadis? I can't answer that as I do not know. I'll say this however: despite my defense of philosophy, I'm of the opinion that the dicipline is becoming less relevant to society than is has been in past decades. There's little doubt that its influence and standing in society 50 or more years ago was much higher than it is today. The large decline in the study of humanities studies is evidence for that.
I'm strongly of the opinion that specialization is largely responsible for philosophy's deline in the eyes of the public and that's very bad news. These days, philosophy has grown into monumentally large discipline with hundreds of specialized subbranches and professional philosophers are required to investigate them in keeping with the longstanding traditions and practices of academia.
To get ahead in their profession, academics have to accept and adapt to the publish-or-perish demands of academia and that means having to specialize. Philosophy academics are now so deeply enmeshed in esoteric aspects of the discipline that they cannot adequately describe to a lay public what their work entails. This disconnect has not only led to philosophy becoming less relevant to ordinary people but also it's not in keeping with taking a more generalist approach to the discipline and emphasizing aspects that have practical relevance to real-world issues.
In short, the public has come to believe philosophy has lost touch with reality. Whether or not that's correct is essentially immaterial, what actually matters is the public's current perception of philosophy, and it's not favorable. That's a tragedy, and personally I find it not only sad but also damned annoying.
Why do I consider these issues important and why am I laboring the points with such intensity? Well, I'd posit that whilst evidence—factual data—is important and plays a significant role it's nevertheless strongly mitigated by one's political and ethical beliefs. Unfortunately, they play a disproportionate role in the public's negative perception of philosophy, also it affects the way philosophers go about their work (both judgment and the degree to which one can be impartial are impacted (that comment needs expanding to do it full justice but I can't do so here)).
Moreover, I'd contend those of a philosophical bent are often not completely immune—myself included, we've all biases. Add to that the fact we don't always arrive at conclusions by conscious deliberation, subconscious thought also plays a role. Again, these are just some more of the underlying reasons for why philosophy as a discipline plays a less influential role in world affairs nowadays than it once did. Given the state of world affairs at present the opposite ought to be true.
_
† It's a shame I couldn't post the stuff on mathematics as I reckon it added weight to my points. There's no great insight here but I did mention the notion of the infallibility of proof in mathematics and how Gödel undermined that worldview not to mention putting the kibosh on Hilbert's idea of mathematicians coming up with a finite set of axioms and proof thereof that would make mathematics 'complete'. The relevance here is that Gödel's theorems had a large impact on the philosophy of mathematics, They're even important in the context of Wigner's oft-quoted "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", one has to ask to what degree or extent does the mathematical analog represent the natural world.
Yes! There are many things you cannot do without a physical bank location. It is worth paying[1] something to have them. I used to use an online-only bank, but I realized I wanted to be able to walk into a branch at times, so I switched to a new bank.
[1] “Paying” can mean a variety of things, including lower interest rates on savings accounts, for example.
I suppose if I wanted to deposit cash I couldn't but it's never come up.
I need to change all these $2 bills and quarters into $20 bills.
Trivial examples that I have done at my bank. Maybe drbit cards now don't need to be put into a machine to change the pin anymore, idk.
As for the cash stuff, those are things you may need to do if you’re a shopkeeper, but I can’t imagine a reason why I would do that myself. Banks over here will sometimes charge fees for changing cash.
banks here don't charge, as one of their expected roles is to change money in the US.
What annoys me now is the closing of the on-line banking Web sites, which could be used easily and without any problem from any computer or smartphone, and their replacement with apps, which may force you not only to have a smartphone but also to be a customer of Apple or Google, because some banks refuse to provide their Android apps otherwise than through the Google app store.
Has anyone looked at the world lately and thought "hey maybe all these apps aren't the greatest idea"? Amazon, Shein, Temu, AliExpress have all but made history just visiting a mall and browsing.
I know Walmart loved the pandemic, too, because all the mom and pop stores that survived the first 20 years of amazon couldn't survive the local and state and federal government interfering with their commerce.
JoAnns is closing hundreds of stores. This whole subject is on my mind a lot lately.
>Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go off the grid
While they don't penalize you, they do make it extremely difficult, if not impossible to go completely off grid. Try putting up your own 'grid', which in IMO should include your own monetary system, and not having to pay taxes.
What's even more confusing/frustrating is that, despite being developed with very elaborate, mature frameworks, they still lack basic UI accommodations, like making clickable elements detectable by add-ons, or allowing you to open up a detail view in a new tab.
I get if Joe Shmoe's cobbled-together app forgets some things, but why wouldn't stuff like that be rolled in as a default, with all the development hours applied to it?
I've provide feedback on multiple occasions, but I don't have high hopes for them to fix anything. If I where running a business and to use the site every day I'd be pissed and threatening to move my business else where.
One of the banks that I am using has terminated its on-line banking service, which I had been using for almost 20 years, replacing it with an app.
That would not have been a problem if they would have provided the app themselves on their Web site, but they refuse to do this and they provide the app only in the Google on-line store, which I cannot use because I do not have a Google account, despite the fact that the app is free.
Therefore I have reduced a lot the number of operations that I do through that bank, redirecting them to another bank, which still has on-line banking on their Web site. Fortunately, for now the bank that has closed their on-line banking Web site still keeps an SMS service, which allows me e.g. to check the balance of my account from my phone and which notifies me about the transactions on my credit card.
Many years ago, I have closed all my accounts at a bank that has annoyed me by updating their on-line banking Web site so that it no longer accepted any browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer. At that time I have hoped that it will be the last time when I leave a bank because they believe that they can force their customers to also be customers of unrelated third parties, but now this problem with Google has appeared.
I am not a US citizen and the bank is not from USA. I doubt that it can be legal for a bank here in Europe to condition their services by their customer becoming the customer of a foreign entity that is Google. However I cannot afford to waste time and money to determine the legality of their actions.
I was not aware of it, so when I will have time I will experiment with it, to see if it works for downloading the app I need when logging in anonymously.
Hello, it's me from the future, reporting live from Germany. My bank is online only and to talk to a person, I need to call the hotline and wait (I shit you not) 20~25 minutes for the PIN input prompt to repeat itself once too many times and time out, handing me off to a very confused human who is wondering how I'm speaking to them unauthenticated (they're very suspicious and will not answer most questions; it's a pretty useless party trick). Alternatively, you can have the answering machine send you an authentication code by snail mail which you can then use once in the next few days to call them one time
I put up with it because the other bank account I applied for rejected me for not being creditworthy (never had a debt in my life, but also no loan, so there is no credit data and apparently that's suspicious; on the other hand, students get accounts there with no problem, so maybe it's a combination of no credit data and age? Or not having citizenship? They're not saying of course, I can only assume it's an illegal reason because why else not say it). The other bank card I own from a neighboring country isn't accepted in most supermarkets, I'd need to bring cash into the country or pay extra for using an ATM abroad. Single European Market is really lovely, you should try it
It's an article about the situation in the UK. If your "rural area" is in the US, it is not surprising that it's a bit different than anything in the article.
I'm not saying that as an insult, but rather because I don't think there's an inherent difference, I just think rural communities are harder for companies to monetize, for multiple reasons - think density and average income.
But like Amazon, they will get there, and unlike cities, rural communities have less ability to resist and less ability to support a diversity of options. Think about the takeover of Walmart and Dollar General/Tree.
I don't think there's anything special inherent to your rural community that protects you from all this "progress". You're just living through the time before it catches up to your community. And i bet if you think about the effects of the arrival of changes like Walmart's rural expansion, you might find that they upset rural life as well, reducing wages, extracting money from the local economy instead of allowing it to continue to circulate locally, and then investing driving distances, and the associated costs in fuel and time among others.
My guess is that you will go from blaming cities for their problems to blaming cities for your communities problems once they reach you.
But maybe if you reevaluate your perspective, you could help your community prepare to resist those changes while you still have time.
Curious, why do you use it?
The scale you are thinking in is comparable to a small web forum being sustainably moderated by the owner of the site, while the majority of the world exists in a place like reddit that has more moderator users than even large web forums have in total. Reddit would not be sustainable if they had to pay a moderation staff, and similarly rural living cannot be scaled up to support cities without becoming city-like.
So assuming you accept all that, why even read this article or post a reply in the discussion?
I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see why you find this topic interesting? It's like replying to a thread about how life in Afghanistan is really difficult, and you're saying "I think this article is not about America because of all the American things I experience."
My ulterior motive and secret agenda is to let people know they can escape that nonsense. Many rural areas are getting faster internet but are much more chill. There are pros and cons people can research themselves. For me most of the cons are pros.
If I can save even one person per year from the social, government and store apps that have massive teams of marketing psychological warfare experts manipulating them then I have done my hero's doodie.
The nearest fast food place to my house is 25 minutes away. Same with Walmart, Kroger, my bank, and nearly everything except dollar general and gas stations.
No ubet, Lyft. There is the food delivery, but only "in town". So far I have never been able to convince anyone to deliver food to my house.
I could use digital ID/license but I don't.
"Reward cards" are just phone numbers, at least the two I use (Kroger and horror fright). Oh and 1 gas station rewards.
I grew up in Los Angeles and spent 33 years there.
Of course, as with all of it, local jobs disappear from the local budget, and that money gets shipped off to Wall Street.
It's about tracking, and push notifications. Full stop.
That's exactly what it is. That is the only real reason. More tracking, more data harvesting, more control for the publisher at the expense of user agency.
It's a farce.
If you try putting a quarter in and it doesn't work (as is often the case because of tampering with the coin slots), I believe you don't have to pay for parking.
Never in my life would I have thought of that.
The cheapest cost per prisoner in the US is $23,000 per year (Arkansas with other states costing more). That's a lot of support you can give a person before it makes sense to send them to prison, especially if the prison doesn't actively work towards rehabilitation.
Problem is MVP prisons for your criminal population is viewed as needed while spending the money more effectively doesn't really have political consensus.
We don't yet have a surveillance state capable of observing every time someone puts gum in a parking meter while pretending to pay it, so they can park for free, it's not that we are "allergic" to enforcing this so choose to prevent parking at vandalized meters instead, it's that it's not realistic to catch that. Although I guess we're getting closer to that surveillance state now, but certainly weren't when these laws were first implemented, their motivation was that it was not feasible to catch most people vandalizing parking meters, instead the reward for doing so had to be removed (which honestly seems a lot more effective anyway??)
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/parking-mete...
Google AI agrees that it's generally illegal. I can't look up every single municipality of course, but here's a few. It certainly may not be universal, but it is not unusual, I don't have figures on how popular it is, maybe not as popular as I thought, but it's not at all unusual!
Rockville MD: "If a parking meter is not registering time with the insertion of coins, debit/credit card or ParkMobile, you must either park elsewhere or pay with another payment method available" https://www.rockvillemd.gov/274/Public-Parking
Chicago: "Overstuffed meters wouldn't accept quarters, leading to broken meters and tickets for the parkers who tried to use them." https://www.governing.com/archive/chicago-parking-meters.htm...
Bellingham Washington: "City code prohibits parking in a space if the meter is broken." https://cob.org/wp-content/uploads/parking-meter-info.pdf
Huh? That's the exact opposite of most municipalities I know of.
Normally it is "If the meter is broken, you cannot park there. It's an automatic ticket."
Otherwise, everybody just jams something in the slot and all your meters wind up broken.
Then, a few months ago, I finally bought a new phone. I quickly found out that there was no way I could get this one banking app from my home country on the new phone (other than switching my country setting again, which isn't worth the potential hassle right now). Fortunately, I could still do online banking with on my browser...right?
I try to login to my online banking. They say they will send me an OTP on my registered mobile number. Makes sense, and, thanks to the wonders of roaming, I will be able to receive it. Except...instead of just sending me the actual OTP like any sane platform would do, I had to first confirm that I was, indeed, trying to sign-in to online banking by replying "YES" to their SMS prompt. And due to the wonders of SMS roaming protocol, though I could receive their messages, I simply could not reply to them no matter which gods I invoke.
Security design by committee. I curse the manager who though this was a necessary and valuable addition to the whole OTP scheme.
It's not so much a "convenience tax" as in the article but, I guess, a penalty for moving countries. I have no choice now but simply to just settle this when I go on vacation to my home country. There is probably no convenient resolution to this even when I am in the correct geospace.
PS. I have two banks from home country and I was able to install the other bank's app in my new phone without a hitch. I try to avoid cynicism but this simply has the stink of Managerial Software Engineering Best Practices all over it.
Can't say about monthly plans, as that depends on the country.
Privacy is a different matter and always dependent on the technical literacy as opposed to hard costs.
Is the requirement of wearing clothes in public a tax? Maybe.
But today definitely someone can still live without owning a phone, if they have access to a computer nearby (e.g. A library or friend).
But you actually don't need either of those. You just need the cheapest Android cellphone or tablet you get, and access to someone's wifi, which is freely available at many coffee shops, or from neighbors.
I still agree you shouldn't need it, especially if you already have a computer. But it's only "expensive" if you choose the higher tiers.
So no security updates and any app can stop working any moment. And all your data are at Google, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
The cheapest device you can get will be unusably slow - good luck doing anything out and about without inconveniencing everyone else while you wait for your device to load and pray the app opens in a timely fashion. Oh, that is, if your outdated device can even download and run it.
Access to wifi isn't really as ubiquitous as you make it seem either - what if the business you're needing to use the app for doesn't have wifi? Run down the street to the coffee shop?
edit: You can even get a free phone from your community. Possibly a better one than the a53. Most people have a phone or several in a drawer.
https://swappa.com/listings/samsung-galaxy-a53-5g?carrier=un...
A good point, but also a parking spot like that which is also not in range of city wifi is pretty rare, I'd reckon.
https://smarty.co.uk/social-tariff
A cheap but perfectly useable phone costs less than £100 new from a brand like Xiaomi, Motorola or TCL; on any high street, you'll find a shop selling second-hand phones for as little as £30. I cannot think of any object in human history that provides so much utility for so little money.
Almost all mobile apps today are Android/iOS only and require an App Store/Play Store account.
Being forced to upgrade phones... Ugh.
I don't have a solution if you're not me and you're not paying me, though.
A smartphone is like a little computer you can use on the go, in case you weren’t aware.
I can think of various solutions (from companies not requiring an app in the first place to inserting an SD card) but suggesting that people simply not store user data on their phone is a new one
Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.
1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to. Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't, and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't free and I'd prefer not to pay for them.
3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my phone.
4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm comfortable with the level of security.
But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin, similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a backpack when you know you might pick something else up along the way.
Digital storage is so far removed from this concept. Let us not excuse poor business practices by trying to offload a piece of their business systems on to their customers' devices.
I shouldn't have to provide space on my property to conduct business with another organization.
But if you have a problem with the train ticket textbook, people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're not managing or carrying your belongings properly. I should get a bigger bag, or I should carry fewer of the books I actually want to read. Why am I carrying around so many things anyway? It's irresponsible! Sure I've got room for a piece of paper, but that's not enough these days. Don't I know that I'll need space for the train ticket textbook?
Have fun with that.
I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has no extra weight or volume in the real world.
What are you talking about? Only the most expensive flagship phones have a terabyte of storage space. There are no phones that have "many TBs". Mine certainly doesn't.
Regardless, none of the following functionality needs an app. It all works great on a website, and doesn't take up any space permanently on my device:
- Buying a ticket - Checking transit times - Receiving notifications (not only does email exist, but websites can send notofications) - Joining a loyalty program
I don't have any problem with people who want to carry these apps around, but as an infrequent user of many businesses, it's death by a thousand cuts. I resent how what were once perfectly workable mobile websites are slowly being degraded in order to force me to download hundreds of megabytes of copy-paste support libraries for what half the time are just wrapped webviews anyway.
It got so bad I had to do things like delete my Internet history if I even wanted to copy and paste something! And I would do everything I could to not have to pick which photos and conversations I needed to delete forever just to download some fucking app I would only use one time to order food or park somewhere or do first-time router setup.
Finally I had to give in and get a new phone, because managing phone storage was making my life much more difficult than it needed to be. But I'm still so mad that I had to, because daily living seems to demand more and more storage space. And people accept it!! Ugh. The dang thing didn't even have a scratch on it either. Would've used it for 20 years if I could.
I still believe it was a tragedy that Microsoft folded their attempt into mobile. To explain my level of desperation, I feel our next best hope here is China.
Anyways. I took an auto ride few weeks back and an old gentleman picked me up. He did have a tattered smartphone. But he didn't have the UPI app or a QR code (QR is the way here; UPI the instant payment thingie in India). He was not agitated but really looked embarrassed and helpless and told me in broken English he tried a few times but he forgets many kinds of PINs and messes up and his bank account gets blocked and then he has to run around with documents to get it unblocked and then again. I had some cash and I was able to pay him. But it's horrible. There are people for whom cash is the ONLY way. Even going to the bank (or ATM; which anyway is still a difficulty for me) means sometimes half to one day's work gone. Just like that. This has a lot to do with political climate changes. So many people get trampled over without any check and balances because they have the vote without a voice or any real power.
I think a lot of us, and for many of us who tap and pay at a Starbucks as if it's bill there lowest currency denomination in our consciousness, never stop to try and understand this and realise this. This is not merely inconvenience in huge part of this planet - it's a real life pain. I don't think even this article considered such a case/life struggles due to smartphones and everything getting tied to a SIM et cetera.
For whatever reason. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it's being fixed. Maybe the battery is dead.
(Maybe you don't want to get a Google or Apple account. But that's not the only use case.)
All public services and essential services (government services, banks, car parks, etc) should respect this right. It's bizarre that people think it's such an outlandish request.
The UK tried to force Apple to Do Evil and failes. Who's to the say the US wouldn't be (or hasn't been) more successful?
If I were a politician relying on WhatsApp for secure communications (as many over here seem to be), I'd be very worried.
Bizarre but not surprising. Tyranny of the masses.
> McDonald’s is running a high-profile promotion called Deal Drop, where it offers items at “bargain” prices, such as a classic Big Mac for £1.49 (normally £4.99) and a children’s Happy Meal for £1.99 (normally £3.59) – but all of the discounts are available exclusively with the company’s app.
The article paints a painstakingly detailed photo of the UK's app culture, but fails to explain exactly why app users are entitled to such discounts. What exactly is McDonald's doing with your data that is worth a whopping £3.50 Big Mac discount, and more?? Why is the app so important?? I have never found an article that does more than scratch the surface on this topic. Any suggestions?
That way you both get to take the full price from people whose time is expensive enough that they won't bother with the apps, and also those who wouldn't pay the full price but have enough time to use the apps.
I never eat McD's, but I see the pattern everywhere. If you make between the minimum and average wage in Slovenia and don't own property, you practically can't get by without dedicating 6h per week to grocery shopping in various different 'discount' chains (Lidl, Hofer AKA Aldi Sud, Euro Spin), keeping up with the weekly discount catalogs and using all the app discounts (more recently).
Fairly obviously the discounts are to encourage customer loyalty so you keep going to McD rather than somewhere healthier. Also to get you to come back - if you haven't been for ages they may offer a 99p big mac to get you back in.
As to why apps rather than paper coupons, my closest McD has a typically had group of about 20 people waiting for the 50 items they ordered with new stuff ordered every 30 seconds or so. The last thing the low wage rushed staff need are customers going can you explain this coupon to me an is it valid for extra fries on Friday etc.
Richer customers self-select to pay higher prices without the app as they can't be bothered faffing around to find the digital coupon/deal/whatever combination (you can, of course, only use one of the wide range of deals at a time). Poorer customers will invest the time in finding and using a deal.
They both get the same sandwich, but McD got them to pay different prices for it.
Get more people to use McD's app. When they order, give them a personalized coupon giving you a discount. The discount is different for everyone. Use the response rate, plus information about your buying habit (always buys a family-sized order on Fridays) to optimize the discount.
Raise the non-app prices so the people using the app think they got a deal ... while the overall price is on average higher than if McD's had flat rates for everyone.
People tend to think flat rates are more fair when the services are identical, and get pissed off when they find it isn't.
Typing on a smartphone is impossible for my 70-something father, even on the larger models.
I've seen this a bunch with people who buy the less expensive phones with smaller amounts of storage: they take photos until their phone is full, and now if they need to install a new app they have to delete something else (including potentially their photos) to make space for it.
By tying your service to a smartphone your are basically refusing to provide service if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or Google's TOS. If the app doesn't complain about emulation or something different than Android or IOS you are in luck, but that's not the case with most banking apps. And that's only talking about people who don't have it by choice and have money to buy one.
For me, once, it went beyond: I took my first dose of the Covid vaccine, and the second dose's date would still be announced. I asked where it would be available to the nurse, "On the Instagram page of the <local health body>". "But i don't have Instagram" i said, and the nurse shrugged. It requires both a phone and a social media account with your real info, but since absolute nobody complains about it they just do because it's easier.
This will continue as long people are complacent with it. In some places the government is required to provide you services, by law, by any means available and not depending on 3rd party service, but they do require apps anyway and people stay quiet. Phones as an alternative is fine, it's a tool, but should not be an obligatory device for you to be considered an human being.
Sure, I own a smartphone, it runs just plain android but without any google accounts or services because I do not agree to Googles terms of services. I never did, and as an European citizen especially with recent developments I feel that has been the right choice.
The thing is, without google account there is no play store, and without play store I am not able to install the majority of apps - no banking, no parking, and all the other services people complain about in these threads.
This is my choice, and I stick to it. I'm also pretty vocal about it and complain when needed. Doctors office informs me I only can get medicine with the app? Apparently they can make exceptions when you complain, because I'm allowed to get medicine with a simple phone call. My bank tried to force me to use their app, but apparently they still do have an alternative login method when you complain. Sure, I know it's a fight I will lose in the long run, but I enjoy it while it lasts.
Or if Apple or Google arbitrarily decide that they don't like that customer. You don't have to have done something wrong, they can decide that you're likely associated with someone who did.
"A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.", https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
In India, Google locked an engineer from Gujarat out of his Google account because it contained explicit content potentially involving child abuse or exploitation. The engineer believes it's because the account contain images of him as a child being bathed by his grandmother.
"HC notice to Google India after engineer loses access Gmail, Google Drive, and more over childhood photo labelled 'porn'" https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/hc-...
I use these examples specifically because many in my government want "Chat Control", where snitchware scans messages for child porn and the like, and notifies the police. It will be full of false positives like these, especially if the scanning software continues to be built by puritanical American companies.
Another class is people who the US deems to be a security threat. How long will it be until the US extends its sanctions against the ICC by ordering Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and Google to shut down the accounts for the ICC and anyone involved in their genocide investigation, work and personal?
I want my nurse to take care of my health, not to know where I can find stuff. You are misplacing your anger...
I can pay for petrol with any card or, if I'm feeling really old school, by going into a building and handing a person cash. Someone like my mum, who still likes to draw the cash she'll need for the week and spend that, wouldn't even entertain the idea of having to download and maintain a suite of apps for every brand of charger.
Apps are a good convenience option for those that want them, but they shouldn't be the only option, especially not for something as essential as fuelling your car. I would welcome regulation on these, even a baby step of "all chargers must accept contactless payment". I'd like to see manned charging stations and cash options too—and I say that as someone who pays for everything by card—but I fear in the short term that might hamper infrastructure rollout.
Came with zero instructions for set up, just a QR code. Scanned the QR code and it took me to install an app. I begrudgingly installed it.
The app had me hit next a few times before scanning a different QR code on the bottom of the modem. That was the entire process.
I guess you just have to pay for installation if you don't have a smart phone? It offered for $150+ when I agreed to the new modem.
TAN apps were still reasonable. TAN generators too, though the hardware sucked and used an insane amount of batteries. Then banks forced apps and smartphones and that is the point where to say no thanks.
They are still required to perform transactions by filling out forms with a pen. It sounds like a lot of work but it really isn't. Use cash or credit cards and cut down the number of manual transactions.
> The German movement "Digitalcourage" has coined the term "Digitalzwang" (compulsory digitalisation) for this feature. For instance, some public funding programmes cannot be used unless you have access to a PC (a smartphone is not sufficient) hooked up to the internet.
> Digitalcourage support responsible digitalisation by offering help in the usage of secure authorisation and encryption but strictly disapproves of any form of compulsory digitalisation. People who refuse using public data networks, whatever their motives, must have equal rights as everybody else.
What they describe is not quite what the linked article describes, but is similar and is related.
I would further say, that in addition to that (and the stuff mentioned in the linked article), you should not be required to use computers with specific complicated software (including web browsers), or to use computers (including smartphones) or credit cards at all, if that is applicable to whatever you are doing working with. There is also the issue of a smartphone running out of battery power or otherwise not working, even if you do have it.
(I have once been in a restaurant where a app is required, although customers who do not have a smartphone can borrow a iPad from them. This is not as bad, but still it is not as good as just not requiring it at all.)
SIDENOTE
People need to chill out with the word "tyranny". It's like saying that you are being "assaulted" by a different opinion, or claiming that ordinary platform moderation is "censorship". You are not being terrorized, assaulted, or censored.
There are people in the world who are truly subjected to those things, and you have NO idea what that's actually like.
That said, words can take on different meanings depending on context. We can only imagine the tyranny of being a prisoner of war but we can also complain about the tyranny of noise pollution in modern cities; that doesn't mean I think they're equal. I know some people suffer assault domestically but I can also label some perfumes as an assault to the senses; it doesn't lessen the gravity of the former. And yes, Calvin, you are allowed to think your household is a den of censorship and oppression (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....).
My problem with gatekeeping words is that it is performative. We can indeed chill out on using these words save for their most extreme interpretations but it doesn't really help anyone suffering from these things and just makes language less colorful for the rest of us. And, once more, nor does their usage dismiss the extent of any of these situations because you don't need to be a genius to know that words can have subtle changes in meaning depending on context.
At least here in Finland Lidl Plus is one of the few which can be used by just entering a phone number.
That said, all "loyalty programs" should be outright banned. They stifle competition, make pricing less transparent and discriminate against the less well off.
The opposite: supermarket loyalty cards are often designed so that the well off pay more: i.e. it is the well off that are being discriminated against. The barriers are designed to allow poorer people to pay less. The topic is called price discrimination.
All the poorer people I know use loyalty cards because they judge them to be valuable (despite the extra hassle).
The less well off often get lower prices (plus valuable rewards) because of the loyalty programs in New Zealand.
I often use my friend's loyalty accounts: so I get the item discounts but they collect the loyalty rewards/cash. Also I like to screw the data surveillance up - I don't get tracked so much and my friend's account is spammed with higher cost items.
Coupons are designed for the same purpose. Allowing poorer people to choose to trade their time/hassle for savings (according to their values).
Price discrimination is anything where the same product is sold at different price for different buyers. All loyalty programs are price discrimination.
Only if you think a $50000 discount on a Lamborghini is disproportionate compared with a $500 saving on a Kia.
Peak security theater: banks (at least in Europe) mandate smartphones as “safe,” yet the device itself is the ultimate attack vector.
- 2FA apps? Single point of failure (SIM-jacking, zero-days, bricked phone = locked out of life).
- Mandatory apps? Swapped phishing for supply-chain attacks + 24/7 location leaks.
- Biometrics? Your face now lives in a corp database that will get breached.
The irony? A YubiKey was objectively safer: no GPS, mic, or app permissions. But we’ve normalized “security” as surrender to surveillance capitalism. Banks want your data, not hardware tokens.
Smartphones manufacture threats:
- AirTag stalking requires… a smartphone to detect.
- Signal/encrypted chat? Tied to a phone number (→ ID → surveillance graph).
- “Find My Phone” = backdoor with a UX polish.
The system isn’t securing you, it’s securing access to you. Every forced 2FA method is another node to map, monetize, and manipulate.
btw. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41310150 - old ASK NH of mine, i still welcome ideas.
I actually find it more convenient than presenting a card in person, because my country uses chip-and-pin cards and many American (soft-)POS terminals break when presented with one. There's also less of a chance of my bank arbitrarily flagging the transaction as suspicious.
I recently worked with NetGear support to have a new router replaced after we determined the firmware was known to be problematic, and the only way the level 2 support person had of correcting it required their app.
So fortunately, there may still be ways around working with IT without a "smart" phone, and I will continue to blaze that trail as needed.
I know Android now lets me copy from the screen but it still flows incorrectly sometimes, like copying from a PDF.
Don’t forget “Can’t block advertisements and tracking”
"Many", like, maybe the ones who are trying to sell you on an app development contract? But not many others!
Here’s hoping this doesn’t change!
I made it five days but could have gone for longer. It was interesting to see how the system worked from without, and how people reacted to requests that would have been banal in the nineties. For the most part, it went well. Very few things were unavailable. I only remember hotel phones being missing or broken. However it was impossible to handle things back home and my life would have started falling apart after a few weeks of ignoring emails.
“ The RAC’s head of policy, Simon Williams, says many people are overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, “when in reality you want one that you like and you’re happy using and that you can use everywhere”.
Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a “national parking platform” (NPP) designed to enable drivers to use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking. It has been trialled by a number of councils, but a big question mark hangs over its future as public funding for the project looks likely to be withdrawn.
The RAC’s head of policy Simon Williams says many people are overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, “when in reality you want one that you like and you’re happy using and that you can use everywhere”.
Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a “national parking platform” (NPP) designed to enable drivers to use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking, and it has been trialled by a number of councils. However, a big question mark now hangs over its future as public funding for the project looks likely to be withdrawn imminently.”
I think the other one was an npr piece posted on HN yesterday? Is there a bug with wordpress or are people just getting sloppy?
[source: grumpy Guardian Weekly subscriber]
What's even worse is that the app is incredibly poorly made such that occasionally some payments just fall into the void and either start the machine for free or require a double charge. Anytime I have reached out to complain about these I just get told to bring my phone closer to the machine.
Government services are a different case. I suppose they feel cost pressure as well, but it's right to expect them to accommodate more people than private businesses.
In many ways Apple without Steve Jobs feels more Google and Microsoft but with better taste of software and hardware.
>"So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product.
>"And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.” *
Clearly we have very different experiences here, because Apple Pay has effectively replaced my wallet. I don’t carry any cash and carry one or two cards for the rare times when tap to pay is unavailable.
In the case of handheld computers ("smartphones") the situation is even more restrictive. The "mobile user" is forced to use both s specific operating system and a specific client in order to communicate with servers that respond to HTTP ("backends"), where the former is controlled by a company wholly or partially dependant on surveillance, data collection and the sale of online advertising services as a "business model".
What ever happened to the protocol part of the URL to direct the data to the right software handler, I will probably never understand
There is -as yet- no laws as strong for 'telephones'. But people communicate a lot more by mobile phone than by snail mail these days!
I think people should be free to do or discuss whatever they want via their phones, just like is permitted for paper mail. Phones should should get very stringent legal protections, including at borders, just like for paper mail.
more and more apps are starting to reject rooted phones. I'm dropping them for now, but I worry that at some point I'll have to carry a decoy phone for essential apps. or maybe I'll learn to just not put anything more personal than the stuff required to use the essential ones like health care and transport.
Of course some companies don't want it so they make their website unusable to smartphone.
There isn't really much that technically would prevent people from using their web browser to pay the parking or to pay McDonald.
You can have geolocation on browser too, save your account, take picture and so on.
It's just better for these companies if we have their app because we can't use ad blocker and just close the browser. The app, it can send data 24/24.
For instance, I have yet to find an llm or ai chatbot app that doesn't force me to have the Google play store enabled on my phone and to be logged in with my Google account.
What the FCK they care if I have a Google account on my phone to be able to use chatgpt, deepseek, Mistral, lama and others ? More and more do that, recently the app I used to use to track food quality (Yuka) did that too.
The more thing goes, the less app I use and the more I rely on web browser. And those who refuse to work in browser, i just ditch them.
I feel like we reached a plateau years ago and now things are going downhill with android and iPhone.
My bank is digital only and doesn't have any local branches. That works for me and is fine. It's not like I'm switching banks every few weeks. They still have an all phone line access as well though. You can call people round the clock to do transfers, get your balance, etc. Even my analog grandmother has her bank account with them.
On the other hand, you have restaurants and other businesses that just over do it. There is a restaurant around my work place that I went to once or twice a month. Nothing special but fair prices and good lunch menus. Then they went all digital. Want a menu? Scan this barcode. Want to order? Create an account and place you order with your table number. Want to pay? You can click pay on your phone and enter your details. Don't have a phone? Totally sorry, we don't have any printed back-ups and our servers don't have any card terminals anymore anyway.
Had to give my phone number to reserve a table today
Tickets on your phone for airline, it's not all bad saw some elder couple with flip phones (they're able to get by without a smart phone)
No, I don't like installing apps for every stupid parking lot or restaurant. But calling it "tyranny" is clickbait and bad journalism. I pay more for my sons bus pass because I don't want him to have a smartphone.
That's a choice I made. My solution isn't to make everyone else pay more because the same discount can't be given without a smartphone. I see why businesses would want to reward me when I let them send me push notifications. Again, not even remotely tyranny. If anything this is tyranny of bad writing.
It's a tool. Do you complain when the bank requires you to sign something with a pen?
We require computers today for many things. Why not force websites to provide phone service with exactly the same pricing. Guess what the effect will be? Higher prices.
The same is true with apps, some things make no financial sense without them.
Apps give discounts and there is a tradeoff. We can't demand similar benefits without paying the same price.
The pain was self-inflicted in my case, but some people simply don't have money for one (as there are lots of people living on 200-250 USD per month or even less — they have nothing left at the end of the month).
If any banking whatsoever then sure, this is a problem like cashless society. But if it's from a set of specific banks that makes sense. I use a smartphone only bank and pay lower costs as a result. That makes sense.
We're giving them something that provides value and saves on costs.
Eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/250d63/was_u... has "We used prints as my partner was dying and lost motor control."
Or, think of Stephen Hawking, able to communicate but unable to operate a pen in the later part of his life. Wouldn't you complain if he had been unable to control his bank account because he couldn't use a pen?
The relevant Uniform Commercial Code has a wider definition of what counts as a signature than using a pen, § 3-401, https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/3/3-401 .
Just as a disabled person would have a caretaker sign as a proxy for them, such a caretaker could use the app for them in such a case.
Better yet. A person who is bedridden or incapacitated could use an app from the convenience of their own home instead of physically going to a bank. A blind person could avoid the walk to a distant location. It's a mixed bag in terms of accessibility.
You should likely be more careful about how your use of "disabled person" as I'm sure you know most disabled people do not have caretakers.
Also, the link I gave says 'agent or representative' - a caretaker is not necessarily either of those.
My point is that, yes, I would complain if the bank requires everyone to sign with a pen - and so would you, it seems.
So why is it okay to complain about forcing everyone to use a pen, but not okay to complain about forcing everyone to use an app, especially when we know there are people who will not use a smartphone including, for example, religious reasons. There is a market for "kosher phones" which don't let you install apps, or even have no internet support at all.
One of the banks I use requires an app since it's an online only bank. I pay lower rates as a result. Does this bar some people from using that bank?
Yes. But as long as other banks exist that shouldn't be a problem. Would it make sense to require that bank to offer branches, phone access etc?
No. Because then it won't be as cheap. Should the regulator make sure banks that provide "full service" exist?
Yes.
I didn't say it's not OK to complain. In fact I gave a personal example in which I chose not to use an app for my sons public transport and as a result am consciously paying more. I did say that:
* Calling it tyranny is nonsense and bad journalism. The entire article is hyperbole and just silly.
* Cheaper pricing and app specific features make sense and are not discriminatory in the vast majority of cases.
* I think it's reasonable to requiring an app bad.
* Maybe not a "tyranny", we'd probably want to reserve that for the government doing it, but not good news.
You replied "Why?"
Since you and rwmj agree that calling is tyranny is too much, it comes across like the "Why?" refers to the objection to requiring an app.
When you follow that up with "Do you complain when the bank requires you to sign something with a pen?", it sure sounds like a statement that you don't think people would complain for an app-only requirement. Otherwise I can't make it make sense.
> But as long as other banks exist that shouldn't be a problem.
So, as long as one bank exists somewhere in the US? Somewhere in a 100 mile radius? When is it a problem, and what could be used to prevent it from getting there? Is 1 mile to the nearest non-app parking space a problem?
Would you say that so long as one bank has handicap access, the other banks should save money and provide lower interest rates by not being handicap accessible? I hope not.
The cantons of Geneva and Neuchâtel in Switzerland voted for the fundamental right to live offline. What's wrong with having that everywhere?
> and are not discriminatory in the vast majority of cases.
We have Braille on elevator buttons even though not having Braille on elevator buttons is not discriminatory in the vast majority of cases.
Because the vast majority of people don't need Braille.
More people don't have smartphones than need Braille.
> So, as long as one bank exists somewhere in the US?
Not an American but that's generally a tradeoff yes. My main bank closed the branch next to me. They are not app only, that's what they do. That's why we have regulators (sorry Americans) to make sure a level of service exists.
But regulators shouldn't "break the market". I use two banks. One does have branches and I use it for my business accounts. Another is app only and far cheaper. A regulators job is to make sure both have room to exist and compete on a level playing field.
Will that mean branches closing? Maybe. The alternative is more cost to the shareholders/customers.
> Would you say that so long as one bank has handicap access, the other banks should save money and provide lower interest rates by not being handicap accessible? I hope not.
That's a straw man argument. Even the apps are required to have accessibility and handicap access is protected by law in practically every western country.
I live in a small country. We have 5 banks. If all are forced to have branches everywhere a 6th bank will never form since the cost/time to build up a bank becomes prohibitive. Thus no competition. Indeed we hadn't had a new bank for 50 years or so. Until we allowed an app only bank which gives much better rates.
This isn't different in the states, competition is difficult when the big banks can crash you and the public is afraid to step into a smaller bank. That means you need to build accessible branches to service a community that will never set foot there. You're effectively saying: "make the barrier of entry so high that no competition can happen".
> The cantons of Geneva and Neuchâtel in Switzerland voted for the fundamental right to live offline. What's wrong with having that everywhere?
That's fair. You 100% have the "right" to live offline. I agree with that and I'm very much against a cashless society.
But this isn't that. What you're asking is for people who are interested in living online to give up potential benefits of the modern age. That's a very different thing from "able". Progress always meant some things went away or became harder to do as a result, this is no different.
> We have Braille on elevator buttons even though not having Braille on elevator buttons is not discriminatory in the vast majority of cases.
Because having Braille on the elevator or having the elevator say the floor we're on doesn't impact the rest of the population. E.g. when I go to the hospital the elevator waits forever in every floor. That makes sense, disabled and elderly need time to reach the open door.
In my building it is much faster, don't the disabled and elderly deserve this in my building too?
Well, they do. But the tenants in my building don't want to wait every time the elevator stops and have a cascading effect on all the floors due to that delay. We can provide localized solutions by holding the door and helping. It's a tradeoff.
> Because the vast majority of people don't need Braille. > More people don't have smartphones than need Braille.
Sure. I'm 100% for the "right" to avoid smartphones and apps. I think every public service and infrastructure should be accessible without them.
However, demanding that it would be in the same price and with the same current level of convenience is problematic as it would impact everyone. I think the analogy you gave is great. Braille on elevators should stay forever when we can. They should also speak, accessibility here is free and doesn't impact people who don't need it. Slowing the elevators for the elderly (of which there are quite a lot) is problematic and probably not what most of us want.
As someone without a smartphone, I caution you to be very wary about what specifically you mean by "nonsense". If you only mean "tyranny", that's one thing. If you mean it's not a problem until I live little better than a hermit in the woods is another, unable to have real banking, real health care, real education for any kids, unable to order taxi service, unable to pay for parking, unable to refuel, unable to get packages, and so on ... yeah, no, you need some empathy.
> Even the apps are required to have accessibility and handicap access is protected by law in practically every western country.
Here's my handicap, which I've had therapy about. I'm on the internet too much. When it's accessible, as now when I should be working, I find it almost impossible to avoid the urge to check.
My solution is to not have a smartphone with me, to limit when I can be online. I am about to head to the basement, where the wifi doesn't reach, in order to focus on work.
Would you force a teetotaler to drink? Would you recommend that someone trying to lose weight should carry a bag of peanut butter cups with them all the time?
Here is another handicap: there are people who are electrosenstive, that is, they get headaches or have other problems when they are too close to radio signals, so they do not even carry a cell phone.
Now, I happen to believe that is not based on the physical effects of radio signals, but forcing them to use a smartphone will cause them severe mental distress.
There are still others who suffer from anxiety knowing their every action is being surveilled. When I started with therapy, the doctor asked if I thought the phones were listening to me, to see if I had any signs of schizophrenia. He then realized how that connected to the conversation, so had to rephrase the question, because we both know nearly all apps listen to us, one way or other.
Apps cannot solve these issues because smartphone-based apps and the ecosystem supporting it are the issue.
> What you're asking is for people who are interested in living online to give up potential benefits of the modern age.
No, what you asked for was a bank that only supports people who decide to use a smartphone which can connect to the Apple and Google app stores, so that you could pay lower rates.
The benefit is that you profit by their ability to exclude people who are more expensive to maintain. Completely legal, of course, as the freedom to live offline is not (currently, in nearly all jurisdictions) a protected right.
That excludes people like me who are "living online" but who do not have a smartphone, that excludes people who use a PinePhone or other smartphone which doesn't run Android, that excludes people who use an Android phone but have not agreed to the Google Store terms of service, as zevv did at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140223 .
And don't forget that one of the reasons we are more expensive to maintain is that you are more profitable for them. Banks can send you ads directly, and know you've read them. McD's can use personalized ads based on your buying habits to induce you to buy more and overeat. And of course many apps have in-app advertising, which cannot be blocked. Uber made $1 billion last year from in-app ads.
Is surveillance capitalism required for the modern age?
> Slowing the elevators for the elderly (of which there are quite a lot) is problematic and probably not what most of us want.
The newer elevators around here, at least the one in government-owned buildings, solve that issue with a flip seat.
Every single time my bank requires me to sign something with a pen, they also provide the pen.
But where I have a big problem is when my local government requires me to install apps to do basic things like parking. It would almost be okay if the apps were developed in house and were open source. But of course they're not. And anyway there's no reason they can't just be web based.
So now I just don't pay for parking and I pay the ticket if I get a ticket...
Markets' "thing" is concentration of capital and the whittling of service/product providers until just a few major ones, or a single one, is left, and then they collude on pricing, bypassing/preventing regulation, psychological manipulation of customers etc.
We should not play the victims. Being without one of those cursed things is a blessing. We get good mental health. We get focus and calm. We get a profound sense of freedom, time to think, to create, to talk to real people, to see the world go by. We learn to enjoy being bored. We interact with other real people. We willingly pay more for freedom and privacy.
What we lose is being tied up in pointless abusive machinations of an already dying "online" culture, one that is over-extended, fragile, dysfunctional, and we dodge much of the abusive enshitified corporate hell that every living being now hates.
Please, big-up your friend instead of painting him as a victim.
The main issue is that end-users not only accept crappy software, they pay for it (sometimes, quite a bit). They also recommend it to others, give it good reviews, and subcultures of "tech-macho" workarounds to bugs cause people to actually prefer crap. It's infuriating (to me, but not, perhaps, to many tech companies).
As long as that keeps happening, the quality of software is going to remain in the shitter. It doesn't make economic sense to write good software. Writing high-Quality software is a lot more expensive than writing crap.
My software tends to be pretty high-Quality, but that's mainly because it is free software, and I tend to work alone, so its scope is quite limited. I would not expect a commercial company to develop software the way that I do. It would just cost too much.
Neuchâtel is including "digital integrity" in its constitution, and other cantons could follow. The National Council had criticized a proposal as purely symbolic. But the consequences are visible in Geneva.
The first time it could be dismissed as an accident, the second time not: that's what Alexis Roussel, the driving force behind a fundamental right to digital integrity, says. Roussel, a member of the Pirate Party and former president, is in good spirits. After Geneva in 2023, his home canton of Neuchâtel also enshrined the new fundamental right in the constitution on November 24. Both times the people voted yes by a very clear margin: 94 percent in Geneva and almost 92 percent in Neuchâtel.
From the new legislative period in 2025, the Neuchâtel constitution will therefore guarantee not only the right to physical, mental and psychological integrity, but also the right to digital integrity. The new right only applies in relation to the state. It includes, for example, the right to security in digital space, the right "not to be monitored, measured and analyzed", the right to an "offline life" and the right to be forgotten.
[...]
In Geneva, Alexis Roussel is already seeing the first consequences of the right to digital integrity. Secondary school students there no longer use the office software Microsoft Office, but the non-commercial alternative Libre Office. The education department explained the change to the newspaper "Le Temps" by saying that Microsoft has been receiving personal data such as names and email addresses since an update to its licensing terms. However, the canton is only allowed to process data at foreign companies if they are "adequately" protected there.
[...]
In the canton of Neuchâtel, too, the new fundamental right is already being mentioned in concrete terms in political debates. The liberal municipal councillor Catherine Zeter said on RTS television about the planned closure of the post office in Boudry that the company would probably prefer to offer its services only digitally. But, said Zeter, this "completely" violates the right to an offline life that the people of Neuchâtel have just decided on with their new fundamental right.
Forget privacy, forget having a paper stub as a souvenir (not even an option), forget paying with cash. As I avoid ticketmaster, I've avoided most concerts the last few years... only going to small local venues, which provide the options above.
But I recently discovered you can just view the tickets in your mobile browser instead and it will work fine for whatever scanners the venues use.
As for other apps, I just have a couple of simple games and Firefox, which I only use when in waiting an office for am appointment. So far where I am, it is not an impediment.
But generally... just buy a phone and download the apps. I imagine in the 1800s someone wrote an article "those without telephones are unfairly penalised". This is just a modern version.
It's goes further into nonsensical territory when a progressive shows up and starts complaining about how the people who don't want to participate in society are being unfairly punished. That being poor is somehow not only a problem, but also YOUR problem.
I run GrapheneOS on an older Pixel. It does everything I need it to do: alarms, offline maps and navigation, end-to-end encrypted communications, podcasts, audiobooks, music, photos, weather, and even phone calls. All without any DRM or spying.
Now let's talk about the downsides in this article: shopping discounts, parking, entertainment, fast food, and banking.
Shopping discounts: The deal is that they get to track me and advertise to me, and they cut some percentage off a purchase here and there. No deal. I've discovered so many great products by moving away from big retail shops that engage in this kind of activity. I mostly shop at Trader Joe's, which has no coupon/discount/loyalty nonsense. For the occasional trip to another supermarket, I simply key in <local area code>-867-5309. Works every time.
Parking: I ride my bicycle or take public transportation almost everywhere, so parking is a moot point for me. But for the rare occasion when I drive to a place where I have to pay for parking, most everything accepts a credit card. If it doesn't, most everything else has a website that I can go to in Vanadium or Waterfox. It's actually very rare that I find I actually have no choice but to download and install a DRM'd app in order to park somewhere. In fact I don't recall that ever actually happening to me. Not to say that's not a possibility in the future.
Entertainment: I despise large crowds, and almost everything that's exclusively done through Ticketmaster et al. is of absolutely no interest to me. If I'm not sitting down in a cozy venue within 10-15 or so feet from the performers, I'm just not interested.
Fast food: I don't eat fast food. Discounted Big Macs isn't my idea of a good time.
Banking: My bank's web site works fine on Waterfox. But if I'm going to be managing my money I'd much prefer to do it on my computer. If I want a reasonable return on my deposits I simply park most of my cash in a money market ETF. It's plenty convenient and is simply not a big issue for me.
I'll add a few more.
Rideshare: I find traditional taxis are everywhere I've recently visited, tend to be driven by more interesting people, and they accept cash, no problem. I've had plenty of bad experiences with rideshares and have never had a bad experience since switching to traditional taxis. Knock on wood.
Audiobooks: I get ODM files from my local library. The audio files you download via ODM aren't DRM'd.
Ebooks: My offline Kobi reader works great. Kindles can be cracked with WinterBreak. Again, the library. DeDRM is your friend.
Email: Fastmail app from apkcure.com.
Chat: Signal.
Airlines: Check in on Waterfox, take a screenshot of the ticket/QR code. If that doesn't work, check in at the airport and get a printed boarding pass.
I don't currently drive a car, and to be honest, I have anxiety about driving. I could bitch about how US is hostile to people who don't drive, to the point that it's difficult to go to places/get things done, but that's useless. I can 1) move to NYC and never leave the city 2) get a car, work on my anxiety, and start enjoying life or 3) talk to Guardian and complain all day long. 1) is not actually a bad choice, and literally millions of people choose that, but I am working on 2) because that's the sensible thing to do. If I intentionally choose not to drive, not because of a physical disability or not being to afford a car, I bear the consequences.
That's not what we are discussing here.
You can't use whatever irrelevant analogy you like to prove a point that doesn't exist.
Yes and?
He makes a choice and he is being penalized for it. Presumably the benefits for him outweigh the costs. For Richard Stallman they do.
There is no innate human right to grocery store coupons or private parking lots.
It'd be one thing, if it were just apps. But all of these apps are essentially just containers for some web application.
Do you get access to the web application without the app? No.
So what's the point of the apps? So they can send you notifications and annoy you with irrelevant updates concerning other groups at the same daycare all day long, because they don't care to filter?
The communication apps are out of control since the teachers seem to have choice in what is required and so changes every year.
My middle schooler needs 3 different apps (and a Chromebook) to check/hand in homework and parents need 2 to receive communication from the teachers.
Setting aside any issues related to privacy or US corporate control over my life, I'm one of the people who doesn't use a smartphone because the temptation to be online, at the drop of the hat, is too much to resist.
I compare it to being like someone who needs to lose weight, so keeps all chocolate out of the house, while everyone seems to expect me to have a luscious bar of high quality chocolate with me all the time, just sitting there, begging me to eat it.
There is an ongoing debate about smartphones at school, and the addiction and distraction they can be for kids. I think my strongest argument is that the addiction and distraction don't simply disappear for adults, and there was no way they were going to force me to get a smartphone.
I don't think that would work for those with a smartphone, but it's a crack keeping an alternative open.
Last fall I was working on getting a username+password access to the portal, since the students and teachers don't need BankID to log in. I was using my son's login to read the weekly newsletters.
At the time I warned our skolnämnden that I would not be getting a smartphone. They switched to app-only, making it impossible for me to get info or let the school know about absences or late arrive.
It took talking with the teachers, with fritids, and the principal to work out an email-based option.
Many people here seem to have trouble understanding how the world works. If all you do is complain (which will change nothing) instead of adapt, good luck with your miserable life.
Complaining on the Internet never does anything. Zero.
It was actually very easy to get by without any of it until quite recently, when legacy options for all kinds of things began being phased out.
But let's use 10 years: you absolutely could get by without internet 10 years ago. It would have been a bit of a hassle for a few things, but internet access wasn't needed for lots of every-day basic activities like parking a car, ordering in a restaurant, using tickets at a concert, etc.
Also: it was easy to use internet at a library, often at zero to no costs. You didn't need to have a personal device only used by you.
Internet is (increasingly: was) an open system that you can connect to on your own terms. Browsers do your bidding, for the most part anyway and you can switch if you don't like one of them. However, you can't simply install an open source version of Google Play Services on your phone and if the Deutsche Bahn app doesn't work for you, there is no alternative that you can install to talk to their server and buy that train ticket (no equivalent to installing a different browser aka 'user agent')
I don't think that a law to help people get smartphones is the answer, the way we made literacy education mandatory. But it's rapidly going to be seen as a handicap.
Literacy is something the state funds for you to acquire and that can't simply be taken away
A smartphone is something you need to acquire and manage yourself, and it furthermore needs to comply with the rules set by an overseas corporation: you can choose between Apple or Google services but neither of them needs to take you as a customer while they're gatekeeping access to certain government and most transportation services
Okay, this wins for euphemism of the week. "We're not a bank, we're a money institution!"
Not having a smartphone is a choice. Nobody is obligated to support you in that choice. It's not "unfair". Not everything you dislike is "unfair".
What's actually unfair is the app store monopolies that dictate what you can and can't do with the phone you "own". But I don't really expect The Guardian to understand the true issue.