Yes, poor people have color TVs

[SheilaT]

9. First off, I'm under the impression that black and white TVs haven't been

manufactured in decades.

I'm old enough to clearly recall when color TV sets were an expensive luxury. I actually only ever owned b&w until sometime in the 1980's, but that has to do with a combination of things connected to being very cheap and not buying a replacement TV for years after any sensible person would have bought one.

I also personally only have a dumb phone (but it's very kind to me and I love it dearly ) but that's the choice I've made.

Oh, and I don't have a TV or cable or a satellite dish. But I watch as much TV as I want via the internet, so again I've made specific choices that work for me.

As for manicures, the one brief (about four month time) period that I got manicures, I became horrified at the ongoing cost. That was about 15 years ago, so it's possible that the ongoing cost has dropped a lot.

But the overall point you're making is the important one: people make choices how to spend their money, and so long as on one else (like a small child) is suffering, who am I to second-guess those decisions?

And even more to the point is the fact that the amount of cash it takes in our society to have a basic standard of living is shockingly high. Cell phones, cable, internet -- these are not luxuries in today's world, but necessities. I have read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Little House on the Prairie, etc) many times, and one of the things that stands out is how very little cash it took for them to survive. Goodness knows, I would not want to live as she did growing up: no electricity, almost freezing or starving in very hard times, the incredible amount of physical labor it took to survive.

The modern world, with color TV, cell phones, and so on, is not going to go away any time soon.