My last post on this site was over 7 years ago so forgive me if this is in the wrong forum or off topic or whatever. Not like they would need my permission but the admins should feel free to move, delete or lock this post as they see fit.
This post, blog, thread or whatever it is, is primarily to gather my own thoughts as I begin to come to terms with my own mortality and look back on my life. I expect to go into many diverse topics including but not limited to philosophy, religion, the huge differences in they way things were when I grew up versus the way things are today and pretty much whatever comes to my mind (within tasteful limits of course).
If this interests you feel free to read. If it doesn't feel free to ignore.
If you feel like posting a positive comment then thank you and God bless you.
If you feel like posting a negative comment then I can't necessarily thank you but say what you will and God bless you too.
The title of this post/blog/whatever is both true and what I intend to be my epitaph (more about this later). The subtitle is probably a better description of the contents.
That's probably enough for now. I don't want to annoy anyone with "walls of text" but given that I don't text, tweet, instagram, facetime or whatever communication method people use nowadays this is really the only place I could think of to put this.
Best regards,
Mumblefratz
Good to see you again, it has been a long time.
Publius,
Yes it has been. Good to see a familiar avatar. Thanks for responding.
I kept up with Nastytang for quite awhile via private messages on this website but he fell on hard times and could only get on in the library or some other public access. Haven't communicated with him in 3 years.
Sorry to hear that. I was wondering about him, I haven't had a message from him since about 2016. Anyway, I'm looking forward to wherever you plan to go with this post.
Good to hear from you again, Mumble. Hard to believe it's been seven years. Blog on.
So on with my hopefully not too narcissistic post/blog.
I need to add a few more prefacing statements, I don't want to belabor the point but I'd like to be as clear as possible to avoid misunderstandings.
I came to this family of websites because I played Galciv 2 for a number of years. Later I became involved in a number of heated political arguments on the Joe User site because I'm a progressive liberal democrat and most folks here seem to be staunch conservative/libertarian/republican. Don't get me wrong, these days I'm probably more progressively liberal than I ever was but I no longer see any point in arguing about it. I don't expect that there is any rational argument I can make that will change anyone's mind nor is there probably (although I will at least acknowledge the slight possibility there could be) any argument anyone can make that will change my mind so let's just agree to disagree. I probably will eventually get to a conversation of a political nature but my intent is informational not confrontational.
Finally for now note that I'm an engineer by education, occupation and disposition. I'm skilled in wide range of knowledge but narrative writing is most certainly not one of them. At 68 years old I think I have a lot of interesting stories that might even be of interest to others but only time will tell. Anyway I'll probably be jumping all over the place as far as my life timeline but hopefully try to cover one aspect before moving on to another.
A final few observations or tenets to live by (at least for this entry) that I've come by over the years.
1) There's always someone better, smarter, faster, stronger, richer or whatever than you are.
2) There's always someone not as good, smart, fast, strong, rich or whatever than you are.
3) Corollary to the above is that you're never a good as you think you are at your best nor ever as bad as you think you are at your worst. Also that you need to be satisfied with your results if you have honestly done your best, but not that you shouldn't always strive to do better in the future.
Now that I look at what I've written above it seems a little trite and sophomoric but I wrote it and meant it, so be it. In the immortal words "I yam what I yam and it's all that I yam, I'm Popeye the sailor man. Toot, toot."
Next post I'll get to the cell phone thing, I promise.
Daiwa,
Another blast from the past. Good to hear from you as well.
Fellow boomers have to stick together these days.
And when that happens your post will be relocated appropriately.
Hi, BTW .... can't believe it's been 7 years either....if I had to bet I'd say 2 or 3...
As well it should be.
Politics is not really the point of this. It's really about the events of my life that have shaped my opinions. My personal politics is only one of the facets of my life and all told not that major a one so I'll probably hold off on it for awhile but as I said in the beginning feel free to move this to wherever appropriate, these days I'm pretty much beyond the possibility of being offended.
OK about the cell phone thing.
I wasn't always the Luddite that I am today. When I was younger I embraced every new thing like it was sliced bread. It was only much later that I began to resent what seemed to me change just for change sake. The cell phone thing is only a small part of it. More later.
My first real encounter with cell phones occurred somewhere in the '91 - '92 timeframe. I had friends that had some form of mobile phone as early as '79 but they were big clunky things the size of a loaf of bread. I think they were satellite phones not cellular phones but I'm really not sure and not many people used them anyway.
I was working at NEC Technologies in Boxboro, MA designing PC's and in those days they were just starting to put in dedicated smoking rooms and prohibiting smoking in your office. At the time I was a smoker (I ended up quitting around 2000) so I spent a fair amount of time in the smoking room. In some sense it was where the cool people hung out, although given we were all engineers and hence basically nerds cool is a relative term here.
Anyway besides the PC development we did in the US, NEC also had a line of PC's that had been developed in Japan but were manufactured and distributed in Boxboro. At one point there was a problem with one of the Japanese developed PC's that caused a production shutdown. If you've ever been the responsible engineer for a product that was a significant portion of the division's income you know how dire this is, if not then you still can probably imagine the situation.
So NEC corporate sent an engineer to manage the situation who happened to smoke and speak very good English so he set up shop pretty much in the smoking room. He had the first cellphone that I really noticed because it seemed to me he would get a call on the darn thing every 15 minutes or so that required a 30 minute update to his superiors. Obviously I exaggerate for effect but the way I saw it the cell phone was not a communication device it was a leash and a very short one at that. That experience pretty much started the ball rolling.
What kept the ball rolling was that I didn't feel important enough that I felt the need to be in constant contact nor did I feel anyone else was important enough to be able to interrupt me whenever they felt like it, not even my wife. Also I was offended by folks who answer their phones in public and talk in a loud voice as if their conversation is more important to them than peace and quiet is to me. To this day if someone starts a phone conversation that I can hear I will start talking in a loud voice about the rudeness of folks that do so.
Anyway at some point I figured "Never owned a cellphone" was a pretty cool and unique thing to be my epitaph so at this point that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
As kind of a postscript to the above the only phone I have these days is an old fashioned landline with both phone and access with Verizon. Most people I know have given up their landlines and gone completely cellular. I find all the dropped calls and poor reception really annoying. And no, voice over IP is NOT a landline regardless of what your ISP says.
Just recently I had to call Guitar Center a couple of times about an order I placed. The sales support folks were working from home these days but the connection was miserable. They insisted they had a "landline" but I'm sure they were using a wireless headset to a VOIP connection. I had to have them repeat things 2 or 3 or even more times to make out what they were saying. Just awful.
I'll be 68 in less than a month.
As far as the cell phone goes you've a right to feel any way you want. You sound like an old man when you talk about "cell phones". Most people refer to them as smart phones. In any event it seems to me that you've never used a contemporary smart phone. They are great. I rarely get phone calls. I use my phone for so much more. There's quite a lot of useful things packed into phones now a days. They really are hand held computers in a lot of ways. You should check it out then you could have a educated opinion and not one based on something you saw 40 years ago.
One other thing. I've worked in offices where people would talk on land line phones and were loud. Those people were usually loud people even when they weren't on the phone. Being loud is being loud. That's how some people talk whether they are on a phone or not.
The first industry to really embrace smart/mobile phones was the building game....the first was essentially a car-phone ...but you were carrying the lead acid battery with it...something the size of a carry-on bag. Being in the middle of nowhere aka a new subdivision meant you really needed communications.
First Motorola flip phone i saw in use was a cafe owner but he was a druggie ...cos one of those was about 7k aud ....
I am an old man but I'm not senile. Also smart phones are merely a subset of cell phones so the set of cell phones includes but is not limited to smart phones.
I'm also aware that smart phones are in fact computers. I've designed computers of all types from mainframes in the 1970's, mini-computers in the 1980's, PC's and Unix based workstations in the 1990's (as well as ultrasound and CT medical imaging equipment), terabit routers and infrared telescopes in the 2000's and military communication hardware in the 2010's. I have multiple iterations of the military communication equipment as well as the infrared telescope in satellites orbiting the planet to this very day 3 years after my retirement. I also have an electrical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (only the best engineering university on the planet) so I don't really need anyone to instruct me about ANY kind of electronic technology. Didn't really want to go into my curriculum vitae this early in the thread but it seemed apropos to your comment.
Also I've had a computer starting with an Apple II in 1980, an original IBM AT, 386, 486, Pentium Pro and over the years 3 different Intel Core series PC's the latest of which is what I use to access this site. I always hated laptops because of the small screen size so I'm hardly interested in a 3" by 6" screen size (or whatever) on a so-called "smart phone." Previously I had dual 27" 2560x1440 resolution monitors but when one of them died I bought an 32" 8K UHD monitor. I would have bought two of them but they wouldn't fit on my desk so I've made do with one.
As far as the loudness thing I always had a private office so I never had the issue you mention but if I did and they impeded my work either on or off the phone I would politely ask them to hold it down so I could work. If they continued anyway then I would complain up the chain of command and I'm sure the problem would have been resolved one way or the other.
Anyway thank you for your comment even with the implied criticism. It means this holds enough interest for you to at least read it. Like I said at the beginning if it bothers you just please ignore it.
Best regards.
And when that happens your post will be relocated appropriately.Hi, BTW .... can't believe it's been 7 years either....if I had to bet I'd say 2 or 3...
After some thought when and if I get into anything political I'll just spawn a new thread in the political forum. Hopefully it would be OK to provide a link to that thread within this one to direct anyone that actually has interest.
Also are there any other topics that are verboten here that I should know about in advance? I chose the Everything Else forum mainly because I intend to talk about pretty much everything.
That's way more than I intended for today perhaps tomorrow I'll go into my motivation for starting this thread.
I'm 70 and I received my first cell phone, as a gift, 7 years ago. Reason..my car broke down twice in 1 month. Could not find a pay phone and had to ask a restaurant to borrow their phone. Since then my flip phone is always in the car for this purpose. I have a land line at home and am happy to live this way. I'm also NOT on any social media as I don't need everybody to know my business.
Almost everyone I know is addicted to their cell.
That's how I feel and I'm stickin to it.
Good for you . That's a very good reason.
Just to be clear the cell phone thing is my own personal thing. It's not like I'm advocating that anyone else should be the same way. I'm just explaining how I am and what events shaped the way I am. As long as you're fine with being able to be constantly tracked via cell tower pings then there's no reason not to have one. My wife has an old Motorola flip phone but the only time she turns it on to my knowledge is to call me from the garage to tell me to come and get the groceries. But given how ages ago the power switch on PC's went from a hard disconnect of the power supply to an input to the CPU to request a power down sequence that actually doesn't even power down the CPU core, can you really trust that turning off the cell phone means you can't be tracked?
I actually gave a thought to enabling both my wife's and my OnStar on our 2010 Impalas but instead early this year I bought each of us a new 2020 Impala. It really wasn't necessary, she had only 30K miles on hers and I only had 50K miles on mine but ten years is long enough. Also as far as the tracking thing goes I also know that the GPS unit in all GM vehicles (perhaps the same is true of other manufacturers as well but I don't know to a certainty) can also be used to monitor where and when you go and how fast you get there. For that matter the CPU in every modern car can be queried to tell how fast you were going, how soon and hard you braked and how you turned the steering wheel in the case of an accident.
I've thought of having the transmitters ripped out of the car but there's a limit to even my paranoia (plus the uncertainty that there aren't other methods to be tracked such as the aforementioned CPU).
I knew a handful of very sharp, young software engineers (also MIT educated) that went to work for the CIA to fight state sponsored cyber attacks after 911 that explained to me that there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent a sufficiently skilled hacker from getting to pretty much any information they want. Your only protection is your anonymity but given that MITRE has worked on data mining pretty much for the last 20 years I wouldn't really count on it.
Hey there. I don't recall interacting with you in the past, but this is a great thread MumbleFratz. I'm /way/ younger than you, but one of the things that I've learned during my time here on earth is that life is far too short to learn from one's own mistakes and experiences. In order to adequately navigate the world one must be able to learn from the experiences, mistakes, and wisdom of other people as well. So I appreciate your perspective.
I've gone back and forth on the moble-phone idea myself, as I've also seen how they (and beepers/pagers before them) became tools to tether individuals to obligations (they do not want to have), rather than tools of convenience or liberation they are originally presumed to be when their uptake by society is on that exponential curve upwards. Already I see inklings of the protected and privileged classes (people with enough education/prestige/wealth to be able to say "no") stepping away from phones/tablets/etc because of the broad recognition of the trade-offs inherent in their dependence upon these devices (and potential harms of this dependence). Thus, while a mobile phone was a status symbol 15 years ago, the ability to ignore calls and turn off the phone is quickly becoming a status symbol over the next 15 years.
If you're interested, there is a lot of academic literature on choice, self-binding, second order preferences, etc with respect to individuals and how they choose to give-up or limit things that they like, but are potentially harmful in excess. I would place mobile phones into this continuum myself, personally. My phone doesn't ring if anyone I don't know calls, I get no beeps, boops, or other alerts at all. I do not use it for personal email, I keep virtually every convenient service on it turned off, have viciously eschewed any apps or games that are not strictly necessary (for security, being the main reason, but I find the idea that any app adds much utility fairly dubious) and generally keep it tweaked for minimal addictiveness... One thing that I will say though, is that phones are INCREDIBLY useful while traveling, although the joy of getting lost is an experience quickly on its way to extinction in the present day...
If I may. What I feel like you're attempting to put into words, but are falling short on the specific language and terminology to succinctly do so is that there is no innate quality of technology that makes life /better/. This is an idea that's been seeing a lot of resurgence as each subsequent generation that's followed your Boomer footsteps has found itself to be increasingly impoverished (Gen-X, the Millenials, then Gen-Z or the Homelanders (the name is still being debated, I think it should be "Generation-F" myself)). What these generations have been increasingly questioning is the "Myth of Progress" and are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the "Progress" and the ideas of Techno-utopianism are actually just religions. Religions both of belief ("all new technology is better than what it replaced"), as well as of practice (consumerism). And like many Religions, many of these precepts have been hijacked by powerful interests, despite being of a questionable infallibility to begin with. The precepts that made this belief system "work" were largely predicated upon resource abundance - which is now transitioning to resource scarcity; if not on absolute terms, certainly on a per-capita basis..
This post wasn't meant to be about religion, but rather, that this idea is so pervasive and so entrenched that the only appropriate terminology with which to describe it is that of something equally pervasive and entrenched in human history, which are religions.
You might quite like, and find a lot of resonance in the writings of John Michael Greer - he also has a ton of book interviews on Youtube. For example: here is a post he wrote about razor blades and how no one can get a decent shave anymore (just like your observation that mobile phones are so convenient that you can't even hear the guy on the other end of the call anymore) https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-progress-means.html
You might quite like a lot of his posts on this archived blog on industrial civilization.
That's probably about enough nonsense from my end, but I just wanted to wave and say that I like your thread..
-tid242
edit: I might add. You might really like Oswald Spengler's "Technics and Man" (recently reprinted, finally), and if you like it you could even dive into his Opus: "Decline of the West" - now that you're retired you would have time for it. It sounds like it would resonate with the zeitgeist you're channeling
For better or worse, a smart phone has become an indispensable tool in my line of work and I find a lot of conveniences come along for the ride. Just wish privacy concerns didn't tag along, too. I could probably resume a land-line-only life but it would be noticeably less efficient. To my way of thinking, if you're willing to communicate via the internet on a computer, it's really no different using a smart phone - the computer just happens to fit in your pocket. 0.02
...
I cut your quote short just because to quote the whole thing would take up too much room and the original is only two posts above but your entire response is excellent and thought provoking and does indeed at least touch on multiple things that I intend to go into. However, your guess as to my reasons for starting this thread and my ultimate goal of what I'm trying to express are not correct.
What I'm doing is pretty much simply trying to describe the why and wherefore of me. How I am and how I came to be that way. Obviously a lot of different experiences over the course of many years factor into it. To this point I have only partially and perhaps not too eloquently described a single aspect of my life out of perhaps dozens.
I know I'm dancing around quite a bit here and my purpose is not really to be intentionally mysterious but it's going to take me awhile to even describe the why of what I'm doing which is what I'm going to try and attempt shortly.
I could probably expand on a number of points you bring up but I do fear alienating folks with "walls of text" but the first thing you mentioned that struck a particular chord with me is learning from other people's mistakes. That's at least a part of my motivation for starting this thread.
Here's a few more observations I've made in my life that echo this statement.
1) The intelligent mostly learn from other people's mistakes.
2) The average mostly learn from their own mistakes.
3) The ignorant generally don't from their own or anyone else's mistakes.
The thing is I doubt there is any one person that any one of these point applies to exclusively. We've probably all learned something from someone else's mistakes. We've all certainly learned quite a bit from our own mistakes and I'm sure if you dig deep enough you could probably find mistakes in your life that for whatever reason you would be incapable of repeating given similar circumstances. C'est La Vie.
I do promise to get at least into the why of what I'm doing as quickly as possible but I still have to set it up a bit so please bear with me. This post is already too long to begin to go into it here.
I fully understand. Perhaps when and if you retire then you may have the luxury of giving it up if that's what you want to do. I've personally found retirement to be extremely freeing, I highly recommend it.
To put to bed my particular form of Luddism; I will not enable the wireless connection to my ISP, I don't allow any programs on my PC to automatically update themselves, I will not use a debit card (although I do use a credit card) and I will most certainly not participate in online banking or in any form of online access to any funds or assets I have. I also will never put a camera or microphone on any computer I own.
That's pretty much it.
The reason I won't use a debit card but will use a credit card are twofold. The first is that it's a Federal law that your loss is limited to $50 in the case of credit card fraud. With a debit card your loss is generally limited to $50 but that is merely a bank policy that can change without notice (if you don't believe me read the small print on your debit card agreement). The second is that with credit card fraud the burden of proof is on the credit card company to prove you made the purchase whereas with debit card fraud the burden of proof is on you to prove you didn't make the purchase (also subject to bank policy, not law) and proving a negative is notoriously difficult.
I'm not going to go into the details of why I won't do any of the rest of these things because I don't want to beat a dead horse but if anyone is actually interested in hearing why I'll be happy to explain.
Smartphones are really cool devices. For entertainment. For communicating. The world in the palm of your hand. Nothing more to than that. I can do my banking. Pay Bills. I have friends all over the world and I use Facebook and MeWe to talk to them. Really cool stuff.
I use my debit card like a credit card. Don't have to use the pin. Never had a problem.
I think WiFi is fantastic. I've never had any sort of problem with it. The Router/Modem is password protected. I also use a VPN sometimes. Never had a problem.
I know people that put tape over the camera on their laptops. I would never do that.
I'll leave the philosophy lessons and social discourse to you guys. Sometimes over thinking something is almost as bad as not thinking.
I use technology to do things. It actually makes my life easier. I'm not obsessed with it. It's just another tool.
Years ago people were in awe of the radio, automobiles, electric light and TV. They all became part of our lives and now we don't even think about them. We just use them. They're just things. If they weren't there anymore people would learn to adapt.
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