11 ms·

My Dad is in his early 70's and has never used the Internet. In fact, he never even had a cellphone until this year when I bought him a flip-phone and convince

My Dad is in his early 70's and has never used the Internet. In fact, he never even had a cellphone until this year when I bought him a flip-phone and convinced him to accept it. I think he's plenty capable of learning such technology, he just doesn't see any compelling reason. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable choice -- I'm certainly not going to tell a senior citizen what they need to be happy. He is starting to run into some practical problems. For example, the local library apparently stopped stocking all the paper IRS forms.

kxrm 8y ago
Side note: he should be able to get those forms at the post office.
- astura 8y ago
  The IRS will also mail them plus the directions if you call and ask. Also, the library has internet access, so the librarian should be able to print them.
SamUK96 8y ago
Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. Part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing [citation needed, I know]. Part of me thinks that the easy way now where we can do IRS forms (and everything) online and to our door of our houses, will make us weak. There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times, but I think i'm going on a tangent from the disappearance of paper IRS forms at local libraries...
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. I'm not sure why. Libraries are still massively popular, and most have embraced digital media fully. In many of the cities where I've been in the last 10 years, the libraries are struggling to keep up with demand. Many even have coffee shops and internet cafes. In my estimation, a lot of people under 40 think the library is empty all the time because they've never been to one to see what it offers. It's like how people say they don't watch PBS because there's nothing good on. But how do they know there's nothing good on if they don't watch?
- xvector 8y ago
  > part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authentic as interaction in real life. > There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times Contemporary moral systems look down on suffering. As engineers, we should strive to create a society where suffering and "hard times" are eliminated. The end-goal is everyone being able to enjoy life with tragedies and hardships eliminated. This is not to say that we should get rid of all intellectual challenges - just that (by any contemporary moral system) it should be the end goal to rid ourselves of suffering.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. I don't find looking at a person on a screen makes me feel "close" to them anymore than watching a person on a television show. The people I feel "close" to are people I see in real life. But maybe I have a different definition of "close" than other people.
    - xvector 8y ago
      This was intended more towards people you don't normally see face to face. My parents live across the country. I can maybe see them twice a year. My college friends have moved elsewhere, but we can definitely play a game of DnD over Hangouts and Roll20. My relatives live abroad, but I still get (virtual) face-to-face time with them. This would have been incomprehensible 100 years ago, and is a huge innovation in terms of bringing humans closer together. Sure, if you decide to start communicating with your roommate over FaceTime rather than actually talking to them in person, you're going to experience a decline in "closeness", but if you use these technologies normally, I think they absolutely have the potential to maintain strong connections where none could have existed before.
    - 8y ago
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I've never heard that quote before but it's pretty solid. :)
- jonstaab 8y ago
  The quote is from Herodotus Book 9 Chapter 122, "Soft lands breed soft men", by Cyrus the Persian. Reference: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126:book=9:chapter=122 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
  - SamUK96 8y ago
    Oh wow thank you! I have wondered for years where it has come from. I love the following sentence: "...wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.". This all is reminding me of another saying, a spartan one. A Spartan woman was asked why they do not submit to their men, and she replied with "strong men are not born from weak women". If anyone is liking these forms of phrases (short, insightful), there is a word just for it: Laconic [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
- bernardino 8y ago
  You are definitely onto something. I'm going to skew this comment towards something similar. As an early twenty-something, I'm urging more friends and family to stop using the internet loosely - meaning, use the medium as a tool but not as a form of entertainment. Extensively, use it as little as possible. I'm not saying reject the medium but rather try to be acutely aware of how it affects things: perception, mind, body, people, culture, etc. Especially, and this doesn't have to do solely with the internet, try to take an objective view of yourself and your life. In my teens, I used to play a lot of video games and surf the internet for 2/3rds of the day, every day. One late evening, I had to take out the trash to my backyard where the trash-bin was. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but late evenings are one of the greatest times of the day - it's just honeyed indolence. Well, from outside in my backyard, I noticed my room, I saw all the light coming from my television and my computer. It was sad. That was most of my life. That room. Since then, I try to use technology less and try to be outside as much as I can. But to the point, please take notice of things. Alas, further reading: Don DeLillo's White Noise.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Is HN a tool or entertainment?
    - bernardino 8y ago
      Definitely a tool or at least, mostly a tool - I continue to learn a lot from the site, largely from the comments but also from the links to articles, etc. I suppose it's important to define tool and entertainment. As I see it: A tool is something that helps you grow, create, learn, etc. Entertainment, on the other hand, is something with no intention of helping you, it's only for gratification purposes. For instance, I think, mindlessly scrolling through reddit.com is a form of entertainment. But if you are subscribed to only certain particular subs in order, for example, to become a better writer, that would be a tool. This is a shaky example though.
      - Bromskloss 8y ago
        > I continue to learn a lot from the site To me, that makes it entertainment, though I guess learning things can be useful for work too. :-)
x0x0 8y ago
My parents were internet-free until they figured out that a smartphone could show them pictures of grandkids. My siblings with kids were printing and mailing them pictures, but out parents were cut out of the daily fb updates of their grandchildren.
- megaremote 8y ago
  It is funny, I think that is pretty standard stuff, getting instant photos. But it is actually a huge change compared to how things were 20 years ago.
cm2187 8y ago
What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.
- pixkpr 8y ago
  Age? How many young kids are curious about how plumbing works or lawnmower engines? It probably has more to do with you and your friends being curious about something and not understanding why other people in general aren't curious about it.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  For many people who started worked before the 80’s, using a keyboard is for clerical work, and a sign of reduced social status.
- nine_k 8y ago
  If you spent your life becoming very efficient in a particular environment, there's an incentive to keep this environment from changing, and not to expend any effort to learn a new environment. That learning capacity can be more efficiently spent elsewhere. (An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)
  - hinkley 8y ago
    A big component of mastery is wiring your brain to make the right decision without sweating over the details like you did when you were 25. Replacing problem solving with intuition. But what happens 20 years later when your intuition is no longer correct? Or when someone keeps asking why? You’re out of practice, And you’re trying to rewire a part of your brain that is no longer part of your internal dialog. Teaching seems to be one way to avoid this. You have to keep defending your decisions. Switching specializations (or creating new ones) is another. The only other way I know is to seek outside help, and that level of humility is rare in experts.
stephengillie 8y ago
My 70-something parents keep their cell phones at home, since they are so nice, so nothing happens to them. They carry pens and paper if they need to track something. My dad was a privacy-conscious bus driver in the 1980s, and has always had an unlisted number. These days, I know he's calling because caller ID shows "Private Number" when he calls.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  They carry pens and paper if they need to track something. I do, too. And in the nerdiest possible way: https://logostore-globalid.us/ProductDetail.aspx?did=17363&pid=83730&logoid=0 https://logostore-globalid.us/ProductDetail.aspx?did=17363&p... And it's super cheap!
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    This looks like a great gift. Thanks for the idea!
- CalRobert 8y ago
  These days I know it's my dad calling because he's the only one who actually makes plain-old telephone calls.
dghughes 8y ago
Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software? In Canada you sign up at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA is Canada's IRS) and get a log on. Then at tax time you can download free tax software from links on the CRA website, click auto-fill to populate with your info and then click the e-file button. That's it, done. My dad in his mid 70s probably wouldn't do it so your dad may not either if it was available in the US. But it is a great feature to have it makes it almost to the point of why is anyone doing this it should be automatic each year.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  > Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software? No. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-hero https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
  - Bromskloss 8y ago
    I used to think making it more automatic was a clearly good idea _until_ I listened to that episode and was introduced to the counter-argument that people should well know what taxes they pay, to make it harder to sneak things in there or make the existing things swell without scrutiny.
    - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
      This is why there's automatic withholding of income tax from your paycheck. If you never see it, you're less likely to miss it. The whole system is designed to try to keep you from realizing how much you pay.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  Many companies sell software to do US taxes for you and an automated system would shut them down overnight so they spend a lot of money blocking any changes to make tax easy.
- TheCapeGreek 8y ago
  Here in South Africa, you give your employer(s) your tax number and for ordinary employment they report your earnings. Then come tax time, you log onto the e-filing system and most of it is done for you already.
siruncledrew 8y ago
That's perfectly fine. To the vast majority of HN, the internet may be the 2nd most time consuming aspect of our lives after family life (or perhaps the 1st). So much of our lives revolves around the internet - maintaining friendships, getting into careers, learning new things - that we've become almost inseparable from the revolutionary communication it provides. Yet, as amazing as the internet can be, it's still what you make of it. There's users with greatly varying proficiencies with vastly different use cases. Some people just aren't as accustomed to it as others. For us younger folks, it's easier to take something for granted when you've had it basically your entire life. A person who is 50-60 years old (born between 1958-1968) was in their 20s-30s when the internet was becoming mainstream. As someone in their 20s that thinks "wtf are these kids talking about" when a teenage cousin explains the internet culture of "vlogging", I could imagine some of the people back when the internet first came about were like "wtf I can send mails to other people over the telephone wires that's not telegraph and is done by computers" (I'm exaggerating). As you can see by standard adoption curves, there's always a group of last remaining holdouts. Maybe they've gotten by fine in life without adopting and don't feel compelled to bother. As the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". These people carry with them what seems to be a soon-to-be historical lifestyle that's still important to remember.

kxrm 8y ago

Side note: he should be able to get those forms at the post office.

astura 8y ago
The IRS will also mail them plus the directions if you call and ask. Also, the library has internet access, so the librarian should be able to print them.

SamUK96 8y ago

Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. Part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing [citation needed, I know]. Part of me thinks that the easy way now where we can do IRS forms (and everything) online and to our door of our houses, will make us weak. There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times, but I think i'm going on a tangent from the disappearance of paper IRS forms at local libraries...

reaperducer 8y ago
Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. I'm not sure why. Libraries are still massively popular, and most have embraced digital media fully. In many of the cities where I've been in the last 10 years, the libraries are struggling to keep up with demand. Many even have coffee shops and internet cafes. In my estimation, a lot of people under 40 think the library is empty all the time because they've never been to one to see what it offers. It's like how people say they don't watch PBS because there's nothing good on. But how do they know there's nothing good on if they don't watch?
xvector 8y ago
> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authentic as interaction in real life. > There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times Contemporary moral systems look down on suffering. As engineers, we should strive to create a society where suffering and "hard times" are eliminated. The end-goal is everyone being able to enjoy life with tragedies and hardships eliminated. This is not to say that we should get rid of all intellectual challenges - just that (by any contemporary moral system) it should be the end goal to rid ourselves of suffering.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. I don't find looking at a person on a screen makes me feel "close" to them anymore than watching a person on a television show. The people I feel "close" to are people I see in real life. But maybe I have a different definition of "close" than other people.
  - xvector 8y ago
    This was intended more towards people you don't normally see face to face. My parents live across the country. I can maybe see them twice a year. My college friends have moved elsewhere, but we can definitely play a game of DnD over Hangouts and Roll20. My relatives live abroad, but I still get (virtual) face-to-face time with them. This would have been incomprehensible 100 years ago, and is a huge innovation in terms of bringing humans closer together. Sure, if you decide to start communicating with your roommate over FaceTime rather than actually talking to them in person, you're going to experience a decline in "closeness", but if you use these technologies normally, I think they absolutely have the potential to maintain strong connections where none could have existed before.
  - 8y ago
wuliwong 8y ago
I've never heard that quote before but it's pretty solid. :)
jonstaab 8y ago
The quote is from Herodotus Book 9 Chapter 122, "Soft lands breed soft men", by Cyrus the Persian. Reference: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126:book=9:chapter=122 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
- SamUK96 8y ago
  Oh wow thank you! I have wondered for years where it has come from. I love the following sentence: "...wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.". This all is reminding me of another saying, a spartan one. A Spartan woman was asked why they do not submit to their men, and she replied with "strong men are not born from weak women". If anyone is liking these forms of phrases (short, insightful), there is a word just for it: Laconic [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
bernardino 8y ago
You are definitely onto something. I'm going to skew this comment towards something similar. As an early twenty-something, I'm urging more friends and family to stop using the internet loosely - meaning, use the medium as a tool but not as a form of entertainment. Extensively, use it as little as possible. I'm not saying reject the medium but rather try to be acutely aware of how it affects things: perception, mind, body, people, culture, etc. Especially, and this doesn't have to do solely with the internet, try to take an objective view of yourself and your life. In my teens, I used to play a lot of video games and surf the internet for 2/3rds of the day, every day. One late evening, I had to take out the trash to my backyard where the trash-bin was. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but late evenings are one of the greatest times of the day - it's just honeyed indolence. Well, from outside in my backyard, I noticed my room, I saw all the light coming from my television and my computer. It was sad. That was most of my life. That room. Since then, I try to use technology less and try to be outside as much as I can. But to the point, please take notice of things. Alas, further reading: Don DeLillo's White Noise.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Is HN a tool or entertainment?
  - bernardino 8y ago
    Definitely a tool or at least, mostly a tool - I continue to learn a lot from the site, largely from the comments but also from the links to articles, etc. I suppose it's important to define tool and entertainment. As I see it: A tool is something that helps you grow, create, learn, etc. Entertainment, on the other hand, is something with no intention of helping you, it's only for gratification purposes. For instance, I think, mindlessly scrolling through reddit.com is a form of entertainment. But if you are subscribed to only certain particular subs in order, for example, to become a better writer, that would be a tool. This is a shaky example though.
    - Bromskloss 8y ago
      > I continue to learn a lot from the site To me, that makes it entertainment, though I guess learning things can be useful for work too. :-)

x0x0 8y ago

My parents were internet-free until they figured out that a smartphone could show them pictures of grandkids. My siblings with kids were printing and mailing them pictures, but out parents were cut out of the daily fb updates of their grandchildren.

megaremote 8y ago
It is funny, I think that is pretty standard stuff, getting instant photos. But it is actually a huge change compared to how things were 20 years ago.

cm2187 8y ago

What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.

pixkpr 8y ago
Age? How many young kids are curious about how plumbing works or lawnmower engines? It probably has more to do with you and your friends being curious about something and not understanding why other people in general aren't curious about it.
mr_toad 8y ago
For many people who started worked before the 80’s, using a keyboard is for clerical work, and a sign of reduced social status.
nine_k 8y ago
If you spent your life becoming very efficient in a particular environment, there's an incentive to keep this environment from changing, and not to expend any effort to learn a new environment. That learning capacity can be more efficiently spent elsewhere. (An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)
- hinkley 8y ago
  A big component of mastery is wiring your brain to make the right decision without sweating over the details like you did when you were 25. Replacing problem solving with intuition. But what happens 20 years later when your intuition is no longer correct? Or when someone keeps asking why? You’re out of practice, And you’re trying to rewire a part of your brain that is no longer part of your internal dialog. Teaching seems to be one way to avoid this. You have to keep defending your decisions. Switching specializations (or creating new ones) is another. The only other way I know is to seek outside help, and that level of humility is rare in experts.

stephengillie 8y ago

My 70-something parents keep their cell phones at home, since they are so nice, so nothing happens to them. They carry pens and paper if they need to track something. My dad was a privacy-conscious bus driver in the 1980s, and has always had an unlisted number. These days, I know he's calling because caller ID shows "Private Number" when he calls.

reaperducer 8y ago
They carry pens and paper if they need to track something. I do, too. And in the nerdiest possible way: https://logostore-globalid.us/ProductDetail.aspx?did=17363&pid=83730&logoid=0 https://logostore-globalid.us/ProductDetail.aspx?did=17363&p... And it's super cheap!
- stephengillie 8y ago
  This looks like a great gift. Thanks for the idea!
CalRobert 8y ago
These days I know it's my dad calling because he's the only one who actually makes plain-old telephone calls.

dghughes 8y ago

Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software? In Canada you sign up at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA is Canada's IRS) and get a log on. Then at tax time you can download free tax software from links on the CRA website, click auto-fill to populate with your info and then click the e-file button. That's it, done. My dad in his mid 70s probably wouldn't do it so your dad may not either if it was available in the US. But it is a great feature to have it makes it almost to the point of why is anyone doing this it should be automatic each year.

jonny_eh 8y ago
> Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software? No. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-hero https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
- Bromskloss 8y ago
  I used to think making it more automatic was a clearly good idea _until_ I listened to that episode and was introduced to the counter-argument that people should well know what taxes they pay, to make it harder to sneak things in there or make the existing things swell without scrutiny.
  - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    This is why there's automatic withholding of income tax from your paycheck. If you never see it, you're less likely to miss it. The whole system is designed to try to keep you from realizing how much you pay.
Qwertie 8y ago
Many companies sell software to do US taxes for you and an automated system would shut them down overnight so they spend a lot of money blocking any changes to make tax easy.
TheCapeGreek 8y ago
Here in South Africa, you give your employer(s) your tax number and for ordinary employment they report your earnings. Then come tax time, you log onto the e-filing system and most of it is done for you already.

siruncledrew 8y ago

That's perfectly fine. To the vast majority of HN, the internet may be the 2nd most time consuming aspect of our lives after family life (or perhaps the 1st). So much of our lives revolves around the internet - maintaining friendships, getting into careers, learning new things - that we've become almost inseparable from the revolutionary communication it provides. Yet, as amazing as the internet can be, it's still what you make of it. There's users with greatly varying proficiencies with vastly different use cases. Some people just aren't as accustomed to it as others. For us younger folks, it's easier to take something for granted when you've had it basically your entire life. A person who is 50-60 years old (born between 1958-1968) was in their 20s-30s when the internet was becoming mainstream. As someone in their 20s that thinks "wtf are these kids talking about" when a teenage cousin explains the internet culture of "vlogging", I could imagine some of the people back when the internet first came about were like "wtf I can send mails to other people over the telephone wires that's not telegraph and is done by computers" (I'm exaggerating). As you can see by standard adoption curves, there's always a group of last remaining holdouts. Maybe they've gotten by fine in life without adopting and don't feel compelled to bother. As the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". These people carry with them what seems to be a soon-to-be historical lifestyle that's still important to remember.