[HN Gopher] The forgotten war on beepers
___________________________________________________________________
The forgotten war on beepers
Author : unsuspecting
Score : 261 points
Date : 2024-04-17 16:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org)
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Beepers with text were peak technology.
| jerlam wrote:
| Beepers are the minimal phone that we had all along.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| YC summer 24: our beeper-with-text app startup is hiring full
| stack developers
| postmodest wrote:
| Our SMS-to-Internet microblogging app startup is hiring full
| stack developers.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| Couldn't Twitter do that once?
| mulmen wrote:
| Yes. That's the reason for the 140 character limit.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| That was essentially twitter 1.0
| astura wrote:
| That was the joke.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Yes, it was glorious.
| sznio wrote:
| That was the point of Twitter.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| This is confusing. This exists already, no?
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| It wasn't until the two-ways that I even kind of wanted one. I
| remember being at the mall with a group of kids and one of the
| girls got paged by her mom and we had to go around to find a
| pay phone for her to check in and I recall thinking 'well
| that's stupid, I just check in when I get somewhere and when I
| leave, she's just carrying an annoying reminder to go find a
| payphone'
|
| Once kids started sending little messages with them, I wanted
| one. Then they had fun colors and transparent cases. Luckily my
| nokia brick phone was just a few years away, half a life-time
| then, but just a few years in hindsight. ;)
|
| None of my friends at that time were drug dealers, but they
| liked to joke they were because of the stigma.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Collect call with a "I'm on my way home" as the caller. Dad
| would decline.
| elric wrote:
| Nah, Nokia 3330 with WAP, that stuff was awesome. I built a
| bunch of WAP sites way back when. Slow, clunky, but usable on a
| phone with a tiny screen and a numeric keypad. Happy days.
| adamomada wrote:
| A 386 in your pocket
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_950
| cdchn wrote:
| I never knew the Blackberry pagers were 386s. I know they've
| made a variety of portable 386s (and still do) but had no
| idea they made them into Blackberries.
| ultrasaurus wrote:
| Literal beepers were still in use as late as 2012 as backups
| for on call people, enough so that we supported them at
| PagerDuty for redundancy (the API was email->provider->beeper)
|
| https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/short-emails-for-your-pager/
| baseballdork wrote:
| They're still in use for people who work in SCIFs.
| hiatus wrote:
| > Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager
| ban still in place - months later 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 was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same
| breath. Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a
| one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-
| way receive-only device and cellphones.
|
| Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In
| 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You
| can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore;
| there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's
| a large difference in distribution.
|
| [1]
| http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...
| karmajunkie wrote:
| > not a lot of difference in capability
|
| Ahh yes, I remember fondly the days in the 90's I spent
| watching porn on my beeper as a teenager. Good times.
| toast0 wrote:
| If I has a beeper in school, I'm sure it would have been
| paged with 8008135...
|
| Alphanumeric, watch out.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Pshaw, but what about the blisteringly high resolution of a
| TI-83? Find somebody who already has what you want and a
| link-cable. :P
| hiatus wrote:
| Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you
| were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with
| each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the
| web with that service would be affordable for any real use.
| jerf wrote:
| Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove
| megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the
| web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it
| wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to
| access them but if you strayed outside that set it
| completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot
| optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized
| for mobile devices back when that meant something, there
| were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably
| better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services
| over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked
| any network effect.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were
| sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to
| rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items
| never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives,
| beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the
| context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive
| device that beeped a few times before blowing up!
| Dwedit wrote:
| beepbeepbeep WHAT THE FU BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
| Muahahahahaha! Muahahahahaha! Muahahahahaha!
| wddkcs wrote:
| Kids aren't allowed to have beepers because that implies they
| have jobs.
| amyjess wrote:
| And the job in question was always assumed to be "drug
| dealer".
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| When I was in high school back in the year 2000, I remember
| teachers getting pissy (rightfully) when someone's cell phone
| rang during class.
|
| Personally, I was always thinking...you're in class. Who the
| hell is calling you and expecting you to answer?
| mttpgn wrote:
| In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult
| learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years,
| my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital
| rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly
| went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled
| out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen,
| the professor accurately guessed: "You're a doctor, aren't you?"
| mongol wrote:
| That is funny, in a way that I feel hard to explain. Something
| about it being a simpler, more innocent time?
| amputect wrote:
| I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them
| these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV
| series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech
| for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy).
|
| This might or might not be an interesting digression
| (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical
| professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not
| like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you
| even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but
| something that is very recognizably an old school beeper.
| They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones
| sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
|
| My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she
| coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting
| very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line
| person for dealing with them and project managing emergency
| situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry
| them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
|
| I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system
| looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided
| that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth
| it to them. The physical hardware for these things is
| outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade,
| they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be
| out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem
| your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision,
| but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your
| phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in
| your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to
| take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are
| recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old
| familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
|
| This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or
| anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just
| thought it was a neat additional data point about the
| considerations that go in to the thought process about
| provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm
| almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question
| about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient
| is about to die".
| op00to wrote:
| Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers,
| totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information,
| but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers,
| totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information,
| but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.
|
| Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes
| place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from
| encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax).
|
| Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping
| nobody notices (which is surprisingly common when it
| comes to HIPAA).
|
| The good news (for them, not for patients) is that, even
| if they get caught, the maximum fine is $2 million per
| calendar year per category of violation, so if they're
| flush enough they don't even need to bother being
| compliant in this area.
| fein wrote:
| 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.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > 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 a definitive claim in my previous
| comment. But I _am_ quite intimately familiar with HIPAA
| and related regulations, and I am extremely skeptical of
| the third sentence you wrote.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Maybe it uses particular spectrum that is considered
| illegal to tamper with, just like analog cell phone
| signals, and HIPAA (inappropriately IMHO) leans on that
| to explain away an exemption from encryption?
| upofadown wrote:
| Probably:
| https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-
| divulg...
| op00to wrote:
| There's not much to do knowing that a patient pooped and
| needs to get cleaned up in room 604.
| fein wrote:
| I don't think I have any logs of these any more, but when
| I was listening on the local hospital's pager traffic, I
| seem to recall messages that were along the lines of
| [last name][room number][sexually transmitted disease
| test is complete]. Surprised me at the time too because I
| used to do work dealing with processing CDA documents
| into fhir data and I know how crazy HIPAA can be with
| PHI/PII, but at the same time these legal frameworks
| often have carveouts or super serious adoption deadlines
| that keep getting pushed to next year (and then next
| year, and then next year).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Pocsag is not obscure at all. A $10 rtlsdr and you're
| set.
| ben_w wrote:
| Good to know.
|
| At least twice, I've accidentally set my iOS devices to the
| Do Not Disturb focus mode. First time made me miss a job
| interview calendar reminder, leading to me (1) learn
| there's no way to disable this 'feature', the 'do not
| disturb' focus cannot be deleted, and (2) setting the DnD-
| focus-mode-specific wallpaper to something radically
| different from normal just so I'd spot it faster next time.
| It did happen again, but the second time I knew what was up
| even on the lock screen and turned the focus back to normal
| before it did any harm.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?
|
| Unfortunately, we will probably think the same about 2024 in
| thirty years...
| mongol wrote:
| Certainly. Something with AI will make this all seem like
| the best of times.
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| As an "enterprise" developer in the 80's, we all had beepers to
| go along with our suits and ties. People often thought we must
| be doctors, but we were just corporate mainframe developers.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Definitely reminds me of "Dr. Beeper" in Caddyshack
| themadturk wrote:
| A law firm I worked for in the mid-90s started a helpdesk
| rotation with five or six of us taking shift with a single
| beeper. The only real complain was from the three women on the
| team, who had no belts or pockets to hang the device from
| (skirts and dresses were mandatory for female employees at the
| time, and women's clothes rarely have pockets or belts).
| dogmatism wrote:
| A lot of doctors still prefer to carry beepers
| shermozle wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Not entirely:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-
| sti...
| kanbara wrote:
| ah yes, the beeper, more high power than the top end 5g UC
| flagship phones. because that makes so much sense
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of pagers operate
| on lower frequencies (~100 mhz instead of 400 or 700)
| that can penetrate way deeper than the higher frequencies
| used by modern phones. Plus the data rate is
| substantially lower, which acts in the favor of getting
| reception.
|
| So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different
| devices operating using different frequencies and
| protocols.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a
| cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end
| of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified)
| Radio Shack tone dialer.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > confiscated and held until the end of the school year.
|
| How things like that were even remotely legal?
| buildbot wrote:
| In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good
| relationship with your parents and they need to care enough
| to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won't listen
| to you, a child.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good
| relationship with your parents and they need to care enough
| to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won't listen
| to you, a child.
|
| It's more nuanced than that: there's shades of grey in
| there, not just black and white.
|
| I had a good relationship with my parents, they cared a
| great deal about _anything_ related to education and would
| keep involved with everything academic (even though my
| parents both never finished school at all, not even primary
| school). Most kids I was in school with had parents with
| the same outlook.
|
| Telling my parents that I had broken a school rule would
| _definitely_ get them involved immediately, but "playing
| with toys when you are supposed to be learning" is unlikely
| to win sympathy.[1]
|
| The reason that the schools could hold things until the end
| of the year (mostly they held them for a week, at worst)
| was because if you complained to your parent that you were
| playing with a toy during a time when you were supposed to
| be learning, the parent with likely confiscate the toy
| permanently.
|
| At least when the school confiscated it, you eventually got
| it back.
|
| I imagine, even today, with most parents who care about
| their kids academic outcomes (surprisingly, quite a few
| don't), the conversation is likely to go like this:
|
| K: The school confiscated my $TOY today. They aren't giving
| it back until year-end.
|
| P: Why? Was it switched on/used/making/noise during class?
|
| K: Errr ...
|
| At that point, the kid is now in trouble with both school
| _and_ parents. Only if the kid is reasonably certain that:
|
| a) The parent doesn't care if they were not attending to
| the lesson at hand, and
|
| b) The parent will call the school to get the $TOY back,
|
| would the child complain to the parent.
|
| [1] Of course, when I was in school you could take anything
| to school; you just couldn't play with it until a break in
| classes. I expect that the outrage now is due to
| confiscation happening not due to usage, but for simply
| possession of the toy.
| toast0 wrote:
| My kid's school now just confiscates until the end of the
| day. Even that might not be strictly legal, but it's unlikely
| to get challenged.
| pc86 wrote:
| This probably has more to do with the fact that 30 years
| ago if you brought an electronic device into school it was
| probably relatively cheap and there was a decent chance
| your parents didn't even know about it. And either way it
| wasn't really a necessary part of your existence. Now it's
| a $1200 phone that is most likely the primary way your
| parents communicate with you between the time you're out of
| school (around 2:30 or 3 when I was in, unless there were
| after school activities) and they return from work.
| ok123456 wrote:
| I don't know about cheap, especially for a kid. A Discman
| could easily be their Christmas or birthday present.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I don't see how it wouldn't be legal. The school has a
| variety of responsibilities surrounding its students, going
| back hundreds of years. They aren't a 'guardian', but the
| school is entrusted with a child's safety, and has
| responsibility. For example, a school may tell a child to
| "be quiet" and "sit down" and "sit in this seat" and "why
| are you not in class", even forcing you to go to school.
|
| The school is allowed to dole out punishments, such as
| detention or even denying access to the school itself. This
| isn't a normal "a bunch of random adults are around"
| relationship.
| lelanthran wrote:
| TBH, most people don't get the `in loco parentis` bit of
| school. It's maddening that there are comments from well-
| educated, smart and intelligent people in this thread who
| are wondering if it is legal for the school to dole out
| punishment to kids.
|
| Look up the relevant legislation in your jurisdiction;
| dig deep enough and you will find either explicit
| legislation or case-law confirming that it is legal,
| usually with the phrase `in loco parentis`.
|
| Any on the spot decision that needs to be made with
| regard to the child, the school can make it with no
| requirement for input or consent from the parents.
|
| Trust me, you don't want it a different way, else one day
| you are going to be asking the school either a question
| along the lines of "Why did you wait for a parent
| callback before you took action?" or a question along the
| lines of "Why are you requiring my response to these
| questions every single day?"
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I'd be happy if other elementary schools didn't encourage
| kids to bring devices to school...
|
| I'm also pretty sure that 75% of the students had a newer
| iPhone than I do!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Probably one of those things where if the parent contacted
| the school, the item would have been returned but most kids
| didn't want their parents to know they had the item at school
| in the first place.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Children don't really have property rights, and even if they
| did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights
| is reduced in school settings.
| autoexec wrote:
| Children don't have property rights but their parents do
| and they own their children's things. If a parent went to
| the school and asked for the confiscated item that school
| would be insane to deny them.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| They'd be insane to deny them because disgruntled parents
| can cause an incredible amount of trouble for schools,
| not because confiscating the phone when established by
| clearly communicated policy is actually meaningfully
| illegal.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Children own their stuff. Parents can control the child's
| things like they control other aspects of child's life.
| They give some of the control to schools.
|
| What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all
| their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it. It
| can be complicated since parents let child use stuff, but
| anything given to or bought by the child is theirs.
| autoexec wrote:
| > What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all
| their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it.
|
| I think that parents basically "gift" their adult
| children their old things. At 17 years and 364 days a
| parent can take everything their child "owns" and burn
| it/throw it in a wood chipper with zero legal issues
| (concerning specifically the destruction of property
| anyway, burning/chipping some things will get you in
| trouble), however once the adult child has been
| informally gifted their old "belongings" there's no take
| backs without legal repercussions.
|
| Things do get more complicated with things the child
| bought with their own money... I'm guessing the law would
| be more willing to accept that those things should belong
| to the child, but even if a 15 year old kid buys an xbox
| with their own money I doubt the cops would arrest the
| kid's parents for smashing it with a bat.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Yes, children have property rights. If there is a homeless
| 14 year old on the street, I can't just go up and steal his
| bike.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Children don't really have property rights
|
| Yes, they do.
|
| > and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that
| the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
|
| Courts have ruled that there are specific interests in
| school that meet the generally applicable (not special,
| weaker) standards applicable for permissible action where
| rights protected in the Bill of Rights are involved.
|
| But establishing categories of and confiscating contraband
| is... not a disputed state power, in any case.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The underlying legal theory is that schools are 'in loco
| parentis' and can establish rules while the students are
| entrusted to the school by the parents.
| mysteria wrote:
| Typically it's to the end of the school year OR until a
| parent comes to get it.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| You could always bring your parents into this if you really
| wanted to. For some reason that rarely ever happened...
| TheCleric wrote:
| Because the loophole was you could get it back at any time if
| your parents came down to claim it. And (for me) it was
| always easier to get it back at the end of the year than to
| tell my parent, where I would still lose the item (via my
| parent's revocation) AND catch an extra punishment on top of
| it.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I was approached by the principal while I was using my modified
| tone dialer on a pay phone in the hall and he freaked out a bit
| and I showed him it was for dialing stored numbers and he
| looked at it for a second and said "Ok. It's just that it looks
| a lot like a pager... maybe be more discrete with it"
| hn8305823 wrote:
| In the 80's I had a walki-talkie confiscated till the end of
| the year also. It "just happened" to be crystaled for the same
| freq the school narcs/maintenance used.
| gorkish wrote:
| > (not yet modified)
|
| <wink> I just used a walkman
| op00to wrote:
| I used a recordable greeting card.
| tonymet wrote:
| Also Walkman/ diskman / portable radios were banned
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yep. At best, the "electronic device" was a distraction, and
| at worst, it meant you were a drug dealer.
|
| I can't imagine having a smartphone in grade school or high
| school. It's so alien.
| samatman wrote:
| I got my pager at 18 (no one cool called it a beeper, this was
| when 'cool' was still a thing), and yes, my weed dealer had one,
| and knew my beeper code (it was a beeper code but you sent it to
| a pager, young people just do this). Beeper code is worth
| explaining: you'd send a number to be called back at, and there
| was room for more digits, so everyone had a three-digit number
| which was theirs, and you just kinda had to know it. Which could
| be tricky, so there would be conversations like "ok who is <three
| digit number>" "oh thats <friend>" "ah right". This let you page
| people from places which weren't your home.
|
| The whole thing sort of worked, but we were happy to ditch it for
| cell phones when they became affordable.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Did people use the telephone number message to send alphabet
| messages or like '1' for 'I am home' etc?
| standardUser wrote:
| I recall in the 90's we would add 911 if it was urgent and
| 420 if it was about drugs. We would also end with our 3-digit
| 'pager code' to identify who sent the message.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Lets not forget the :
|
| Rock-Satan scare of the 80's.
|
| Rap-Drug Scare
|
| Walkman will let kids get snatched up.
|
| The pager
|
| Trans people are coming for your husband.
|
| Seems like every decade people have to freak out. But it isn't
| just the common generational trope. The religious right has to
| always have another issue that can be used as the poster boy for
| the war on Lucifer. If you don't have a boogie man, then how do
| you keep the troops lathered up and ready to fight.
| vkou wrote:
| Let's also not forget the scares about the dangers of smoking,
| leaded gasoline, asbestos, licking radium paint, and drunk
| driving.
|
| Not all new inventions are a net benefit to society just
| because they are new, not all things are always good in all
| contexts, and 2024 is not the end of history, or of cultural
| evolution.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But all of your examples are 'real'. Real physical things
| that can impact someone materially. Chemicals, products.
|
| Lot of the 'scare' things are just 'ideas'. Should we outlaw
| ideas is the problem. That is basically how anti-communism
| works, 'communism' is an idea that the right calls a 'mind
| virus' that we should ban because it can infect people.
|
| Of course, super hard to tell what is freedom of speech these
| days. I've been hearing the right scream about freedom of
| speech for years now, and all of sudden with Gaza they want
| to round people up if anybody criticizes Israel.
| vkou wrote:
| Having a television or radio blasting propaganda into your
| living room is real. It's an actual physical thing, it's
| not a concept. So is the Facebook app, and the social
| dynamics that prevail on it. So are screens in general.
|
| I'm sure that the optimal amount of all those things is
| non-zero, but it's possible that it's also not 'all day,
| every day.'
|
| It's not unreasonable for schools to restrict this, just
| like it's not unreasonable for a school to restrict you
| from bringing a mariachi band with you to class.
| FdbkHb wrote:
| You forgot people summoning demons through Dungeons&Dragons.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/Occult_dnd.pn...
| bregma wrote:
| Comic books. Elvis and the rock-n-roll music. Heck, even self-
| pleasure makes you grow hair on your palms, lose your eyesight,
| and causes mental illness.
|
| Don't forget home taping destroyed the music industry and
| nothing new has been recorded since the early 1980s.
| ghaff wrote:
| And porn on BBSs predated modern Internet porn by a few
| decades and, as I recall, it was even a Time cover story once
| --when the weekly news mags were still relevant.
| rickydroll wrote:
| To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even
| though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years,
| people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of
| newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past
| events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more
| complicated than tweaking some HTML.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated
| than tweaking some HTML.
|
| With how many people are skilled in Photoshop compared to web
| development, forging a scan of a page is probably easier for a
| lot of people.
| rickydroll wrote:
| Yes, you are right, but theoretically, it's easier to prove
| the forgery if you have copies of the newspaper stored in
| multiple places. I think we need multiple archives of
| newspaper articles stored in an archival medium. We can't
| trust crypto signatures to be future-proof.
| adamomada wrote:
| "People tend to think that a pager's foul"
|
| A Tribe Called Quest - Skypager (1991)
| lagniappe wrote:
| I dont own a phone, but to me a beeper is an okay compromise.
| During the quest to find one, I came across some really cool
| things.
|
| - Some beepers are made to only RX, not TX, as to not skew
| results of medical equipment
|
| - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and
| prices) still provide service at the historic prices
|
| - Beepers are still sold today, new in box
|
| - Two-way pagers have been almost totally displaced from the
| market (lack of service and hardware) despite being more advanced
| than regular beepers.
|
| Anybody want to share a testimonial about their current beeper
| for someone who's looking for a good option?
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| I'm curious about your desire to not own a phone. Have you
| written about the experience anywhere?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I don't carry a cell phone, and stopped using email _years
| ago_.
|
| When I do discuss these experiences, most people aren't able
| to believe me. "How?" is a typical response... which to me
| seems equally strange a question.
|
| It does make parking difficult ("pay with the app!"); last
| time I had a court action, the judge required me to sign a
| document stating I did not use email, because this is "a
| required piece of information."
|
| Until this year, I handed out my numeric pager as "my phone
| number," which grateful reduced successful contact [to my
| chagrin].
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| There are lots of us.
|
| But I've learned that, aside from mentioning "I don't have a
| phone" it's really not useful to discuss it any further on
| the internet. There seems to be a large cohort of trolls who
| love arguing with anybody who doesn't have a phone. I guess
| it bothers them that some of us can be free from what so many
| are addicted to.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wouldn't argue with you. I'd just observe that you cut
| yourself off from a lot of modern conveniences. (I
| certainly grew up without cell phone until well into my
| adult life and largely without Internet as well.) You don't
| need electricity or indoor plumbing either--although those
| are arguably at a different level.
| asdff wrote:
| Modern conveniences is right. Everything is two factor
| authenticated now. Even if you avoid that in your private
| life your workplace is liable to roll it out if they
| haven't already.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are alternatives to 2FA that don't require phones.
| But, yeah, at some point you become the weird person who
| refused to have a smartphone (or a cell phone at all)
| and, unless you're really special in some way, you
| probably have a target on your back.
| asdff wrote:
| For my workplace it was a choice of downloading duo on
| the phone or getting sms codes. In the past year they cut
| out the sms codes, now you get a temporary code from the
| duo app you need to enter into the login portal vs just a
| push to duo.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are hardware tokens. But, yes, not everyone
| supports them.
| cdchn wrote:
| Maybe there is a market for minuscule TOTP devices. Just
| 7 segment displays for the code and the lowest res camera
| that can decode a QR code.
| Izkata wrote:
| Or even lower-powered?
| https://www.amazon.com/Token2-miniOTP-2-NFC-programmable-
| Two...
|
| I remember my dad worked at a bank in the 90s and had one
| shaped like this to enter one of the buildings:
| https://www.amazon.com/HyperOTP-Time-Based-6-Digit-
| Services-...
| cdchn wrote:
| Yeah RSA made these for a looong time.
|
| But if you don't have a phone to program it you'd need a
| camera or some way to manually enter the data.
| drhuseynov wrote:
| FIDO2 Security keys should be considered good "hardware
| tokens" now , more phishing-resistant than TOTP
| prmoustache wrote:
| There are TOTP apps for regular computer. I am using an
| old tablet for the microsoft authenticator and banking
| apps.
|
| Technically it is pretty much like a phone but it is not
| used as a phone. No number, no sim card.
|
| I am pretty sure some of these apps could work on
| waydroid too if needed.
|
| So in the end all this discussion really depends if we
| are talking about the mobile device as a whole that you
| carry with you nearly all the time or some parts of the
| ecosystem that you may have at home.
| cdchn wrote:
| People cutting themselves off from modern convenience for
| moral reasons only gets interesting to me when it
| approaches Amish levels of commitment.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Not all Amish are the same. You're likely thinking of
| Swartzentruber Amish. It depends on your community, some
| have phones, some have a house with a shared phone. The
| Amish world at the moment is facing some of these
| changes, and some standards are evolving, but there will
| always be some separation with the English world until
| these modernities can be used in ways that don't erode
| community faith and relationships.
| codedokode wrote:
| Maybe because phones allow to track people? It is a spy in
| your pocket.
| lagniappe wrote:
| It's Ordnung.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Which companies? Where can we read more about the no-TX design?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I heard about it years ago probably from WP:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security
|
| It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast
| every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages
| from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted
| unencrypted to a huge area.
|
| So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a
| hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for
| continental coverage of 100 million users.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| _It 's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast
| every message._
|
| No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are
| _tiny_.
|
| If you need to send a long message, then you page the
| person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use
| higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".
| cdchn wrote:
| Its not too bad when you only need 30 kHz of bandwidth per
| channel.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I happily used PagerDirect[.net] 2020-2023 -- their service
| includes a receive-only pager, either numeric or
| alphanumeric. They also have Tx pagers, but I have no
| experience with that service.
|
| An issue with Rx-only paging is that your device must be on
| 24/7, and within RF range -- if offline/out-of-range, you
| will never receive that page.
|
| I only stopped because I moved outside of their reliable
| service area (but they provide service to practically any
| metro center with greater than 100k people). When I lived 3
| miles from "downtown" the pager was a great asset (for call
| screening, e.g.: spammers never "figured out" how a pager
| worked).
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| Have you found any that still have service over a significant
| area in the US?
|
| Particularly the one-way (RX only) pagers.
|
| Very interested in this.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092
|
| > - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites
| (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
|
| If you get a chance to add the names/links of these companies I
| would really appreciate it.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| For posterity: one of the services appears to be
| https://spok.com
|
| Still would like to know what the other one is.
| lxgr wrote:
| Iridium still offers it, I believe -- 100% global coverage!
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| Note that the not-insanely-priced Iridium paging service
| requires you to transmit before you can receive.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714
| lxgr wrote:
| No, see also my answer to your comment. SBD and Iridium
| paging are two different services.
| asdff wrote:
| Hospitals have become a sort of a standardized customer
| cdchn wrote:
| >- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites
| (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
|
| Hold out companies for obsolete technologies always fascinate
| me. I remember reading there is like one guy who services
| candle pin bowling pin setters that run on 90s era Turbo Pascal
| software on whitebox 486 PCs and he's pretty much retired and
| drives up and down the North East in an RV doing his work.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I guess in the US there's still companies providing service but
| here in Europe (Spain in my case) we're straight out of luck,
| sadly.
|
| Ps I would not want a two way pager anyway as that defeats the
| privacy purpose.
| threeio wrote:
| I remember having to get an exemption to have my alphanumeric
| pager in school because my job (pc support for a Fortune 500)
| required me to have it with me when I got to the office... it was
| ridiculous but eventually worked out.
|
| --
|
| Alternatively I've got a modern DAPnet ham radio alphanumeric
| pager now that I use occasionally for notifications related to
| radio stuff. :) (https://hampager.de)
| aftbit wrote:
| Hey I was waiting for someone to mention DAPnet. Which pager
| did you buy? Do you run your own gateway? I have a Pilot AL-A26
| which is a neat little device, but my example is filtered for
| 450 to 458 MHz, and on 12.5 kHz steps. I can get it to just
| barely work with 449.800 MHz but that's awfully close to a
| local repeater.
| threeio wrote:
| I've just got a normal DMR hotspot and I ended up with the
| GP2009 just because it was stupidly simple to work with.. my
| only issue is nigh rechargeable batteries don't last as long
| as I'd like.
| function_seven wrote:
| My brother gave me a beeper as a Christmas present in 1996. It
| was cool, but it got _really_ cool when I bought an 800-number
| from LDDS Worldcom. The only thing I was charged was (IIRC) 6C/
| per minute, and no call setup charge.*
|
| I got paper bills in the mail for $0.34. Friends could page me
| from a payphone without having to drop a coin.
|
| *(EDIT: I think I misremember a bit. If the call originated from
| a pay phone, I think I was charged additional for that.)
| dpifke wrote:
| I had a beeper in high school around the same time, because it
| came with a voicemail box and was a lot cheaper than a separate
| phone line. (Around $5/month in 1992 dollars, IIRC.)
|
| It was a way to get messages from friends without my parents
| and siblings eavesdropping, and despite said siblings
| monopolizing the home landline.
| zzzeek wrote:
| it's important to note that the fake panic over beepers is not
| related to the current concerns that kids shouldn't be on their
| phones all day long and at school. The former is a "fake moral
| panic" based on the premise that all kids were doing / selling
| drugs. the latter is a concern regarding
| mood/attention/bullying/self-esteem well established by
| statistics and experts (though not all experts, it's hotly
| debated. For parents with kids, not so much debate as it's
| extremely obvious).
|
| The article refutes this: "months later The Washington Post
| editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely
| - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, "
|
| There's no "moral" panic about devices right now and this is
| straight up strawman. it's about mental health and learning.
| duped wrote:
| Seriously, talk to a teacher about dealing with cell phone use
| in class. A friend relayed a story to me recently of a parent
| (whose child is constantly on their tablet during class) who
| had the audacity to respond to teachers' complaints by saying
| their child "shouldn't be punished for their [internet]
| addiction."
|
| There's no reason kids should be on smart phones during the
| school day at all. The only "panic" is from parents who are
| terrified of being more than ten seconds away from contact with
| their child.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I think "moral panic" (to paraphrase Terry Eagleton on
| ideology) is like halitosis in that it's what the other person
| has and not oneself. Arguments that invoke it seem always to
| break down into finger-pointing and one-upmanship.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm sure our elders did their best, I just wish their best hadn't
| been lies, paranoia, fearmongering and arresting children.
| afandian wrote:
| Forget the beeper. The idea of arresting a child at school for
| _anything_ (short of maybe violent assault) seems to be madness.
| cvwright wrote:
| I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if
| that means we get them _before_ they can kill someone.
| exe34 wrote:
| What about shooting a kid for having a water gun?
|
| Edit: fuck me, I was half joking and thought I'd check
| anyway. What a shit show. Latest case was 5 days ago. https:/
| /www.google.com/search?q=American+police+shoot+kid+wi...
| qwerpy wrote:
| Look at the water gun in question though:
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-
| justice-...
|
| Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the
| confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.
| exe34 wrote:
| That's the thing though, in the civilised world, if you
| see something like this in the hands of a child, you'd
| assume it's a toy.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized
| or not, but there are teenage "children" the same size as
| the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit
| violent robberies in parts of my city. So it's not
| trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding
| a black gun is a threat or not.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an
| acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck
| is the point of all the aggressive defense around the
| second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are
| free to murder people?
|
| Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact
| have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot
| for holding a gun is absurd.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving
| a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing
| it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be
| made, but if that fails, I wouldn't want the cop to just
| shrug and leave. I'd expect him to do whatever it takes
| to remove the gun from this individual.
|
| There's a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs
| wandering around in public pointing it at people.
| chowells wrote:
| 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.
| cdchn wrote:
| The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats)
| - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in
| rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.
| chowells wrote:
| And?
|
| The only way someone is _ingesting_ that accidentally is
| if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a
| lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses
| if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going
| to leap out of someone 's pocket and fly down your
| throat. It's not magic killing dust.
| cdchn wrote:
| Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things
| with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs.
| Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near
| constant basis.
| llm_trw wrote:
| OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's
| gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective
| begin near it is enough to knock them out:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk
|
| If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages,
| look no further than this.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even
| when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a
| few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case
| - there are so many things wrong with the entire thing,
| starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what
| really takes the cake is:
|
| _" Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County,
| Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied
| decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan
| would not admit his involvement in the crime."_
|
| "We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be
| innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt
| logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year
| old?!
|
| It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have
| continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In
| any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a
| 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher
| should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it
| didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind
| of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...?
| This along is pretty crazy.
| lazide wrote:
| Because it shows no remorse. The reason for reduced sentences
| for juvenile offenders is the idea that they 'didn't know any
| better'. That they can learn and grow and NOT be a menace to
| society soon.
|
| If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any
| contrition even after being clearly shown something was a
| major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the
| penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?
| arp242 wrote:
| Remorse for what? Something he didn't do? There is nothing
| to be remorseful about. This is the sort of non-logic where
| you're presumed guilty and/or punished for asserting your
| innocence. Aside from the obvious absurdness of it, it's
| also literally unconstitutional as it violates your 5th
| amendment rights, which is why another judge reversed the
| decision later on. And considering all of this is about an
| 11-year old makes it that much worse.
| lazide wrote:
| If the court finds you guilty, then by definition within
| the system you did it.
|
| It doesn't mean you actually did, but it does mean the
| system says you did.
|
| Which is the point of my comment. It doesn't mean it
| actually makes sense in real life, but it's why the
| system does what it does.
|
| And the reason why the system will prosecute kids like
| adults sometimes - the nominal reason is because they
| don't think it's worth giving them a pass either due to
| the severe nature of the crime, or because of the lack of
| contrition of the accused.
|
| If they're actually innocent, then per the system they
| should get zero penalty eventually regardless of how they
| are prosecuted.
|
| We know that being held in an adult jail while awaiting
| trial is a pretty severe penalty in fact of course, which
| is why it eventually got thrown out that he got treated
| that way. Plenty of adults get stuck in jail for years
| while awaiting trial, then get released and theoretically
| suffered no penalty either. But we also know that is
| bullshit. No clear better alternatives (except bail) have
| shown themselves however.
|
| If the kid had been caught on tape murdering a bunch of
| other kids and still claimed he was innocent, then no one
| would be objecting that he be put in an adult jail while
| awaiting trial though. Since putting someone that violent
| in a juvenile facility is making it as dangerous as an
| adult one.
|
| Judges have wide discretion to make these calls, and this
| judge clearly screwed up.
|
| But that's the how and the why.
| arp242 wrote:
| No one found him guilty of anything at this point. How
| can they when deciding in which court he should be
| judged? That happens before the trail. You're talking
| complete bollocks utterly disconnected from anything to
| do with this case.
| lazide wrote:
| You might want to actually read my comment. He was
| arrested pending trial. They have to decide where to put
| him, pending trial.
|
| If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the
| reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an
| adult jail.
|
| If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the
| reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a
| juvenile jail.
|
| Either way, someone does have to make the call. And there
| are circumstances where the call that was made is
| appropriate.
|
| Since it's 'detention pending trial', if he gets
| acquitted or charges dropped then per the system he
| 'suffered no penalty'. Same as anyone else arrested and
| put on trial. We know that isn't true though, since
| anyone in jail is still in jail and jail sucks. If he is
| found guilty, then he gets transferred.
|
| Clearly it was a bad call on the Judge's part doing what
| they did, which is why it got reversed - eventually.
|
| But as anyone who has dealt with the courts is well
| aware, everything is glacial - unless it's going to make
| your life a pain in the ass. That usually happens
| quickly.
|
| But like everyone else, one you're in the system, you're
| going to have a bad time regardless.
|
| What else do you propose is going to happen though?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| > What else do you propose is going to happen though?
|
| Not parent but I don't think that we should be holding
| anyone pending trial when what they're accused of is so
| minor, child or otherwise.
|
| Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention
| shouldn't hinge on remorse or contrition, they should
| hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their
| potential risk to the community.
| lazide wrote:
| The judge is supposed to consider severity. Obviously it
| went too far in this case.
|
| Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely
| a factor of in potential risk to the community.
|
| Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher
| risk? Someone who insists they didn't do it and fuck
| anyone who thinks they did and they'll do what they want,
| or someone who says 'that was terrible, and I didn't do
| exactly what the prosecution says, but I'm not going to
| be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out'?
|
| Because plenty of people in the first category end up
| driving drunk _while pending trial_ and kill more people.
| exe34 wrote:
| So you want them to lie? My dad was like that. I admitted
| to several things I didn't do in order to reduce the amount
| of caning.
|
| This led to a funny incident at school. Somebody did
| something, and another grassed. The bully came to question
| me - I had no memory of telling on him, but the way he
| described the comments, I though oh that does sound like
| something I'd say. I took the beating. Then the actual
| grass came up and asked me why did I admit something I
| hadn't done?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Unclear what a 'grass' is. Are you referring to falling
| down?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| "Grass" means "report to the authorities." Seems to
| originate in Britain as rhyming slang between copper and
| grasshopper, though I looked up the etymology for this
| post.
| ajb wrote:
| Grass is British slang for informing on someone
| lazide wrote:
| Fair or not, this is the idea behind 'no contest' pleas
| in court.
|
| No admittance of fault, but not going to fight the
| prosecution either because it isn't worth it.
|
| It isn't necessarily fair or sane - it's predictable
| though. Which is something.
| maxbond wrote:
| This line of thinking is entirely incompatible with the
| presumption of innocence and the right to protection from
| self incrimination.
| lazide wrote:
| Welcome to bail/pretrial detention hearings.
|
| Practically, what are the alternatives?
|
| Every arrest is cite and release pending conviction?
| Society would be even more out of control.
| maxbond wrote:
| The alternative is to charge them as a juvenile, and to
| refrain from inferring a guilty conscious from their lack
| of "contrition" (which is a patently ridiculous thing to
| expect from an 11 year old - which is the real issue with
| charging children as adults, not that they supposedly are
| more reformable, but that they cannot be held to the same
| standards as adults).
|
| You're engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. This was a
| miscarriage of justice. Civilization would not have
| crumbled if this child wasn't put through the wringer.
| lazide wrote:
| No, I'm not arguing if it is right or wrong. I've been
| explaining why the levers exist as that was what was
| being asked. And to be clear, the case I'm referring to
| the kid was tried and convicted (originally) of 1st
| degree murder with a shotgun. In juvenile court.
|
| And if it turned out the kid did murder them, then people
| would be up in arms that he got released early -
| especially if he committed another murder before he got
| locked up again. Which could happen.
|
| Cases like this too [https://www.klfy.com/local/iberia-
| parish/trial-for-11-year-o...].
|
| Was it a miscarriage of justice? Perhaps, I haven't seen
| the evidence. The courts eventually came to the
| conclusion it was! Until they did, according to the
| courts it wasn't.
|
| it was also legal while it was happening.
|
| And 11yr olds are plenty capable of being defiant,
| malicious, contrite, etc. too.
|
| And active dangers to those around them.
|
| I wasn't there in court when this was going on, so I have
| no idea if the kid was being out of control, or the judge
| was being out of control. I've seen both play out. The
| appeals court felt it was the judge.
|
| The whole situation is quite terrible regardless. But
| that's what the criminal justice system is for - to
| resolve terrible situations in some eventually sensible
| way. Woe to whoever gets caught in its gears though.
| morsch wrote:
| Children might be incapable of determining certain actions
| are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but
| unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A
| trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11
| year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.
| lazide wrote:
| The case involved an 11 yr old accused of 1st degree
| murder with a shotgun.
| morsch wrote:
| Yeah? My point stands. Also: Throw the owner of the gun
| in jail.
| lazide wrote:
| The owner was the one murdered, if I remember correctly.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards
|
| As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put
| in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that
| just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a
| school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws
| that have been put in place removes common sense and power
| from principals so that everything is now a police matter.
|
| Legislatures have done similar things to judges with
| mandatory minimums and other draconian small minded knee jerk
| reaction to look like they are being effective.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > removes common sense
|
| This happened about 5 miles from where I grew up:
| https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/7-year-old-
| suspende...
|
| In the 80s, kids would have bows or hunting rifles in the
| car or truck in the school parking lot. Now eating your
| pastry the wrong way gets you sent home.
| Izkata wrote:
| In the early 2000s my middle school had archery for a few
| days as part of gym class as a special event. Only the
| girls were actually allowed to do it though, they had
| something else for the boys (don't remember what though).
| brewdad wrote:
| Same was true in my middle school in the 80s. In
| hindsight it really was the right call. That same year we
| had a sub in gym class playing tennis and four of us boys
| managed to launch about a hundred tennis balls over the
| fence and into the woods home run derby style. We would
| have definitely put an eye out with archery equipment.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to
| discrimination claims.
|
| If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be
| used(and abused).
|
| Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's
| and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools
| were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to
| turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.
|
| Probably current administration needs to justify it's
| existence and high pay by making rules.
| hughesjj wrote:
| > Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to
| discrimination claims.
|
| Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong
| implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination).
|
| That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy
| of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd
| rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so
| that we can still hurt kids we hate"
| themaninthedark wrote:
| From wiki on Zero Tolerance, specifically talking about
| harrasment:
|
| >Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance
| policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and
| in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of
| illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that
| such policies will underscore the commitment of
| administrators to prevent such behavior.
|
| It leaves out how when we went into these things, there
| was outcry over administrators covering up harassment,
| showing favoritism, etc.
|
| If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled
| and the other does not, this situation can seem
| unbalanced.
| Clubber wrote:
| >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, but this sort of thing is shockingly
| common, even when dealing with children.
|
| The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably
| encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to
| authoritarianism.
| elzbardico wrote:
| It is a long discussion, but the TL;DR version is Puritanism.
| asveikau wrote:
| > 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 wrong.
|
| Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a
| lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay
| my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy
| life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working
| life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals"
| as some kind of revenge fantasy.
| arp242 wrote:
| In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids
| from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison
| population and include just the white population (~60%),
| the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other
| comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general
| racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it
| being the _main_ factor.
|
| I don't have the impression the other factors you mention
| are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds
| seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort
| of thing seems innate to the human condition.
|
| So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I
| don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as
| another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US
| isn't the only country with a history of that sort of
| thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular
| answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily
| persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in
| the US, but it's not unique to the US.
|
| Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just
| "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other
| reason than to capture people so they could rip out their
| hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where
| cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially
| acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why
| were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a
| complex interaction between various factors.
| asveikau wrote:
| Well, I don't think the tough on crime rhetoric is
| totally unique to the US either. I hear them coming from
| other countries too. Eg. when I was paying attention to
| Javier Milei's presidential bid in Argentina, it's
| largely the same talking points about crime, could have
| been lifted word for word from American internet
| comments.
|
| From what I understand I think northern europe in
| particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison
| being about reform of criminals, and less towards
| vindictive punishment.
|
| PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I
| believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel
| warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by
| Spaniards.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The main reason is that we refuse to spend money to
| address the root causes of crime. We won't fix urban
| poverty or the failing urban education system so most
| people choose to live in car-dependent suburban hellholes
| that make our youth uniquely miserable. Some of them
| shoot up schools, leading to zero tolerance policies and
| to moral panic campaigns to ban some inanimate object as
| the culprit that is supposedly corrupting kids.
|
| If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for
| people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better
| life that doesn't involve playing professional sports,
| we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country
| and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that
| only we have or the school shootings that we've only had
| for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had
| gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve
| spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who
| aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.
| cyberax wrote:
| The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are
| genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably
| more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are
| more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill
| this guy, I only fenced his watch".
|
| What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way
| is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance.
| At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.
|
| So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving
| children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean.
| But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.
|
| Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_.
| No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of
| jails for different offenders. Mental health resources
| and job training.
|
| Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service
| are great too.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and
| wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some
| papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%.
| There is a lot of over-charging going on too.
|
| Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people
| pleading guilty to things they did not do because they
| fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
| cyberax wrote:
| Sorry, not buying it. There's no way 20% of convictions
| are wrong. Even 1% is honestly pushing it, especially
| these days. Extrapolation from convictions overturned via
| the DNA evidence also results in about 0.5-1%.
|
| I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit
| working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to
| normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who
| were actively trying to get away from the prison life.
| Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent
| people in jail.
|
| And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a
| roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a
| search for their names. You'll find that pretty much
| everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time
| merely being the "crowning achievement".
|
| And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes
| that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored
| community service, probation, ignored bench warrants,
| etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor
| or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if
| they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
|
| That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail
| time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should
| absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
|
| HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially
| for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but
| days or weeks.
|
| And there is solid research backing that up. It's the
| _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent,
| not the strictness of it (that's also why the death
| penalty is useless, btw).
| asveikau wrote:
| 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 _very very hard_ to
| overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of
| new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it
| at every turn.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| Faaak wrote:
| Bystander here, but I think you should open your horizon
| a bit.. or maybe you're a troll, who knows?
| cyberax wrote:
| And have you tried to open _your_ horizon past the usual
| slogans ("mass imprisonment", "school-to-prison
| pipeline", etc.)?
|
| Try it. It might help you. Or not.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of
| takers are guilty.
|
| So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends
| months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and
| says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in
| prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time
| in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"
|
| 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
|
| 2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person,
| can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just
| to go home to your family?
|
| Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is
| disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't
| think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored
| either.
| cyberax wrote:
| > So all these stories where someone is put in jail,
| spends months waiting for trial
|
| At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed
| to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be
| denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous,
| so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-
| trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.
|
| So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West
| Coast.
|
| > 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
|
| They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are
| rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly
| need to be reformed.
|
| My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in
| such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial
| discretion or plea deals.
|
| > Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is
| disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't
| think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored
| either.
|
| If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you
| should start communicating with prisoners. Your state
| department of justice will have a program that allows you
| to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps
| people to stay connected with the outside world.
|
| I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong
| in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by
| just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely
| must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.
|
| And very few organizations are lobbying in this
| direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the
| root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is
| destructive, and it's not helping.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>At least in West Coast states,
|
| The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this
| kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I
| have no data to prove otherwise.
|
| >>My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in
| such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial
| discretion or plea deals.
|
| Well, we 100% agree then.
|
| >> Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root
| causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is
| destructive, and it's not helping.
|
| I also agree.
| infotainment wrote:
| _> (that 's also why the death penalty is useless, btw)._
|
| I'd argue that if a criminal is dead, they can't commit
| future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite
| useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when
| there is a more efficient option?
| cyberax wrote:
| Death penalty does not serve as a deterrent compared to
| life imprisonment. It also sometimes applied to innocent
| people.
| asveikau wrote:
| Killing somebody for murder is called being a hypocrite.
| TheCleric wrote:
| I think your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found
| that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1].
| This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our
| system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would
| have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not
| even counting the people that have been leveraged into
| plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because
| the system is so weighted against them.
|
| 1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111
| llm_trw wrote:
| Absolutely. So much of white trash culture has been
| criminalized. 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.
| 1_1xdev1 wrote:
| > 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.
| llm_trw wrote:
| I'm sorry you think that racism is ok. I hope you learn
| to judge people on the strength of their character and
| not on the fact they need to carry a semi automatic to
| kill board on the way to school in their pickup truck.
| max-ibel wrote:
| > what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the
| first place...?
|
| The kind of school that prevents a student with dreadlocks to
| attend schold indefinitely [1]? This is happening right now.
| In the past, there was also the role playing game (dnd)
| satanism scare...
|
| Granted, I'm not sure if there have been actual arrests, but
| it's the logical next step to take.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68377156
| pc86 wrote:
| Arresting kids for bringing something that's legal for them to
| have is one side of a spectrum of silliness, thinking that
| arresting a kid for violently assaulting someone is a "maybe"
| is pretty far on the other end of the same spectrum. There are
| plenty of things it's completely reasonable to arrest a child
| for.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I was almost arrested twice; once for having phreaker box plans
| in my bookbag (in 1998, when they no longer worked), another
| time for "computer hacking" (fixing the school computer's proxy
| settings).
|
| And they wonder why we grew up to hate authority figures.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Treating public school as public space with public rules
| creates a huge class divide with the private schools. Short of
| actively shooting up the place, I can't think of a single rule
| you could break at the private university I went to that could
| result in law enforcement getting involved. I knew of at least
| one kid who got caught with most of a kilogram of cocaine, who
| got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.
|
| In contrast, a kid at my brother's public uni got arrested for
| petty vandalism. It's an extremely stark class divide.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| It doesn't need to be this way. Essentially all UK
| universities are "public" and none operate this way. There
| aren't special police forces that roam their campuses (Oxford
| had this for a time, but I think it was the only one).
| Violation of university rules is no more serious from a legal
| perspective than violating any other private rules.
|
| I think campus police are an insane idea. There should
| obviously be a good relationship between any university and
| the police in their area, but the idea that they should
| _report_ to the university leadership is nonsensical.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Nobody was arrested for pagers at my school, but both pagers and
| cell-phones were minimum 3-day suspension on first offense and
| expulsion for repeated offense -- larger minimum punishments than
| bringing a knife.
| sllabres wrote:
| Reminded me a bit about the use of satellite internet for
| anonymity
|
| https://securelist.com/satellite-turla-apt-command-and-contr...
| 83457 wrote:
| My late father owned a small commercial radio business for a few
| decades. It provided sales, install, repair, and repeater service
| to primarily public safety groups and companies with a fleet of
| vehicles. A more consumer oriented side to his business was
| pagers through Metrocall.
|
| A major drug dealer in our region was a kid in my high school. He
| leased a pager from my dad's company. During the investigation,
| authorities had my dad create a cloned pager. They could then
| record all pages sent to the drug dealer, about 6k in as many
| months, to track his activities and build their case.
| astura wrote:
| For the youngins here, I can confirm this, getting caught with a
| beeper in my school was just as serious as getting caught with
| weapons or drugs. They were the ultimate contraband.
| koolba wrote:
| I bet there's at least one person reading this thread who has
| heard of the company "PagerDuty" but does not know that it's
| referring to a beeper.
| cdchn wrote:
| I have people on PagerDuty who weren't alive when pagers were a
| thing.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| This happened when I was in HS in the 1980's I think it was
| around 86-87 that they outright banned beepers/pagers, no
| exceptions.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Wow. Weird.
|
| We never had this in the Netherlands. But we got them later.
|
| In fact for a long time they were the only way to be reachable in
| hospitals because they banned mobile phones for fear of
| interference with medical equipment.
| mcmoor wrote:
| I don't really know how beeper works, why is it not interfering
| with medical equipment like mobile phone does? Solely because
| of low power?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| No they don't interfere because they only receive. They send
| nothing. At least the pagers of those days didn't, two way
| pagers did exist but they were super expensive and really
| uncommon.
|
| To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to
| be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain
| has no pager network in operation anymore.
|
| In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over
| the whole country. Because the network had no idea where you
| were or if you even were reachable. This is why they had to
| be so short and why text paging was expensive.
|
| The messages were not encrypted either so everyone could see
| them. It was not a perfect system but really most people just
| received codes or at most a phone number.
| wa2flq wrote:
| There were two way pagers (receive and send). The receive
| only ones rarely interfered with medical equipment. But
| occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers
| would interfere with medical or sensitive research
| equipment.
| agrippanux wrote:
| I went to high school in the early 90's. Every kid I knew with a
| pager (about 5) used it primarily to buy or sell pot.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, initially they were associated with drug dealer types.
| Eventually in my group everyone had one so our parents could
| get in touch with us. The beep had a certain cadence when it
| started and even now when I hear it I get fun flashbacks to
| being a teen.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| ahh my first tech job gave me one of these.
|
| You kids complain about always on. This was the late 90's the
| beeper was so they didn't have to pay for my cell phone. I was
| making stupid money so...
|
| I grew to hate that fucking thing.
|
| One got dropped down 4 stories in a wire chase.
|
| Another I threw in front of a steam roller on its way to flatten
| some asphalt. The driver gave me a thumbs up and I pitched it.
|
| I nailed one to a the bar of a dive I hung out in.
|
| I think I "flushed" two... The first one was a mistake (I think
| the first to die) I brought it back in a plastic baggie. I was
| told to throw it out.
|
| One out the car window at 80 (I was young and stupid and it was
| BFE texas... there wasnt a car for miles)
|
| Another in a lake...
|
| At some point they asked me to stop, I did, but it was fun while
| I could get away with it.
| tudorw wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUZCV95SCXE
| m0llusk wrote:
| I'm a beeper sometimes.
| motohagiography wrote:
| When I was a teenager in the 90s, playing in bands before I got
| into tech, I knew a slightly older girl who worked as a model.
| She had a beeper for go-sees that always made plans difficult. In
| hindsight I may have been very naive, but sometimes I'm still
| grateful she allowed me my innocence.
| munchler wrote:
| A "go-see" is when the model visits a photographer to discuss a
| potential shoot?
| devilbunny wrote:
| Or an agency for a potential hire - basically an audition, do
| you look the way we want the model for this shoot to look?
|
| Implication being that she was actually a call girl or drug
| dealer.
| munchler wrote:
| 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 leash. They both immediately
| agreed that since they now carried cell phones, their wives
| called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get
| milk on the way home. I was a bit shocked, because I was talking
| about _them_ , not my wife, but I didn't say anything more. (I
| got a cell phone shortly after anyway.)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| There were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell
| service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many
| folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they
| turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line
| option.
|
| I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and
| phones are MY devices, and _I_ get to decide how _I_ will
| respond to them.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I
| will respond to them.
|
| Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call
| back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner?
| Lucky...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's pretty cool. Your son has a better relationship to
| technology than a lot of adults. Probably reflects some
| good parenting, nice work.
| kanbara wrote:
| "we" -- you mean that you decided for your family,
| removing agency from other humans
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm having a hard time understanding how allowing each
| person to use their phone as they please is removing
| their agency.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| If you can't decide what is better for your kid, maybe
| you shouldn't be a parent.
| op00to wrote:
| Sure, we have that discussion and I answer and we set clear
| boundaries.
| armada651 wrote:
| > Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I
| will respond to them.
|
| Do you though? Because people on the other end will often
| demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with
| you. This is why people consider it a leash.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Fuck 'em.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Several of us are not the top dog in our hierarchies and
| can suffer consequences for telling our superiors to fuck
| off
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Grow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice
| but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if
| you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for
| you.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| How do they know if you have the phone if you don't pick
| up?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Because they see you're active on WhatsApp or telegram :)
|
| I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even
| that really triggered people.
| gruez wrote:
| Can't you just read messages from the Notification Center
| if you want to avoid it showing up as "read"?
| 1_1xdev1 wrote:
| But then anyone else that can see my phone screen can
| read them :)
| gruez wrote:
| You mean the message contents, or that you received a
| notification at all? On both ios and android you should
| be able to configure the notification so the contents are
| not shown, so it shows that there's a notification from
| whatsapp but not the message itself.
| xattt wrote:
| > Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I
| will respond to them.
|
| You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late
| 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope.
| People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a
| human being on the other end.
|
| Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with
| robodialers and mixed messaging methods.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True. Conversations were dropped as soon as a phone rang.
| Mind you, this was also because most people didn't even
| have a caller ID display or answering machine so if you
| didn't answer you had no idea who had called. The curiosity
| factor was strong. These days I don't answer when I don't
| recognise the number.
|
| The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower
| than these days though. Because of course not being at home
| meant not being reachable.
|
| There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling
| people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my
| circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg
| on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep
| anyway.
| buran77 wrote:
| > and battery life was short
|
| In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than
| they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.
| swores wrote:
| Pretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than
| mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in
| your pockets.
| buran77 wrote:
| Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do
| that but I've never had the feeling it was common or
| desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my
| guess.
|
| A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery,
| still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd
| have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h
| of talk time from a charge but then again realistically
| very few people actually talked that much on the mobile
| in those days when even the networks would have severely
| limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning
| off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really
| saved anything for talking time within a day, until you
| had the time to recharge.
|
| I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where
| instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to
| _drain_ it when you had the time so you could charge it
| from 0.
| swores wrote:
| Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before
| charging every day like you would a few years later once
| you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only
| turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many
| days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's
| the time period original commenter was talking about, and
| why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s.
|
| It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the
| early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure)
| it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with
| phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see
| why it would've been different somewhere like USA
| either.)
| mcmoor wrote:
| One of the earliest labor principle is "if you can do it,
| you'll be forced to do it". Sometimes adding your capability
| will result in more burden to you instead of less. This is
| why sometimes it's a good idea to hide the fact that you're
| good with computer to your family; lest you become their tech
| support.
| tyingq wrote:
| I really liked that the phone was mine, work didn't call me.
| The pager was for work, and they had to use that to get me to
| come in for issues. Nice clean separation.
| philwelch wrote:
| I have actually enjoyed having both at previous jobs. If
| you're oncall and you use your phone to receive oncall pages,
| you can't turn it off or turn off notifications or even
| silence it. Having a separate physical device you can receive
| pages on keeps you less tied to your phone.
|
| If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a
| cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason
| why I still don't have a smartphone :)
| nvy wrote:
| Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm aware that Google and some others require phone
| number verification for account creation these days, but
| do they actually require a smartphone?
| pjerem wrote:
| Also you really don't need a Google account to live
| correctly, especially if you don't even own a smartphone.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I've been maintaining my own mail server for almost 20
| years. The thing though, I found that sometimes I end up
| needing to use one of the bigger email providers like
| gmail, apple mail, etc because otherwise my mail is
| classified as spam.
| ruined wrote:
| only if you don't have everything you need already
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Only because people like you keep repeating that lie.
| nvy wrote:
| What I'm doing is asking a question, as denoted by the
| "?" glyph at the end of my comment.
| firewolf34 wrote:
| 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).
| Symbiote wrote:
| Can't you print the tickets?
|
| Even here in Denmark that's still an option.
| guenthert wrote:
| Here in Germany, the "Deutschlandticket", a country-wide
| public transportation ticket, is currently valid only via
| smartphone or "Chipkarte" (smart card). Unfortunately
| that smart card isn't available everywhere and won't be
| before early next year. It seems rather like a policy
| snafu then intended though [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschl
| andtick...
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| It is intended. The goal by all governments is to
| "encourage" smartphone usage. That ticket situation is
| both carrot and stick.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been seeing more and more events that only have
| digital tickets. They say it almost like it's a point of
| pride... all the paper they're saving, or something.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Thanksfully in many cities in the world regular taxis do
| still operate. In my city they aren't necessarily more
| expensive than Uber. It depends of the kind of route and
| time of the day/night. Sometimes you pay more, sometimes
| you pay less.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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,
| and I mostly don't check it during the day. I don't have
| email on it, and I don't do social media. I treat it as "my
| device" not as an "interruption device".
|
| Of course the joy of them is that for every person it's
| different. You can use it whatever way you prefer.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| 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.
| eks391 wrote:
| I have notifications disabled on everything except for
| when my credit cards are used, calls and texts. Even
| then, I have a whitelist for call notifications and a
| blacklist for text notifications, and silent hours at
| night that only my mother can bypass. I am no longer
| bothered by every nagging app or fake urgency.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I do the same. I hate "notifications" and very few things
| are so potentially important that I need to be
| interrupted by them. Effectively zero notifications have
| any real urgency. Also apps and websites treat
| notifications like an invitation to spam you. I default
| deny every request for notifications.
| consp wrote:
| 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.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| You might love Japanese trains where people have to use
| silent mode (so called mana modo), I've always loved
| this.
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| Yes, also understandable as "Manner Mode". It came with
| my Sharp DOCOMO SH-05G tablet-phone!
| themoonisachees wrote:
| As someone younger who grew up in a time where you would
| get a cell phone during teenage years, I can't say I
| empathize with your view of "my device" vs "interruption
| device".
|
| 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.
| stoperaticless wrote:
| Keep strong!
| atoav wrote:
| In my organization all people have work phones, but they are
| rarely used to call people. When I get a call from coworkers
| it is usually emergency stuff where it makes sense for them
| to call me -- rarely outside of my work hours. All the rest
| are emails or chat messages, which I can read when I decide
| to do so.
|
| I am okay with that.
|
| Although a smartphone related work horror story I heard once,
| was somebodies boss who communicated the plans for the week
| for 12 employees in _one_ 40 minute rambling speech message,
| which may or may not involve crucial need-to-know information
| at minute 35 and 30 seconds of information that affected you.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Alternatively, we get better at ignoring notifications.
|
| The same way people somewhat adapted to urban noise by better
| insulation and noise proofing, having a phone in dnd most of
| the time is I think a must nowadays.
|
| You still can pay attention when you want, potentially at
| some regular intervals you set for yourself, and ignore it
| the rest of the time.
| teddyh wrote:
| For your appreciation:
| <http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/incremental-progress>
| swozey wrote:
| This is always such a weird flex. There are so many things I
| use my smartphone for, 99.9% of which is NOT being a short
| leash for anyone to communicate with me. I can't remember the
| last time I had a conversation on my phone.
|
| Spotify/Audible/etc in my car. Google maps/Apple maps. When I
| go camping I have overlanding/camping/blm apps that are
| constantly updated with openings, etc. Weather apps so I know
| to put the top of my jeep/car on to not get rained in.
| Uber/Lyft of which I use multiple times a week. Bank apps.
| Investment apps. Checking the news/hockey/whatever when I'm
| out and about. Looking up facts my friends and I argue over
| while knocking back beers. Checking to see if anyone has
| stolen/broken into my car. Launching my botvac. Controlling
| my AC from anywhere. Plex..
|
| Everyone survived without them, sure, but everyone survived
| without computers for a long time and now they've given us
| massive convenience.
|
| It's far more a computer in my pocket than a telephone.
| mderazon wrote:
| Everyone has a boss
| wkat4242 wrote:
| To be fair, that is exactly what happens now except most of it
| is on WhatsApp :)
| dhosek wrote:
| 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...
| guenthert wrote:
| Well, that article also mentioned the 'other service', i.e.
| FM, which more readily penetrates buildings and underground
| facilities and covers wider areas. And if there is a
| disaster, there's always the danger that remaining cells in
| the affected area are overcrowded.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Plus SMS, which was used instead of a pager, is not
| guaranteed to be delivered while this is not the case with
| beepers.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| My fire department still gives out pagers to firefighters who
| respond from home. 99% of the time we get alerts from a phone
| app, but a few times it's gone down and we have to rely on pagers
| and a big horn that sits near the center of our local.
| asveikau wrote:
| I remember this well. Crime, drug, and gang hysteria were very
| big in the 90s. "Gangs are using pagers to sell drugs to
| children" was a quick and easy way to demonize them and ensure
| that they get banned hastily, without a lot of questions.
|
| The funny thing is that in political discussion, drug, crime, and
| gang hysteria are back. Rates of crime and gangs are much lower
| than the 90s. With drugs, fentanyl and its difficulty to dose
| correctly is definitely more deadly. But the rhetoric is pretty
| similar to the crack epidemic and the period shortly after.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| There's always some kind of moral panic going on.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down.
|
| VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications
| without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All
| satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course
| LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers'
| triangulation of the receiver.
|
| VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should
| have let go of.
| ale42 wrote:
| 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...
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| Nothing prevents you from sending encrypted payloads over
| POCSAG.
| ale42 wrote:
| Sure, you can send whatever you want... but is there any
| off-the-shelf solution that can display encrypted messages?
| kotaKat wrote:
| There are a bunch of POCSAG paging products that support
| their own flavors of encryption. Unication has a few that
| support AES encrypted messaging. You keyload it at the
| same time as the rest of the pager setup.
|
| https://www.unication.com/alpha-pagers
|
| And here's LRS's implementation of encryption on POCSAG:
|
| https://paging-systems.readme.io/docs/encryption
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications
| without having to offer up your location to surveillance"
|
| ...and instead anyone in your city can read every single text
| message with a trivial amount of hardware?
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with open communication when everyone
| understands that it's open and treats it accordingly.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| They can read my AES-encrypted ciphertext all day long and I
| don't care.
|
| You can even buy two-way pagers that transmit with AES-128
| encryption. Hospitals have to use this due to HIPAA:
|
| https://www.spok.com/blog/standard-or-encrypted-pagers-
| whats...
|
| I think you're confusing commercial pager services with Ham
| radio.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Usually pagers were used to ask people to call back so I
| don't think that is a big issue. It is like shooting at
| someone you recognize far away in the street so he can look
| back and meet you. Everybody will hear that but not the
| actual content of the conversation afterwards.
| theodric wrote:
| Hams still have and use them.[1]
|
| I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-
| appointed cops, so I got a _new_ Chinese pager made up with a
| center frequency of 433.5MHz (ISM, unlicensed), then configured
| it to work with a Pi-Star rig radiating well under the EU
| /Irish legal power limit, and receive messages infrequently
| enough not to run afoul of duty cycle limits. Because I know
| there's some ham who's just salivating to track me down and
| quote the rule book to me, and I want to deny him (it's always
| a him) that pleasure. It reaches all the way to the far end of
| my farm!
|
| You can get traditional alphanumeric belt loop pagers or snazzy
| modern wristwatch pages these days. Check AliExpress.
|
| [1] https://hampager.de/#/
| cdchn wrote:
| >I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-
| appointed cops
|
| Hams do have a "Whacker" problem. General Boomer mentality
| scares away a lot of new Hams as well.
| 7thpower wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the bit about cops. I'm interested
| though, please do tell.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still
| existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to
| feel free.
|
| Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way
| and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of
| it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now
| second hand.
| cubix wrote:
| I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's
| data center was two stories underground in one of the older
| tower blocks in downtown Toronto.
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| No, iridium is definitely transmit-before-receive.
|
| The only thing you can receive without transmitting is a one-
| bit "message waiting" indicator, so you don't waste uplink
| bandwidth polling the satellite unless there's something
| there for you. Basically the satellite broadcasts a list of
| terminals that have messages waiting for them. I recall there
| being some kind of bloom filter, so technically it's less
| than one bit.
|
| You can't get anything else downstream unless you transmit
| first to ask for it. Also the only way to clear the "message
| waiting" bit is by transmitting to the satellite, so you
| can't even try to encode a message by flipping that bit on
| and off.
| lxgr wrote:
| No, the original Iridium paging service really is (was?)
| one way.
|
| You had to manually update your paging location by dialing
| some number or by using a web interface when moving
| significantly, or link an Iridium phone to your pager,
| which would then automatically update the paging area (MDA)
| every time you made a call.
|
| What you mean is probably Iridium SBD, but that's a
| different, bidirectional service (also used for pager-like
| devices these days).
| karma_pharmer wrote:
| Yes, Iridium SBD requires transmitting before you can
| receive.
|
| I did not know about Global Data Burst; I think that's
| what you're referring to. Holy cow it's expensive though,
| although I guess it has to be since you're using a lot
| more bandwidth*footprint. Like $6.00 per message per
| delivery area expensive. And they're kinda vague on how
| big a "delivery area" is.
|
| https://apollosat.com/featured/iridium-gdb-pager/
| lxgr wrote:
| No, I'm referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its
| own service and has been around longer than SBD, I
| believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a
| monthly flat subscription rate per pager.
|
| GDB seems to be a successor to that, though.
| kotaKat wrote:
| GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what
| they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear
| to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium
| Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD?
|
| https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/
| lxgr wrote:
| SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you
| say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a
| mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message
| waiting" indicator.
|
| Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and
| optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier
| SBD" makes sense!
|
| But their paging service was definitely unidirectional
| and unicast. Here's an old talk on decoding the signal,
| if you're curious:
| https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6236_-_en_-
| _saal_1_-_201412281...
| filleokus wrote:
| In Sweden the "minicall" network (POCSAG, [?] 169 Mhz) is still
| active and in use by some niche industries.
|
| I know of it being used for fairly mundane things like Grafana
| Alerts (or the equivalent), but in circumstances where you need
| to reach people in areas where cellphones are forbidden or lack
| coverage (like security sensitive data centers for example).
|
| Snooping on that frequency band in [?]Stockholm it also seems
| to be quite actively used for sending machine-to-machine
| commands in some industries, perhaps not always that
| stringently authenticated...
|
| Which I guess is a downside though, you need to take proper
| precautions in the "application layer" since the network is
| completely open.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| <ph#>-420-911
| micheljansen wrote:
| In the Netherlands there was a brief period where "Maxers" [1]
| were all the rage. They were like pagers, except you could send
| text messages to them by calling to a specific service number and
| leaving spoken messages. It was outrageously expensive and GSM
| came shortly after so they rapidly faded into obscurity.
|
| [1] https://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/5064/philips-
| prg+2140...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The "buzzer" was also popular. The maxer got popular because
| pepsi gave them away. But the buzzer network was way more
| reliable (160 MHz Vs 400 something) and cheaper.
|
| The reason maxers were so expensive was that a real person
| would transcribe your message from voice.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Well it's nice knowing that moral panics have always been pretty
| stupid. But it's not so nice knowing that we keep making this
| same easily avoidable mistake.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I think I was 15 when I got a beeper? It was translucent green
| plastic, clipped inside the baggy khaki pants of my school
| uniform. Surfing the web to find lists of beeper codes, trading
| beeper numbers with friends, sending them "secret" numeric
| messages. Learning about hacking and how to intercept or transmit
| beeper messages (and not being able to, but still finding it
| cool).
|
| _Nobody_ thought me or any of my private school friends were
| drug dealers for having beepers. They just thought the beepers
| were a distraction, and not allowed in class. I don 't remember
| them being banned but they might have been eventually.
| heelix wrote:
| My favorite pager moment: Was part of a large consulting effort -
| lots of people. One of the execs was doing a demo of the system
| and they were playing DNS games with dev/test/stage/prod. They
| did a quick restart - which is when we all found out stage and
| prod apparently used the same credentials. About 30 seconds or so
| after the restart kicked off, about 50 pagers went off.
| PortiaBerries wrote:
| I graduated high school in 2000. I knew 2 kids in that school
| with pagers, and the only reason I paged them was to buy weed...
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'm sad that radio pagers are going away. They're a much more
| reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a
| multifunction mobile phone. Their battery life is much longer and
| you won't put it on do not disturb or silent mode.
|
| Being on a separate radio network also means that in a real
| emergency when mobile signal is degraded, the pagers still work.
|
| The other thing that's convenient is that you can hand them off
| physically, so people know who is responsible for them at any
| time.
| cdchn wrote:
| >They're a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call
| out than a multifunction mobile phone.
|
| More reliable than a landline?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Real landlines are a rarity these days, most stuff is VoIP.
| In any case, I was talking about getting an emergency call to
| the person wearing a pager (as in the case of doctors or
| other on call people), not the reliability of calling
| 911/999/112/whatever. Any mobile device is going to be more
| useful than a landline in that situation because the doctor
| could easily be out at the shops or having lunch. Pagers were
| invented for that particular scenario.
| xs83 wrote:
| I remember when mobile phones started to become big, I still had
| a pager / beeper at the time and realised that you could SMS
| directly to the beeper number for them to appear - that was a
| pretty cool few months until everything went the way of mobile
| and 2 way texting!
| swifferfan wrote:
| Only tangentially related, but emojis allegedly owe their
| existence to beepers: https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/emoji/
| yndoendo wrote:
| Pagers in the 450 to 470 mHz frequency are still used in the
| senior living nurse call industry. It is still taking time to
| transition to an android or iOS device because of the cost to
| replace a $500 to $1000 device versus a $100 one, after it falls
| in a toilet.
| riffic wrote:
| haha the scary headline "Beepers Speed Drug Connections" like
| there's absolutely nothing speedy about a drug connection.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| "3 decades later, the New Jersey law was still on the books"
|
| So, theoretically, what would happen if a student brought a retro
| beeper device to school today?
| lxgr wrote:
| My dad used to be really into collecting Swatch wristwatches when
| I was in primary school in the 90s. The coolest one was
| definitely one called "The Beep": It had a built-in pager!
|
| Battery life was about a day or so when in reception mode (it
| came with a key ring battery holder and the battery was hot
| swappable!), and sending a numeric-only message was horrendously
| expensive, but it was still just about the coolest thing ever
| when I got to borrow it.
|
| (Close second: "Swatch Access", which let you store RFID ski
| passes.)
| jasonkester wrote:
| This may be hard to understand today, but you need to remember
| that a lot of these kids were already worshiping the devil due to
| backward messages that satanic heavy metal bands were hiding in
| their music.
|
| It was a tough time to be a kid. I'm just happy so many of us
| made it through.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| Jonathan Haidt has a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he
| presents evidence that smartphones and social networking really
| do cause a decline in teenager mental health.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| He did a pretty terrible job defending the hypothesis on
| Conversations with Tyler recently
|
| https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-
| haidt-a...
| hobom wrote:
| FWIW, I thought he did pretty well and came away more
| convinced of his theses. For most of Tyler's alternative
| and let's say colorful explanations of the data, Haidt
| provided different sets of data and explanations that were
| more convincing. As a libertarian and techno optimist,
| Tyler seemed pretty biased, for example when he offered as
| an explanation for the plummeting mental health of teens at
| the exact time smartphones get introduced a random " maybe
| everyone's mood just got worse randomly". The only thing
| Haidt didn't refute that well was Tyler's (imo
| overconfident) assertion that teens will just use AI to
| summarize social media to them and spend more time with
| friends.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > teens will just use AI to summarize social media to
| them and spend more time with friends
|
| Yeah, this seems a bit off. People spend time with
| friends via social media. That's part tof the issue.
| cubefox wrote:
| For what it's worth, it doesn't seem like TikTok would be
| any less addictive if there was a way to summarize it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Haidt's claims are not supported by a preponderance
| scientific studies:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
|
| > Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious
| Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of
| copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about
| children's development that many parents are primed to
| believe. Second, the book's repeated suggestion that digital
| technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing
| an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.
| Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might
| distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of
| the current mental-health crisis in young people.
|
| ...
|
| > Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for
| the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts
| have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most
| data are correlative. When associations over time are found,
| they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes
| depression, but that young people who already have mental-
| health problems use such platforms more often or in different
| ways from their healthy peers.
| cubefox wrote:
| Here is Haidt's detailed rebuttal of the piece you cite:
| https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-
| epi...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember this being a problem for high school students that
| were involved in activities like search and rescue.
| dosman33 wrote:
| While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug
| dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember
| people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had
| a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started
| carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out
| on all the fun.
| hateful wrote:
| I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a famous case at the
| time (don't remember the names) where a woman shot someone at
| his front door and the news was saying she was a drug dealer
| because she had a beeper.
|
| But I had a beeper, and all my friends had beepers, and it
| seemed very strange to me.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| I'm old so... I remember when someone having a beeper was awe
| inspiring. "Oooh that dude must be a doctor!" After a while it
| became more like "Oh that dude's sketchy" and finally "Oh wow
| that dude must be poor"
| dghughes wrote:
| There's a video on YouTube of a doctor showing his beeper/pagers
| how it works and why he still has one. He goes two or three
| floors down in the hospital into a shielded room. His phone
| utterly lost no bars but the beeper worked fine.
|
| Found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAwW9arTxGo
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