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Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

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Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#171
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can carry a phone and leave it turned off most of the time. Unless you're paying only in cash, your electronic payments can be traced anyway

Turning off a spy-phone does nothing to prevent them from tracking you. You need to either take the battery out (impossible with most spy-phones) or use a faraday bag.

Does Airplane Mode not do anything? AFAIK it could be a violation of FCC regulations if it was still transmitting or receiving with that enabled.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#172
post #165
post #72

I'm part of the new generation and I think the opposite. I am obsessed with my phone and the Internet. And I don't think it's bad. It's extremely stimulating in a way real life is orders of magnitude worse at. Point of reference, born around 2000. There's no going back for me. I want my phone at all times to have access to billions of possible thoughts, pictures, memes. It's literally a god like power.

I recall a time, many years ago, when you could be at a pub with a couple of friends and some really obscure question like whether it's a duck who has a corkscrew willie or a woodchuck, and nobody would know the answer and there was no way to find out, barring going down to the threadbare and underfunded local library to look it up in the encyclopedia, which itself was terse on facts and probably omitted ones like th…

And which conversation was more fun? Heh. I still laugh with friends from college about the arguments we would get into about crazy facts.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#174

Personally I find modern technology to be very liberating. When I was a child, even going around my own city was a stressful thing. What if I get lost? What if I run out of money for the train? How do I know I got the bus in the right direction? (the darn things didn't announce stops at all). The first times I traveled involved printing a stack of papers including names, addresses, and maps. Getting to a hotel in a c…

That is because you were a child. Not because you didn't have a phone.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#175
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all of human knowledge.

In this community we tend to overestimate just how much knowledge is found on the internet because essentially everything to do with tech happens here. In the bigger picture, even if you restrict yourself to only intellectual knowledge, there are entire fields that are extremely poorly documented on the internet. Either information isn't there at all, or the information that is readily accessible is plain wrong. Furt…

if you gave someone the equivalent of wikipedia 1,000 years ago (and the ability to read and understand it), they would seem to have god like knowledge.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#177
> I realized how our phone has become a real integral part of our bodies

Almost: my phone shows my blood sugar level. Thus it's always in Bluetooth range.

Here's a very short review of the Dexcom G6 doing the actual measurement: the medical device is absolutely awesome, the mobile app / website / APIs are the most god awful thing I had the bad luck to work with in my three decades of using the web.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A couple of years ago there was a little feature story in the newspaper about how they had never--not once--been used in a real emergency. But the university did not want to take them down because they provided a feeling of security. How many real emergencies occurred near one of these boxes?

Probably none, if they were never used. Again supporting the idea that they are better at creating a feeling of security than actually making any difference.

Maybe no emergencies occurred because of the presence of these emergency call stations. (At least those perpetrated by other people, i.e. assaults, thefts, etc.—I presume potential perpetrators would be discouraged by the presence of these call stations.)

Creating a feeling of security is as important as creating security—you need both.

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#179

Personally I find modern technology to be very liberating. When I was a child, even going around my own city was a stressful thing. What if I get lost? What if I run out of money for the train? How do I know I got the bus in the right direction? (the darn things didn't announce stops at all). The first times I traveled involved printing a stack of papers including names, addresses, and maps. Getting to a hotel in a c…

I like this perspective, and indeed, I recently had a physical job interview and it went like this: I bike to the train station, check when the next train will arrive and as I walk into the station (phone knows where I am, I just enter where I want to go), then prep for the interview on the train, Apple pay for a sandwich at a transfer station, check email for exact address, use navigation to walk to the final destination. I had a Teams call with colleagues on the train even.

It's all doable without smartphone, but the prep time and the notes and cash (or passes) I'd have to take...

Re: Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

#180
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a time, many years ago, when you could be at a pub with a couple of friends and some really obscure question like whether it's a duck who has a corkscrew willie or a woodchuck, and nobody would know the answer and there was no way to find out, barring going down to the threadbare and underfunded local library to look it up in the encyclopedia, which itself was terse on facts and probably omitted ones like th…

And which conversation was more fun? Heh. I still laugh with friends from college about the arguments we would get into about crazy facts.

Yep, that's exactly the question. All of this stuff is awesome when I'm trying to get a job done, but it peels a lot of the magic away from the world.
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