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Culture Rant

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YakkoWarner said:
I still have one because cell service is questionable at best where I live (if you drive up to the top of the hill and hold the phone in just the right direction you might get enough signal to make a call). I wish I could drop it - thay charge a fortune for it now (almost $90 a month!!) and it is not the level of service it used to be. I worked for the phone company when it was just "the phone company" because there was only 1; nothing short of total, biblical scale destruction would stop that phone from working. Now it goes out whenever the local power fails (no longer independantly powered), randomly just doesn't work at all for a day or 2, sometimes works for outgoing calls but fails to ring on incoming, etc...
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Here in California, AT&T is trying to get rid of land lines because of the cost. The state won't let them because of the lack of cell service in remote areas and reliability. Our "land line" is now cellular/ VOIP. We still use the same phone, it's just attached to a cellular/VOIP box. It was my wife's business line for years (she's now retired) and most people know it as her number. If it rings, I won't answer it even if I'm right in front of it because it's never for me.
 
equiprx said:
For the ignorant techno-idiots like me.
What does that mean????
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Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Basically your “landline” is using the internet to make calls instead of the traditional phone lines.
 
John Turney said:
Nokia phones were indestructible. I had one that I lost. When I went looking for it, I found it on a gravel driveway to a tank farm that I visited. It had been rained on and driven over, but still worked.
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Not sure if it was Nokia but a friend was building a building and the cement truck driver came back looking for his phone - they had to scrape up dried concrete to get it but I think it still worked.
 
Gliderman8 said:
Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Basically your “landline” is using the internet to make calls instead of the traditional phone lines.
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So if I no longer have a land line I'M SCREWED????
 
One of my relatives who lives in a major city has a similar setup - her "landline" is actually connected to the internet (she has affordable fiber access in the city) - instead of being connected to a copper wire pair going back to the phone company switchgear, it now just connects to a little box (the VOIP interface) at her location which is connected to the internet (like a wifi router but for physical phones instead). The bad thing is if her internet goes down or power goes off, her landline phone is now a paperweight as well.

I believe my neighborhood is on a larger-scale variation of the same idea. We still have copper wire on the poles going "somewhere", but I expect that it all goes into a larger VOIP device and the calls are converted to datastreams. And nothing is independantly powered anymore, if the power goes off the phones go dead as well which to me was one of the main points to keeping a landline.
 
Well, they changed my lane line, which means a hard wired connection rather than an over the air radio type signal, last year. Part of the local service removing wires and replacing them with fiber optic. They could have kept a land line, but was going to double the cost since it wasn't designed for that. So I dropped it, never used it anyway, in favor of my cell phone.
 
equiprx said:
So if I no longer have a land line I'M SCREWED????
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No, you’re not at a disadvantage. You can still have a phone in your house that will act just like you remember how a landline worked. It just uses the internet to route the calls.
See YakkoWarner post #46 above.
 
JPSmit said:
Agreed - slagging kids these days is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Aside from kids on their phones. (and note the various lawsuits about social media being intentionally addictive), my kids and nieces and nephews

1. educated daughter - laid off last September has applied to literally hundreds of places with no luck in part because of AI
2. nephew with Business degree - working in a restaurant and living at home because he doesn't make enough
3. Educated niece - working in wineries and living at home because she doesn't make enough (in fairness also travels the world teaching scuba diving)
4. Other nephew - business degree and working in a restaurant in British Columbia and sharing a house

Ironically my son who never finished university has some of the most consistant employment as a tree planter (he is 39 so in management now) and a contractor - but even there much of his work is under the table and he lives in a basement apartment owned by friends. It is a tough time.
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Quick update. After over 2000 applications, my daughter got offered a job yesterday. One year contract, probably half of what she was making - but, a start. She is happy, we are over the moon!
 
J-P - congrats on the success.

Just wondering ... did your daughter apply to over 2000 job *openings*? or just send 2000 applications to companies that *might* have openings.

"Inquiring minds want to know!"
Tom M.
 
NutmegCT said:
J-P - congrats on the success.

Just wondering ... did your daughter apply to over 2000 job *openings*? or just send 2000 applications to companies that *might* have openings.

"Inquiring minds want to know!"
Tom M.
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As someone who spent a long time fighting that game myself, that question really cannot be accurately answered. You send applications because there is a listing for a job, but in the vast majority os cases there really is no opening, or if there is an opening the organization already has a "preferred". The ritual of collecting applications and conducting interviews is often just a stage production so that the organization can legally claim they conducted an unbiased employment search, even though the non-preferred candidates never had a chance at getting the job anyway.
 
Thank you sir! I always wondered about that. Many former students of mine told me they get 500 resume's printed, or just upload their resume' to as many companies as they can find on the 'net. When they say they got no bites, most also said they didnt' really know if there was an opening for someone with their skill set, so they just kept sending/uploading.

eek
 
Thanks Mike. I know they can have "fake" job postings - but I wondered if many people are applying for jobs, just in the hope that a job may exist. That's why they get no replies.
 
I hate the fact that in applying for a job,everything is done online now.
I missed a job driving around doing traffic control & assisting motorist on
the side of the road.They probably saw my age & passed on me.I was very
irritated that I couldn't tell anyone in person what my qualifications were,&
this is the same thing I did for Humboldt Bay Fire before we moved.
 
I've read that increasingly AI is being used to do initial screening and tends to reject most applicants since it isn't capable of "reading between the lines" so to speak about what the I want this because can mean and say about skills and knowledge.
 
mikephillips said:
I've read that increasingly AI is being used to do initial screening and tends to reject most applicants since it isn't capable of "reading between the lines" so to speak about what the I want this because can mean and say about skills and knowledge.
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So as per the conversation - she was responding to openings and not just blanket emailing. (Pretty much all through Linkedin). She got scammed at least once where they asked her to do a piece of work to 'prove' her qualifications - we knew it but, it wasn't a ton of hours and she was desperate. This job actually came through a recruiter who reached out to her.

To Mikephillips comment - this is where it gets really weird. She did use AI to tailor her applications - when I wondered aloud about the efficacy of this she responded by saying that the really hard part is figuring out what her AI needs to say that will be right for what their AI wants to read since their AI is vetting the applications. What a strange strange world.
 
With this thread pre-hijacked into AI, I volunteer my critique. LLMs will wreak much remediable havoc and produce little societal advance. They will not destroy the world as we know it nor put us all into unlimited Cohibas and silk boxers. Limited and tailored-to-purpose models will succeed modestly. The main effect of LLMs will be significant, in some cases ruinous, financial harm to those now throwing unlimited money at them.

Nostradamus (aka Bob)
 
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AngliaGT said:
I hate the fact that in applying for a job,everything is done online now.
I missed a job driving around doing traffic control & assisting motorist on
the side of the road.They probably saw my age & passed on me.I was very
irritated that I couldn't tell anyone in person what my qualifications were,&
this is the same thing I did for Humboldt Bay Fire before we moved.
Click to expand...

It also means people who do not have reliable access to the internet are effectively shut out of the job market completely. I know for myself that if my currently work shut down and I had to start grinding for a job again I would not be able to, since I live in an area that the internet has chosen to bypass in terms of service. There are no in person/paper applications available in most cases, which means if you don't live somewhere that has a high enough average income for the internet to bother serving, you can't even apply for jobs.
 
Well, just keep in mind that Musk has said that he wants robots to take over everything and having a job will be optional, if you feel like it. He see each person having 2-3 to do everything from working to grocery shopping to mowing and on and on. So we'll just sit on the couch issuing orders to them, and wondering how we'll pay for everything since we won't have any job...

So having access to forms, what's right to say and so on won't matter...
 
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