Preparedness for when

jk0

lillibet_dripping wrote: »

Just de-lurking to mention ....
I've just heard on the BBC news that a company in Stockholm is 'micro-chipping' its employees so that they can do away with card swiping or code-entering. The micro-chipped employee can do everything from gain entrance to the main building, their office and the photocopier plus buy their lunch in the canteen simply by holding their hand against the reader.
This makes me feel very uncomfortable - what do you think?

Crikey. I wouldn't like that. Guess it would do away with the need for redundancy notices. You'd just show up at work one day, and find the door wouldn't open for you.

Edit: Just found it. Stupidly, Rory Cellan-Jones went and got himself chipped to demonstrate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31037989

Doesn't occur to him I suppose, that TPTB can now track him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life.

GreyQueen

Being chipped has long been a meme in dystopian science fiction.

Imagine how it starts; with the poorest. You want social security benefits? OK, have to accept a chip. It could expand insidiously through the population, marketed to anxious parents as a way of knowing where Junior is at all times. Worried your spouse is dallying with Another when they claim to be working.........? A chip is the answer.

It would be the end of all human dignity, of privacy, of the right to go quietly about your business. I'd have it done to me over my dead body.:(

moneyistooshorttomention

lillibet_dripping wrote: »

Just de-lurking to mention ....
I've just heard on the BBC news that a company in Stockholm is 'micro-chipping' its employees so that they can do away with card swiping or code-entering. The micro-chipped employee can do everything from gain entrance to the main building, their office and the photocopier plus buy their lunch in the canteen simply by holding their hand against the reader.
This makes me feel very uncomfortable - what do you think?

:eek::eek:. I would have protested loud and long if an employer had tried to do that to me, and the end result would probably have been them having to accept I was prepared to put a sticking plaster on my hand with a microchip stuck to it (or some such solution) to come to work and would then remove it again at the end of each workday. If they didn't like that compromise, then they could darn well lump it.

Mind you, having said that, its all the medical profession can do to stick a needle under my skin anyway for my own sake (and, more often than not, they don't manage to convince me to accept that). So why on earth would I put up with the process of physically inserting one of those into MY own body for THEIR sake?

I'd have all sorts of questions on behalf of those fellow employees who accepted it:
- would they be able to be tracked outside the workplace?:
- would the microchip be removed during holidays? would it even be removed when they leave the firm?
- how would they propose to insert one into the body of a hapless employee without causing them pain/cosmetic scarring/etc?
- how much extra would they be paid as a bribe to put up with it?

EDIT: just watched that clip and...yep...its painful to have it inserted. What gives an employer the right to inflict pain on an employee? Also, if the thought has occurred to "normal/honest me" that it wouldn't have to necessarily be the employee themselves waving their hand around to unlock things...it could be anyone who was in possession of that employees hand iyswim. You can just see some terrorist or something wanting access to a government building or the like that had forced that onto its staff and the easiest way they could achieve that would be quick bit of cutting off a high-level employees' hand and taking that along with them (well...if ISIS are quite prepared to cut off peoples heads....then a hand wont faze them in the slightest).

That's another thing that's gone onto my personal "I'd be unemployed permanently sooner than do that...." list. Thank goodness I'm now retired.

vivatifosi

GreyQueen wrote: »

I despair of this molly-coddling. We will truly raise a generation of fools, weaklings and whiners. Well, a second generation, anyway, the horse has well and truly bolted on the first one.

I can vividly recall being shown deadly nightshade as a child by my Dad in the garden with the exhortation never to eat its berries and, if I had to touch it, to wash my hands afterwards. I also went on my own foraging walks as a 10 y.o. with my Observer book of wild plants and another book of trees.

Very few things in the British countryside are deadly poisonous. Plenty are bitter and unpalatable, and I speak as someone who decided to try a nibble off a horse chestnut just to check Dad's advice, having done the same thing as a child; yes, they're unpleasant. As are unprocessed acorns but beech mast is fine, although madly fiddly.

We need to know how to interact with the natural world at a very basic level,

Please excuse clumsy edit, am on tablet. I previously worked in a different part of local govt dealing with children. We would regularly hear from park keepers that parents were complaining about trees with low branches and wanted them chopped off in case their kids climbed them.

The same parents absolutely hated the concept of messy play in case their children caught germs.

The parents were I suppose the first generation to grow up under crazy health and safety "implied" rules (which in many cases are urban myths). Unfortunately it's proof that you reap what you sow.

[Deleted User]

When my girls were younger we always when walking them through woodland or the countryside taught them what was safe to eat and what should be avoided because it was either poisonous or unpleasant. We ate wood sorrel, hawthorn leaves in the spring, dandelion leaves, plantain roots (after they'd been washed, hairy bittercress, ox eye daisy tubers,hedge garlic, wild plums, sweet chestnuts, beech mast really anything that was safe. This started when they were still pre school with the proviso that unless Mummy was there to tell you it was OK you did NOT ever eat anything. They both grew up with woodsmanship built in and hopefully will teach their small people the same lore. Both did brownies and guides so picked up outdoor cooking skills from there and from me at home in the garden. It's so very short sighted to feel children aren't safe being shown what is edible and what is not that grows in the wilderness. Purely from the point of keeping them healthy surely knowing what NOT to eat is more important than knowing what is safe?

Re the microchipping of people - surely it would be very easy to track every action of every person if we were all compulsorily microchipped. What better way to keep check on the movements of the nation.....does anyone else remember the film 'Logans Run'?

Re stupidity of the nation ... from what I see on an everyday basis the nation, particularly the younger portion of it has no grasp on the realities of life any longer, no interest in anything except celebrities and appearances and no aspirations in life other than to be 'famous' or 'infamous as long as they make the pages of the celebrity magazines, No Hope I'm afraid!!!

moneyistooshorttomention

Quick bit of googling later and a YouTube clip that was put up in 2011 reveals this isn't the first firm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXJpUoElsnQ

and I've found:

www.antichips.com/is-the-threat-real.htm

greenbee

GreyQueen wrote: »

:eek: I think that it's the step into hell. :eek:

I was listening to this thinking about how I was told off at work for suggesting microchipping/barcoding as a solution to people forgetting access cards about 6 or 7 years ago.

Believe me, there are MUCH scarier options out there now. I work (tangentially) in this field. Just assume you have no privacy and make decisions on that basis.

GreyQueen

The thing which 'amuses' me, in a sardonic and despairing sort of way, is that the cotton-wooling of the young often achieves the opposite of the intention. It removes the realistic understanding of cause-and-effect, that the doing to stupid things often leads to bad consequences. If you don't have to face the outcomes of your decisions, good and bad, how will you ever learn?

I know parents who have relocated from the inner city to a village to protect their youngsters from the evils of drugs, not knowing that the dealers are their kids' peers and just about anything can be bought down on the Rec'. And country kids go tearing about the lanes in each others' cars as late teens and end up wrapping themselves around trees and other cars, with fatal consequences.

With the exception of precipices, swamps and a few other extreme environments, there are mostly not dangerous places; there are dangerous people. You need to learn to recognise the wasters of the world and avoid them, not fret about apples which are as found in nature, rather than in a styrofoam and shrinkwrap cocoon from le supermarche.

greenbee, I don't trust the beggars at all. I bumble around my little life and if people think I am someone of no consequence, they would be perfectly correct. If they think I'm a fool, they would be very badly mistaken. If they think of me rarely or never, then I have achieved my goal.:rotfl:

[Deleted User]

Frugalsod wrote: »

As for wild food the only thing that I avoid are mushrooms as I am not expert enough to identify the dangerous ones.

Field mushrooms are easy to recognise.

I gather them whenever I find any.

Frugalsod

greenbee wrote: »

I was listening to this thinking about how I was told off at work for suggesting microchipping/barcoding as a solution to people forgetting access cards about 6 or 7 years ago.

Believe me, there are MUCH scarier options out there now. I work (tangentially) in this field. Just assume you have no privacy and make decisions on that basis.

They could make use of smart phones and put bar codes on that. So that you flash the screen across the barcode reader. That would be unique to individuals and not trackable outside the office. Plus the user generally looks after their phones so will have it as they enter, plus one less thing to carry. Once the employee leaves the company they can block the bar code making it useless and so even if someone attempts to enter they will get refused.