The same reason the Democrats do - fund raising. It's not like the Dem's don't have their own corporate favorites, like GE, who wangled waivers from ObamaCare. They now even have their own version of crooked corporate friends in Solyndra.
Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.
There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?
Rust no, but oxidize yes.
What you suggest might happen in the emergency room is charity. And since when did any offer of charity return a right of control over the charity recipient? That doesn't happen under any set of ethics or morals I know of. Nor is forcing the hospital to give free service a charitable act.
Only a slave owner has the right to demand products or services be given to him or her as a right. There is no right to health care in a free society.
Hmm.. Just maybe that extra cycle time might now be spent doing something constructive that we did not do when cycle time was dear? Sending and receiving email used to be quite cheap. But add in cryptographic signatures (rfc 4871) and the cycle time spent on one piece of mail goes up an order of magnitude.
The software industry would be derelict if it didn't try to find something useful and profitable to do with the extra cycles granted it. Well, I suppose there are exceptions. I find youtube.com to be useful, even if Google doesn't find it profitable.
Got a link for that? Somebody worried about all the whale oil being burnt? Not enough warm blooded animals swimming in the deep so the ocean cooled?
Standing on a high point tends to give you a clear path to cell towers quite some distance away. Flat land, like North Dakota gives great reception 30 miles from a cell tower as there are no obstructions. And even if it's populated like farm towns in the Midwest, and everybody has a phone - well most farmers spend most time working, not yakking and there aren't enough folks in a 30 mile circle to need that many cell towers.
And labor in Sikkim is probably cheaper than labor in the USA, so building that cell tower was cheaper.
You are right that the business model of locked-in phones is a pain, but your examples of better service are apples & oranges if you are comparing the sparse farmers of Sikkim to the densely packed IPhone users of Silcon Valley.
More important might be that not much is known about what politicians will do
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.