> actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
> open competitive programs based on project quality
This will never, ever happen. There will always be bonus points available, even if they're awarded to "conservative"-leaning feel-good attributes like veteran-owned sponsor businesses.
These investments are likely to always fail at their declared purpose. Better to put the money towards free childcare and maybe trying to convince parents to read to their kids.
Your consent is given when you choose to pay for a ticket and attend an event there.
For publicly-funded venues, you may have a point. But if Bimbo's or the Warfield in San Francisco wants to ban someone and it's not for a reason prohibited by law, more power to them. Casinos have been doing this for many years, and generally speaking businesses have the right to refuse business to anyone. Make them post signs if that makes you feel better, but they should be able to ban, say, a person who attacked a patron or staff at the venue (and then was swiftly let out of jail by an activist judge).
> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.
That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.
Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.
I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.
The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.
That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
Passing a mandatory class != believing in its message and acting on it.
Unfortunately, rather important courses like engineering ethics have become lumped in with mandatory DEI objectives and similar 'grievance studies' requirements, classes which many suffer through quietly, regurgitating the Correct responses while they count the minutes until they can get back to more substantive classwork. Some undergraduates may unfortunately gloss over ethics just as they gloss over lectures on privilege.
SSNs have been used as student IDs by particularly stupid educational institutions. The 'nice' thing about getting SSNs from students is the likelihood they'll live for a long time after the breach and thus be subject to identity theft for many years to come.
> Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year
I don't understand how anything that has occurred in the last year would make a Somali pirate think it's less likely they would be killed if they chose to resist an American boarding party. If anything, they would think it's more likely they'd be killed and that there might be unpredictably severe reprisals against their clan, supporters, etc.
Until the cost of local production (union labor, environmental regulations, etc.) meets the increasing costs of imports during said shortfall. Then we'll just make it here. The shortfall goes away but the price would admittedly be higher.
That was the point of Horizon Worlds. They were trying a (very expensive) social play for VR.
The problem is that the intersection/suitability of VR and social media is rather low, while as a counterexample the intersection of mobile and social media is very large. I have no desire to chat with old classmates when I "suit up" with VR goggles, I'm there to game.
I work on products that feature live monitoring capabilities. There's no connection to the monitoring side's microphone (or camera) — why would there be? I'm not sure why there would be for their products.
Whatever the cause, it sure sounds like it was a strange and unnerving experience.
Some are installed by private entities. Home Depot installs Flock cameras in their parking lots.
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
No way, no how, not ever.