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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.
What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.
Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
This is why I always get the bare minimum insurance legally possible. Self-insuring is much simpler; I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly. If their insurance covers me when they total my car, great; if not, or if I am the one that crashes my car, I'll just have to buy another car. It helps that I have never owned a new or expensive car; all my cars have been 10+ years old and worth only a few thousands of dollars on the used market.
But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.
Similarly, when my job offered me a bunch of different health insurance tiers, I deliberately picked the ones that would deduct the least from my paycheck, on the idea that I probably wouldn't be able to navigate the insurance bureaucracy anyway (I was right; my contract was not renewed, and I barely got a couple of primary visits before my benefits lapsed). I am aware of my own limitations and deliberately try to opt out of interacting with complicated systems whenever possible.
Which is also one of the reasons I have a prepaid phone instead of a monthly phone contract. It's so simple; account balance is near zero or time is expiring means I need to buy another card, same as I buy gas when the tank is empty. What could be simpler than that?
Phone contracts specifically, I can't believe people pay $50-100 a month, and don't understand what benefits they could be getting from it.
Usually the newest iPhone. They’re expensive, so only paying 20-30 extra over 2 years generally works well for people, especially those who can’t afford 1000 dollars up front or don’t want to pay the whole shot unless they irreparably break it.
If you’re careful with your stuff this is a non-issue but those people tend more often to have 1000 dollars laying around.
Most credit cards have a 6 or even 12-month zero-interest financing period. Amazon store cards have this.
I sold carrier phones for years. I'm on Mint and buy my phone outright and pay it off over 6 to 12 months, usually buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other. This is what I tell other people to do. Just about no one does. Instead they buy carrier phones.
Or a 400-dollar iPhone SE, which is the phone I recommend to everyone either unwilling or unable to install ad blocking on Android (with a side of "I could do this, but I refuse to be tech support for this person") because iOS is a better experience than Android is under those conditions and the hardware is powerful enough that, unlike Android devices, you'll actually get 7 years out of it.
It honestly shocks me that particular phone isn't what most consumers who want iOS want, but then again, sometimes you have to know enough to ask for it (and the pricing on the latest models, which aren't actually any better than the SE outside of the camera and screen size, is significantly more than the SE making consumers think there's a massive difference between the two even though there really isn't).
You cannot begin to fathom my disdain for apple products. It's a personality-type thing, getting an iPhone would be...caving in. I prefer to have something different from what most people have. Even the Pixel is becoming a smidge too mainstream for me.
Also, I take pictures of wildlife I run into, including extreme close-ups of bugs. Camera matters to me. Also, I don't think it uses USB-C yet. Otherwise I agree with you regarding the SE, but the SE doesn't convey wealth/conformity, so of course most people don't buy it.
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