People care about privacy up to a point. The majority of people (myself included) are apparently willing to give up their privacy if it means not having to pay for email service, or other information (search results, news).
As someone in the industry (with domain knowledge), I can tell you that you are oversimplifying the problem and ignoring Tesla’s advantage and leadership in this space. Other manufacturers have to account for legacy systems/designs, it is not as trivial as you make it sound.
“Tesla has spent a lot of resources reinventing car manufacturing and yet they can't produce a vehicle that meets their needs.” Where are you getting this information? Design and manufacturing influence one another. None of the “leaders” in automotive space outsource their design or manufacturing. You need to control and master both to compete in this space. Perhaps you can take the Apple route and outsource the labor (Foxconn), but Apple still controls much of the manufacturing process such as introducing friction-stir welding to shrink the iMac or introducing unibody aluminum machining to the MacBooks and iPhones.
There are certain software bugs that cause undefined behavior. Debugging tools such as GDB can only get you so far in identifying and solving such bugs. That’s where static analysis can help.
If the jail cell is as comfortable as the unlocked room, there is absolutely no difference—until you try to leave. Any sane distribution should come with built binary blobs—and an option to rebuild them at will. But forcing you to build everything from scratch is pedantically impractical. But what do I know, I only do this on regular basis at work!
You should have nothing to worry about. Just follow directions and be cooperative. The people at the border get off on authority. Don't give them a reason to harass you.
I would like to see research of which nations stand to gain the most due to climate change. My guesses are Russia and Canada. Perhaps in the future, Canadians will want to build a wall to keep out Americans, assuming they don't want that already. ;)
Does anyone know any details regarding why the moderators are each being charged with "one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking"? I cringe at the thought that this is only because they happened to commit crimes using a computer.