It's like the person in a long ice cream line who needs to ask for a dozen samples one after the other, but this then makes the ice cream store stop giving samples entirely.
All of them. I used to work for one. Every government/private sector contract is like this. A giant waste of money. This is where we spend so much money on the military and government projects with poor results.
This is a wildly inaccurate, simplistic, agenda driven take. I was going to give some additional perspective, but you've covered about 40 topics, and all of them poorly.
I'm looking into that right now again. It's a pretty tedious process where the Governor has to personally approve the request. Right now there is a Republican governor in that state so they're less likely to approve it. Since background checks can only go back 7 years, 10 in some states, I let it go and decided it wasn't worth it considering that. I thought it was behind me, but this definitely changes things. Thanks for mentioning it.
I found my conviction for assault from a bar fight 23 years ago. Since then I quit drinking, went to college, raised a child who is now 20, and turned everything around. It's pretty disheartening to see it can be found by anyone 23 years later. Unfortunately, I'm not surprised in the least that we allow this in the US.
This is part of the reason. Another part is that typically the closer you get to the equator in the US the more conservative. It's related to the reason why beach towns typically have bad food and no real culture.
An ISP tech? Just learn to code and then bounce from job to job to job until you find one with a good manager.
Okay, sarcasm aside; I've worked for many different tech companies and good managers are exceptionally rare and there is no pressure from the top to change that, and pressure from the bottom doesn't work. There is, however, a lot of pressure to not fire or demote managers as it looks bad for the management above them.