Hmm I love phone free nightclubs (or rather camera free, they tape off the cameras). Like techno clubs.
Not so much of a fan of this in bars and restaurants, sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc. Or often they change their mind "this place is cool, why don't you come to us instead of us coming to you?". But ok plenty of places to choose from.
> sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc.
Do we need to? We are way too communicative now days. Back before everyone had cell phones, you said on Monday to friends and/or co-workers, "Let's get drinks on Friday at 7pm at BarClub" - Everyone put it in their diary, and on Friday at 6:55-7:30, people showed up where they were supposed to.
We now have this anxiety around not being in constant contact with people, when just a couple decades ago, we wouldn't talk to a person for days/weeks at a time, but still manage to get together without (m)any issues.
Humans used to get on ships and sail away, perhaps never to be heard from again. We can absolutely survive several minutes of confusion around eating arrangements. "Text me when you get there." Let's all just calm down and live with a little uncertainty
There will always be other places that don’t care.
But I think it’s okay to appreciate the world around you and spend time being present while waiting for someone. We used to do this all the time. People watching is fun.
There's another aspect: these days most people don't like being told what to do. When it infringes on other people's lives like making photos I understand but anything else nope.
I couldn't imagine working in an army either. I'd never let them get away with barking at me.
People have never liked being told what to do. Even in the military, it's rare that anyone likes being told what to do. The point is that you do it anyway, because you are disciplined and believe in the chain of command, provided you aren't being asked to do something illegal.
If you don't trust your chain of command, then there are issues. But militaries are decidedly not democracies, because the military often requires swift action, and democracies move slowly by design.
That's fine, I wasn't trying to convince you. :) I was just clarifying that there isn't a human alive who actually likes being told what to do. There is usually a reason they do it anyway, but it is rarely because they like it.
(I am exaggerating, and in the sense of pleasure there are obviously submissive people, etc., but you get my point, I think)
True and I'm one of them in fact. But it's different, I'm submissive only when I want to, to whom I choose to, within limits that I set. There's a lot of safety net. Whereas people who are forced to work in the military don't have any choice.
I think being so antiauthoritarian is what makes that interesting for me. Though I'm never authoritative myself, I could never manage people either.
In 1989 I wrote and posted a paper letter to a college friend of ours in Northern England, asking, hey, around [June date I forget] we will be in London, want to meetup? A while later I get a reply letter saying sure, how about we meet at Piccadilly Circus on this date at this time. I posted an affirmative reply and there was no further communication. We were in Arizona at the time.
On the agreed-to date and time we were there, and so was she.
If we were talk about paper maps, it would blow people's minds. If we were to get further in the weeds and describe how we traveled around communist Czechoslovakia w/o a map, only a phrasebook entitled "Travelers Czech", well...
Ah I forgot! We, without being specific about the date, knew that other college friends of ours, originally from Czechoslovakia, had told us they were going to be in their home town of Olomouc. We got the barest help in Prague with my wife's bad German on how to get there by train. Arrived, got a room, and called them up. For the next week they showed us around the country and visited family and friends.
Other than lousy waiters in Prague we had a terrific adventure. Different times.
But you sure had to able to demonstrate you had integrity in your agreements and were open to changes of plans.
What's amusing is that I've tried to do this nowadays, where I make plans with someone a few weeks in advance and then just show up. Only to have them not be there, and when I ask what happened, they said, "oh, I didn't think we were still doing that, you hadn't said anything about it in a while"
It’s kind of funny that business etiquette has moved much more to scheduled meetings even for short discussions, and social life has moved in the opposite direction.
At higher levels, I think impromptu calls/messages of a time-sensitive nature are probably more common. But, in general, phone calls out of the blue are less accepted than they were 10-20 years ago outside of a very close circle. And in business there would probably be a preceding message to the effect of “can we chat?”
The protocol we have always implicitly used in this case is 'no news is good news'. I.e., participants in the meetup understand that they only have to communicate 'I won't/can't be there.' The reason is optional. Could be lots of things.
But socially this has gotten inverted.
I have several very long relationships with people (>30 years) who are overwhelmed by this. Living their lives immersed in constantly buzzing irrelevant social noise.
It depends. My friends with kids have everything planned out months in advance. If they're to come out to something they have to have it all scheduled between judo classes and school birthday parties blah blah
The rest of us just wing it. Which I really prefer. I hate having plans. Especially in case I might not feel like it on the night in question.
Czechia has a very dense public transport network and if you want to walk a very nice network of marked tourist tracks. Not that different form 1989, except for marking an explicit cycling network since then.
It is what it is. It's how things work now. Anyway I have great respect for places that tape off cameras because it makes others feel safe. Because they know they won't be photographed without consent.
But being on your mobile somewhere is more of a "you do you" thing for me. I'm not always on my phone, when I go out I don't go near it normally but getting a quick message is no problem IMO. For example when plans change. When others are on phones around me I don't find that very annoying, there's much more annoying behaviour.
Personally I hate planning and love chaos so I really like this thing where I see someone online at 2am and they're like "hey why don't you come out to this club". Which happens fairly often.
You described a want, not a need. How often does this actually come up? If your friends are frequently having "emergencies" that prevent them from meeting you, they may not be good friends.
And have you tried working a stressful job where emergencies come up all the time so you need to work till 8 pm instead of 5:30 pm, and have to cancel plans last-minute a quarter of the time? Or you have kids where all sorts of unknowns happen all the time?
For many people, it happens. Frequently.
Maybe you can be less judgmental and realize different people lead different lives, rather than think you know enough to start judging other people's friends. Talk about arrogance.
We don't need to be communicative at all times. But don't romanticize it either; we did what you say because we had to, whether we wanted or not. Not having any chance of correcting course or being more flexible is not a cool thing of the past, it's a limitation of how things were.
That you find confort on it, is a different thing than it being better or worse... it just was.
Your scenario sounds like a nightmare of sorts. Constant chatter of what or where to go and no commit to one place. I think you can overcome a lot of excuses by meeting at one place and then sorting it out.
It's just to create a brand to attract targeted customers. If you really hate phones in restaurants you are going to stick to them. Not an issue for me TBH, it's their free choice. It's kinda difficult to compete in food quality and such, but rather easy to just create a brand. You see this kind of things in politics a lot.
I bet if you study the rate of "mind changing" over time since phones got smarter we'll see it correlates. As does ability/willingness to commit to anything or anyone.
There's a breakfast spot that I visit sometimes, with a sign on the wall that reads; "We do not have 'WiFi' -- Talk to each other -- Pretend it's 1995"
I totally support the phone-free bar and restaurant experience and encouraging people to socialize verbally instead of online but the thing is that I like to eat breakfast alone.
It's a meditative process to me. There's nothing better than sitting in a greasy spoon looking out at a rainy day eating bacon and hashbrowns while sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Just watching the world and gthe people go by while flipping and folding the pages of a large newspaper. That's bliss.
Now that newspapers aren't really a thing anymore I like to read the news on my phone, or a paper about a topic that interests me.
It's good to promote socializing as long as it doesn't come at the expensive at reflective processes.
What experience are you expecting in a phone-free breakfast joint if you are there by yourself? Interupting other patrons meals to randomly talk to them? That sounds kind of like hell.
Of course not, but its also not an exclusive experience you can only get at resturants.
And quite frankly noisey busy resturants are a subpar place to have that sort of experience. Most people who want to do that sort of thing go to a park or somewhere quiet with nature.
I knew someone was going to pull on that little thread.
So let's use a dictionary definition: meditative -- of, involving, or absorbed in meditation or considered thought.
In that context I have for decades now enjoyed sipping coffee, reading the news, and watching peope go by, smiling at the waitress, and considering how it all fits together. The cream in my cup, the man crossing the street, the price of tea in China -- it's all connected. Sometimes do this without a phone or a newspaper or a book. Sometimes I don't.
This is just how I like to spend my Sunday breakfast. Alone. Not talking to people. Watching them and the world.
I agree that a phone provides a suboptimal experience for this kind of thing.
I loved seeing the pile of newspapers that have already been rifled through by previous patrons who have finished their morning meal. Picking the exact paper or sections that I want, perhaps grabbing a finished section from an old man who has already sat down and made it half way through his morning breakfest ritual.
thumbing through the pages, holding the paper up to fold it over, putting it down on the table and pressing that edge of the with your thumb to make a sharp edge and then sipping your coffee.
When I think of places where phones aren't a problem, I think of bars and restaurants.
So why on earth would you even need to make them phone-free...?
People are socializing plenty. I've never walked into a bar or restaurant that's full of people where they're all on their phones. It doesn't even make sense.
Really? I see this all the time. Maybe I'm going to all the wrong places. I see "couples" on their phones, I see groups of friends on their phones, etc., etc. Maybe different parts of the country / world?
I don't see the problem; when you're out drinking with buddies, sometimes you're talking and sometimes staring at the sportsball TV in contemplative silence. Or a phone instead of the TV, it serves the same role. It doesn't have to be talk all the time. Somebody who's not talking now might have been talking a minute ago, and will be again in a few minutes.
If you're all staring at the TV, you can at least share your thoughts on the thing you're all watching together. If you're all staring at your phones, your minds are in different places. It doesn't serve the same role at all.
NYC here too, I'm not sure where you're going but go to any sports or Irish bar and >50% of the people there will be on their phone, especially when they're solo. I do wish I could read a book, but so many bars keep it so dark even in the daytime that it's impossible these days.
People go out by themselves all the time (I'm single, WFH and live by myself, if I didn't go out by myself I would literally leave the house only once or twice a week).
I am so surprised at the negativity about this idea in this thread. It's a novelty, and it's pretty fun, if you don't like the idea you can just go to the 99% of other bars or restaurants that do allow phones.
I personally like going to these types of places. When you go with a group of people it does change the social dynamic, not being able to ask ChatGPT the answer to a question you don't know off the top of your head, or scroll through your messages as a crutch when there's a lull in the conversation. Everyone is more fully engaged.
It's just a fun novelty, an experience you can't get elsewhere.
Phone/device free venues have to become a thing. Social media has taken a strong hold of people but the ai chat bots are upping the game even more. If anything phone free areas will become an incentive to visit these establishments for me
Passive interference like this isn’t illegal, although you might have a lawsuit if a customer gets injured and it takes a few extra seconds for someone to step outside and dial 911 (people will sue over anything). It’s active jamming that violates FCC regulations.
Hi, I have worked in numerous shielded environments, built one, and am in the process of building a second.
Wifi works perfectly fine inside a shielded enclosure, if both the AP and the client are inside the shield. It should not work across the shield, if the AP is inside and the client is outside, or vice versa. (If that worked, it wouldn't be a very good shield.)
It is entirely plausible, practical, and not even all that hard, to build precisely the environment described up-thread. "Magnetic" paint is not necessary, it just has to be conductive. Ecofoil® Ultra NT® is my favorite shielding material, it's good as a radiant energy barrier (say, to keep your hot roof from radiating heat down at your attic) and as a radiant signal shield. Which makes sense, when you consider that RF is just RF is just RF. Filtered power passthroughs aren't particularly hard (Start with the Delta 20DBAG5 and add some ferrite beads), and if you really want to be snazzy with your data passthrough, use fiber. There are all sorts of cheap-and-cheerful ethernet switches with SFP slots now.
The door seals are the tricky part. Commercial shielded enclosures go all-out with complicated lever-actuated doors that wouldn't feel out-of-place on a bank vault, but I've found that simply sanding the paint off a commercial steel door and covering the bare steel with copper tape, then engaging it with beryllium-copper spring finger-stock around the doorjamb, is sufficient for about 60-80dB of isolation, which is plenty in many environments.
Good to know! I only knew about the magnetic paint because a company I worked for a long time ago wanted to put up big mural-like pictures throughout the office space and decided to mount them on magnets and cover the walls in magnetic paint so they would stick. But then some of our conference rooms couldn't get good wifi even though the AP was right next door... We only figured out later (after putting hard-wired APs in every room LOL) that it was because of the magnetic paint.
Inside of the cage it'll be fine. It just won't do great traversing the boundary. As long as there's a WAP/antenna inside the cage everything inside the cage will get a signal.
The worst has been the post-covid assignment of seating and QR code driven ordering in bars. So few opportunities to mingle. I miss standing in bars, talking to bartenders, chatting with random patrons. This has recovered much better in large cities but I find that restaurants and bars in US suburban environments are deeply impersonal now. It’s no wonder singles are stuck meeting partners on apps with so little unstructured social opportunities left. Not to mention no one is going to bars anymore anyway.
You could enforce this by making a farday cage out of the building. I looked into this for an irrational (5G is government poison) family member. I wasn't going to debate how RF works, just buy some points by helping her indulge her fantasy. But actual RF blocking copper mesh material is very expensive. I wonder if this could be done via wallpaper and printing using a conductive ink printed on the same pattern?
Linus Tech Tips made a Faraday cage out of an employee's house using graphite-based EMF-blocking paint. MMS messages with images couldn't be sent from within the house, although text messages and phone calls went through. They didn't do anything to treat the windows, though, so maybe if you combine the paint with some sort of fine wire mesh over the windows you'd get a more comprehensive blocking effect.
At $200/gallon, the cost of the paint would also be a major consideration.
For those near the SF Bay Area, the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, with its copper-cladded exterior, is an excellent instance of this.
I suspect that the effect was unintentional, but (at least until internal WiFi access was provided) the consequences were delightful.
Any metallic grid should attenuate signals effectively. Old-school lathe-and-plaster construction (which often incorporates a wire mesh) is well-known WiFi / cellular poison:
You really don't need a full on faraday cage. Signals in the phone frequency range are pretty poor at penetration, especially brick or concrete. I once lived in a house with lath and plaster walls, and I had to leave the office door open to even get wifi in there.
Perhaps some well placed metallic material on or near the windows would suffice?
A large cage probably doesn’t need to be grounded to prevent a relatively weak signal from escaping, as attenuation would be high due to the amount of material involved. Smaller cages may radiate the signal after some attenuation.
Edit: reading some more about it, cages that are close to the radiating element may experience capacitive coupling, and this is what can cause an ungrounded cage to serve as an antenna. A larger cage, with the radiating element farther away from the cage, is less likely to experience this. In either case grounding should reduce this risk.
Well, what does it mean to be "grounded". There isn't something special about the voltage potential of Earth.
If a Faraday cage blocks interstellar signals only if one part of it is stuck in a ball of mud and rock... well, I have some questions.
There is the possibility of the ground being a return path to the transmitter, but if that were effective, radio infrastructure would interfere world-wide, and you could transmit through the earth's core. And even that argument would suggest that the Faraday cage should be floating, not grounded.
Just a typical metal mesh building material can do it. My friend has a house with an accidental Faraday cage like that. 0 bars unless you're near a window, 90% packet loss if you're near a window but not sticking the phone outside. Wifi only works if you're LOS to the access point.
SImilar, except their belief is part of a illness that's some kind of dementia. It went further into all kinds of radiations, including things that are meaningless, like the 911 frequency.
It degraded slowly over a decade. It's "stabilized" but just a bunch of word salad.
I'm so frustrated with her. she believes any health conditions are either a result of RF emanation or "the jab. Her brain is completely unaccountable for illnesses incurred by those before RF or vaccines. It's infuriating, but telling her she's wrong won't help. It reminds me of the advice to never tell a paranoid schizophrenic they are delusional. It just makes you part of their opposition.
How do you prevent people from having phones while inside?
Do you just get in trouble for whipping it out? Or do you have to drop it off with a phone valet at the entrance? If so, how do you prevent theft or mixups? Are all the staff comfortable confronting people who have taken their devices out, risking their tips and personal comfort levels? What if somebody gets cranky after being asked because they didn't know and it's halfway through dinner?
Great. It would be nice to normalize that as a feature. A cafe near me sort of has this by simply not offering WiFi and having a sign about it, and it works - there are people having conversations with their kids and with friends and with strangers there, while all other cafes seem to be mostly people on their phones and iPads (especially kids) and laptops. Also we need a total ban on meta glasses and other similar surveillance devices.
Well if they don't want businesses from phone-carrying people that's perfectly fine with me.
Restaurants are too expensive anyway. A random breakfast in a random diner now costs around 60 CAD (include tax and tip) for two persons nowadays in my city. It is difficult to justify eating out unless I'm financially free.
There are a couple of communities that have almost no phone presence. Certain kinds of music festivals are an example, and it's really quite nice not having to worry about being filmed.
148 comments
Not so much of a fan of this in bars and restaurants, sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc. Or often they change their mind "this place is cool, why don't you come to us instead of us coming to you?". But ok plenty of places to choose from.
> sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc.
Do we need to? We are way too communicative now days. Back before everyone had cell phones, you said on Monday to friends and/or co-workers, "Let's get drinks on Friday at 7pm at BarClub" - Everyone put it in their diary, and on Friday at 6:55-7:30, people showed up where they were supposed to.
We now have this anxiety around not being in constant contact with people, when just a couple decades ago, we wouldn't talk to a person for days/weeks at a time, but still manage to get together without (m)any issues.
But I think it’s okay to appreciate the world around you and spend time being present while waiting for someone. We used to do this all the time. People watching is fun.
There's another aspect: these days most people don't like being told what to do. When it infringes on other people's lives like making photos I understand but anything else nope.
I couldn't imagine working in an army either. I'd never let them get away with barking at me.
If you don't trust your chain of command, then there are issues. But militaries are decidedly not democracies, because the military often requires swift action, and democracies move slowly by design.
There's talk of bringing military service back in my country but I would honestly prefer fighting my own country than the enemy.
I hope more people are going to be like that when they implement it.
(I am exaggerating, and in the sense of pleasure there are obviously submissive people, etc., but you get my point, I think)
> there are obviously submissive people, etc
True and I'm one of them in fact. But it's different, I'm submissive only when I want to, to whom I choose to, within limits that I set. There's a lot of safety net. Whereas people who are forced to work in the military don't have any choice.
I think being so antiauthoritarian is what makes that interesting for me. Though I'm never authoritative myself, I could never manage people either.
But I understand your point, thanks!
On the agreed-to date and time we were there, and so was she.
If we were talk about paper maps, it would blow people's minds. If we were to get further in the weeds and describe how we traveled around communist Czechoslovakia w/o a map, only a phrasebook entitled "Travelers Czech", well...
Ah I forgot! We, without being specific about the date, knew that other college friends of ours, originally from Czechoslovakia, had told us they were going to be in their home town of Olomouc. We got the barest help in Prague with my wife's bad German on how to get there by train. Arrived, got a room, and called them up. For the next week they showed us around the country and visited family and friends.
Other than lousy waiters in Prague we had a terrific adventure. Different times.
But you sure had to able to demonstrate you had integrity in your agreements and were open to changes of plans.
But socially this has gotten inverted.
I have several very long relationships with people (>30 years) who are overwhelmed by this. Living their lives immersed in constantly buzzing irrelevant social noise.
The rest of us just wing it. Which I really prefer. I hate having plans. Especially in case I might not feel like it on the night in question.
But being on your mobile somewhere is more of a "you do you" thing for me. I'm not always on my phone, when I go out I don't go near it normally but getting a quick message is no problem IMO. For example when plans change. When others are on phones around me I don't find that very annoying, there's much more annoying behaviour.
Personally I hate planning and love chaos so I really like this thing where I see someone online at 2am and they're like "hey why don't you come out to this club". Which happens fairly often.
If I'm meeting someone for drinks and then an emergency happens, I kind of want to know rather than waiting around for 45 minutes and then giving up.
It comes up. Frequently.
And have you tried working a stressful job where emergencies come up all the time so you need to work till 8 pm instead of 5:30 pm, and have to cancel plans last-minute a quarter of the time? Or you have kids where all sorts of unknowns happen all the time?
For many people, it happens. Frequently.
Maybe you can be less judgmental and realize different people lead different lives, rather than think you know enough to start judging other people's friends. Talk about arrogance.
One time someone said "day after tomorrow" instead of giving a date, that was a mistake.
Yeah gonna be downvoted, but whatever.
It's a meditative process to me. There's nothing better than sitting in a greasy spoon looking out at a rainy day eating bacon and hashbrowns while sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Just watching the world and gthe people go by while flipping and folding the pages of a large newspaper. That's bliss.
Now that newspapers aren't really a thing anymore I like to read the news on my phone, or a paper about a topic that interests me.
It's good to promote socializing as long as it doesn't come at the expensive at reflective processes.
> I totally support the phone-free bar and restaurant experience
If you then expect an exemption because your phone use is different then I challenge that you don’t actually support the experience.
If you want to read news in a phone-free environment: bring a newspaper, a kindle, etc.
And quite frankly noisey busy resturants are a subpar place to have that sort of experience. Most people who want to do that sort of thing go to a park or somewhere quiet with nature.
>
It's a meditative process to me. [...] I like to read the news on my phone.I don't think reading news, especially on the phone, is meditative.
With paper you might pause & reflect while turning a page, with phone even that is lost.
> Just watching the world and the people go by while
Why not do that without looking at the phone?
So let's use a dictionary definition: meditative -- of, involving, or absorbed in meditation or considered thought.
In that context I have for decades now enjoyed sipping coffee, reading the news, and watching peope go by, smiling at the waitress, and considering how it all fits together. The cream in my cup, the man crossing the street, the price of tea in China -- it's all connected. Sometimes do this without a phone or a newspaper or a book. Sometimes I don't.
This is just how I like to spend my Sunday breakfast. Alone. Not talking to people. Watching them and the world.
I'm glad I pulled on that thread :)
I agree that a phone provides a suboptimal experience for this kind of thing.
I loved seeing the pile of newspapers that have already been rifled through by previous patrons who have finished their morning meal. Picking the exact paper or sections that I want, perhaps grabbing a finished section from an old man who has already sat down and made it half way through his morning breakfest ritual.
thumbing through the pages, holding the paper up to fold it over, putting it down on the table and pressing that edge of the with your thumb to make a sharp edge and then sipping your coffee.
There really is nothing like it.
So why on earth would you even need to make them phone-free...?
People are socializing plenty. I've never walked into a bar or restaurant that's full of people where they're all on their phones. It doesn't even make sense.
I see single people use their phone while they wait for their date/friends to arrive. Or while their date uses the restroom.
I see groups of friends where one person is temporarily texting because the babysitter reached out, or a friend is asking where they are, etc.
Going to restaurants and bars is expensive. People aren't going out to use their phones.
People go out by themselves all the time (I'm single, WFH and live by myself, if I didn't go out by myself I would literally leave the house only once or twice a week).
I personally like going to these types of places. When you go with a group of people it does change the social dynamic, not being able to ask ChatGPT the answer to a question you don't know off the top of your head, or scroll through your messages as a crutch when there's a lull in the conversation. Everyone is more fully engaged.
It's just a fun novelty, an experience you can't get elsewhere.
You will get "No bars". (and also maybe no customers and a safety code violation?)
Wifi works perfectly fine inside a shielded enclosure, if both the AP and the client are inside the shield. It should not work across the shield, if the AP is inside and the client is outside, or vice versa. (If that worked, it wouldn't be a very good shield.)
It is entirely plausible, practical, and not even all that hard, to build precisely the environment described up-thread. "Magnetic" paint is not necessary, it just has to be conductive. Ecofoil® Ultra NT® is my favorite shielding material, it's good as a radiant energy barrier (say, to keep your hot roof from radiating heat down at your attic) and as a radiant signal shield. Which makes sense, when you consider that RF is just RF is just RF. Filtered power passthroughs aren't particularly hard (Start with the Delta 20DBAG5 and add some ferrite beads), and if you really want to be snazzy with your data passthrough, use fiber. There are all sorts of cheap-and-cheerful ethernet switches with SFP slots now.
The door seals are the tricky part. Commercial shielded enclosures go all-out with complicated lever-actuated doors that wouldn't feel out-of-place on a bank vault, but I've found that simply sanding the paint off a commercial steel door and covering the bare steel with copper tape, then engaging it with beryllium-copper spring finger-stock around the doorjamb, is sufficient for about 60-80dB of isolation, which is plenty in many environments.
The only way around this is to build somewhere that happens to have no cell reception.
At $200/gallon, the cost of the paint would also be a major consideration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5BOFsiDpYQ
I suspect that the effect was unintentional, but (at least until internal WiFi access was provided) the consequences were delightful.
Any metallic grid should attenuate signals effectively. Old-school lathe-and-plaster construction (which often incorporates a wire mesh) is well-known WiFi / cellular poison:
<https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-get-a-wifi-signal-...>
Perhaps some well placed metallic material on or near the windows would suffice?
>I wonder if this could be done via wallpaper and printing using a conductive ink printed on the same pattern?
AFAIK they have to be grounded so it'll be a massive pain to install, even if you can get it printed.
Edit: reading some more about it, cages that are close to the radiating element may experience capacitive coupling, and this is what can cause an ungrounded cage to serve as an antenna. A larger cage, with the radiating element farther away from the cage, is less likely to experience this. In either case grounding should reduce this risk.
If a Faraday cage blocks interstellar signals only if one part of it is stuck in a ball of mud and rock... well, I have some questions.
There is the possibility of the ground being a return path to the transmitter, but if that were effective, radio infrastructure would interfere world-wide, and you could transmit through the earth's core. And even that argument would suggest that the Faraday cage should be floating, not grounded.
It degraded slowly over a decade. It's "stabilized" but just a bunch of word salad.
Do you just get in trouble for whipping it out? Or do you have to drop it off with a phone valet at the entrance? If so, how do you prevent theft or mixups? Are all the staff comfortable confronting people who have taken their devices out, risking their tips and personal comfort levels? What if somebody gets cranky after being asked because they didn't know and it's halfway through dinner?
It's a tricky policy to enforce smoothly
Restaurants are too expensive anyway. A random breakfast in a random diner now costs around 60 CAD (include tax and tip) for two persons nowadays in my city. It is difficult to justify eating out unless I'm financially free.