I volunteer supporting a school that has several POTS landlines still. But the infrastructure seems to be rotting. We're moving off of them as fast as we can, because they go down all the time now. That never used to be a problem back in the day. Who in the world would have thought that cell phones would ever be more reliable than landlines for emergency systems like the fire alarm?
Vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants
to anymore.
The irony is that a lead-acid battery, a carbon granule microphone and
an electromagnetic earpiece represent the simplest technology which I
understood as a 7 year old - enough to build my own telephone so
friends could talk from the tree house. Even the electromagnetic
routers that use pulse dialling are simple enough for a kid to
understand.
This is now third-world tech that we can't keep up with [0].
The death of fundamental expertise permeates the western "post
industrial" world now. People who know how basic stuff works and can
maintain it are dying out or giving up. They're being replaced by a
generation raised on smartphone apps and wishful thinking.
Maybe the demise of Boeing is the template to watch for the next 10
years as more things fall apart under the gross mismanagement by a
deluded corporate class.
Of course those of us who dabble in things like "physics and
engineering" and do stuff like "resilience and planning" are just
Luddites and old men who shout at clouds, right?
Comments
My parents' "landline" has 5G backhaul now. Landlines are like X11: vanishingly few people know how to maintain them, and nobody wants to anymore.
I volunteer supporting a school that has several POTS landlines still. But the infrastructure seems to be rotting. We're moving off of them as fast as we can, because they go down all the time now. That never used to be a problem back in the day. Who in the world would have thought that cell phones would ever be more reliable than landlines for emergency systems like the fire alarm?
The irony is that a lead-acid battery, a carbon granule microphone and an electromagnetic earpiece represent the simplest technology which I understood as a 7 year old - enough to build my own telephone so friends could talk from the tree house. Even the electromagnetic routers that use pulse dialling are simple enough for a kid to understand.
This is now third-world tech that we can't keep up with [0].
The death of fundamental expertise permeates the western "post industrial" world now. People who know how basic stuff works and can maintain it are dying out or giving up. They're being replaced by a generation raised on smartphone apps and wishful thinking.
Maybe the demise of Boeing is the template to watch for the next 10 years as more things fall apart under the gross mismanagement by a deluded corporate class.
Of course those of us who dabble in things like "physics and engineering" and do stuff like "resilience and planning" are just Luddites and old men who shout at clouds, right?
[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=25