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The forgotten war on beepers
291–300 of 405 posts
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)
Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?
Probably depends on how digitized things are where they live and how much of that they interact with.
Where I live, going without a phone would be incredibly tedious, as it handles bus and train tickets, tracking for hourly busses, no ATMs within walking distance and it's basically standard for local events to do "sign in" by having you scan a QR code and so on.
Not having a phone would mean budgeting much more time for going anywhere and having to carry change for the bus.
But if you have a car, you get to bypass most of that, no need to worry about tickets or tracking, ATMs don't need to be very local either. Then if you don't really care about attending local events, you get to avoid everything.
If on top of that, if your job is accomodating, you could conceivably go without a phone entirely. My job would crawl to a near stop if my coworkers had to wait for me to be in front of a laptop/desktop to respond to them.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong. Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this. When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's ver…
Sorry, but YOU are wrong. Go on, do the experiment I mentioned. Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial. Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.
Bystander here, but I think you should open your horizon a bit.. or maybe you're a troll, who knows?
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they see you're active on WhatsApp or telegram :) I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even that really triggered people.
Can't you just read messages from the Notification Center if you want to avoid it showing up as "read"?
But then anyone else that can see my phone screen can read them :)
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism. I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wron…
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> The only acceptable way to be white these days is to agree with everything that is in vogue in SF and Cambridge in the last 6 months.
I feel sorry for you if this is your lived experience. This isn't normal, even in HCOL left-leaning US cities. You might be the problem.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?
The NUMBER 1 most annoying thing about not having a phone in the modern day is ticketing services / events. The second is Uber/Lyft/etc (though less of an issue in cities with public transit).
Can't you print the tickets?
Even here in Denmark that's still an option.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?
Getting a mainstream email account is now impossible without one! How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.
Honestly if you were able to live without a phone until now, living without Gmail (or what you call a mainstream email) is pretty easy.
There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting a mainstream email account is now impossible without one! How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.
I’m aware that Google and some others require phone number verification for account creation these days, but do they actually require a smartphone?
Also you really don’t need a Google account to live correctly, especially if you don’t even own a smartphone.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus, VHF signals can get where no LTE or satellite can arrive, even if you are two floors underground. Downside is that anybody can read POCSAG, especially nowadays with inexpensive SDR receivers...
Nothing prevents you from sending encrypted payloads over POCSAG.
Sure, you can send whatever you want... but is there any off-the-shelf solution that can display encrypted messages?
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if that means we get them before they can kill someone.
You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl? They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.
to be fair, i think carfentanil somehow got conflated with fetanyl early in the drug-scare-hype cycle, and carfentanil is pretty deadly.
i do agree with your point though.