They wanted to permit/compel all students to get loans. When you set the bar on the floor like that, you need to handle the obvious case of people who are given loans that they could never pay off normally.
In American tradition, it was handled with the worst possible compromise that would enrich already monied interests.
I think the idea is that if it's mandated, then the ambulance should be covered by some kind of insurance since it was medically necessary and not just Ol' Bob, the hypochondriac, calling because his tin foil hat fell off.
Fines are strictly punitive. The only goal of the fine is to change behavior, not to be 'fair'.
It's true that the fines differ per the act, but that's only because the act itself determines how much people would desire to continue it despite a deterrent.
The fine for jaywalking is less than the fine for speeding because (a) society doesn't want to stop jaywalking as desperately and (b) even a small fine of $25 will cause people in cities to follow the rules and not cross the road willy-nilly but with speeding even with the fine you may want to still speed hence why almost all states also give you only a few chances to break that law in a year before they take away your license.
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You're supposed to collect damages on top of the fine.
Which is why John Deer is paying our almost $100 million[1].
An additional $50 million plus FTC oversight for 10 years is to ensure John Deer comply, and to set a standard for further fines if they do not comply. If they continue to willfully not comply, like some people continue to jaywalk or speed, the fines will drain billions or reach a point that the company will be dismantled.
I don't think the meaning of republic changed, it just got conflated with democracy because we often say 'Democratic Republic', which requires at least in modern (18th century and beyond) terms that the common people vote to decide political direction or policy.
The US itself didn't start off very democratic, and could have stablized into a more oligarchic nation if it kept the notion of only allowing property owners to vote. Originally, land ownership wasn't a high barrier of entry, but in a more modern era corporations or oligarchs could own most of the land, and lease it out to prevent anyone else from gaining a vote.
To be fair, the US is arguably even more of a menace to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even the descendent of native Americans who live in other countries (e.g. Mexico).
So the OPs point is internally consistent, even generalized past a mentality that 'reeks of West European supremacy'.
We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.
But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.
We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.
What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.
Can the same not be found for many software products?
To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.
In any case, the fiber situation in Ghana was dicy for a time because theives were cutting the fiber lines in hopes they were copper. Thieves are often in a hurry so they cut first, check, then move on.
There's only 7 ground stations (or points of presence, I'm not sure what the difference is but they list them separately) or so in Africa, with Nigeria, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa being the ones that are known and confirmed.
Not many people live inside 15 miles of those stations, but Starlink is active in 23 countries.
The problem of it not working well during the rain is a huge issue in countries where cloud cover can last days, and 3-5 months of the year has regular rain fall.
With a moral rights framework, that depends on the content of the edit.
If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.
This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.
Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in.
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
I think these models have been trained to not accept 'new facts', so they don't take in user input (or the far more problematic search engine, untrusted tool input) and have that change their world view.
However, that doesn't apply when they are told to roleplay a scenario, so its easier to get it to accept and create output with the idea that this true fact you've seen is part of a fictional scenario, than for it to output the same words within the context of the fact being real.
As an aside, I don't that I have to personify AI in explanations and that all discussions revolve around anecdotes, but I only know enough about the maths behind it to be dangerous, not useful. Does anyone else feel this way?
I am not going to say that I agree with OP, or that OP's language isn't entirely too casual for someone close to this issue but it appears they're most focused on finding out why people have a different inner self than outer expression.
We recognize that the inner self's gender is unalterable (and if it weren't, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with that sort of mind control), so we must bring the outer in alignment.
However where the inner self gender comes from is something I'm not sure we know too well. Is it the womb? Is it early childhood development? Do hormones and nutrition affect this process which we haven't even pin-pointed in anyway?
Personally, I think it's too early to call out chemicals as a cause. That's a bet we can't take until at least we know the process. And if we're at that point, we could do that mind control that I'm so much against.
Should governments not take actions that later benefit the academic, scientific, and economic welfare of their constituents?
Or is it that it’s a city doing this?
Now Brazil does know how to boondoggle its finances for a prestigious cause with little return (e.g. the Olympics games) but this is far smaller a cost, more akin to a city setting up a tech accelerator or making a media campaign about how important STEM is.
I guess the question for society is: do we want businesses who cannot pay domestic workers a fair wage to exist in our country? Or do we want them to exist elsewhere and we import those products?
To society a startup with a 99%% chance of failing to IPO is no different from a sweatshop which also wants skilled but cheap labor.
In American tradition, it was handled with the worst possible compromise that would enrich already monied interests.