Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.
I remember one service, a weather service that many private fishermen used was ended last year I think. Now they go without or they may need to subscribe to an expensive satellite service that is probably worse than the one that ended.
There is a larger pattern here worth noting: old tech atrophies in the presence of new tech. For example, stores that stop taking cash. Books that stop publishing on paper. Music that has no physical media distribution. The problem is that the conditions of the new tech are almost always far more fragile and centralized (!) than the old tech.
Broadcast radio and TV is (and newspaper, and telephone lines) are, ironically, a more resilient and distributed form of information distribution than the internet in many ways. The internet itself becomes the bottleneck; the power-law distributed control becomes the bottleneck; the devices (and all their security and psychological downsides) become terrible yet indispensable.
For every middle manager gung ho to replace paper with an iPad and an app, I say: find something else to do with your time. You're making the world actively worse.
https://archive.ph/rLyXv
They better start dancing and distill their news into 10” video chunks. This is how we consume news today.
Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.
I remember one service, a weather service that many private fishermen used was ended last year I think. Now they go without or they may need to subscribe to an expensive satellite service that is probably worse than the one that ended.
There is a larger pattern here worth noting: old tech atrophies in the presence of new tech. For example, stores that stop taking cash. Books that stop publishing on paper. Music that has no physical media distribution. The problem is that the conditions of the new tech are almost always far more fragile and centralized (!) than the old tech.
Broadcast radio and TV is (and newspaper, and telephone lines) are, ironically, a more resilient and distributed form of information distribution than the internet in many ways. The internet itself becomes the bottleneck; the power-law distributed control becomes the bottleneck; the devices (and all their security and psychological downsides) become terrible yet indispensable.
For every middle manager gung ho to replace paper with an iPad and an app, I say: find something else to do with your time. You're making the world actively worse.
I thought you meant the British Shipping Forecast, which for some reason I thought stopped a few years back, but apparently it’s still a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast