tails: A Place for Mastodon Posts

I’m not trying to read something that isn’t there. Poverty does cause negative consequences and it will show in statistics, but here at least, poverty does not seem to be the dominant factor.

The internet adoption map mostly shows 3 correlations:

1. A political one along national borders. That for example Romania and Kosovo have relatively high internet adoption and Greece + Portugal don’t, is caused by government policy, not because of wealth: Greece + Portugal are still far wealthier than the other two.
2. A division within countries whereby the capital region has higher internet adoption rates than other regions. The capital region usually has a higher gnp per capita (not in Poland apparently though), but it also usually has more immigration of young people.
3. And another trend within countries, whereby regions with declining + aging populations (Fe Saarland + southern Italy + former east Germany) score lower.

But the one that clearly dominates is 1) Government policy. You can have 2 regions with similar demographics + wealth and a national border between the 2 regions, and the internet adoption rate between the 2 can be vastly different, a far bigger difference than between 2 regions within the same country.

Your attempt at discrediting my obversations as looking at trees in a forest is cute, but it’s not going to fly. You can’t claim that a forest is boreal and then if someone observes that it contains palm trees, proclaim that they’re not allowed to look at the trees.