So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[GHT]

^^^^^^
I trust those are rhetorical questions.

This forum couldn’t exist without these newfangled technologies.

Yes Tony, I agree with both of those comments.

People with e-tickets arrive, have to pause at the door, have to open their email app, have to search for the ticket, have to ask their companion to check THEIR phone because maybe they ordered on the other account, have to find the email, have to open the email, have to press the button that says GET TICKET, have to enlarge the ticket image on the screen to bring up the bar code, have to have it scanned, have to brighten the image on the screen because the scan didn't work, have to have it re-scanned, have to hold it at a better angle and have it re-scanned, and finally, only then, do they get to enter.

But I can't help but have some empathy with Lizzie's observations. Technology is there to help, but sometimes it's just surplus to what is already an efficient way of doing something. A point you made, most succinctly:

"I still use pen and paper shopping lists, because I find it LESS cumbersome than putting the lists on my iPhone."

The problem being that any sort of remark that is seen to be against change The Luddite accusations appear. Have you heard of The 1811-1812 Luddite riots? The Luddites were named after 'General Ned Ludd' or 'King Ludd', a mythical figure who lived in Sherwood Forest and supposedly led the movement.

They have been described as people violently opposed to technological change and the riots put down to the introduction of new machinery in the wool industry. Luddites were protesting against changes they thought would make their lives much worse, changes that were part of a new market system.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Taken a commercial airline flight lately? It appears that digital boarding passes are rapidly supplanting the paper version. And it also appears that the people using the digital pass have it ready to scan without holding up the process at all.

We've been doing the e-ticket option for nine years now, and I'd guess maybe 70 percent of those who use it look startled when they're asked to show their phones. The other 30 print out their ticket at home.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
At sea level? And here I thought it was just the oxygen deprived up here in the thin air.

 

[tonyb]

..,
The problem being that any sort of remark that is seen to be against change The Luddite accusations appear. Have you heard of The 1811-1812 Luddite riots? The Luddites were named after 'General Ned Ludd' or 'King Ludd', a mythical figure who lived in Sherwood Forest and supposedly led the movement.

They have been described as people violently opposed to technological change and the riots put down to the introduction of new machinery in the wool industry. Luddites were protesting against changes they thought would make their lives much worse, changes that were part of a new market system.

“Disruptive technologies,” was the buzz phrase from a few years back.

I suppose it’s an accurate enough description. But most of the occupations made obsolete were their own sorts of drudgery. It sucks for the people being thrown out of a job, but new jobs are created. Or so we hope.

I and many others have long argued that pen(cil) and paper is a superior technology for learning basic literacy skills. Something happens between the hand and the brain that “keyboarding” can’t match.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I find it so much easier to take a book off the shelf, turn to the index, flip to the page I want and get the information I need than I do to turn on a device, open a browser, do a search, look at the links, decide which of them is least likely to be full of crap, go to the link, read the link, feel uneasy about it, check another link, and figure out which I can trust most, and then forget why I needed the information in the first place.

 

[tonyb]

Among Charles Eames’s maxims was “Never delegate understanding.” The decidedly modern furniture for which he and his company are known started as handcrafted prototypes, most extensively reworked and reworked until a high quality, good-looking, comfortable, mass-producible design emerged.

Technologies old and new might be of some benefit in that process, but if it’s made for humans by humans, human hands and heads are inseparable from that process.

 

[Benny Holiday]

Like any tool, tech can be used for good or evil. Use a hammer to construct a wall or a house, good. Use said instrument to bash somebody's head in, evil. Social media is a good way to keep in contact with family in the country you don't see often, you can share pics of the kids and outings etc. easily; but people also use it to troll other people and bully them online. It's a two-edged sword.

At my day gig, they decided to implement an electronic account system for the public, companies, and legal firms to pay their council fees with. The idea is that it's customer-driven, they register with a company to receive their bills online and they can order their legal certificates and documents electronically. They have their own e-mail addresses and log-ins. It's supposed to streamline the process and make it easier for people.

BUT

As happened to Lizzie, it ended up creating a load of phone calls from people who can't remember their account name, or their password, and so on and so on. So it pretty much now takes up one whole position in the council for someone just to deal with it. So on the one hand, it's created a mess, but on the other, it's giving some poor sap a job and keeping him/her gainfully employed.

 

[GHT]

As happened to Lizzie, it ended up creating a load of phone calls from people who can't remember their account name, or their password, and so on and so on. So it pretty much now takes up one whole position in the council for someone just to deal with it. So on the one hand, it's created a mess, but on the other, it's giving some poor sap a job and keeping him/her gainfully employed.

You have such a way with words, Benny. Cracked me up, nothing like a good belly laugh to kick the day off with.

 

[Trenchfriend]

But I BET with you!

In overaging areas as oooold Germany, the next time, we will surely see adverts for hearing aids with smartphone control options. And some folks maybe fall for this. Not the majority, because the Krankenkasse only pays for the basic 90s hearing aids.

 

[tonyb]

Of late there have been reminders of then-President William Jefferson Clinton’s prediction that the Internet would be the bane of totalitarians. He likened attempts to control the available information online to “nailing Jello to the wall.”

How wrong he was, which points to my greatest concern for what digital communications technologies bode. I am not so naive as to believe that most people are capable of seeing how their views of themselves and the larger world are being manipulated by media. It’s become so sophisticated now that online content can be targeted to individual persons.

“But the other side can do that, too,” Pollyanna Purplepants pipes in. No, it can’t, not in authoritarian regimes, who do indeed have the capability to keep inconvenient information away from their citizens.

So here’s to the clandestine printing press, and to books and pamphlets on paper, which don’t track who has read them.

 

[Edward]

Taken a commercial airline flight lately? It appears that digital boarding passes are rapidly supplanting the paper version. And it also appears that the people using the digital pass have it ready to scan without holding up the process at all.

I see it a lot. I had to deal with anapp for covid entry (thankfully now dropped) for Beijing a couple of times last year. It was a constant anxiety bring sure the phone would boot up, connext, was charged... screenshotz helped, but I've also used digital ticketing apps which were designed with a dynamic qr code and obligated connection at point of entry. I still prefer to print out a paper ticket, though that's familiarity I suppose. Younger friends do all their ticketibg and even payments on the phone without thinking. Convenient for sure, though the idea of being so dependent on one decice gives me the heebie jeebies.

^^^^^^
I trust those are rhetorical questions.

This forum couldn’t exist without these newfangled technologies. Does it “bring nothing new to the table”?

Yes, as I’ve already noted, something is lost. But something is gained, too. My little enterprise couldn’t exist without digital communications technologies. These days, that’s true of businesses of all sizes. As our friend Art Fawcett put it nearly 20 years ago, you either get aboard that train or you get run over by it.

I'd certainly struggle to find an awful lot of the things I buy in bricjs and mortar stores, even here in London. I've bought the significant majority of all my clothes online for years now. Not by preference, but simply because that's thevonly place to find them. As you know, niche tastes mean there are a lot more businesses like Art's as was that can survive online where they can have the reach for a bigger audience.... I'm all for it.

“Disruptive technologies,” was the buzz phrase from a few years back.

I suppose it’s an accurate enough description. But most of the occupations made obsolete were their own sorts of drudgery. It sucks for the people being thrown out of a job, but new jobs are created. Or so we hope.

I and many others have long argued that pen(cil) and paper is a superior technology for learning basic literacy skills. Something happens between the hand and the brain that “keyboarding” can’t match.

Recent educational research is now claiming that kids learn better and retain more information when they write by hand. Supposedly it connects them with cognitive stuff better than typing. I can well believe it. That said, the biggest problem I see is the vogue for onl8ne, open book assessment creating the notion that they don't need to commit anything to memory, and so they don't bother.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Nuclear weaponry was the most horrific technological advancement of the twentieth century. "The Algorithm" could quite easily achieve that status for the twenty-first,

 

[GHT]

Nuclear weaponry was the most horrific technological advancement of the twentieth century. "The Algorithm" could quite easily achieve that status for the twenty-first,

Ain't that the truth? Financial institutions can, and do, track all your card spending, bill payments, and purchases to learn details about you. Through purchasing data, your bank or credit card issuer can discover everything from your browsing habits to your favourite shops and preferred products. Banks then purchase yet more data from third-party sellers. It's become known as customer profiling. I prefer the George Orwell description: "Big Brother." Such personal data allows them to build a view of who you are and link that to you as an individual.

There was a time when a retailer would thank you for your custom with a handful of trading stamps, now those stamps have morphed into loyalty cards allowing retailers and card issuers to do much the same as the clearing banks.

In recent years we have the electronic gizmo payment, just point your phone, wristwatch or other device, zap the barcode and hey presto, payment made...........................and information stored, thank you very much.

Over the coming years, it is likely that alternative digital payment methods will become ever more widely accepted and used. Since 2017, debit cards overtook cash as the most frequently used payment method in the UK. Cash payment is entirely anonymous and that will never do.

Worth noting that this year, 2024, treasury officials have for the first time ordered no new coins to be minted for general circulation, putting the future of the 1p and 2p pieces in doubt. The treasury officials are reported to be considering a number of options including scrapping those coins altogether as the use of cash declines across society and thereby ending the last method of avoiding Big Brother.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There is perennial talk of eliminating the penny and the dollar bill in the US -- replacing the latter with coins and dropping the one-cent denomination entirely. Lately talk has also begun toward the possible elimination of the nickel. The reason given is that neither coin is profitable to mint, and both see far less use than they once did.

I still have my childhood Lincoln cent and Buffalo nickel coin folders, containing coins pulled from circulation in the late 1960s-early 1970s. In many cases, these coins are so heavily circulated that they're nearly worn smooth. You might find forty or fifty-year-old pennies or nickels in circulation today, but they will show far less wear than the coins in those folders. They really don't get used like they once did.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Do you got these unmanned "day-and-night/24h" grocery shops in tourist areas, where you can only enter "digital" or with a special check-in card from tourist service/hostel and where only E-cash is accepted?

But I think, It's just a tourist thing for camping fan areas, where it makes sense.

 

[Edward]

Do you got these unmanned "day-and-night/24h" grocery shops in tourist areas, where you can only enter "digital" or with a special check-in card from tourist service/hostel and where only E-cash is accepted?

But I think, It's just a tourist thing for camping fan areas, where it makes sense.

Amazon have opened several outlets across London for their 'Amazon Fresh' grocery service. Last I heard they were serving more as a loss-leader form of advertising for the brand, as they fall between two stools. Too techy / data hungry for those who eschew even a loyalty points card and want to do all their shopping with cash, too much effort for those who don't have a problem with leaving a data trail when it comes to buying a bottle of coke, but don't fancy the hassle of having to go to an actual shop when they can just order online and have delivered to their home.

I did go to look into one of the amazon places once, but I just couldn't be bothered with downloading and using an app on the go when all I wanted was a packet of um for a few pennies. My real objection there is much less the data thing and more it's just so much unnecessary faff. I'm not a data privacy fundamentalist, but when I choose to allow my information o be collected there needs to be some sort of convenience trade-off for me.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Are overhead racks always at level 1.75 m, all around the world?

Ouch, again...

 

[Trenchfriend]

If you ever visit Germany, better DON'T waste your time, visiting the inner city of Jena, especially when you want to go tobacco shopping.
Altogether, the inner city of Jena (still) doesn't have anything, justifing a visit from 20 km outside. Ugly, boring, prototypical german new inner city style.

Jena was a really different thing in the 90s, but these times are over.

If you're in Weimar, stay there, THAT'S unique!

 

[GHT]

There is perennial talk of eliminating the penny and the dollar bill in the US -- replacing the latter with coins and dropping the one-cent denomination entirely. Lately talk has also begun toward the possible elimination of the nickel. The reason given is that neither coin is profitable to mint, and both see far less use than they once did.

I still have my childhood Lincoln cent and Buffalo nickel coin folders, containing coins pulled from circulation in the late 1960s-early 1970s. In many cases, these coins are so heavily circulated that they're nearly worn smooth. You might find forty or fifty-year-old pennies or nickels in circulation today, but they will show far less wear than the coins in those folders. They really don't get used like they once did.

Many financial experts are predicting the death of cash as a means of paying for the goods and services we enjoy. As contactless cards, mobile payment platforms, and Open Banking drive faster development of digital payment options, the need to carry cash is significantly diminished.

Only thirty four percent of payments in the UK are now made using cash and, in 2017, debit cards overtook cash as the most popular payment method for the first time. Likewise, in Sweden, cash now accounts for only two percent of all transaction values, with that number predicted to fall to one percent by next year.

According to "Which Magazine," the UK is likely to go cashless in the next 15 years, but nearly fifty percent of the population would struggle if access to physical money was removed, that's around twenty five million people.

My objection to card payment is that banks and retailers record every minute detail on a profile. It encompasses a detailed analysis of an individual's credit history, repayment patterns, outstanding debts and other pertinent financial information like purchases, to assess the risk associated with extending credit or lending money. What is most objectionable is that profiles are bought and sold.

 

[tonyb]

At work we went to an e-ticket system as an option several years ago in which the patron can opt to receive their admission ticket by email and then open it up on their phone to have it scanned at the door. Or, they could just step up to the box office window and buy a regular paper ticket.

Result: people with e-tickets arrive, have to pause at the door, have to open their email app, have to search for the ticket, have to ask their companion to check THEIR phone because maybe they ordered on the other account, have to find the email, have to open the email, have to press the button that says GET TICKET, have to enlarge the ticket image on the screen to bring up the bar code, have to have it scanned, have to brighten the image on the screen because the scan didn't work, have to have it re-scanned, have to hold it at a better angle and have it re-scanned, and finally, only then, do they get to enter.

Meanwhile, the person who just bought a regular paper ticket walks up to the other side of the door, hands it to the person ripping tickets, takes their stub, and walks in.

Technology sure is swell. (At this point I actively warn people away from e-ticketing if they don't want to deal with all the rigamarole.)