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7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

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Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#141

Post by deepstack »

random5634 wrote: post #76

I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…

> Local social life was fantastic- I missed nothing about the internet.

In general after decades of working with Internet and technology, I realize that I enjoy life (not work) better when there is no Internet. Of course, it is nice to have Internet to have occasional communication with friends and family not in the surrounding area.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#142

Post by donw »

randomdata wrote: post #111
donw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect this is why your friend seems like a completely different person online. I disagree, and strongly. Considering a different perspective does not in any way require that you become a different person. You may end up doing so, but at that time, the entirety of who you are shifts, and not just some persona that you present on Twitter.

Great example of using the device. It would be interesting to know if your post here had you re-evaluating your face-to-face persona or if it validated your status quo for you, but as we've never met face-to-face before to see how you may or may have not changed in such a setting I guess I have no way of finding out for sure.

Nah, I'm pretty much the same online as I am in person. Having to support multiple personalities is just too much work.

Moreover, the whole "different person online" thing reminds me pretty strongly of one of the more common patterns in abusive relationships -- in that the abuser behaves very differently depending on the situation.

Never want to walk an inch down that road.

That said, online, nuance and tone don't come across well, if at all. E.g., the reader can choose how they want to "hear" a phrase like "I disagree, and strongly", and that'll color their opinions of me accordingly.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#143

Post by thaumasiotes »

random5634 wrote: post #98
ramraj07 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course…

I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local? Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice. You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no fo…

> You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons)

In the West, this is a conventional thing that many people expect.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#144

Post by mcgin »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #137
marlor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of “newstainment” and 24-hour news programs significantly improved the quality and breadth of the news I consume. By just reading a quality daily newspaper and a couple of newsmagazines, I’m better informed than when I was a news junkie with cable news on in the background and news websites refreshing on my phone. “Breaking news” is broken. Print media, especially weekly newsmagazines, have the luxury of…

Which print media do you recommend?

The Financial Times is my main news source. It seems to be the only one that I've found which doesn't have sensationalist stories/click baity headlines

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#145

Post by varjag »

watwut wrote: post #132
random5634 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local? Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice. You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no fo…

> There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left. I would guess it made up, because when people conquer stuff, they tend to have actual material goals and need. Starting from basic - their army needs to eat. The way you get that f…

Do you really think all wars are rational, resource-driven pursuits? How about Falklands, what Argentina planned to extract there? Steal the rocks and tax the 300 sheep? Or Russia with Crimea, whose ownership value is enormously negative?

All it takes is one moron with delusion of grandeur.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#146

Post by gspr »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #143
random5634 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local? Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice. You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no fo…

> You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons) In the West, this is a conventional thing that many people expect.

Probably an American equating "the west" with the US and Canada.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#147

Post by GloriousKoji »

aimor wrote: post #122
chriszhang wrote: post #84

I wish I could limit the use of Internet to 1 hour per day. Like the olden days in the early days of internet. Internet was given in our university for only 1 hour per day. It was possible to live in this manner even when I used to do programming. All programming documentation was available as PDFs or downloadable copies. I remember the MSDN documentation for C++ could be kept on the local machine. For Python I used…

I often do work without direct internet access and it's painful at times. PDF documentation is wonderful, but when that's not available I sometimes save entire websites. Other useful things: dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, world maps, reference books. It was surprisingly difficult to find a free dictionary file. Overall it's not very different, just inconvenient at times, and the lack of distractions is nice. I…

At the beginning of lockdown last year I thought it would be a fun projects to build a doomsday-type local internet. Just a raspberry pi with it's own AP hosting various offline version of reference websites.

I thought it would be pretty low effort: maybe a few scripts to crawl some websites and then a few scripts to spit out html. I never got passed acquiring all the references. Most of the available stuff is from over 10 years ago. Wikipedia's convenient snapshot are from 2008, the dictionary files I found seemed to be based on Merriam Webster from 2009 and I couldn't find a good reference for scientific unit conversions just to name a few.

In the end I shelved it since it was going to be much more than quick project. But I must say that i'm impressed with Gutenberg project on how they provide an option to download all their books.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#148

Post by Stupulous »

mcgin wrote: post #144
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which print media do you recommend?

The Financial Times is my main news source. It seems to be the only one that I've found which doesn't have sensationalist stories/click baity headlines

Financial journalism really outperforms most media sources in terms of picking important stories and telling them in an unbiased way.

Maybe their wealthier audience means that they're not racing to the bottom for clicks. Maybe the people in charge know to run a business that gives people what they want without alienating half of potential customers. Maybe something else entirely. Whatever it is, it's working, and I hope it stays that way.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#149

Post by nicbou »

deepstack wrote: post #141
random5634 wrote: post #76

I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…

> Local social life was fantastic- I missed nothing about the internet. In general after decades of working with Internet and technology, I realize that I enjoy life (not work) better when there is no Internet. Of course, it is nice to have Internet to have occasional communication with friends and family not in the surrounding area.

> I realize that I enjoy life (not work) better when there is no Internet

On the other hand, life becomes utterly miserable with a little internet. It's an all-or-nothing kind of deal.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#150

Post by michaelt »

JimDabell wrote: post #97
Lammy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward…

> I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another I think this is unlikely because it would be far simpler, cheaper, and more effective to employ a small number of people and use tooling (automation, templates, etc.) to amplify their reach drastically. Why invent an unreliable AI to push narrative…

I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference between an AI controlling 100 accounts and a paid human with automation controlling 100 accounts.

If they're both under orders to (for example) upvote negative sentiments about vaping and positive sentiments about smoking - the consequence is the same no matter what type of drone it is.

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