As long as unemployment stays at a reasonable level, even people with some mental/addiction issues will be able to hang on. But as unemployment stays high they will slowly be weeded out, possibly because they are more likely to be fired/have to switch jobs due to their problems. As soon as you hit rock bottom (first get unemployed, then loose the house and car) and you're already dealing with either mental issues or addictions (or both), those problems will get worse and your odds of getting a job will go down even more.
Your freedoms don't extend to your employment (never has). Regarding your employment you've willfully signed away most of those rights (freedom of expression etc) when you signed your contract.
You're missing the point. Seat belt laws are weird when compared to motorcycles, because the purpose of the law is to limit personal injury during an accident. Which would make sense, if it wasn't for the fact that if you have an accident on a motorcycle, you are pretty much guaranteed to be more injured than when in a car without a seat belt. So either outlaw motorcycles and require seat belts, or allow motorcycles and using seat belts is up to the driver. But the current legal situation is inconsistent.
There's more ways of doing it. I might be sitting across the street from you right now, doing 35 hour work weeks for a fortune 500 company, riding the SV income bubble and pulling in $150K a year as a sysadmin that keeps your oh so trendy cloud up in the air (Up, up in the air! Light as a bubble in the wind!), while living a $50K lifestyle.
Couple more years and I'll be down south, daydreaming about those good old days full of taking risks (I took the stairs last week!) and how I miss the company gym and free massages, while I'm sipping from my non-alcoholic beverage on a beach somewhere, and considering finally getting my college degree.
Worst case scenario, all the websites I visit sell my data and it ends up (either directly purchased or through mergers/cooperations between data owners) into a single DB, which then sells this data to anyone interested. This can include anyone from secret service, to targeted advertisers to the PI my ex-wife hired to gather information to use against me in a lawsuit. Away goes my privacy.
A culture of fear only works on people that are unable straighten their finances out. No threat of being laid of has any meaning if you have 5 years of salary stashed away in cash (Netflix is located in Silicon Valley where competitive salaries are more than enough to establish this in a short period of time).
"Fueled by Doritos and RedBull among other things". Does this imply what I think it implies? I'm curious about how widespread drug use is during these hackatons. I've visited one or two myself and more than once I've been surprised by the odd responses and (facial) ticks of the participants, but I've never really been able to figure out if these were just socially badly adjusted individuals, or if they were tweaked out of their skull.
Switch to Esata with a $30 Esata docking station. I backup with bare drives (cheaper, no usb enclosure needed) at on average 90MB/s (2TB drives, 3Gb/s sata controller).
I don't want a strap, they restrict my movement and require lubrication to work. I want a wearable 24/7 solution that's unobtrusive. The suggestion here is that you can attach the arduino sensor to your clothes and get reliable data.