Funny how this is completely flipped over. The opposite of what you said is true. Or maybe this is just because you're talking about your life in specific, with your specific circunstances, as if the same could apply to everyone. Anyone who has been into very different places, with different people living in different ways, can see very clearly that our society is sick as fuck, this is big-city-people problem, and your suggestion is big-city-people thinking and big-city-people problem solving. I don't mean to be rude, but thats how I see it.
Or maybe all companies saw the better strategy for the profit of the industry was for people to need to keep buying new phones frequently and so they all removed that option from the customer hands, on a backdrop of design efficiency and 'innovation' and then it was done because consumerism is a big pile of bullshit.
Most people when I see they talking about it, and I suppose most people in general, would like stronger screens and more battery even if it meant a thicker phone, but the illusion of "last generation" and stuff like that make so, for marketing purposes, supported by the profit motive, that it should not be this way because "customers"... I'm sorry, I just think it's absurd that people take those tales uncritically like that.
My current phone is a middle-end Sony, it's screen already has that kind of shatter that starts to spread, the p2 connector stopped working these days, and after I bought it I could not find any of the accessories to help me preserve it(screen protection, cover, etc), had to buy some chinese stuff online that were worthless, it's less than a year old. We're systematically made of idiots. I still have an S3 that I used for 3~4 years, it's screen is intact and all the rest works fine.
Sorry but imho this question shows a lack of knowledge of how much banking is tied to the economic system. They are entities that hold unfathomable ammounts of power. The most explicit evidence is that governments in general put their interests and needs above the people's will. This is not just because government really like the guys, they do have more leverage than most about anything and they can make people/companies/countries hostage.
As if there isn't a counterpart. Honestly, I've been in farms where simple people lived in with no electricity(my grandparents lived in a farm, and it took some time for electricity to arrive, and around the place there were people living even more simpler, completely isolated, which I'd visit to greet with my cousins), it's actually pretty ok. Now, seriously, using "television" as an argument is just lame, who cares about this trash?
Just because you or someone else never got used to living without these, it doesn't mean everyone else needs it, not at all. From my point of view, autonomy is the greatest thing ever, it is freedom, and dependence is weakness and slavishness, subjulgation. IMHO Only a fool would think in terms of "if I enslave myself I'll get to play with this!"(plus, isn't it a bit like the deal with the devil?), to me it's just an example of how little some people can see what is actually beautiful and good in life to raise stuff to this level. Sincerely, I think people who think like this don't have a clue of what freedom feels like(and gladly, I think I've enjoyed plenty and been introduced to it early on). My life is not made of stuff, it is made of time, living, thinking, appreciation, growing, caring.
As another personal example, my father is also deurbanizing and moving back to the farm(which is not an industrial farm as in a business, but actually a place to live, think straight, work on living things which do need upkeep but not artificially). There's no AC, the only thing he watches is F1 races. He's busy most of the time anyway, usually having a beer and working on the farm, he loves it.
Ah, surely the aristocrats of before would instantly jump at the opportunity of giving up their lifes of free-time, leisure, education, servants, 3-hour-meals, giant houses, countryside retreats, upper-class-socializing, to trade it with the shopping-mall-worker that does 60h weeks(no weekends), for he'd have a smartphone! Funny.
This argument, which I've read before, only works with a really, really narrow definition of 'rich' and 'poor', maybe what you mean is upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class?
I'd like to point one thing: ever since I started getting more interested into etymology, I've sort of fallen in love with words, and came to see them as much more alive and powerful than before, and I've started to care much more about their weight, their truthiness, their application, etc, so that I'm precise, and of course I also started getting more annoyed when I see them malapplied. I sometimes think that nothing made me feel smarter and sharper mentally than etymology(like the same effect history, logic, philosophy has, but maybe a little bit more fundamental), the confusing there is not just "this is bad!", if you're using confusing words your thinking gets less clear, lies pass through, making sense of things is harder, more error-prone, etc. When you start to notice things this way, a lot changes. And we sort of have to defend ourselves from the tonnes of bullshit we're shot with everyday. So, yeah, I think this shit is real. Of course changing your vocabulary entirely can feel a bit extreme, but still, KNOWING words are loaded or confusing, or just marketing, or plain lie, plain propaganda, plain politics, is useful.
RMS of course cares much more about truthiness than he does what others think of him(and he was right before, remember it?). If one puts 'self-awareness' above 'truthiness' in their mind, it's no wonder they'll think this is weird, eccentric, etc. The cool thing about Truth, though, is that it's way above vanity and opinion. The former scratches the later two, the opposite, not so much or not for very long.
Well, it would be simple/small businessess mostly, and mostly taking the place of phone calling, for example asking for information, ordering something, "signing up" to receive offers/the daily menu... And that would be just a guy with a list and a phone forwarding and repplying messages and etc. Radio shows also use it to communicate with listeners(although it's kinda ridiculous that then they have to warn all the time not to text while driving)... So.. Yeah, mostly about communication, not about process.
Northeast is historically prejudiced against, it's where people used to die of hunger every day because of drought, poverty and hunger, like 10 years ago an image that's probably imprinted in every brasilian memory(from TV) is of the "sertão" with really dry land that's basically just red dirt, skeletal cattle, bones of dead cattle(because they also died of hunger), poor people with skin that looked like the eroded soil itself from living and toiling under the sun entire lifes. So because of this there was also a lot of migration, with the Southeast(São Paulo) being one of the central destinations because it's an economic center and etc so you can probably guess where the bad talk comes from..
The Northeast has improved a lot today, but it still has a lot of poverty and violence in big cities. Also it has a very rich culture.
Brasilians are social-network junkies... Whatsapp was 'the messaging app' around the time where just about everybody got a smartphone so it just caught on, and there are groups for everything(and there's a lot of porn) and a lot of stuff goes viral through it(I've received Lula's lawyer wiretapped call through groups, for example) and then businesses started using it too, putting their "zaps" on billboards and etc. Before Whatsapp it was Facebook, Orkut, MSN..
"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry." — Charles Sanders Peirce, "First Rule of Logic"
What does studying people who "can't calculate a tip" has to do with understanding extremism/intolerance? Seems the cap fits.
Edit: I'll also add that I'm STEM and I don't agree that "binary thinking", "intolerance of ambiguity", etc are bullshit things, so watch out when you put a whole category of people in your camp. I'm rigorous in rationality and I've come to this stuff through my own questioning, watch out because the non-conservative can also put an aggressive rethoric to use.
IMHO this corporatism thing is just 'No true scotsman' for capitalism. If the right is able to do that, then the left should be allowed to get back talking about communism and socialism again, since none of the problems that happened were in the original thing thought. Also, no true scotsman is too a compelling narrative. I mean, I'm not here to bash you, but since I started looking into this topics more closely, this type of argument doesn't seem much coherent anymore, without state intervention 'the system' would have crumbled a long time ago. IDK it just sounds like ideology.
Slavery, colonization and wars enabled a lot of prosperity building too, and also a lot of technological innovation.
It's awkward to even have to compose a reply to that answer! Some people reaaaally need to affirm to themselves that everything is fine whatever happens, for some reason. Small minds.
So, after the innumerous crimes and injustices commited by CIA abroad and home, since nothing was done to the agency, it means it now turned into a free pass? Justice, like a lot of other stuff in our societies that basically are just common agreements, is actually pretty fragile, if it's not upheld things tend to go down. There's consequences and stuff.
(Explaining: Your post only exposes the size of your ignorance)