If, however, you don't subscribe to the starving lifestyle, such blanket assumption are useless.

Same for phones: do you just not use a phone? Does the poster above you rely on the heuristic that people using the term "pwned" generally don't have much of relevance to say anyway?

Because if everything is terrible, and everyone is corrupt, and there is absolutely no use in considering the probability that some options are less terrible than others, and that there may be signs the public can pick up on to make decisions, then congratulations: those believes do help in feeling really smug about your cynicism. But they don't really help otherwise.