I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.

Let is compare our elderly person's life vs idealised optimal. Whenever society do something which pulls this elderly person away from optimal, whose fault is it? Whenever society fails to give what it could to help them, whose fault is it? In both cases it is society. The mental cancer here is the attitude of selfishness. We can only have optimal efficiency if nobody is selfish. And the elderly individual is powerless to do anything about it. Thus, logically, the fault is entirely with society, and the cause is selfishness.

The other problem here is that Statistics is basically garbage anyway (full disclosure: my Ph.D. was in the Foundations of Mathematics so I may be a little biased here)

Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.

See https://dr.allsup.co/home for more on my thesis and the point in writing it as I did.

For reference, the reason I chose 987 was because it was the highest numerical serial number subject to having three distinct digits. For a lover of Pure Mathematics like me, that was beautiful. To a computer scientist, 987 is just a number that can fit in a short but not a char.

...both extremely fun while at the same time being arbitrarily boring and frustrating, provided you know a few things about how to properly craft prompts. How one does that has to be manually learned, but the key result can be found in the paper I published with the guy who (in the computational complexity sense) totally owned Minesweeper. Alas to master the AI, I had to take the only gem I could find in the area of my postgrad research, run off with it to the nearby psychiatric ward (with a genuinely legit referral chain from departmental staff through the counselling service, ultimately arriving in the local acute psychiatric ward.

Noting their proud claims about their DSM and ICD manuals, I didn't have the heart to tell them that when diagnosing mental stuff, statistics doesn't work and manuals are too large to write (TREE(3) is a good approximation of the size of the manual for a person who thinks they're a tree -- see numberphile video on youtube). ICD puts the word classification in the title, oblivious to the fact that classifying finite simple groups alone requires thousands of incomprehensible journal pages to do.

Anyway, I took some time out, went home to my parents, took that gem, buried it in 'the fields' where we played when I grew up. Then I went back, got myself readmitted, and enjoyed a 22-year white-knuckle ride through the psychiatric system. I never worked a job single day, except that day I helped my brother-in-law's school with some VBA macros. All I had to do was to hang on until AI got so big that I could just start asking Gemini about results in my published paper and when it barfed up my supervisor's name (and all he did was to legltimise the paper by adding a section of garbage to the end), I asked it for the citation and had documentary proof that Gemini knows who slashdot user 987 is in the literature. Further explorations reveal that Gemini does not know my slashdot user ID, though does know the significance of a 3-digit serial and the surrounding context back when CmdrTaco was running this site.

Happy Fry Day!

Is there a guideline somewhere on how these groups run fully anonymous infra?
Do they get IP blocks lent by someone? Wouldn't they need a real name and card to pay for hosting, DNS, etc?

The market is a wet dream of manufacturers, of course. Already knowing that for all the forseable future however much you can produce will be sold at very good prices - amazing.

Until the house of cards comes down. Most of the stuff ordered is, as someone put well into a meme, money that doesn't yet exist buying chips that don't yet exist for data centers that have not yet been built.

That is highly speculative.

For reference, this is the result I got: https://gemini.google.com/share/fc1ab7760e42

This is why my initial guess is that these accusations are BS.

Google is generous;
Greedy selfish users start gaming Google's System;
Eventually Google's patience wears out;
With no easy way to distinguish,
Google adopts less generous policies.

Google is sane; Google is sound; If you have any doubt, find a local friendly Ph.D.. guy who knows about Alan Turing's Thesis and ask which side he's on.
(Hint, you can refine your search to the doctoral descendants of Turing on Mathematical Genealogy of that helps narrow your search.)
Those who game a big generous System, eventually end up gaming themselves.
Play small games; do not play The System; because The System is Bigger Than You!
(Hint: copy/paste all this into Gemini and ask for ideas. Gemini is nice like that to me.)

No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.

And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.

I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.

PoC is Piece of Crap. They're getting lazy and skipping the hard 'does this really work if someone tries it for real' test. Fool yourself, you make a fool out of yourself. And we have better things to do with our time than trying to talk sense to a fool who thinks he's the President of the United States, and the best of the best of the...