this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
142 points (93.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35678 readers
1194 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
142
Phonebooks (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (4 children)

No joke! I don't know if I've ever actually seen a phone book. How would they even fit? Seems like they would have been enormous.

I did see a payphone in a restaurant once but it didn't work. I saw another one outside of a gas station on a road trip in the south. That one had a dial tone, but I think you had to pay more to call anyone we knew, so we just took selfies pretending to use it.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Residential listings were "white pages" and businesses were "yellow pages."

Yes, they were big, printed on very thin paper, with small typeface.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

OMG 🤣🤣🤣

Edit: is Hershey where they make the chocolate? Didn't realize that was a town and not just a company. I'm learning so much today

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Milton Hershey made chocolate, a town, and a school that inherited a controlling interest in the chocolate company.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wonka vibes intensify

Oh and a really good hospital too it looks like. Because he made chocolate shaped like a drop?? Dang

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

His real innovation was a less expensive method to produce milk chocolate (although this process seems to produce butyric acid which is an unpleasant taste in chocolate if you’re not used to it) and becoming the first mass-produced chocolate in the US. The Hershey Kiss was just one of many products he made.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Looked it up, that school seems very cool. It does sound like you're describing Willy Wonka though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are going to think I made this up, but the street lights are shaped like Hershey kisses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Like in the town town or the amusement thing.

Did this dude enslave small-statured orange people by chance?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The town, or at least the main street that goes by the factory. As far as I know, no orange people were enslaved.
Seriously though, Milton Hershey was surprisingly progressive for his time. He built affordable homes for his workers and helped them become home owners. The school he built was originally for orphaned boys.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I'm from Pittsburgh. I think we ran a cross country meet in Hershey once.

The amusement park and factory tour are all quite charming. It's hard to recommend one make a dedicated trip, but if anyone is ever on a road trip nearby, it's worth the detour to stop by for a day.

Then again, my recommendation is 20 years old. It could be either better or worse now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Wow! I grew up with these. (Nostalgia intensifies!)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Did the voice on the payphone say: You must please deposit 25 cents to place your call LOL I think that's engrained in my memory

Fun fact:
Once touch tone phones became the norm there were actually games you could play by just calling a number. There was also a number you could call and get the local time and temperature. Oh, and lets not forget Mr. MoviePhone!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I don't remember a voice, but maybe! I just remember the tone because we were excited that it worked. Someone came out of the gas station and saw us taking pictures and stuff and they told us that it's there because until recently (and even still) cell coverage was really bad or nonexistent in the area, so a lot of people still used landlines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I’m old - it was a dime for my calls.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

One use for a phone book was to prop a little kid in a regular chair so they could eat at the table. Like, after they outgrew a baby highchair and could balance on their own. Also you could prove your strength by ripping one in half.

Listings were usually under the name of the adult male, for safety as well as sexism. A woman living alone would probably use just her initials for safety.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

They were quite big, but used super thin paper and small font. There were books thicker still, but still the phrase "thick as a phone book" was used.

There were also Yellow Pages (same format as phone books, but entirely yellow) which listed businesess and stuff.

Pre-internet these were the household essentials.

There was also a number you could call to ask for phone numbers or other stuff. Basically a call in google.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Man, I was already feeling ancient. You using "1900s" didn't help much :D

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I did that one on purpose as a joke! 😁