This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.
Because it builds credit, and most credit cards these days have points/cash back programs, the caveat being you have to be very diligent about budgeting and ensure you pay the balance off in full every month.
40% do pay off every month. Not a majority but still a large number. We don't have numbers for those who normally pay them off but once in a while miss - that might be significant.
It's fascinating that they completely missed smartphones or even a mention of a handheld computer like device. They were spot-on about the birthrates though.
Cell phones reduce drama in a plot. If you let phones seep into the plot at all, you then have to bend over backwards to explain why one character can't simply call another at any time. A lot of shows pretend they don't exist.
But, but, but! Triangulation by infiltrated and gag-ordered by corrupted government carrier/ISP! End to end encryption! Trojans! Malware! Hacked Wi-Fi! Burner phones! Bought with anonymous and forbidden cash, or even stolen! War driving! The possibilities are endless!
Not sure that one counts. They missed the important trend, which was that the rate of increase was slowing, and that it was slowing more quickly than thought possible. Off by "1.2 Bangladeshes" isn't really an A+ (or a B+). But then I remember still seeing yearly articles about how overpopulation was going to turn the future into a nightmarish hellscape at least through the mid-1990s, perhaps out of habit they'd been cultivating since the 1960s.
Bad Religion had a song Ten in 2010 that predicted 10 billion people by 2010. Not only were they wrong about the total population, they were overly pessimistic about the ability of societies to feed and support that many people.
I'm highly confident we never reach 10 billion. There's a somewhat (small, but realistic) chance we never reach 9 billion. This is even without anything quite so dramatic as a dinosaur-killer meteor. And it's not even slightly good.
Which is strange because the palm pilot was only a year away (this in R&D), and there were other hand held organizers.
The big miss wasn't that cell phones would shrink to fit in a pocket, it was that they would be cheap enough to use. In 1995 you paid dollars per minute to talk and most people who even had one avoided using it.
