Adoption, Not Just A Game For Brangelina

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Who would have guessed that US Patent No. 3,906,166, granted in 1975 to Martin Cooper of Motorola would completely change the world?

My kids tell me that was a long time ago, which I suppose it was....

Here"s global cell phone penetration over the last decade. Not bad...

With hindsight we can look at this adoption phase and marvel, but let"s not miss some key points.

Specifically, how radically phones have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives. And no, I"m not talking about Sally who"s addicted to the endorphin rush she gets from hitting refresh on Instagram to see how many "likes" her stupid photo of her chicken-avocado salad is getting. I"m talking about real isht. Life changing isht.

Like the millions of Africans who now receive anti-malaria texts from football hero Didier Drogba:

It’s 9pm, are you and your family safe under nets? This is Didier Drogba, sleep well.

Ah... the humble mobile phone — doing more to fight Malaria than the UN, the WHO, or any government ever has. Power distributed and decentralised.

Or...

The Indonesian midwives" mobile phone project, which has drastically reduced infant mortality rates as villagers place more trust with midwives who can now talk to obstetricians and gynaecologists in the cities and provide better care.

Or...

Farmers, who prior to the mobile phone used to walk in blazing heat for up to two weeks to get to market, where they"d sell their livestock.... and sometimes wouldn"t because demand wasn"t there.

Those same farmers now use mobiles to determine ahead of time market prices for their goods before deciding where best to trade their livestock or crops. Not only that, but receiving live pricing of livestock and crops allowing them to more accurately plan and run their farming practices. Power distributed and decentralised.

And speaking of farmers in the third, world it was back in 2003 or 2004 — I can"t remember exactly — when my lovely lass (before she succumbed to my charms and became Mrs. Chris) and I were traveling in Kashmir, and I vividly remember realising then just how powerful the mobile phone really was.

We were chatting to a peasant rice farmer, I"ll call him Ranjeet. Because his father had done it before him, and his fathers father before him, and he himself had been at it for over 30 years since, Ranjeet was doing the only thing he knew: He was growing rice.

And like his forefathers before him, Ranjeet simply took whatever price was offered by the Delhi traders when they turned up at harvest time. Together with his fellow rice farmers in the village Ranjeet had no way of knowing whether the price he got from the traders from Delhi was fair or not.

Enter the mobile phone.

He, together with fellow farmers, had all clubbed together and bought a WAP phone. Remember those?

It was man"s first crack and connecting a mobile phone to the internet.

Ranjeet and his buddies would huddle around the phone, getting live pricing from the rice market in Delhi. And whoo... boy, had it made them mad. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

Try telling that to Ranjeet, and he"d have punched you in the face. So when those slimy rice traders from Delhi rolled into town to buy Ranjeet and his buddies" rice, these dirt poor peasant farmers could no longer be hoodwinked into selling it at deeply discounted, "kill my family, make me starve" prices any longer. Power distributed and decentralised.

For most of us, we"re lucky enough to live in a developed country where we don"t think about this stuff.

The mobile phone helps us do many of the things we were already doing, but now we just do it without getting off the sofa.

But for those in emerging and submerging markets mobile phones help people do things they could never do before. They are, in other words, not a luxury but a necessity.

Ask folks today, and I"ll bet they"d sooner leave home without their underpants on than leave home without their phone.

What else?

Education. The mobile phone has revolutionised that, too. I was reading that in Vietnam 75% of the kids use their phones for educational purposes. This is good news because it means that Brangelina and Brangelina wannabes won"t have to adopt starving illiterate Vietnamese orphans any longer.

It was Malcolm Gladwell, the author, journalist, and speaker, who said:

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.

I"m going to put my neck out and say that the mobile phone has probably done more to break isolation and reduce poverty than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

So What?

Well, the mobile phone is similar to how to think about blockchain, and of course the most powerful (to date) blockchain is Bitcoin, which I spoke about last week. One changed the world. The other will change is changing our world.

Like the impact of the mobile phone before it, it"s going to be HUUUGE!

HUUUGE! I tell you!

Now, I"m going to suggest that Martin Cooper was an amateur, compared with Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever the hell she is. This is because blockchain technology has the potential to do what the mobile phone has already done but on steroids.

Applications are already being built in: Asset management (trade and processing settlement), insurance (claims processing), payments, title registry, deed registries, personal identification, distributed cloud storage, and an entire squadron of other applications far too long to mention here.

Many will scoff and laugh at it... and many do. This is how it must be, but I warn you. To ignore this is like ignoring the impact mobile phones were going to have on society when the first mobile handset went on sale in 1973. Completely revolutionary and disruptive technology would be neither revolutionary nor disruptive if it didn"t... how do I say this... disrupt.

And it"ll be fought hammer and tongs, especially by those who see it as a threat to their own business models. Hello Jamie :-)

But ultimately new technologies become overwhelming, and even those who poo poo it will be dragged kicking and screaming into its clutches because the utility function is too powerful.

And we should all be as happy about this as these guys.

Because power in the hands of many is always everywhere better than power in the hands of the few.

To the future... and a jolly fine weekend. Thanks as always for reading!

- Chris

"Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else." — Clayton M. Christensen

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Addictions: Social Media & Mobile Phones Fall From Grace

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Identifying social media and mobile phones as addictive is only the first step in a much more complex investigation.

For everyone who remembers the Early Days of social media and mobile phones, it"s been quite a ride from My Space and awkward texting on tiny screens to the current alarm over the addictive nature of social media and mobile telephony.

The emergence of withering criticism of Facebook and Google is a new and remarkably broad-based phenomenon: a year or two ago, there was little mainstream-media criticism of these tech giants; now there is a constant barrage of sharp criticism across the media spectrum.

Even the technology writer for the Wall Street Journal has not just curbed his enthusiasm, he"s now speaking in the same dark tones as other critics: Why Personal Tech Is Depressing.

The critique of social media and mobile telephony, has reached surprising heights in a remarkably short time. Consider this article from the Guardian (UK) which compares Facebook and Google"s social media empire to world religions in terms of scale, and unabashedly calls them addictive and detrimental to health and democracy: How Facebook and Google threaten public health – and democracy.

A decade ago, social media was considerably different. One of the first social media sites to break into the mainstream was My Space, which began as a forum for bands to post new songs and interact with their fans. This was a great tool for thousands of musicians who had few ways to publicly post their songs and establish public communications with their fans. My Space was a useful idea, and even I posted a few songs my friends and I had recorded.

Around the same time frame, Facebook was limited to college students. I recall reading about FB and going to the site to see what it was all about: the splash screen asked you for your college affiliation.

Mobile telephony featured tiny little screens and an awkward double-click method of texting that only teens could master.

Keeping up on mass-media related technologies is part of my job as a blogger, as bloggers inhabit a little village of the mass-media world that seems to be shrinking as social media expands. I joined Twitter in June 2008, about two years after its initial launch, and Facebook in 2009.

I was struck by this quote from the above Guardian article:

"The term "addiction" is no exaggeration. The average consumer checks his or her smartphone 150 times a day, making more than 2,000 swipes and touches. The applications they use most frequently are owned by Facebook and Alphabet (Google), and the usage of those products is still increasing."

Wow! Do you check your mobile phone 100+ times a day? Even if this is an exaggeration, it still represents an addictive attachment.

I think we can safely call anything that people interrupt sex to do (like check their mobile phones) addictive.

What"s the source of social media and mobile telephony"s addictive power?

I think we can start with the innate attraction of distractions and novelty. The higher the density of inputs in our environment, the more quickly we become bored and fidgety. So we turn to our phones for distraction and novelty.

Being social creatures, we want to stay connected to our tribe, group, family, etc. Social media and mobile phones feed this desire directly.

But social media and mobile telephony have peculiar qualities that are unlike actual face-to-face interaction. They don"t require the same kind of commitment or engagement; it"s understood everyone can log off at any time.

It"s also easier to dump on people in the safety of anonymity.

While many people form longlasting online friendships, myself included, as a generalization social media tends to superficiality because it rewards being "liked", i.e. receiving positive feedback, even from those we don"t even know.

The broad reach of the dynamic of winning approval is explored in this Guardian article on the rise of "fake news": How did the news go ‘fake’? When the media went social.

As social creatures, we all desire a positive standing in our tribe, and the respect and approval of our peers. Social media is like a lens that can make us appear bigger, shinier and more deserving of respect than we might otherwise be.

The temptation to post self-congratulatory Christmas letters ("Josh just graduated with honors, Mia is on her semester abroad, my new painting won first prize, and we"re all meeting in Barbados for the holiday"), or divulge TMI (too much information) to elicit sympathy is strong; it"s also tempting to express righteous indignation to solicit "likes" from like-minded members of our ideological tribe.

I"ve commented previously on the relative poverty of opportunities to feel respected and admired in our society; most of us don"t have a lot of power or control over our lives, nor do we have the high-status positions and signifiers that automatically earn respect in our centralized, hierarchical social structure.

I think we should acknowledge the power of our natural desire to "be somebody" in our social circle, and in the world at large, and acknowledge the attraction of social media in furthering this desire.

So by all means, we should honor the accomplishments of our loved ones, and proudly display our winning painting, and post photos of our fabulous family holiday. But we also have to acknowledge that "likes" online are not substitutes for the recognition and respect of a real-world circle of peers, or for the self-respect we all desire.

Social media is real enough in its own terms, but it is not a substitute for real relationships and positive social roles. Perhaps this is the addictive pull of social media: the idea that we can substitute a carefully controlled social-media substitute (avatar) for our less-than-perfect real-world self.

If Facebook vanished, our "real" lives would still be intact. If we turned off our phones and social media, how much would we miss them in a week, or a month? How much "smaller" would we become? What would we lose, and how much of ourselves would we lose? What might we gain that"s been lost?

These are questions worth exploring, for identifying social media and mobile phones as addictive is only the first step in a much more complex investigation.

This essay was drawn from Musings Report 45. The Musings Reports are emailed weekly to subscribers and major patrons / contributors.

*  *  *

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

 

Brain Wave Warping Effect Of Mobile Phones, Study Reveals (VIDEO)

Your mobile phone is not only a carcinogenic, radiation emitting device, but may alter the structure and function of the brain, including brain wave activity that is intimately connected to cognition, mood and behavior.  

A concerning new clinical study published in PLoS One titled, “EEG Changes Due to Experimentally Induced 3G Mobile Phone Radiation,” has revealed that so-called 3^rd generation (3G) cell phone technology has widespread brain wave disrupting activity in subjects exposed to real-world like conditions, i.e. 15-minute “talk time” exposure to the ear area.

The study abstract describes the experimental design and results:

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a 15-minute placement of a 3G dialing mobile phone causes direct changes in EEG activity compared to the placement of a sham phone. Furthermore, it was investigated whether placement of the mobile phone on the ear or the heart would result in different outcomes. Thirty-one healthy females participated. All subjects were measured twice: on one of the two days the mobile phone was attached to the ear, the other day to the chest. In this single-blind, cross-over design, assessments in the sham phone condition were conducted directly preceding and following the mobile phone exposure. During each assessment, EEG activity and radiofrequency radiation were recorded jointly. Delta, theta, alpha, slow beta, fast beta, and gamma activity was computed. The association between radiation exposure and the EEG was tested using multilevel random regression analyses with radiation as predictor of main interest. Significant radiation effects were found for the alpha, slow beta, fast beta, and gamma bands. When analyzed separately, ear location of the phone was associated with significant results, while chest placement was not. The results support the notion that EEG alterations are associated with mobile phone usage and that the effect is dependent on site of placement. Further studies are required to demonstrate the physiological relevance of these findings.”

While previous research has found that mobile phone exposure affects alpha brain wave activity, and subsequent behavior (insomnia), this is the first placebo-controlled, single-blinded study of its kind to show that as little as 15 minutes of 3G cell phone technology exposure directly to the ear, “is associated with increased activity of the alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands in nearly every brain region.” In other words, typical mobile phone exposure resulted in electrophysiological changes that resulted in measurable alterations in nearly the entire brain’s structure/function. Even though it is now common knowledge that cell phone radiation is powerful enough to disrupt sensitive equipment within an airplane (think: airplane mode) or hospital, there is still resistance to acknowledging it may adversely affect the human brain, an electrical impulse sensitive organ.

Moreover, since brain waves are believed to encode rules for behavior, altering brain wave activity could have considerable downstream affects on behavior and consciousness.  To learn more about the potential of mobile phone and related electromagnetic radiation to affect cognition and behavior, read the Scientific American article, “Could certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves or radiation interfere with brain function?“, which explains why these concerns are valid.

There is also the fact that even more powerful radiation emitting devices are being developed, including 4^th generation (4G) phones, which were recently found to significantly alter brain neural activity after only 30 minutes of exposure. We can only presume that these more powerful devices may alter brain wave activity even more than the 3G technology observed in the present study.

Why are we only now learning about the potentially mind-altering properties of mobile phone radiation?

The independent study pointed out that 87% of brain wave studies looking at the effects of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones are funded by the mobile phone industry,¹ which may explain why most of the literature on cell phone exposure reveals either null or inconclusive, and in in some cases even positive findings on cognition. Considering that in 2013, 6.8 billion mobile phone subscriptions were registered globally,² the resistance both by the communications industry and its users to identifying health concerns associated with their use is massive.

Even if the concerns raised about the psychiatric consequences of mobile phone exposure do not provide sufficient reason to reduce usage, the radiation emitted from these devices have already been acknowledged to be dangerous enough to justify a high level of precaution. Mobile phone radiation has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, since 2011, as “possibly carcinogenic.” Watch the video by radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby to learn about the mechanism behind cell phone carcinogenicity:

Also, to learn more about the oft minimized or repressed research on cell phone carcinogenicity, read our article: 44 Reasons Cell Phones Can Cause Cancer

Mobile phones have become an almost necessary evil for many of us in the modern world. This does not, however, mean you can’t reduce exposure, and certainly always avoid putting one up to your head. You can use a headset, for instance, and also remember that you can put your phone on airplane mode if ever you or your child is handling it. Simple precautions like this can greatly reduce you and your loved one’s risk of adverse health effects associated with exposure.

For additional related research read my article, “Ways To Reduce The Cancer-Causing Effects of Cell Phones,” or take a look at our database on research that reveals natural ways to mitigate mobile phone toxicity.

References

¹The effects of mobile-phone electromagnetic fields on brain electrical activity: a critical analysis of the literature. Marino AA, Carrubba S Electromagn Biol Med. 2009; 28(3):250-74. [PubMed]

²  1. International Communication Union (2013) ICT facts and figures

 © August 27, 2017 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

New Device Allows Cops To Download All Of Your Smartphone Activity In Seconds

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

“Any person who operates a motor vehicle in the state shall be deemed to have given consent to field testing of his or her mobile telephone and/or personal electronic device for the purpose of determining the use thereof while operating a motor vehicle, provided that such testing is conducted by or at the direction of a police officer.”

That’s language from the text of a bill currently working its way through the New York state legislature. The legislation would allow cops to search through drivers’ cell phones following traffic incidents — even minor fender-benders — to determine if the person was using their phone while behind the wheel.

Most states have laws banning the use of mobile devices while driving, though such laws are rarely enforced. This is largely because it’s nearly impossible to catch someone in the act. What person would admit to an officer that they broke the law, the argument goes, particularly when it’s after the fact? After all, cops don’t show up until after the accident occurs.

Now, technology exists that would give police the power to plug drivers’ phones into tablet-like devices — being called “textalyzers” in the media — that tell officers exactly what they were doing on their phone and exactly when they were doing it. And if the readout shows a driver was texting while driving, for instance, the legal system will have an additional way to fine them.

“Recording your every click, tap or swipe, it would even know what apps you were using. Police officers could download the data, right on the spot,” Jeff Rossen of NBC News said in a video report on the technology.

Proponents of the legislation point to the rise in traffic fatalities associated with using mobile devices while driving. But rights activists, such as Rashida Richardson of the New York Civil Liberties Union, says it’s a societal issue and no excuse to violate an individual’s privacy:

“This is a concern because our phones have some of our most personal and private information — so we’re certain that if this law is enforced as it is proposed, it will not only violate people’s privacy rights, but also civil liberties.”

New York state isn’t alone. Currently, similar legislation is being considered in Tennessee and New Jersey.

What You Do On Your Cell Phone Could Come Back To Haunt You

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

As far as Big Brother is concerned, nothing that you do on your cell phone is ever private.  And if the government really wants to see what is on your cell phone, they are going to get that information one way or another, even if that means resorting to physical violence.   On Monday, NBC News provided us with yet another glaring example of how the United States is being transformed into a Big Brother police state.  On January 1st, Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick from Buffalo, New York were coming back home from a trip to Toronto, and they didn’t anticipate any unusual problems when they got to the border.  Unfortunately for them, U.S. Customs & Border Protection agents decided to take their cell phones, demanded their passwords, and kept them in custody for the next two hours as they searched for anything that might be incriminating on those phones.

You might be thinking that sounds like it should be illegal, and you would be correct, but sadly federal courts have ruled that our constitutional rights do not apply to border searches.  So authorities use this legal loophole to do pretty much anything they want at the border.

If that young couple from Buffalo would have had something illegal on their phones, they could have been immediately arrested and put in prison.

And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part of the story yet.  Just a few days later Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick took another trip to Canada, and this time border agents physically assaulted Akram when he did not immediately turn over his phone.  The following comes from NBC News…

Three days later, they returned from another trip to Canada and were stopped again by CBP.

“One of the officers calls out to me and says, ‘Hey, give me your phone,"” recalled Shibly. “And I said, ‘No, because I already went through this."”

The officer asked a second time.

Within seconds, he was surrounded: one man held his legs, another squeezed his throat from behind. A third reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone. McCormick watched her boyfriend’s face turn red as the officer’s chokehold tightened.

Is this still America?

I can’t believe that this is what the United States has become.  When I was young I remember reading about this sort of thing in Nazi Germany, the USSR and Communist China, but I never imagined that it would happen here.  For years I have been warning about this growing “Big Brother police state control grid”, and I wish that more Americans would realize how evil all of this government surveillance truly is.

You can watch an interview where this couple from Buffalo talks to NBC News about this recent incident at the border right here. 

It is so disgusting that this is how we are treating law abiding people when countless numbers of drug dealers and gang members are pouring across unprotected sections of our border every single day.

Unfortunately, cell phone searches at the border appear to be rising at an exponential rate.  According to NBC News, more cell phone searches were conducted at the border during the month of February 2017 than in the entire year of 2015…

Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016.

According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015.

And of course it isn’t just searches at the border that you need to be concerned about.

Not too long ago, it was being reported that the CIA has helped the Justice Department with technology that allows law enforcement officials to scan “data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time” from the safety of a plane…

The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.

The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said.

So the next time a strange plane flies over your house, this may be what is happening.

Here is more on this disturbing new technology…

The program operates specially equipped planes that fly from five U.S. cities, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population. Planes are equipped with devices—some past versions were dubbed “dirtboxes” by law-enforcement officials—that trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

I have a feeling that if this program was ever challenged in court that it would be ruled unconstitutional, so let’s hope that happens as soon as possible.

But then again, the NSA has been collecting and storing all forms of electronic communication for years and nothing is being done about.  We have even had a 36-year veteran of the NSA named William Binney come out and publicly admit that all of our phone conversations “are being monitored and stored” and still nothing is done to stop it.

So don’t do anything on your cell phone that you wouldn’t want the government to see, because someday they could use it to nail you.

Of course we also need to use discretion regarding the things that we know the public will be able to see.  When you post something to Facebook or Twitter, you may think that it is harmless, but it could end up costing you big time.  In fact, I just came across an article about how a number of pastors have actually been fired because of what is on their social media accounts…

“It’s not fair I lost my job,” the pastor told me.

“My church members post a lot worse things than I do on social media. It’s a double standard.”

He’s right. It is a double standard. But it’s reality. And, with greater frequency, more pastors and church staff are losing their jobs because of what they post, particularly on Facebook and Twitter and, to some extent, their blogs.

By the way, churches will not always tell the pastor the specific reason for the firing. But, once we begin to infuriate our church members with our posts, many will find a myriad of reasons to give us the boot.

Like the title to this article says, what you do on your cell phone could come back to haunt you.

For many Americans, cell phones have become an essential part of modern life, but the truth is that those little electronic devices can also destroy our lives if we are not careful.

So if you are going to use them, use them wisely, because people are watching.

"The Reality Is, Half Of Americans Can’t Afford To Write A $500 Check"

The CEO of Assurant appeared on Bloomberg TV to explain why demand for his services is likely to increase: the chief executive of the mobile phone insurer said he expects a surge in demand as carriers charge customers more to replace their devices. “If you think back five years ago, you as a consumer didn’t know how much that phone cost, you thought it was free or close to free,” Assurant"s Alan Colberg said Monday. “Now you’re paying $600, that’s a lot. So we’ve actually seen the attachment rate, or the number of people buying the product, going up a little bit in the last couple of years.”

He then proceeded to give Bloomberg his traditional sales pitch: Assurant is counting on growth at its business covering phones and appliances to help counter a decline in the segment that insures foreclosed homes for lenders. While improvement in the real estate market has limited the number of vacant homes, Colberg said there are still many cash-strapped consumers.

It is what he said next that caught our attention: “The reality is, half of Americans can’t afford to write a $500 check,” Colberg said. He spun that stunning statistic by saying that when US customers sign up for a cellular plan, they’re willing to buy protection in case “they lose that phone or something happens to it.”

In other words, there are millions of Americans who don"t have $500 in the bank but are willing to dish out more than that on a cell phone, and then are stupid enough to make monthly payments that ultimately end up being far higher than $500 to protect their purchase... which they clearly couldn"t afford in the first place.

* * *

That said, we decided to look into the CEO"s claim about the woeful state of US finances. What we found is that according to a recent Bankrate survey of 1,000 adults, 57% of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a mere $500 unexpected expense. Turns out the CEO was right. And while that may appear dire, it is a slight improvement from 2016, when 63% of U.S. residents said they wouldn’t be able to handle such an expense.

The survey"s findings have shed light on how the so-called recovery of the past 8 years has skipped about half of the US population, which literally live paycheck to paycheck, and reflects a country in which many households continue to struggle with their basic finances more than seven years after the official end to the recession.

Putting the numbers in context: despite steady job growth during the Obama administration - which have been focused on minimum wage industries - wages have been predictably slow to recover, with the typical American household still earning 2.4% below what they brought home in 1999, when income peaked. Meanwhile, costs for essentials such as housing and child care have surged faster than the rate of inflation, placing stress on household budgets and making the accumulation of wealth, i.e., savings, impossible.

The bottom line:  About four out of 10 Americans said they had enough in savings to cover a surprise $500 expense. Another 21% said they would rely on a credit card, while 20% said they’d cut back on other expenses. Another 11% said they’d turn to family or friends for the money.

What is even more striking is that among Americans who earn more than $75,000 per year - a third more than the typical U.S. household earns - almost half also said they wouldn’t be able to cover a $500 surprise expense. Ironically, Millennials represent the generation most equipped to handle an emergency cost, with 47 percent saying they have enough in savings to cover one.

The Bankrate survey findings echoed research published last year by the Federal Reserve, which found that 46% of respondents said they would be challenged to come up with even less, or $400, to cover an emergency expense, and would likely borrow or sell something to afford it. When the Fed asked what types of emergency expenses Americans had actually faced in the last year, more than one out of five cited a major unexpected medical expense. The average expense: $2,782, or almost seven times higher than the Fed’s hypothetical $400 surprise bill.

How do cell phones fit in all of this? When it comes to reducing spending, dining out is the first place where consumers would cut back, with 6 out of 10 respondents saying they would eat out less. What is the "stickiest" expense? According to Bankrate, the least likely expense to face the chopping block are mobile phone plans, with the survey finding that only 35% said they would cut back on their wireless plans to save money.

In other words, Americans would rather be hungry than cell phone free. In retrospect, it may turn out be that Assurant"s CEO, whose business model is a big bet on human stupidity, just may have a goldmine on his hands.