The OP video actually addressed this: He went to the physical box office, and they seem to be able to print individual tickets. Just not a season ticket, for some reason.
No, it's not. If you are physically incapable of operating a piece of technology, the ADA covers reasonable accommodations for that. If you are simply unwilling to learn how to use a piece of technology, it doesn't and shouldn't cover that.
I love technology but having to give money to google and apple should not be a reason with stop people from doing things that CLEARLY don't need technology.
Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.
If your ticket was in the form of a piece of music that you had to perform on your violin to gain entry, would you feel the same way? Keep in mind, it’s only in the last 15 years that playing the violin in this world became commonplace and only in the past 5 that these performances became required to access common goods and services. Violins also still cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Look at how conveniently you chose to ignore the fan's age, attributing his behaviour to unwilling or luddite! Or do you really have absolutely no idea, what it means to be 81 years old? Still, I would bet you have met at least some people of such an age.
The problem with this argument is that forcing people to use technology, without proper training and against their will, introduces them to risks as well. Anyone with older parents/family can tell you the harms that come with phishing and other fraud scenarios that cost more than just accommodating people not using technology, both at the micro and macro level. Insulting people and bullying them into technology adoption when there are relatively simple fixes to the problem seem better than increasing risk exposure for no reason other than 'I believe that people who don't use technology are somehow lesser'.
I don't think the discourse is about just this one guy, it's about an entire class of people for whom swiping around a smartphone is a bewildering experience they managed to live their whole life so far without. If you're not adept at it, it makes you feel stupid, maybe you haven't had that experience but there's more to being a luddite than stubbornness.
If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
> If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
I would agree. It also seems unreasonable to expect the organization to make an exception to a completely legitimate anti-scalping measure for one person.
Why not? Going to a Dodgers game is not a constitutional right, if the business wants to make it harder for people to give them money that might be stupid but it's their right.
Do you know how many old people get scammed per year in the United States because they are using technology that they are trained on, but assume that they have to use the technology in order to function each year with minimal practical gain relative to the costs? Its around 12.5 billion dollars in 2024, up from 10 billion in 2023 [1]. Why is introducing someone to that risk worth it to watch a baseball game?
Asserting that individual 'get smart' doesn't actually solve for the actual harms and if it were just simple, we would not be seeing the upward trends in fraud that we are seeing within the elderly.
80 year old people do not have the same neuroplasticity as 20 year olds. It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
In particular, it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
> It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
Of course it is. Maybe if we didn't normalize people refusing to learn things for no other reason than "I don't wanna" they'd have better neuroplasticity.
> it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
I agree with you 100% on this but it doesn't logically follow from that that you get to make the Will Call clerk for the Dodgers print your ticket for every game even though you've been told for multiple years that season tickets are going paperless as an anti-scalping measure.
Then it’s reasonable to expect ticket sellers to use modern technology to implement zero-knowledge, physical rfid token, etc measures that prevent scalping.
The technology does exist, but it might take more effort than a lazy smartphone app - that probably isn’t effective against scalping anyway. Can’t a phone app / QR code etc be forged?
In this case nobody is forcing them to buy a dodgers ticket. It’s a completely optional and absurdly expensive luxury good that is purely for leisure. They can simply not but a ticket if they don't want to accept conditions of sale.
Yeah... I mean, who says I should have to put in wheelchair ramps for my ballpark that seats tens of thousands? I mean, so few people use/need them, I should just be able to refuse service to those people. Right?
So, you want to force people to give money to specific, monopolistic, corporations? Why would I want a smart phone if I'm blind... how am I expected to use a smart phone when I am blind, exactly?
Because quality of life doesn't have a value in of itself. Especially for the elderly, they should be excluded from enjoying the end of their life simply because no wants to think of a solution to the problem that doesn't require them to introduce massive amounts of risk into their life which, also, negatively impacts their quality of life.
Most Amish under 30 have secret cell phones. It would only be the oldest generations without them. There are even lots of wink & nod arrangements where they may even have electricity in some outbuilding but they unplug it when elder comes to visit. It also depends on the Order as some are more strict than others. They generally aren't allowed to have electricity in "the house" but batteries and other workarounds exist.
They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.
[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]
There are large populations of Amish who don't use cell phones, landline phones, or anything. The closest they'd get to a phone call is asking a neighbour to call 911 in an emergency (assuming they're even willing to do that).
One group I am aware of will only use a payphone in the nearest town. They actually filed to force AT&T to keep a payphone there because the relevant tariff required AT&T to do so, and were the only people who ever bothered to make AT&T do this. So there is one payphone in that town that they go to and drop their quarters in to make phone calls.
They don't really receive special accommodation for not using technology outside of being allowed to submit some required tax forms on paper instead of e-filing them, the logic being that the government requires them to do so under pain of punishment, so the government has to find a way to let them do it without violating their religious beliefs.
But there is not a general accommodation provided.
I was referring specifically to the idea that the Americans with Disabilities Act should cover people who simply choose not to utilize or learn a particular piece of technology which has been around for the better part of two decades.
The "poor people don't belong in society?!?" trope is completely different (and kind of boring).
Well context is important and this was in directly response to the (spurious strawman) claim that if you can't spend $500 on a phone then you are excluded from society.
Technology is often an issue for elderly people not because of disability or unwillingness, but because they lack the literacy, cognitive or motor skills necessary to operate technology that they are not familiar with. Many of them worked an entire career and retired before PC or cellphones were commonplace.
Maybe you are so familiar with computing that you take computing skills for granted.... but things like Solitaire were included in Windows explicitly to train people how to use a mouse. These skills are second nature to us but they aren't something we are born with.
"The importance of the move may be largely symbolic at this point, as it does not apply to generic medicines - the most commonly used medicines in the US."
Fellow panelist David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said his system is already seeing great success in deploying such technology. The AI Westchester uses misses very few breast cancers and is “actually better than human beings,” he told the audience.
“For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said.
Sounds like 3 wrongs are an acceptable level of risk for this CEO. It would be interesting to put radiologists up against AI to see which have better results, but I would still rather a human read my chart and then have AI give the second opinion, rather than the other way around.
QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
My experience at a research university, albeit 12 years ago, was that many of my professors loathed teaching. Some openly expressed disdain for the time they wasted teaching when they could be researching. I think a better framework in the future would be to have researchers, and lecturers/teaching professors separate. One is to teach, the other is to research.
I disagree. Coming froma PhD background, the researchers that spend all of their time investigating the intricacies of their field are the most qualified to train up the next generation of researchers. This isn't primary and secondary schooling, where the syllabus evolves at a slow pace. To teach how to research, you need people doing the research.
If we split them up, then the teachers will only be able to teach what they have theoretically learned from literature only. What we need is for institutions to reward teaching, reward students who excel and most importantly, reward teachers who produce excellent students.
Disdain for teaching should not be the norm. After all, what are they doing if not teaching when they publish a paper, or give a talk at conferences? Might as well be a hermit scientist then.
I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an account after some time they will repurpose it.
I disagree, there are security implications if an account was previously linked to someone but then it’s repurposed allowing for fraudulent social engineering use to occur. It’s like as if Gmail gave your email to someone else after a while. They don’t because it’s a bad idea.
Yes, that’s why I don’t recommend people use a custom domain when signing up for accounts given they can eventually be used by someone else. Use email providers that don’t allow your email address to be reused ie gmail, apple
I'm confused about that. I was pretty sure that Google's policy was that, while they'll delete inactive accounts, the addresses don't become available for use. I thought those addresses were basically dead.
But at least one poster says they're reusing addresses.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr, and
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman
Extremely insightful about how much it cost to run a grocery store, where profits go, who the food suppliers really are, etc. Very eyeopening.
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