8/28/2003

Arnold's polling and polling in general is getting worse because of cell phones. In states like California where it seems that 90 percent of us are wireless, the young have no land lines at all, preferring to use the combo of cell phones with free time plus the now super cheap beeper/voice mail as a land line number. The result, for young and old, is that they are not reachable for polling. Thus polling measures the old farts sitting around the house with nothing to do. NOBODY is going to sit still for a poll taken on a cell phone when the person polled PAYS for the call. To show you just how serious this is, incoming telephone sales rooms, the ones that take all the TV deals and phony foreclosure and car auction ads in the throwaway papers, those operator/salespeople get paid a bounty for collecting cell phone numbers and are fired if they don't ask each caller for their cell phone number. We have at least 1/3 of our urban population in California unreachable by conventional land line telephones.

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