> Obviously we've the luxury of taking both for granted, but given the choice, how many people on here would pick the phone over the toilet? It's not an either

> Obviously we've the luxury of taking both for granted, but given the choice, how many people on here would pick the phone over the toilet? It's not an either-or proposition. In a high population density area, you can (by definition) serve a large number of customers with one cell tower. You can also manufacture basic mobile phones at incredibly low cost. I'd imagine this costs substantially (orders of magnitude?) less than digging up the ground, running miles of plumbing, buying water from a neighboring utility, etc.