Posted on 08/08/2015 4:05:43 AM PDT by HomerBohn
We use our cells sparingly, and use land line as necessary. For us....
3 cells (1 as backup) Pay as you go annually... $8.33/mo times 3 = $25/mo for our 3 cell phones
Internet.....$19/mo. If you are paying regular price, ask for that company's customer retention department. You will be surprised how badly they will want to keep you as a customer. Add a land line, good TV antenna, and netflix, and that is pretty much all the entertainment we need.
I got turned against cellphones in the 1990’s when my husband finally got one of those first HUGE cellphones that took up half the front seat of the car. (We were having to stop at various payphones on our way when he traveled in his job before he got the “cellphone”.) Well, they quickly got smaller & smaller, until now when it’s about like talking into something the size of an Oreo cookie. He still has one in his car since he retired. - I still refuse to become as addicted to a darned cellphone as I am to FR & am amazed at how people have become just an accessory to their cellphones. I’m still human enough that when a person comes up behind me talking, I answer them. I’m 69 & don’t really fit in to this “culture”.
Despite the fact that cells can be convenient (wife can reach me if she needs help no matter where I am), I miss the days when the phone stayed on the wall/counter/end table and answering machines were for those who couldn’t bear to miss a message...
All of this I firmly believe was by design.
The globalists wanted an isolated and callous humanity hooked on electronics and depleted of real human interaction, and the cell phone gave them the perfect tool to advance this idea.
I agree 100% with the premise that cell phones are the most annoying and destructive component of automobile usage today.
I very, very rarely talk on a cell phone while driving, and if I do, it is because I have been paged and am unable to pull off the road.
I wear my Bose sound canceling earbuds constantly since I listen to audiobooks while I drive. I can listen to an audiobook, and I can send a text via Siri (usually something like “I am at the junction of route x and route y, be there in 10 minutes, but when I do, I both hands on the wheel, and am non-interactive on the phone...it is a task) but I cannot talk on the phone.
I can do the voice activated text by pressing a button, saying “Send my brother Joe a text” and dictating it. It plays back, and asks if I want to send, and I either say “Edit” and redictate, or send it. Listening to music or an audiobook is no problem, I lose no awareness of what is around me, I don’t take my eyes off the road or hands off the wheel, and am completely tuned into driving safely.
However, if I attempt to speak to someone on the phone, I completely lose a sense of where I am and what is around me, so I don’t do it. It is frightening. I presume the difference is, when you talk to someone on a phone, some different part of the brain is used, and it gets in the way of your situational awareness in a way that listening to music doesn’t.
I am horrified at what I see on the road with people talking on their phones, and the complete and total ubiquity of it. You can watch driving behavior (weaving, not moving with traffic promptly, creating dangerous situations at intersections, etc) and predict pretty accurately what is going on, confirmed by seeing their head down, or their mouth moving as they drive with one hand on the wheel and the other glued to their ear. I think it should be outlawed.
I know a guy who was the head of a huge Harley Davidson Chapter, big customized bike, and stopped riding it. He said it was insanely dangerous with the number of people using their phones while they drive. Like taking your life in your hands.
I understand the completely corrosive power of it. I use it as a tool (I work in IT, so having a camera, calculator, internet, flashlight, and various useful applications is a Godsend) but I really don’t talk at all on it, and if I do (usually once every few days) it is usually for a focused purpose. I just don’t like talking on the phone, and neither does my wife or my friends. But being in Medical IT and being on call, having a phone is a form of previously unimagined freedom. I used to have to know where every single pay phone was no matter where I went, and if I didn’t know, I had to search for one.
Culturally I believe they are harmful as well. My wife and I drove through a major city last night, past a crowd of college age and younger people (several hundred) and I would say 70% had their heads buried in their phones.
When we had dinner at the top of a large skyscraper, the view was stunning, the young man and his female companion (my wife thought she was a Ukranian hooker!) were obsessed with their phones barely looking away at them, and when they did, it was to take selfies. It was very odd.
Anyway, I agree with items 1-3.
4 I reject completely, unless you have the phone glued to your ear 24 hours a day, in which case you should have your ear removed.
5 is just plain stupid and idiotic.
6 I agree is a concern.
7 is stupid. The writer sees this as a disadvantage, where I see it as an advantage. Information is only as good or as bad as what a person accessing it interprets it and uses it. I happen to think it is a better path to valuable, truthful information that was unavailable before. If you are the kind to accept information at face value, sure that is bad. By why should others, who critically examine information, be denied it. It sounds like the writer would rather have us all denied it. That sounds like a great idea.
I love my cell phone. I rarely talk while driving, and never dial out, but I feel lost if I leave the house without it. My husband is 80 years old and has serious health problems, if I am not with him I want him to be able to call me.
I love my phone.
I see now WHY
I don’t have a television (I never got the digital adapter),
I don’t have a cell phone (I can’t STAND them)
I stopped reading newspapers years ago
Going out in my car in a local neighborhood means trying not to run over idiots oblivious to their surroundings while they walk directly out into the street,
The standard operating procedure for pedestrians in a close to 100% illegal alien neighborhood near me (which one can’t avoid driving through to get to other places)
is to step out into the street while talking on a cell phone in one hand WHILE HOLDING a baby in the other arm.
In that neighborhood there are wreaths of flowers on the median every 25 feet or so (the extended family chips in for an attempted memorial for their traffic fatality member).
I pick up an occasional newspaper that someone has left on the counter at the Waffle House in order to do the xword. I haven’t been to a movie in some years since the third one in a row where after 5 or 10 minutes I was saying,” and I spent $xx and am wasting an hour and a half to see this?” The last one was the Alice in Wonderland thing that looked like it would be really interesting with the animation/live mix. 5 minutes in I knew it was a standard Disney flick and knew how it would progress and how it would end.
I just love Consumer Cellular. Pretty cheap!
It is a standard procedure in boxing to do something to distract the attention of the opponent in order to drop the ceiling in on him with something he can’t see because his attention is misdirected by the first move(s).
Years ago I started seeing people out in public with their earphones on.
I said to myself, “Why don’t they put on a blindfold too to finish job?”
They were CUTTING THEMSELVES OFF from observation of their environment.
What if a car honked at them.
What if a hoodlum came up behind them?
Today, with the texting on a cellphones, that has been accomplished in full.
“I’m referring to the OLD land line phone system”
Oh yea? Where did you refer it? They still make FAX machines,
they still make answering machines. They had caller ID, forwarding and call waiting way before the cell phone craze
took off. And you couldn’t get teenagers off the phone back in the “OLD land line” days. I’m sure there were people
just like you who were complaining about the “OLD land line”
over smoke signals and the telegraph back in the day. That
was bunk then just as this article is bunk now.
I see that you refuse to understand my point so have a nice day.
That is certainly true. It works exceedingly well for me, but I understand the limitations because I manage a speech recognition medical application, and know what will and won’t work and adapt to it.
Doesn’t work well in a noisy environment, and you do have to adapt to what it does well.
Works great for me...
“The tracking is a serious issue, between Stingray equipment and internet spying.” is a good point
But.
“How Dangerous Cell Phones Are to Humankind”
Maybe to our liberty and freedom, but dangerous to humankind?
I put this on the same grounds as how Rock and Roll, mini skirts, the automobile, alternating current and Wham were Dangerous to Humankind.
Exactly. You have to drive so defensively in both cars but even more so in motorcycles (and bicycles too, but you HAVE to no matter what with them) that it has taken the joy out of it, as I described in a previous post.
What, wasn’t Wham dangerous?
“I see that you refuse to understand my point so have a nice day.”
And what point was that?
“There was no caller ID or phone blocking etc. until very recently.”
Twenty years ago is considered very recent?
“I hardly know anyone who has a REAL landline phone now.”
Every person I know who is in business has a hardline with
the few exceptions being VOIP which in the context of this
conversations is the same.
“It was voice only, nothing else.”
No telex, no fax?
“When young people tell me themselves that they don’t know how to sit and carry on a face to face conversation I have to believe something has changed.”
A young person actually told you that? Sorry that sounds
made up.
There, I think I’ll have the last word and say it out right
and not sulk away with “have a nice day”.
Naw ...cop working the night shift not wanting to fill out any more paperwork than he has to.
Was 2013. Besides we got taken care of financially. Wife is OK and got more for the car than I paid for it (got good deal from dealer originally and they paid me for totaling at the current new market value car was 10 months old )
LOL...
While I agree that cell phones and computers as well have changed our society in a lot of negative ways, the idea that such a small EMF field causes cancer or in any way damages a human being is ludicrous. Papers written to this so called effect are mostly junk science.
You step into a strong emf field everytime you wash clothes, wash the dishes in the dishwasher..drive under or parallel to a power line. Watch TV....sit at your computer within 24-30 inches of the power supply...listen to music..go to a stadium game...I could go on, but what’s the point..
It’s nonsense..
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