Comment by grishka
4 days ago
No, why should I? I'm not proposing to "change society to 15 years ago", my idea is more selective. It's more like "do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
It seems pretty optional in the US at least. My phone has been broken for extended periods of time before. But different story trying to use budget European airlines like Wizz that require an app to get a boarding pass.
It's also very much optional in Russia as well. Everywhere still takes cash, everything can be done on paper. And speaking of air travel, most airports actually require a printed boarding pass. IIRC you can use an electronic boarding pass in SVO since relatively recently, but I've never done that myself.
>budget European airlines like Wizz that require an app to get a boarding pass.
They do not.
https://www.wizzair.com/en-gb/help-centre/check-in-and-board...
https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-ie/articles/39758330098577-Wh...
Ryanair FAQ may be out of date then. I have a Ryanair flight booked. In the portal, it says "You must download the Ryanair App. This is the only way to access your digital boarding pass, paper boarding passes are no longer issued or accepted."
Will see about Wizz, maybe it was only Ryanair.
2 replies →
>"do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
we should probably workshop ideas that are within reality.
downvoters are welcome to tell me how they would approach a worlwide review of everything that requires internet and un-internet it. i will wait.
some primer questions to get your brain turning: who organizes and conducts the review? who pays for the review? who pays for the implementations? whats the messaging and how do you convince people to go along with rethinking/re-implementing their entire already-working infrastructure that they have potentially spent millions to billions of dollars on? do you just dissolve all of the internet-only services, and tell the founders to suck it? who enforces it and how?
Consumer protection legislation would be a way to solve this:
If a business has more than X employees / does more than X amount of business per year / has more than X physical locations (pick one or more, make up some new criteria, tune to suit the needs of society) it must offer the same capabilities to interact with the business to those without smart phones as those with.
Small businesses wouldn't be radically impacted because they generally aren't "Internet only" anyway. The large business that are impacted have plenty of resources to handle compliance. If anything I'd argue it levels the playing field to an extent.
some immediate thoughts that pop in my head are:
1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:
2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.
it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?
(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)
9 replies →
I had some thoughts on dynamic tax rates depending on how desirable a product or service is.
Then can do standard formulas like, will operations continue if the power is out, internet, smart phones, running water, phone lines, payment processing, etc, how long will service be down 1-3 days, weeks, months etc
If your store can't immediately switch to cash apply some modest tax increase. If people can't buy food for more than a week the extra tax is high. You might want to buy gas lamps and a "home" battery.
"There is no alternative" is a self-fulfilling prophecy
i am not saying "there is no alternative".
i am saying that you cant do a worldwide systematic review of everything that relies on the internet, and un-internet it.
if you have a realistic approach to doing so, i will eat my shoe.
5 replies →
It's not "there is no alternative", it's "you're not putting that tiger back in the cage no matter how much you bitch about it".