June 2020: with the public's trust in the media at its lowest level in history, controlled press claims engineered bat virus decreases smartphone sales, increases suicide rate

“Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.”

― From " The Art of War ", by Sun Tzu, 5th Century B.C.

January 30, 2020 - Daily chart - America’s suicide rate has increased for 13 years in a row

April 8, 2020 - US Suicide Rate Climbed 35% in Two Decades

May 19, 2020 - Is the Pandemic Sparking Suicide ?

January 31, 2019 - Global smartphone volumes dropped 4.9% in the fourth quarter of 2018.

May 28, 2019 - U.S. smartphone sales dropped 15.8% in the first quarter of 2019.

August 22, 2019 - Global Smartphone Sales dropped 1.7% in the second quarter of 2019.

November 26, 2019 - Smartphone sales continued to decline around the world in the third quarter of this year, dropping 0.4% compared to the same period last year, according to Gartner.

January 4, 2020 - Coronavirus has many of us glued to our smartphones. Whether it’s checking the news regularly, scrolling through social media or keeping up with endless Whatsapp chats, it can quickly feel quite overwhelming.

June 1, 2020 - Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Declined 20% in First Quarter of 2020 Due to COVID-19 Impact

February 13, 2020 - Motorola Razr review: folding flip phone flops

March 11, 2020 - Samsung Galaxy Z Flip Review: A Folding Phone That’s a Dud

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Smartphone sales in the U.S. dropped 15.8% in the first quarter of 2019. They dropped by that huge margin because everybody here in my country is getting wise to the fact that those so-called “smart” phones are horribly addictive, and are the primary driver of suicide rates that are as high as they’ve ever been in recorded history. It’s just that everyone’s too embarrassed at having fallen for the con to admit it publicly.

It’s embarrassing.

Embarrassing, you know, like it is when you give up all freedoms and destroy all of the world’s economies for an engineered virus that’s got a mortality rate as low as or even lower than the seasonal flu.

Speaking of which, another current article that I’ve appended below is headlined "Is the Pandemic Sparking Suicide ? ".

While another is headlined “Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Declined 20% in First Quarter of 2020 Due to COVID-19 Impact .”

Ah, the government-engineered virus, is there anything that it can’t do?

Here, the bat virus with four amino acids added to it for increased transmissibility to humans is claimed to be driving down sales of the most important invention in human history, the so-called “smart” phone, while simultaneously causing an increase in suicides, which have in fact been rising steadily for twenty years.

Twenty years ago was right when the literal forest of towers, repeaters and panel arrays that many still mistakenly presume only carry cell phone traffic sprang up suddenly literally overnight in all the nations.

There’s another headline below, from 2020, which reads “America’s suicide rate has increased for 13 years in a row”. That maps right back to 2007 :

The iPhone (colloquially known, retronymically, as the iPhone 2G, the first iPhone, and iPhone 1 after 2008 to differentiate it from later models) is the first smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc.

Successor: iPhone 3G

Operating system: Original: iPhone OS 1.0; Last: …

First released: June 29, 2007 ;

The claim that " the virus did it " is a cloud of bullshit propaganda to cover up the truth, which is that smartphone sales are dropping precipitously because people are realizing that using them makes you want to kill yourself one third times more than if you had used the land line.

Or, if you’d like to maintain current programming levels, you can go with the establishment version, that “consumers stopped spending on nonessential products during the first quarter.”

Wait, what? How is a phone nonessential? At this moment, the essential-business phone stores are open, even though most everyone else has been forced to close their businesses for no good reason.

As the hugely-addictive, suicide-inducing, so-called “smart” phone passes out of existence, the propaganda will shortly shift to “populace too broke to buy smart phones, coronavirus killed the industry .”

There’s a lot of hysterical spin and sleight-of-hand surrounding the subject, but, plain and simple, it’s a huge positive change.

And, as a radical futurist, I’m here to tell you that we may do an end run straight back to the land line. I hated cell phones from the moment they appeared. From the moment someone first pulled one out in a restaurant and began talking loudly on it so we could all see how important they were. And that was before I knew that they made people want to kill themselves, en masse .

But I’ll settle for the death of the phone with the interface directly modeled on a Las Vegas slot machine, for maximum addictive power. And I’m beyond pleased to say that we’re witnessing its death at this moment.

For example, both of the industry’s last-ditch, hyper-expensive, bait-and-switch “foldable flip phones” have failed. The manufacturers had done studies, and hoped that the zombie brain of the hipster would think it had bought a non-web-enabled flip phone, only for more money than I paid for many of the cars that I’ve owned over the years. When, in actuality it had purchased a web-enabled “smart” phone, so craftily designed, they wouldn’t even notice the difference between them .

But that spectacular generational Satanist bait-and-switch gambit has failed. Like all of their other gambits are failing, anymore.

Awareness is inexorably rising.

Jeff Miller, Brooklyn, New York, June 5, 2020

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January 31, 2019 - The data revealed that after a " challenging holiday quarter" at the end of 2018 global smartphone volumes declined 4.1% last year with a total of 1.4 billion units shipped. In the fourth quarter alone, volumes declined 4.9% with 375.4 million units shipped.

January 30, 2020 - Daily chart - America’s suicide rate has increased for 13 years in a row

May 28, 2019 - Global sales of smartphones to end users declined 2.7% in the first quarter of 2019, totaling 373 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. … The two countries that sell the most smartphones, namely the U.S. and China, saw sales decline by 15.8% and 3.2% , respectively, in the first quarter of 2019.

August 22, 2019 - Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Continued to Decline in Second Quarter of 2019

Samsung Smartphone Sales Grew After Six Consecutive Quarterly Declines

Global sales of smartphones to end users declined 1.7% in the second quarter of 2019, totaling 368 million units, according to Gartner, Inc.

November 26, 2019 - Smartphone sales continued to decline around the world in the third quarter of this year, dropping 0.4% compared to the same period last year, according to Gartner.

January 4, 2020 - Coronavirus lockdown : how to beat your smartphone addiction

It’s time for a digital detox.

Coronavirus has many of us glued to our smartphones. Whether it’s checking the news regularly, scrolling through social media or keeping up with endless Whatsapp chats, it can quickly feel quite overwhelming.

February 19, 2020 - Smartphone addiction may shrink key areas of your brain in a similar way to drugs

Smartphone addiction is linked to changes in key areas of your brain, similar to drug addiction, according to a first-of-its-kind study.

While the term “smartphone addiction” is debated in the scientific community , it generally describes feelings and behaviors like being unable to concentrate due to smartphone use and feeling impatient when you’re not holding your device.

While past research has shown that people can have addictive behaviors around their smartphone use, the researchers say this is the first to show physical signs of addiction in the brain.

Being glued to your iPhone and feeling naked without it is a lot more socially acceptable than experiencing the same pull to cocaine, but new research suggests addiction to both devices and substances have a similarly detrimental effect on key parts of the brain.

The study, out of several universities and research centers in Europe, compared 22 18- to 30-year-olds who met criteria for smartphone addiction to 26 people who did not. Using MRIs, the researchers looked at the size and activity levels of certain brain regions.

They found that those who were considered smartphone addicts had lower gray matter volume — a measure of brain cells — in several areas, including the left anterior insula, which has been “robustly associated” to substance addictions, the researchers write.

The team also found the more highly people scored on a scale measuring smartphone addiction, the less activity and volume they had in the right anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area associated with empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision-making that’s also affected in other types of addiction.

(The author uses the hedging generality " lower gray matter volume" and then goes on to withold any statistic as to how much lower. That’s a heavy protective slant.

In “The term “smartphone addiction” is debated in the scientific community”, “the scientific community” is general. As you may recall, generality is a hallmark of propaganda.

The author is setting the stage with the general allusion that the addiction the article documents is not even real - ed)

February 13, 2020 - Motorola Razr review: folding flip phone flops

March 7, 2020 - Can switching to an old, outdated smartphone cure your addiction ?

Living with a dumb phone for a week was revelatory for me. The experience underlined how unhealthy my relationship with a smartphone had become. I emerged out of it more mindful about the time I spend staring at a phone and the apps that I allow to hack my attention.

But while I enjoyed the simpler times — albeit for just a few days , I did miss the comfort of modern apps. Plus, even though I was returning with a fresh perspective on a smartphone’s role in my life, it didn’t take long for those same apps to consume and intoxicate my attention again.

More importantly, following the article’s publication, several readers who were also fed up with their inability to put down their phones reached out to me and expressed that it simply wasn’t practical for them to switch to a feature phone. For some, it was a specific app they actively relied on and others were restricted by their carriers .

Which made me wonder : What if you just had a shitty, old smartphone ?

(This author tries to stop people from going back to flip phones, trying instead to trick them into simply using an older, but still web-enabled smart phone. Yes, they really think you are that stupid.

Restricted by their carriers? Wait, I’m laughing so hard I can’t type. - ed)

March 11, 2020 - Samsung Galaxy Z Flip Review: A Folding Phone That’s a Dud .

April 8, 2020 - US Suicide Rate Climbed 35% in Two Decades

(Ah, " climbed ", so vigorous, so adventurous. - ed)

May 11, 2020 - The British public’s trust in tech companies is wavering at a time when it needs it most

The British public is demanding increased regulation on the technology sector, according to a report from think tank Doteveryone.

National attitudes toward the benefits of technology are being overshadowed by distrust and disempowerment, according to the report.

The coronavirus lockdown means that people in Britain are more dependent on the internet than ever .

Silicon Valley’s image has been tarnished by scandal after scandal over the last decade and now the British public trusts the technology sector less than ever, according to a report out Monday from think tank Doteveryone.

The study — titled “People Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report” and based on responses from 2,000 members of the U.K. public — found that only 19% of Brits believe that tech companies are designing their products and services with citizen’s best interests in mind.

May 19, 2020 - Is the Pandemic Sparking Suicide ?

June 1, 2020 - Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Declined 20% in First Quarter of 2020 Due to COVID-19 Impact

Samsung, Huawei and Oppo Recorded Double-Digit Declines

Global sales of smartphones to end users declined 20.2% in the first quarter of 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. The global shelter-in-place combined with the economic uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic led to demand for smartphones collapsing as consumers stopped spending on nonessential products during the first quarter.