Look long enough and you will always find something to support your claim.

Shall I cherry pick some stats from some of Cuba's administrative divisions?

Those are going to be some spicy hallucinations.

> Think what's going on in Iran is very sad, but

> the above is not to diminish the other sad loss of life

That's a lot of caveats.

Any source for this?

How could it be spammed in previous years since this is only the 2nd year of "The Indie Game Awards". Not to mention the event only had less than 7.5k total views to the 171 million for the "The Game Awards".

The Game Awards 2025 had more viewers than the Superbowl with a total of 171 million global livestreams vs The Indie Game Awards (7.1k Youtube views and 433 Twitch views).

Sure, I know all of these things because me and all my friends make a tradition to watch it... to laugh at it. It's a hilarious farce. Which advertisers are fine with, naturally, but don't mistake someone admiring the spectacle of a catastrophic trainwreck for someone admiring the engineering of the railway. The actual awards given are a meaningless afterthought.

Do children buy devices and pay for internet service?

Pocket money is a thing, PAYG is a thing, gift cards are a thing.

Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s.

Parents can still confiscate their children's belongings even if the child bought them. Imagine a child buys large speakers and puts them on blast with windows open in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter if the child bought them on their own, the parent should still be able to confiscate them.

Sure. But a phone is easy to hide… well, until it gets addictive and overused.

Cellphone service providers will most likely be unwilling to start a contract with a child, so the child can't get a SIM on their own. Also if the parent wants to make sure that the SIM card they get can't be used with another phone than the one they provided, they can get an eSIM.

The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.

School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.

The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.

If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.

Contract, yes. I said PAYG, as in Pay As You Go, as in not a contract.

Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for PAYG as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.

Does the USA not have PAYG options?

Is "no contract" to be taken super-literally? Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least? or ask for ID at least to ensure you're a resident of the jurisdiction? I always thought "no contract" was just a term of the trade to mean "no post-payment contract". I'm skeptical they're willing to have anonymous users.

> Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least?

Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.

It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.

Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.

What the heck is ‘dinner money’?

Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?

Good luck denying your 12 year olds a smartphone when every single of their friends has one and they are cut off from everything.

My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)

No luck necessary. Not like you need permission from your child to deny them things.

You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.

As a fellow American said: "I don't think about you at all."

That's kind of the point... and hardly surprising, you don't think at all.

Come on now, this sort of stuff breaks the rules of this site.

Same as the solution to declining birthrates is to import more people to also not have children.

Neither addresses the problem just provides a way to ignore it for longer.