391–400 of 417 posts
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Publicly provided wifi would also help them and everyone. But of course, guess who's fighting real hard against that...
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If you mean why I don't pay for the publicly provided wifi: well, I would. And all of us. Public services are funded by taxpayer dollars. I would happily accept public wifi for that
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They’re already given unlimited data? It just gets throttled the 2G speeds. They can also just go to the local library or Starbucks for the WiFi if they need more.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
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> Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.
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If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose. Guess how I know you've never actually tried this. Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the terrible real-world conditions where our customers are. Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell se…
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
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> finding a library that's somehow still funded Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills. > Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026 No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people wor…
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things for free, that's really a "you problem."
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Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that). The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
> Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.
Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.
(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)
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>would be able to make a lot of money doing so. That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that. Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value. >And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, bu…
> That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented . It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse . Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect…
As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]
>Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect?
As human being, we can’t avoid to make errors, including in our representations, if that is what is meant here, then we have an agreement on that point. But as sure as there are no absolute total truth reachable in the frame of human existence, it’s impossible for a human to claim absolute ignorance in total honesty.
Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes. In a sense, sure it does measure some human values. Mostly values of dominating classes.
> Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value
Hello, here is an unreasonable poorly-educated person to which class disdain won’t bother them to the point they just keep quite.
> there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.
There are of course many possible alternatives. Actually neoliberal capitalism is a very brief moment in human history, even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2] Sure money can also be used in different social models, but not all models using money try to inseminate in its social members that it’s the one and sole best indicator of human fulfillment.
>Everything else in your comment is incoherent.
Once again, an LLM can give some chip feedback on such a matter, at least at the analysis level that LLMs can operate on.[3]
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
[2] https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/5fc6465f-05fd-4a83-841f-60f9e5c...
[3] https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/e6fe5224-506d-40ac-857f-e14e56b...
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How are they supposed to know which job search platforms (app or web) aren’t going to blow their bandwidth limits?
Non technical people are afraid to block adds on their Android device since Google might find out about it and decides to eliminate their account; I was not able to convince them otherwise.
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> Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste. If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose. It would be great if they got higher days caps, though, because let’s be realistic in acknowledging that they’re not only going to use it for Google Maps, email, and job search apps.
For those who can't understand this comment, here is what it means: "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"
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I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month. You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side…
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software. But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transa…
I just tried to look for this and all links I'm seeing just forward to the main Opera page