Those restaurants are worthless
>Keys
Carrying your car key does not count as inconvenient
>Banking
Agreed, and this is a problem, but you can just do your banking at home without carrying around your smart phone. This is a case where the industry is forcing a choice on consumers. I'm considering joining a local credit union for this reason.
> Navigation
How did people manage this prior to 2007?
> How did people manage this prior to 2007?
We had a map for each county. My wife would switch them when we crossed county boundaries and would give directions. We still got lost. It was romantic.
MapQuest? It sucked.
Google Maps does allow you to download areas to your device that can be used offline, too.
You just looked at a map. People used to be good at looking at maps, and remembering cardinal directions prior to GPS units. We have unfortunately lost that sense of natural direction.
And you’re flat out wrong about banking, there are things and situations that require you physically entering one. And yes it is a situation where society is forcing the decision, that’s my entire point - I as an individual cannot apply the non remedy of “just do everything on your computer, ldo” because society has stripped that choice from me. unless the prescription you’re giving is to withdraw from society - which is only proving my point.
I’d also hardly describe my job as a minor inconvenience.
I see these types of arguments a lot on this site and I am very confused where they are coming from. It’s almost like the implication is you have no right to complain about the privacy nightmare if you participate in using things that are necessary to participate in society. You can have reasonable privacy and these tools at the same time, it’s not an impossibility.
With regard to the job, and the banking, I agree. I need to have OTP on my phone and I haven't tried to bank in person for a while. We have two young kids, and once things calm down I'm going to see if we can swap to a local credit union. The decision will be predicated on whether I can do everything in person.
With regard to the phone, I think the softer version of my argument would be that you can install the bare minimum number of apps, and otherwise just set the phone on a table and not carry it around with you. If you're worried about government tracking, power your phone off when you drive to work. Your work itself (and all your logins) will reveal your location, so it's not really as if powering your phone back on once you get to work is much of a detriment. The same is true for banking. Even if you must use the smartphone, just leave the phone off / or in airplane mode and then just do the banking at your desk at home.
In fairness to you, I'm pretty sure I failed a job interview once because I asked if I needed a smartphone for the job. I think my point would be that with the way things are going, it's becoming more and more important to figure out how to avoid as much of the smartphone as possible.
I don't want to do everything in person. It's frankly amazing that I can deposit a check on my phone, from my home, and don't have to go to a bank branch to deposit it anymore. For close to 20 years now, my primary banking has been through banks that don't have a physical presence at all, let alone in my city. And I don't mind it that way at all; in fact I like it, because these banks focus harder on making things more convenient for me.
Your attitude here seems to be that if other people's preferred method for doing something doesn't conform to your preferred method, then the other people must be wrong somehow. That's not a reasonable way to be looking at this.
> keys + mfa: this one is a tricky one for me. thinking to go do web-only mfa fwiw and go full RMS with just a laptop and a hotspot. does he even use a hotspot? haha. as far as SMS MFA goes... maybe tailscale out an adb session to your real cellphone at home. feels brittle, but so is sms mfa. edit: actually i'll just forward SMS to myself via e-mail; this is what your financial advisor does, since SMS is heavily regulated in fintech
> nav: yeah when smartphones first came out i just hated every design aspect about them (stupidly fragile screens at the time), but the most compelling reason to switch at the time was navigation. i don't mind printing mapquest again or just using a dedicated gps.
it's the value prop of having "all the world's knowledge at your fingertips" versus:
stupid obsoletion practices + lithium mining, corpogovernment surveillance + tracking, eroding mental health, porn, gacha games, cellphone thumb + turtle neck, doom scrolling + time wasted, enshittified content, the reverse flynn-effect, infuriating typing ux on both ios and android, and people having near constant access to you at all times (remember when it was rude to call past 8p?)
does this thing really make you happy?
that i think it's time to just leave your phone at home...like in ye olde days with your landline and i'm an app developer. (you should keep the phone and gps on and at least pretend that you're a normie).
anyone in construction really like their ruggedized SIP phone and can recommend a good voip system (ie they trust their voip provider) with e2e encryption that I can connect a wifi 6 mobile router to? someone a few months ago on hn mentioned the mudi v2 and sim swapping with https://github.com/srlabs/blue-merle
Paper maps. Or even (in the earlier 00s) looking up directions on MapQuest or whatever, and then printing those directions out. I don't want to keep printing out directions; what a huge waste of paper that would be. Paper maps are doable, but awkward to use, and can easily become out of date. You need to have addresses (or at least nearby landmarks or cross-streets) for everywhere you want to go, because paper maps have a very limited set of points-of-interest on them.
> Those restaurants are worthless
That's just, like, your opinion, man. Your criticisms seem to mostly amount to "people should just abandon the various conveniences and niceties that smartphones provide, because there are alternatives, even in cases where those alternatives are incredibly inconvenient".
Yes, it's idiotic that we're subjected to so much tracking when we carry our phones around. But the response shouldn't be "let's just become a luddite and not take advantage of modern technology". It should be "wow, this makes me fucking angry; we need to fix our laws so this sort of thing doesn't happen".