Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

Just wanted to see how far behind the times I am.

Yup, they're cheaper in the long run if you do a lot of talking. There are no 'boundary lines' or toll calls. Of course, it'll depend on the plan you buy. But most all are free after 9pm and on weekends.
Ed and I have been known to talk for hours and it doesn't cost us a dime more. And, that's from and to Arkansas to Georgia.

My phone wasn't working right and I finally broke down and bought a new one, it's a cordless (not a cell phone) and that was a huge step for me. I won't get a cell phone since brain cancer runs in my family and I don't want to tempt fate. Also, you should never carry a cell phone on your hip if you are a guy who is looking to replicate yurself since they do affect sperm.

Debbie and I both have one. Hers costs $45. (prepaid) a month and that gives her unlimited local and long distance, at any time - day or night (calls can be made form anywhere to anywhere, unlike MetroPCS where you're limited in the originating point). The best thing about hers is; when we bought it we also bought a prepaid card and when we activated her phone the only information we had to give them was the number on the back of the prepaid card. No name, address or anything. We pay cash for the cards so there's no way that anyone could find out who owns the phone.
'Course the Feds are trying to change that.

My phone is also prepaid but mine costs 10 cents a minute. I buy a prepaid card for $30. and I get 300 minutes or 60 days, whichever comes first. If the 60 days comes up before I use the 300 minutes, whatever minutes I had left roll over into the next 60 days. At one time I had about 1200 minutes built up.
The only reason I keep my phone and not get one like Debbie's is because I like my phone a lot better than the one's they offer for Debbie's plan. I paid $30. for the phone and it's the best cell phone I've ever had (and I've had a few). It's a Nokia; in my opinion - one of the best manufacturers of cell phones. Debbie's is an LG. It's OK but not near as good a phone as the Nokia.
Debbie's phone also costs $30. to buy.

We did away with our land line about a year ago. We just no longer have a need for it.

Edit 1: I forgot to mention one thing. Neither phone requires a 'service agreement' (contract).

Hawk, the type of phone you use is called a "burner" in The Wire. Now the government probably thinks you're some kind of Georgian drug lord. :)

nedfumpkin wrote:Hawk, the type of phone you use is called a "burner" in The Wire.

Burner, disposable, throw away. For $30. if we use it for a year it's paid for itself and can be then 'thrown away' and replaced with a new one.

nedfumpkin wrote:Now the government probably thinks you're some kind of Georgian drug lord. :)

At least if the Feds are spending their time trying to decide if I'm a drug runner, maybe that will take away from the time they can hassle someone else.
All they can do though is use GPS to find out where the phone is. They have no way to prove it belongs to us, if we were to throw it away or something.

I wish car technology would have moved as fast a cell phone tech. Driverless car should have been here by at least 1995!

I'm not aboard the hype train for driverless cars. They scare me. Maybe this is partly because I don't trust car manufacturers.

The terrain where I live makes a cell phone impractical, too many hills and narrow hollows running every which way. More dead zones than anything. Add to that that it's rather thinly populated and, no matter how driven by greed they may be, no cell carrier is willing to drop the millions for all the towers it would take to make it worthwhile to have a cell phone. Heck, this region is so unprofitable for tech firms that Verizon pulled out and handed off its telephone/DSL operations to Frontier, which if you never heard of, be thankful. And cable, hah! don't get me started on how long it took and how much it cost to get a coaxial wire strung to my house. Mild exaggeration: It would almost have been cheaper to knock down that hill that is in the way of a sat-link. If I could convince a coal company there was a coal seam in that hill, they'd do it for me. Maybe even pay me. Oh, the irony.

RulerofRails wrote:I'm not aboard the hype train for driverless cars. They scare me. Maybe this is partly because I don't trust car manufacturers.

Remember at first it was not the Car cos. pushing this tech. It was google & other tech cos. Plus before car one of the ways people got home was a trolly. The *Internet* said evil car industry bought out & shutdown most trolly-like systems in the USA. Besides if the Car companies had their way, we would still driving in version 72 of model T!

Now driving down Interstate, any roads during daylight. Traffic Jams! No problem.

My leap of faith would be to let it make a decision @ a Stop Sign. Drive though traffic lights @ night or any Construction Zone!

Another thing I've always pondered. When was the first car moved by Railroad? Were they forced? What did the RR CEO of the time think of that?

At the time Henry Ford turned things into a shape we might recognize, the automobile was considered a novelty for the rich (only). So the railroads didn't feel threatened. Even when Ford said he meant to sell a car so cheap that everyone could afford one, the railroad execs simply though Ford was a fool. Others had tried and failed. Even when Ford set up a huge factory (with borrowed money) in Michigan, the railroad execs thought it wouldn't last. And they had good reason. Almost no street in New York City was paved and there were hardly anything we'd recognize as a road connecting cities. For example, to travel by rail from New York City to Boston was about a 4 hour train ride. To go by automobile might take 7 or 8 days, because the roads (such as they were) were unpaved, prone to being muddy quagmires that stopped a car dead in its traces, often had no bridges over rivers and creeks, etc. So automobiles, like everything else, was moved by rail from almost the very first day.

About 1925, between the Rockefellers making gasoline cheap and Ford making the automobile cheap, automobiles were everywhere. Then everything changed. Massachusetts built the first modern interurban highway complete with overpasses and cloverleaf intersections. Even mostly rural states started building paved roads (or at least roads that an automobile could use in dodgy weather), and (more importantly) cities started paving streets. By about 1930, the modern suburb began to come into being. All because of the automobile. The railroad execs probably felt like the guy at IBM who said the desktop computer would never sell....