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Comment by Aqwis | Hacker News Reader

Unlike seemingly everyone else who has commented here so far, I actually took some time to read through the results. There are some interesting findings, like whites being the racial grouping least likely to own a cellphone at 97% ownership, compared to black and hispanic people at 99% and 100%, respectively. Assuming this isn't just a statistical artifact from a low sample size (the sample sizes are not stated, unfortunately), could this be at least in part due to luddite conservative Christian (and nearly exclusively white) groups like the Amish or Mennonites? In total, groups like these seem to have millions of members, but I'm not sure how many of them actually live without modern technology.

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The likely confounding variable is just age: the oldest segments of the US population are the most caucasian, and these are the populations least like to use smartphones. So the correlation may be spurious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

To me those look more likely to be sampling artifacts.

Amish people are about 0.1-0.2% of White US adults, Mennonies about 0.2-0.3%. Things I would expect to move the numbers are that 0.5% of White and 2.3% of Black Americans are incarcerated, and that about 0.7% of adults are in nursing homes (with no apparent difference between racial groups).

I know at least two (maybe more, but i didn't ask for cellphones) who are just old back-to-lander hippies who bought some land in WV in the 80s. They use public library for emails and spend their time playing music, farming, drinking their own beer and smoking their own weed and tobacco.

Not conservative at all.

Everyone I know in that demographic is super far right.

The MAGA deadhead crossover vibe is so weird. At least the actual cultural icons they worship seem to have kept their heads on at old age.

They are super pro-union, they all have sticker "protect the water/Save the Elk River", most of them go to the farmer's market and one of them (one of the young lesbian) was documenting the opioid epidemic in WV with the help of a local journalist (who was present because he played bass pretty well i think?).

They do have some MAGA friends, "Try supporting Manchin, honestly i don't blame them", and honestly it was really enlightening.

What a stupid study. Happened to miss huge chunks of Native Americans who have neither cell phones nor land lines.

Have you also considered that white people are the only ones likely to have a landline but no cell phone? Due to the terrible design of the study, it excludes people who didn’t respond (which has many of the racial groups you incorrectly attributed as 100% having mobile phones).

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