When I first read this post, I thought the same as you: garbage framing.

You've nicely posited some alternative explanations -- NONE OF WHICH are addressed in the first paper linked (Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly), contrary to one reply below yours.

Correlation, as we know, is not causation. Until proven otherwise, those research efforts are just blind to many other possible causes.

Maybe I'm confused, but I think that FCC rules will not impact the verification of burner phone elsewhere in the world.

Which, I suspect is where much of the spam/fraud/etc originates.

Voice over IP from elsewhere will always exist, thus this isn't the protection that the FCC wishes to create.

Or am I confused (I am 80 years old, and long retired from tech)?

For many years, my friends and I have noticed that Google Translate (and YouTube) have a better chance of getting a European language pronoun wrong than correct.

We've noticed this: French, Italian, German, Spanish ... and most of the Scandinavian languages all suffer from this.

It must somehow be related to how those LLMs are trained.

Talking robot dog?

K-9 was introduced in Doctor Who during the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) serial The Invisible Enemy, which first aired in October 1977.

"Drink up, the world's about to end." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's funny how quickly corporations respond to financial threats.

Meta would quickly oblige.

I have 2 MacBooks, and I network attach 6 Seagate 5TB portable external drives to those Macs (three to each of the 2 Macs). That's about 30TB available directly over my home router.

Seems to work fine, and the Seagates are far less costly than most NAS drives. Though, they do die occasionally. Oops.

Basically, I found a way to make my older Mac useful by simply leaving it on all the time, with the external drives attached.

My concern, beyond giving my phone to another party ... is whether some kind of clever hack is possible if the phone is stolen.

There's always a hack, but I'm not clear on what this could entail.

maybe sometimes?

Exactly. Almost never in the history of the world has major power and wealth simply been given away.

Musk is smart and capable and extremely successful.

But that's no guarantee that this prediction will pan out.

In a year's time, or two or three, someone should remind him of this erroneous thought.

Also, please remember this Tweet he posted 3 months ago:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1740913974135459902?lang=en

"I stand by my prediction that, if Tesla executes extremely well over the next 5 years, that the long term value could exceed Apple and Aramco combined"

Right, Sure.

And fully autonomous cars, and the rise of twitter (X) as the sole source of Truth.

25 years ago, I wrote a book (published by John Wiley & Sons) predicting this. It was obvious back in 1997 that this was gonna be a sure thing.

On one of the first pages of my book, I wrote: "Television is something that watches you."