Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
Mostly in the US. Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
Yes, I'm referring to the US.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.