Sail Fawn Hate

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In re sail fawns: I hate them on principle. This whole business of being “reachable” at all times is sick and evil – as well as ironically impossible, because the fucking things don’t work! Every time I try to speak with another person who is on dey sail fawn, the call either drops or the conversation becomes hard-to-impossible due to interference. My $12 wall phone is completely reliable.sail fawn

True, I cannot carry it with me everywhere – thank fucking god!

The world has gone stupid. People gulled by social pressure and narcissism to believe they just have to be gabbling away about The Bachelor (or whatever) all the got-damned time. And pay $90 a month to do it!

Remember Back to the Future? If you’d told 1985 movie-goers that in 2015, people would line up to spend $600 on a “phone” that was better at taking videos and selfies than making (or receiving) phone calls, you’d have been laughed out of the theater.

Squinty-eyed pinheads fingernail typing at a keypad smaller than a box of cigarettes. Incapable of having one-on-one/face-to-face human level conversations. Communication reduced to 15 character “tweets” (perfectly named) via texts. The next step down will be the elimination of words entirely. Just pictures. Maybe grunts and squeals, the pitch or tone signifying intent. Wasn’t technology supposed to smarten us up? Instead, it’s dumbing us down. And de-civilizing us along the way.

Maybe brain cancer is a blessing.

PS: Several people have sent in donations recently, but without giving a mailing address – so I can’t send out the EPautos “No Clovers!” stickers to them. Please remember to send in your mailing address if you’d like a sticker….gnomesayin’?

29 COMMENTS

  1. As if on cue…

    Ecuador rolls out National State Electronic payment system
    http://www.cnbc.com/id/102397137

    Driver, caught using cell phone jammer to keep motorists around him off the phone’
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617818/Driver-60-caught-using-cell-phone-jammer-motorists-phone.html

    Magician David Copperfield was robbed at gunpoint and used sleight-of-hand to hide his wallet, passport, and cell phone.
    http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-04-26-copperfield-robbery_x.htm

    30 years of sail fawns
    http://i.imgur.com/8jm7CjO.jpg

    Cell phone covers found in Neolithic China ruins
    http://i.imgur.com/o0KHTWR.jpg
    Like everything else, the Chinese had cell phones for millenia before the west finally did

  2. Phones don’t annoy people, people annoy people.

    Part of the problem is that they’re not any smarter than the old dumb wired phones, and we still treat them as such. A real “smart phone” would screen the call/text/email and decide if I should be interrupted or not. If it’s the wife in a panic, and her location is someplace like a hospital, you bet, put it through. If it’s dad and he sounds a little bored, log the call and tell him I’ll call back later. If it’s sonny’s school, tell them to call the wife. If it’s the mistress, make sure the wife’s not around before putting the call though (and scrub the call from the history too).

    We’ve all been Pavlovianly trained to react to the sound of a ringing phone as a priority over everything else. Of course back in the old days, because of the expense of the call, it very well could have been more important. With the communications revolution destroying the price of a phone call, we have to realize that a phone call is actually not as valuable as a face to face conversation.

  3. There is hardly a city anywhere on our planet that does not bustle with enterprise — with healthy, well-dressed people engaged in interesting work. All is calm, all is bright, and even the wretched of the earth have cell phones.

    Is it all a fool’s paradise? Do we really face decades of peace and prosperity in a world dominated by a single free, civilized and reflective superpower with primarily mercantile interests?

    Rudyard Kipling and the God of Things As They Are
    http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/Considerations/kipling.html

    It is curious that Kipling, for all his interest in machinery and his respect for “The Day’s Work”, seems hardly to have known of the existence of these working people.

    His books are full of his fascination with how things are made and done. “The most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the next man gets his vittles,” says the preppie in Captains Courageous.

    This might almost be Kipling’s life motto. Yet on closer inspection Kipling’s interest in work processes was limited to those that had some connection with his core enthusiasms: India, the army, the sea.
    —————————

    Like all true Tories, Rudyard Kipling was a very democratic man. He had, as the English say, “no side.” He would talk to — and, much more important for a writer, listen to — anybody at all.

    To the end of his life he refused all non-academic honors, though he was offered a knighthood and could have got a peerage with a word in the right ear. This is the more surprising when one recalls that British India of the 1880s, when Kipling was working his apprenticeship, was a place where snobbery, that most loathsome of English vices, flourished unchecked.

    As the son of a nobody — his father was an art instructor — practising a barely-respectable trade himself (“Who is it, Jenkins?” “Two reporters, milord, and a gentleman from The Times”) Kipling must have been on the receiving end of a great many slights.

    A lesser man would have sought compensation in his days of fame and wealth; but Kipling never troubled himself in the least about rank or status and never sought out great men. If he ended up with many such among his acquaintance, it was from their seeking out him.

    Literary snobbery, when he first encountered it in London of the 1890s “Decadence”, seems to have disgusted him. I doubt he was much bothered that at the end of his life he was as unfashionable as it is possible for a writer to be.

    You would have been thrown out of any self-respecting literary gathering in 1936 if you had quoted “Mandalay” (which Orwell, according to Malcolm Muggeridge, thought “the most beautiful poem in the English language”). Among the eight nominal pallbearers present to inter Kipling’s ashes in Poets’ Corner were the Prime Minister, a Field Marshal and an Admiral of the Fleet. The nearest thing to a literary person was Howell Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post.

    Now we are wiser. After our time of nightmares, when the mass murder of unarmed civilians has routinely been used as an instrument of peacetime social policy over half the world, Kipling’s reactionary blatherings seem merely crusty and feudal.

    Even the Raj doesn’t look like such an unspeakably bad idea after the horrors of Partition and, what is it? three? Indo-Pakistani wars — the next one apparently to be fought with nuclear weapons. The hottest show on Broadway is The Lion King — whole sections of whose plot are lifted from The Jungle Book.

    On my table is a copy of Newsweek containing an interview with one of the founders of Medecins Sans Frontières, headlined: “A Man Who Fights the Savage Wars of Peace.” Best of all, after a century of murderous political fantasies, great masses of the human race have returned in allegiance to the God of Things As They Are. For how long, this time around, that deity will be able to hold off the God of Wishful Thinking remains to be seen.

  4. Truly we are herded, branded, chipped, cattled, made to pull the plow and so forth. Having phones and whatever other tools and property at our COMMAND, means the better off we are.

    Watch Alex Jones. Learn all the things he uncovers and makes the case for. But then move beyond. Because there’s way more than what he is shining a light on. Technology can be weaponized against us. Sure. But we can defend and turn the tables.

    The key concept. You have to COMMAND of whatever you have. If you can’t do this, don’t have it. Whether it’s a cell phone, a car, a home, a business, a girl friend. Whatever.

    Not be a subscriber of it. A clueless user of it. A feckless custodian of it. But a master and a smith of it. An ancient Greek with full Techne and Episteme. A tool user and an object adapter. A material master.

    Other items…

    1 The abyss.
    2 The mark of the beast.
    3 Room 101.
    4 Life as a Ren and Stimpy cartoon.

    Useful nouns to get points across. And show how high the stakes are. But these are useless concepts that have no rationality or much utility in arriving at logical conclusions or even future predictions.

    Also slippery slope. There is no trendline to draw based on today’s known variables. Tomorrow is unmappable.

    False dichotomies. There’s always more possibilities than you think. If you divide the world into blacks and whites. That still leaves you billions not yet sorted. Now what? Yellows. Olives. Way more than two, that’s for sure. This is a scalable idea that fits nearly every situation.

    I think in a lot of ways the horse and buggy would still have a rightful place without the weaponization of mass produced vehicles to break our natural bonds with our fellow animals.

    Beasts have an important role to fill for us. The mark of a good beast is his noble inclination to be of use and to faithfully serve one and all. He gives his quid. Doesn’t receive his earned quo. And then still soldiers on. That is the true natural mark of nature and the many wondrous beasts of this world.

  5. If you have a choice to use a device or not, then you are dealing with tools and technology.

    If you have no choice, then you are dealing with whips, chains, cages, and slavery.

    This is a hugely important topic. Only total CLOVER ASSHOLES would demand that people live in the more “modern” way regardless of their personal preference.

    Sail phones is one item in a huge list of items covered by the same principle.

    You don’t need to remember your government identity, unless you agree you are a territorial slave. You don’t need to be vaccinated. Take showers and remain clean. Treat illness. Worry if you’re infested with parasites. Communicate or answer questions in majority language. Or use any language. Follow any customs. Adhere to any social norms.

    If you are free, you are free to climb a tree. Live up there and have others leave you be. You don’t need a tree title. Or a tree address.

    You don’t need to give official names to you kids. Or worry if they’re fed or not. Or even keep track of them just because you birthed them.
    You are not another man’s statistic. Each A is unique. No man equals another man in any way. There can be no forced A=A you don’t consent to.

    Many homeless people reject shelters. There should be no negative consequences for this according to the NAP.

    Other people might reject using state designated identities. They should be left alone in their unaccountability and anonymity.

    The Americas were filled with people living in primitive dwellings made out of natural materials including animal skins, bark, adobe, grass, rivercane, vines.

    It’s fantastic more advanced people came to the Americas. That should have given everyone more choices how to live. That shouldn’t be an excuse for holocausting different peoples who had lived a simple life for many millenia and were perfectly happy the way they were.

    It doesn’t matter what happened in the past, unless you personally did something. It matters greatly that you recognize this principle going forward. And no longer impose what you think is better on anyone else.

    Maybe primitive ways would decline naturally and without force. But when interventions are made. And holocausts are imagined and then conducted for entire ways of living. That is a huge problem, and must not be condoned or rationalized.
    http://www.native-languages.org/houses.htm

    No one wants a sail fawn forced on them. Same goes for cars. Single family homes. Computers. TVs. Clothes. Medical care. Morality. Ways of forming clans and families. And all the rest are equally things that must not be forced upon anyone calling themselves a man, if one is truly to claim the label of NAP libertarian.

  6. My parents in Western Carolina have terrible cell reception. I’m sure rural Virginia is the same because of low population density, lots of hills.

    If you use a wifi app, you’ll get good reception because it’s not the cell network, it’s the wifi.

    If you have android and a tablet, get Groove IP Lite app for free and make unlimited free calls whenever you have wifi. Also receive voicemails for free at call.to.

    Instead of monthly charges, you need only pay for the tablet.
    http://snrblabs.com/snrb/apps/GrooveIP/About.aspx

    I don’t know what apple offers. Not groove, but I imagine there’s something similar.

    • I will never own a sail fawn. Why? Not because I am Luddite. Rather, because they offer me nothing I need or want. I have zero interest in being “reachable” when I am not in my house (and even then, I rarely answer the phone; leave a message and I might get back to you eventually). I do not need a video screen or a processor to make a got-damned phone call. I can’t stand tiny buttons and it amazes me that people put up with it. Pecking away with fingernails or a stylus. The got-damned TeeVee remote is enough already.

      Never.

      Remember: Sanity is not statistical!

      • I am with you. It’s up to you what tools you want to carry around. Or not carry around. I waited forever to get a sail fawn. I ended up getting one because other people demanded I have one.

        The convention now is you have to play a phone tag game before visiting them. I find this beyond annoying. I hate calling anyone or being on the phone, but sometimes I do it anyway.

        I’ve learned to accept other people’s disjointed use of technology. It’s gotten so they have no attention span or concentration. Never know what doodad is going to beep and need attention. Best to keep your mind empty just in case, they seem to think.

        I join them by doing research or talking online, but not in the sense that I respond to a device just because it blinks or flashes.

        I have no love or investment in any of today’s tech. If I wake up tomorrow and all that’s left is hammocks and raw nature. I will crawl into one and take a nap. Then jump out and go hunt or gather. I wouldn’t miss clothes, homes, elec, furniture, or any of it really.

        I mentioned groove for someone who has a tablet anyway, they could get this app for freeeeee. Even if you had to buy one, its cheaper than monthly service. Mine works to call out. I never get any calls coming into the thing.

        A cell phone is a tool made by men you can carry around with you or not. A multitool and gun are other tools you might keep with you. No one is required to carry any tools if they choose not to.

        When I hear a guy gushing about his phone, I’ll keep a straight face. But really, he might just as soon be talking about his new apron. If available, I’d want a device too complex for most men or women to even operate. Anything even a toddler finds accessible
        bores me.

        Maybe when an 8 cylinder internal combustion phone comes out, it’ll be something for guys to talk to other guys about and not be so pathetic sounding.

        • Tor, to the young, incredulous I used to say “I’ve lived 50 years without a phone in my hand, twice as long as you’ve been alive”. But I got one anyway and the costs and trouble it’s saved me has been almost worth it. There are times I get a call and have a good idea what it pertains to and my phone happens to not get that call for a period of time I deem it’s safe to call back and feign “out of range”. Then there are times I miss a call because of two rival companies competing so one just doesn’t send the call through. Those are maddening.

          • I hate android/apple neutered smart device platforms. They are pathetic and infantilizing to someone comfortable with behemoth old school computers. And the new desktops and servers that are so affordable now.

            Maybe a slide rule & abacus guy, do it in his head calculation guy feels the same way about my preferred methods.

            Even so, I do greatly enjoy the Galaxy Tab I now carry around town, keep in my vehicle. Whatever works best wins, in my eyes.

            If teacup poodle/chihuahua blends were the most useful and skillled dogs. I’d use them and keep them around, regardless of appearances and the way those kinds of canis familiaris just seem “wrong.”

            Most importantly

            To me, the way to do things right is do them yourself. Libertarians and productive maker/engineers should build their own devices and operate their own independent networks their own way.

            Only a slave is dependent on strangers for tools he feels he needs. To be a free man, you should have a CHOICE of being a mere consumer and buying a manufactured device by a big manufacturer.

            Or of using homebrew DIY solutions you and your friends make yourself.

            You brought up a great point earlier 8.

            A smart phone in your hand is a device that only a few years ago wouldn’t have been available for purchase, even if you had a trillion dollars.

            A lot of the vitriol against people lost in their phones at root has to do with wanting to force people to interact with them.

            Just because you’er buying a cheeseburger, driving down a road, walking on the street, doesn’t mean anyone has to talk at you. EVER. Or even look at you. Extend you any kind of anything. The NAP is clear. You are entitled to FUCK ALL any time what you want requires another free being to give it to you.

            It doesn’t matter if you bought a million dollar home. Hundred thousand dollar car. No one has to be polite. Respond to you. Do anything you think is customary or preferred.

            Thank Crom for those sail fawns. They will bring trillions of dollars worth of freedom for billions of people worldwide.

            Even people with no skills or general value can be freed for a few dollars of tech.

            Maybe in 2016 no one will respond to you about anything, unless you send them a heads up tweet requesting they do so. That’s just the way shit goes.

            If you don’t like it. Tough. Maybe evolution is truly about surviving with the least effort.

            Not really survival of the fittest. But rather of the aloofist and survival of the don’t give a fuckest.

            There is no requirement for anyone to be skilled, provide value, be healthy, attractive, nice, considerate, or any of it. Those things might arise naturally, but if they’re forced, they lose their utility and value, at least in the eyes of an Austrian NAPster.

            • Tor, I’m laughing my butt off now. I decided a couple weeks ago to get a smart phone, mainly to store my music library in and not have to listen to a radio and store movies I can watch when I’m too tired to read and bored away from home. There is another feature, the internet, which I need at times for many things such as weather forecast or weather radar. I’d like to check email every day too. The cheapest way to be on the net in the middle of nowhere is via smart phone. It was cell phone radar that allowed us to haul ass last year and miss a killer storm. I don’t think I have to describe west Tx. thunderstorms to anyone or few if any. The wife’s been on me for years, tries to pawn off every one of them with a separate keyboard as if I could do anything with those tiny buttons. I’ll run, not walk, to the nearest cell phone with it’s own keyboard, real keyboard. I could live with live internet no matter where I went and be able to actually type. I’ve found a Motorola that will sync with a monitor although i think a lot more of them do that are the latest thing. I ain’t paying for the latest thing. Way too cheap for that. I’ll buy an 11 meter radio and antennas, NB’ing mic and all the other goodies but I’ve been doing that since 1964 when I bought my first CB….that I still have and it works on 12VDC or 120V AC. A blue face Pacer tube type manual frequency board CB. I won’t be found on FB. I finally got away from most of those people. Why would I want to open those cans of worms? I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass where or what my old classmates(they’re old, yep)are doing or not. I quit tv years ago and that’s just a new, twisted form of Reality TV. At least the show is somebody else’s problems or encounters. Most everybody i work with has a smart phone with their music libraries, playlists and movies. They get on equipment and plug in and listen to their music their way.

              • Perhaps the PTB make life unpalatable and difficult. Then they allow the way life should be to exist in a way their corporations control – which is to say – only in media form.

                Sometimes you need to listen, read, watch something for pleasure. It would be great if that thing was live and before us.

                Most of want real tangible experiences and things. We settle for virtual because of limited options. Perhaps its a kind of virtual slavery.

                The way lab rats at least get bottled water and food pellets. That’s the way civilized human rats eat TV dinners and watch entertainment pellets on the screens in our cages. When we take a break from our hamster wheel job.

                We like things to be live, but often or most times, that’s not the case. We lack the imagination, capital, and freedom of action to do the kinds of things that would adequately entertain and sustain each other in real life.

                So the human pet owners become the hero. Their media trinkets are placed before us. All sparkling and bewitching. As an individual, the best thing often times is to just consume the pellet, enjoy the song, video, book. And forego our real world options.

                It makes for a pecking order, where inanimate objects are a part of the order. This means often times you might be on the losing end against an article of inanimate media. That’s just your human reality you should soberly acknowledge and make peace with.

                It hurts when you’re on the receiving end of a technosnub. Those who choose to go to war over this, I wish you the best in your righteous struggle. But I’m already at war with the cagers and prohibitionists. I can’t fight that battle with you.

                I too get dissed by sail fawns. TV shows. Ipods. XBox consoles. And all the rest. But that’s my lot in life sometimes, and really, it’s not that big of a deal.

                The first adjustment I had to make, is how young people end phone calls. They just hang up without warning sometimes. It took a while not to get pissed, but I’m used to it now.

                It goes both ways too. I am also free to just leave without indication or warning. All’s fair under laissez faire. I leave you be. You leave me be. Easy, unless we ask for a critique/advice.

                Maybe I pay the bills. Provide the roof. Contributed 1/2 the proteins that matured into individual living beings back in my day.

                But ishould it be the case that said protein offshoots would rather watch videos, or listen to music, or text with their friends. And not pay me the least bit of never mind.

                Why should that be a problem. All that hogwash traditions ain’t worth keeping a pig’s trough around for.

                Things tend to revert to mean anyway, just by alternate means. Be patient. Tolerant. Open minded. You might be surprised who has something to teach who.

                Maybe nature gives children to people who are deficient in some way. Maybe we’ve got it all backwards that their is such a thing as parents.

                Perhaps that’s back asswards and contrary to nature. Each offspring is born to correct their parents. The child raises the father. Anything is possible.

                The first few years of life involve severing of connections between neurons. Perhaps this simplification of the brain indicates we are making huge mistakes by forcing our young to march in a single file towards a predetermined regimen.

                It might just be everything in the world right now. And everything we can even imagine. Are all horribly inadequate suboptimizations, and the right answer is in the mind of some 18 month old somewhere, if only we’d back off and just let the Alpha Toddler articulate the right answers to us oldsters about what we should be doing with our toys and blankies.

              • For the smartphone micro keyboard issue.

                I picked up a cheap wireless keyboard ($14) and a four port OTG cable ($11) for my Moto. The OTG cable lets any standard USB device (KB receiver) attach to a phone. Works with my 10″ tablet too.

                I leave it in the truck and plug in when I need to type an email on the road. Parked of course.

                For music, I have a USB car deck and a 16GB thumb drive. By the time it starts repeating songs, I have forgotten the last time I heard them.

                Other than proprietary, power hungry software, (CAD) almost all of my computing has been moved to the tablet.

                • Me2, sounds like what I need. Made a trip to Big Lake today, a little 400 mile jaunt with a gross overload. N wind blowing so hard the right turns were hairy. I was supposed to load that truck but another person did it “for me”. I appreciate it, just don’t overload hell out of it.

                  Nope, won’t have to worry about me texting, emailing or anything else going down the road. I do love my music though and the easiest way to take it from one vehicle to another is the cell phone.
                  I screwed up this morning and got the truck started at the yard, started airing a low tire and realized I didn’t have my cell phone. I had to go back home and get it, causing me to put another driver behind for nearly an hour. I had no intention of going to Reagan county without a cell phone. If I got stuck I’d be there the rest of today till about 7 am tomorrow and that would suck……only had 3 beers and Cholley Jack would surely have to pee before then.

                  While I don’t watch TV, I do like a good movie and there are plenty of them if you just check them out. I didn’t say they are all “new” but many of those are good too.

                  Mainly though, I like to listen to “my” music as opposed to commercial music no matter if it was produced yesterday or 80 years ago…..or longer.

                  I realize not everyone has the circumstances I live with, and good for them since we can’t all be on the road although I sometimes wonder if we all aren’t. Another day of more state troopers(and DOT) than I could count as well as a couple city cops. I lucked out on one city cop, had to slow behind another speed limited truck that saved me from a DPS a-hole. Good day to you and all. I hear that backhoe calling me, gotta remove some trees and small boulders and work on the driveway.

            • I agree, Tor.

              The problem is the got-damned things are rip-tiding the entire society along toward the abyss’s edge… it’d be okay if you could just have a simple trac phone to make – you know – phone calls as needed. But what’s going to happen is they’ll de facto (and perhaps de jure) compel everyone to have a “smart” phone of some kind that will be used to monitor and track every last little thing we do. It will be the “e” mark o’ the beast, so to speak. Life, commerce, will not be possible without one. Your choice will be – if you’re lucky – life on a savage reservation per Huxley or to become a happy! happy! joy! joy! member in good standing of the Brave New World collective.

              • Eric – ‘Life, commerce, will not be possible without one.’
                Indeed. It’s worrying that this might become reality long before I shuffle off.

                Eric – ‘ Your choice will be – if you’re lucky – life on a savage reservation ‘

                There will be no luck. ‘You are either with us, or with the terrorists’ was not a Bushism, it was simply a statement of fact regarding the long existing dichotomy thinking possessed by the mono-mind majority. There are only two possibilities to every issue to these simpletons.

                Just like crops, the aim seems to be mono-culture. Engineered mono-culture.

                BTW – My favorite thing about smart phones, texting. No more 20 minute calls, 19 of which are vapid filler, to get the one sentence you need from someone. I barely talk on the phone now.

                • Me2, An old axiom of conversation is the first 3 things you speak of. Almost everyone speaks of the real reason they call or look you up, as the 3rd subject. I notice I do it too, maybe the 2nd or 4th or more but it’s still averaging about the third thing. I think Ancap was right in wanting to receive a text cause people(this is bidness, no bs)will try to be friendly and say something to ingratiate themselves to you if not just identifying the weather and mainly to show you that you do matter, etc. so most people don’t want to call up and when you answer say Is this right? or did you get that part? or something along those lines since it would make it seem they simply want something of you and that’s where your connection ends. People don’t get that from a text that most people will make as short as possible. But the point is you don’t have to reply to every text. I almost never reply to a text unless it contains a question. I don’t like to use my sausages to punch tiny buttons I can’t see and everyone seems to have a different keyboard layout for everything now. My texts are extremely brief….and rare. I have no hesitation of calling the boss and having him answer What’s up? and my telling him what is up as briefly as I can. I wish everybody was that way.

                  I’ve been talking on the phone all afternoon and evening but it’s not chitchat. Impending deaths in our family and our close friend’s family concurrently with some serious health problems of family members and legal problems that must be addressed in the next day. And the difference in a cell phone and a land line is that I’d would have just started receiving information a couple hours ago as opposed to a cell phone all day as things are happening. If the NSA wants to listen to conversations about carcinoma and metastasis then maybe they’ll learn something….as if they wouldn’t hear it on both. I bought my first cordless phone in 1980. It was big and clunky but I wasn’t bound to one spot when talking. I immediately found out how valuable it was in being able to go to something and describe it and get help in repairing it. Fixing it as we say. I kept buying better phones with better range. The day I found out just holding one phone in the window of the pickup could make it talk 3/8ths of a mile to the end of the driveway where a great many things are located like working pens, wells, other sources of electricity and equipment storage I was shickled titless. Best damned phone I ever had but all things wear out.

                  Cell phones even make hunting or fishing with a partner not only more productive but exciting at times. A cell phone was really the ticket after we heard gunshots in the pasture and then a friend calls and asks if we want some venison. He showed up and we butchered two deer, hung one in my barn, the other in his. I didn’t feel put out in any way by getting good news in a timely fashion.

                  Company legal problems with a truck and driver and the DOT revenooers. Shorthandedness, short truck-wise and the like.

        • For $30 per month, you can get a no contract phone with page plus…….if you have or want a cell phone(sail fawn).

          I wish I could get by without one, but business necessitates it. Unfortunately I need to be available when I’m not home. Sometimes have to send email when I’m not at home with a computer. It’s a technology I wish were never invented, then my competition wouldn’t have it. Since they do, I have one or go broke.

          My cell phone allows me to contribute money to EPautos that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to out of business.

          If you are in a situation that doesn’t necessitate one, as Eric and several others here are, I salute you. That is an enviable position to be in. If I sell my taxi business, I’ll still have to have a phone for my other venture….but not a damned-able “smart phone”.

          • Ancap, business does necessitate it. Typical conversation: Hey, we’re dying here, gotta have that(fill in the blank). Where is it? My company: Don’t know. Customer: Well , give me his cell number and I’ll see if I can help. My Company: he doesn’t have one. Customer:Oh, ok, well I guess we’ll get our stuff sometime(he’s thinking, what dolts, a driver without a cell phone? I’ll know to use XYZ next time.

            I’d love to live a life where getting in touch with people would simply be my choice(although I’ve had emergency calls from friends who are frantic when a little problem arises, like their spouse, and my very close friend, trying to stay alive in the ER or CCU). As far as being tracked, that’s fine since there is nothing connecting me to that number except cash on the barrelhead once a month.

            Actually, I have experienced in my youth, family members dying and asking for me and I couldn’t be contacted. All through the ages stuff like this has happened and people wished very much they could know of what’s happening to their family and friends. And that brings to mind the night Stevie Ray got killed and my phone rang off the hook.

  7. Eric,

    Always enjoy your rants, :), but I have to disagree with a few points, at lest for my preferences.

    I had a land line only until recently, then decided to ditch the land line.

    Simple plan with a free, as in no up front cost, phone. Very nice Moto G. Great android device that doubles as a fantastic GPS when hunting.
    ~$45/month for several times more than enough time for me, calls to anywhere in my country.
    Reachable? Well yes, but only if I want to be. Voicemail is a free screener. I’ll call back if I want.
    Texting. Brilliant if used appropriately. I have manners. If I am with others, I NEVER look at my phone, even if it vibrates. I chastise those who do in my presence for their inattention. It’s rude.

    Never place it against my head. I use the speaker option or a corded headset. Paranoid? Maybe. But no loss in being safe.

    When not in use, it sits in a nice silver cigarette case. Seems to be fully isolated in there. 😉

    Poor quality voice transmission is an issue sometimes. I did add a little copper trace sticker thingy to the case of my phone. No hard data, but it seems to be better from what I can tell.

    Tracking device? Yeah. But whoever is listening or following is dying a slow death from boredom. Hopefully I am wasting some of their time. 🙂

    Oh, cameras? Two layers of electrical tape over them. Selfie? Of me? Uhg.

    • Hi Me2,

      I still hate ’em!

      Mainly for the de-civilizing effect they have had. I’m geezing, I know – but I can still remember a world in which you could have a face to face conversation with people without a tinny “ring tone” interrupting it. When it was accepted (socially/culturally) to be unavailable because you weren’t near a phone. I despise the inhuman ubiquity of the damned things. The fact that they have destroyed privacy and private space. Infantilized the populace. Throw ’em in the woods!

      • eric, I think you have lost perspective…..plus the fact that cell phones have every bit as good of sound reproduction as any phone these days. I suspect you haven’t used one in quite a while. About 6-7 years ago they went digital and that reduced range but technology has once again trumped that problem for the most part. I did prefer analog, a much greater range and the ability to use an antenna on your vehicle to boost said range a great deal. I text very infrequently, mostly because of being out of range of voice but sometimes when I know someone is in a meeting but it’s imperative I contact them. Then there’s the picture issue. Millions of people take pics of every imaginable thing every day to do business. I have an engine problem, I can take a pic of the ID plate on it and send it to whomever needs specific info.

        I suspect you’ve never been trapped in a remote location with no way out but foot. That could be some serious walking in Texas and like many times this winter already, you’d have a hell of a time determining which direction was which when it’s (1)pitch black, (2)snow falling straight down or just socked in with fog. Walk out of Reagan county in the night with no stars and no visibility. Or even if you can see, take note of landmarks(yeah, I see I’m on a hill and it looks like there’s another hill about this size say 10-15 miles away that looks just like this one with nothing but mesquite trees in-between……oh wait, no, just heat shimmering, never mind, thought it was water but that’s not likely)and navigate somewhere. Hey, I see rig lights, I’m saved except it’s the trek from hell in front of me and I hope that mountain lion doesn’t see me.

        I use my cell phone many times a day to coordinate with other people tasked with another part of the same job I’m involved in. I’m in a hole, quite literally, a geological hole, and don’t have reception. Once out of that hole I find a missed call. I return call. Don’t bring what you just loaded someone will say, unload that and pick up something else. Good deal, cause getting a couple hundred miles to the delivery point and having to go back again is a drag. Rome wasn’t built in a day? No shit. And oil doesn’t come up and refine itself either but I’m tasked with making sure that happens whatever the problem may be. If a gas line has ruptured, somebody needs to know quickly. There is no going home, not today or tonight or maybe tomorrow. Hey, I just came on this guy unconscious and burned(this has happened recently). He’d probably rather die than have me use a sail fawn to call for help.

        Facebook is the biggest waste of time I think I have ever seen and so is sexting(not my thing for sure). But to say mobile communication is un-needed is ridiculous. We used to spend thousands of dollars on each FM radio in a vehicle, often 3 of them. That’s lots of cell phones and not nearly as reliable.

        There’s a good reason the company will spend $300 on a cell phone booster on a truck and it has nothing to do with Facebook. Maybe I’ve been working without a break for 18 hours and have many more to go. I get a call, forget it, it’s been put off. Go get some rest. Ah, thanks cell phone, that was the call I’ve been looking for. And just for the record, not having entertainment all day sucks. I’ve heard every song on every station I can get nearly everywhere or anywhere I can go and heard it a million times. Gee, I’d sure like to have some “good” music. Oh, I’ll just plug my phone into the radio and listen to Robert Earl Keen do Merry Christmas from the Family and that’ll give me a laugh I desperately need. Every tool has its place and need.

        If you had a time specific job, a static thing, you’d come to appreciate a cell phone like I do. And yes, at times that means just calling up someone and shooting the shit. I can only talk to equipment for so long before I began to doubt my sanity. I can speak to the loneliness factor of life and that cell phone can save my sanity.

      • Oh, I agree that the effects of the technology on the species are pretty dismal.

        However, the technology is not really the problem, the way the mindless masses use it is the issue. Bad manners aren’t limited to cell phones.

        Blaming the technology is kind of like blaming the PT Cruiser (not the driver) for driving badly. Inanimate objects do absolutely nothing, people do.

        That said, if they were never invented or made practical as opposed to the old briefcase size units, I wouldn’t really care. They are here so I use them, my way.

        • The “steel” sword, plow, hammer, hoe, shovel, gunpowder,etc. were all innovative technologies. I don’t see them as reducing the quality of life or intelligence.

          Bag phones=PITA but dang sure beat a pay phone. I used to get calls and sometimes just pushed the button cause I was busy enough not to want to hear it ring. I’d answer and then the bitching would start. “You sound like you’re in a well”, bitch bitch bitch. I’d be in the middle of a turn trying to get around some airhead who had to pulled too far forward for me to simply make a turn.

          My reply”hey, you called me and I can’t hold a phone and shift gears and turn a steering wheel and watch mirrors”. Then I’d get the old “Well, if you couldn’t talk(hey dumbass, we are talking)why did you answer it?” Me, cause I don’t want to hear the damned thing ring while I’m busy. Caller, Ok, you’re busy(hangs up). No skin off my butt if they think they’re somehow second-rate for being put on speakerphone……or back then they could have called my beeper……When I see an old movie with people looking at their beeper I cringe. Technology, it’s great.

          • My phone is always on vibrate. It never rings.

            I wish all phones were like that as it seems the norm to immediately pick it up and answer. Pavlovian response.

            Several times I have been in conversation with folks who, without excusing themselves, break off the conversation mid-sentance to answer their phone. I usually make a point of telling them ‘Pretty fucking rude to do what you just did’, and walk away. Left one guy standing in a parking lot yapping away (I drove him there) and drove off. About ten minutes later, he called. I let it go to voicemail and called back the next day to ask how he got home and if he would be so rude in the future. Don’t hear from him anymore.

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