Slashdot Mirror
When the Senate Tried To Ban Dial Telephones
An anonymous reader writes "With the Senate now looking to have the government block access to websites it deems to be bad (which seems to be called 'censorship' in other countries), it's worth pointing out that the Senate doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to deciding what technologies to ban. Back in 1930, some Senators came close to banning the dial telephone, because they felt that it was wrong that they had to do the labor themselves, rather than an operator at the other end."
"Gotta save those phone operators jobs!" This is really no different than those backwards member states (i.e. OR and NJ) that don't allow self-pumping of gasoline. They probably would outlaw self-dialing too if they had thought of it.
Every time I drive through NJ I pump my own gas, not because I'm anti-full service, but because they move so damn slow. I have better things to do than sit in my car for ten minutes waiting for an attendant to show up, especially if I still have a 2 hour drive ahead of me.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I hardly qualify as "older" and I honestly think self checkouts are a waste of time and resources. When they're properly maintained and every item is entered correctly in the system and has a bar code I'm sure they'd work perfectly. As a former retail checker for several years and a customer I know that's hardly ever the case. SKUs change too fast to keep up with sometimes and maintenance from the equipment vendors doesn't come often enough and they react too slow to emergencies. The number of times I've gotten stuck on "Please put your item in the bag" are too many because it can't detect the weight properly and not to mention it feels like the laser in the scanner is much weaker than the one on a proper checkout terminal. If there's an issue you have to wait for the single employee who manages at least four of those self checkouts to come over and fix it. Usually that means waiting for them to finish with the other one or two customers with issues.
They tried to ban the dial telephone because the operator's union had a lot of clout in congress and was afraid of losing jobs.
Remember, every piece of legislation that goes through congress has a special interest group behind it.
I realize that grocery stores actually operate on pretty thin margins; but I have a very hard time believing that the fairly elaborate(and deeply buggy and annoying) "theft prevention" mechanisms in the self checkouts actually work well enough to justify their existence.
Pretty much every item in the store is marked with the weight of its contents, and the packaging weights within classes of objects don't vary too much(ie pound of shitty store-brand coffee vs. pound of the good stuff). Even an amateur should be able to break the weight-based verification system without breaking a sweat; but it is inevitably either failing to register my small items or freaking out because I've accidentally left the corner of my bag of earlier purchases just slightly on the scale. I'd assume that, if you are one of the pros(stealing mass quantities of baby formula to cut your drugs with or whatever) it isn't rocket surgery to haul out a scale and work out precise weights for your UPC swap scheme. Never mind, of course, that the checkout system doesn't know that it exists if you don't scan it.
I have to imagine that it would be more efficient to have one loss prevention/old lady helper dude watching over 4 or 5 checkouts that focus on efficiency, rather than paranoia, instead of having zero humans watching a bank of paranoid but ineffectual self-checkout units...
Now, it's true that the resolution only impacted the Senate -- but when another Senator asked why they didn't ban dial phones from all of Washington DC, Senator Carter Glass from Virginia who sponsored the resolution apparently said that "he hoped the phone company would take the hint," and would remove all dial phones.
Do you want your local supermarket to "get the hint" and stop selling toilet paper?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
When I rented a car in Oregon, learning that I wasn't allowed to fill it, was a totally weird experience. And when the guy told me "You can't, state law," seriously, I thought he was pulling this tourist's leg. It had to be a scam. It just had to.
It wasn't.
I wonder if Oregonians feel that same strangeness when they pull up at a non-OR gas station and nobody comes out to "help" them.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Show me a Scandinavian country that has the kind of spending US has on military, pork spending, education spending, medical spending. Whatever US gov't is doing, it always ends up spending more than anybody else.
US is not built as a monarchy, right? It was the first (the only) country to be built as an attempt to be different, democratic republic, not affected by monarchy and special interests, using free market, but it's failing.
It's failing because the Constitution is not strict enough to make the free market work, it allows the special interests to take over and to distort the market to give power to special interest.
Certainly it is possible to have an economy not based on Free Market, but that economy is NEVER going to produce the same advances and progress as an economy that has Free Market. The economy that has no Free Market may appear to be more stable for a longer period of time, eventually it will succumb to the global changes and shift of labor to the more competitive parts of the world, like US did. Scandinavian countries are over-borrowing and under-producing, all having trade deficits and will have the same sad outcomes, but theirs will come later as they do not do it on the same scale.
The rate of change is about the scale of things that are done.
You can't handle the truth.
Of course if I have to put up with one more cashier that can't count and can't speak I may use self checkout more.
Or shop somewhere else.