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Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.
“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans
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More to do with the fact a pager will reach places a phone won't. Operating theatres are often in the basement or the middle of the building where mobile signals don't reach but pager signals do. They're super high power and lower frequency so they penetrate further.
ah yes, the beeper, more high power than the top end 5g UC flagship phones. because that makes so much sense
I detect sarcasm, but yes, it does.
The history of phone tech is "can we get more done with less joules?", while a pager is "you have one job".
Even when a pager is implemented on top of normal cellular networks like 3/4/5G, it's still better because there's nothing else on the system to drain the battery.
But it doesn't need to be on those systems at all, it can be an even less 'smart' radio receiver such as POCSAG system, on its own frequency, chosen specifically for getting though concrete etc., and disregarding any concerns about bandwidth because 1.2 kb/s is probably more than it needs.
I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.
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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 abl…
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Mines usually on silent too because certain individuals abuse it and I don't like hearing it ping and boop and beep every 30 seconds. None of this is urgent stuff.
I'd very much like if everyone was forced to use buzzer only. The annoyance of people having to let everyone know they have a phonecall which cannot wait is borderline insulting.
> The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school. I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.
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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.
[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschlandtick...
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I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)
I resisted having a phone at all until 2013. People were amazed even then. I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else. Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required. People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent,…
Although there are likely an overwhelming majority of my peers who do have an interruption device phone, I refuse my phone not be My device, and I explicitly buy phones that I know I can customize (unlock bootloaders, flash roms, or simply just know it has the interop capabilities I need to make it my own). Where this is in opposition with your statement is that I do have social media, mail and even work email on my phone, I just chose to customize it to not be interrupting to work and personal life (though obviously that line is different for everyone).
Of course I'm not saying your way is wrong at all, just sharing my experience.
In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short le…
This interview on Fresh Air goes into why pagers have continued to be used in hospitals (tl;dr: cell-phone communication gives a faster turnaround, but the lower barrier to communication means that people will go to the on-call person more often than they would with the beeper where they’re more likely to find their own solution). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
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It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
> It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered. I'm not familiar with this particular technology, which is why I didn't make…