In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because "get with modernity" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.

In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.

So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.

Then exactly the same government also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.

Maybe he doesn't then get any of the benefits of having a smartphone.

I don't understand why we need to bend over backwards for folks who have chosen to ignore modernity. There was a woman in my neighborhood association at one point who would throw a fit about us using email for communication because "not everyone has a computer you know." This was in 2018. As a society, we've gone completely out of our way to make living on your own terms legal and doable. You don't even have to get you or your kids vaccinated if you don't want to! But then going even farther and expecting to get all the same benefits as folks who've decided to accept and use modern technology is ridiculous... the Dodgers don't owe this man physical season tickets, just like Google doesn't owe me the ability to physically mail in a search term and have the results physically mailed back to me.

Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks, and later some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy, else there was no chance of a deal. Showing up with my goat to offer in exchange would get me laughed out of the room, although there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Although realistically the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment, but it isn't worth the effort for those who have multiple buyers on the table. Where technology makes their life simpler and buyers are willing to go along with it, they will demand it.

I would say catch enough iterations to keep the basic premise in mind, because there is a bit of personal responsibility to maintain technological literacy in the modern age. A telephone isn't really an esoteric device, either.

To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.

My mom is 83, a retired school teacher and she has been using computers since 1986 and has an entire networked computer setup in her office with multiple computers and printers. She went from the original Apple //e version of AppleWorks to Office now.

Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.

The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.

I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.

That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.

They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.

So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?

This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.

But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.

If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.

(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)

But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.

Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?

It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They could, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.

It's most definitely baloney because I also had to provide ID. So, certainly there is no way I could identify myself "even more" by giving them a phone number than by giving them a government issued ID.

I think you missed the point. The process creates an identifier, by strongly associating you with the phone number.

This association allows the bank to quickly establish your identity later when you call up or use online services.

My wife's elderly aunt has a flip phone that can receive SMS but not MMS. We just went thru an "identity verification" procedure with a major bank last week that sends MMS, not SMS, and could not reach her flip phone.

The whole ordeal was a huge pain in the ass and if my wife and I weren't there to help her it would have been completely impenetrable to her.

But this might not really have been a 2FA case - I mean, I was physically sitting in the bank.

Some folks go vegan after seeing how the sausage gets made.

I'm always annoyed when some real-world good or service is only available to people with a smartphone, especially when it wasn't always so. Blue Bikes (rentable bicycles) were in the past usable with a membership card, but it got phased out in favour of an app.

Twitter still does have quite a lot of unique content that either appears there first or isnt accessible anywhere else at all, unlike paid article websites, previews without logging in actually work for the most part, and xcancel as you said is a thing. Which extension are you using for redirects?

While I can use my phone for a lot of things, some UX with the larger text/display settings is absolutely unusable... so many modal dialogs where the buttons are off-screen and cannot be pressed, for example.

I can understand a small group/org not going through the effort in a lot of places... but for multi-billion dollar organizations, corporations and large govt entities, there's really no excuse.

Being a luddite is not a protected class.

I was (pleasantly?) surprised when my office parking lot implemented paid parking because it's doable via SMS and webpage (not an installed app). [thankfully my employer is picking up the tab, so I didn't have to do anything beyond providing my license plate numbers]

Congrats, you're an essential part of the problem.