Well, yes, as long as he didn't have anything he might want to pass on because he had noticed suspicious activity. You can in fact have your lawyer handle that, which is practical for anonymity. Plus, if it is your regular bike route or the like then you might have some idea what the usual vehicles in the area are...and might want to let the cops know, say, that there was a free candy van hanging around. But otherwise? Just have a lawyer lined up so if you're called in for questioning you don't need to go find one.

Oh, do talk to the police, but not without your lawyer. Your lawyer's job is to take care of your rear. That includes helping you provide whatever info you might have without getting yourself in trouble, or risking the actual perp's lawyer trying to use you as a scapegoat. (And if you want your name kept out of it, your lawyer can help determine to what extent that is possible, especially if you think you saw something and want to be an anonymous tipster.) Refusing straight out to talk to the cops at all isn't the best idea. Just go straight to "I'm sorry, but I want my lawyer here" on repeat. (Note: US only! Consult a local lawyer if abroad.)

You're still very solidly prompting me to ask "What we, white man?" The current food security issues in the US are pretty much entirely an issue of availability: People are having trouble affording to have food at all, and/or having food available around where they are. A lot of the Green New Deal is going to just make it worse for those who are already having trouble affording basic necessities by raising prices even higher--and it's not going to produce more jobs. Raising the minimum wage isn't going to help. Rent control is going to make it worse. A lot of the Greens are either Watermelons (and don't actually care at all about the environment) or various flavors of Neo-Luddite Gaia Cultists (so they care, but their woo:reality ratio is simply too heavy on the woo side & sometimes they even manage to be so heavily woo that they make things worse).

If you want to shut down coal plants without driving up the cost of living too high for anybody not very well off? We can do it in pretty much the time needed to build nuclear plants, and the current trend in designs seems to be that yesterday's waste is today's fuel. It seems a trend to encourage, especially if we can keep that going until we can hit a point where the spent fuel will, gram for gram, be no worse than a brick or a banana. I mean, we're already stuck with quite a bit of nuclear waste, let's see how far we can deal with its existence by recycling it.

I'm a stray Millennial with a STEM degree, from the older end of the generation. Our STEM degrees are pretty useless, because some morons had the 'brilliant' plan that, since people with high school diplomas earn more over their lifetimes, we can pull people up from poverty by handing out high school diplomas like paper towels and that will totally make them earn more...instead of grasping that if you hand out diplomas like a diploma mill, your diplomas will be treated like they're from a diploma mill because guess what? You are a diploma mill! So the value of a HS diploma dropped, and that made a BA or BS pretty much the new HS diploma, and...I think a lot of people figured that out. A lot of my generation also got preyed upon by schools that pretty much existed to collect government funds for college, not to actually give out (useful) diplomas--and there are perverse incentives throughout the system to ignore that not everybody is going to be served well by going to college right out of high school (if at all) nor care that you have to be pretty damn rich to be able to afford to not care about if you are going to be able to successfully graduate from a given school. The people worst hit by student debt are those who for whatever reason did not get a degree--all they got was the debt.

Really, a lot of the student debt problem can and should be blamed on the utter failure of the K12 system, and those politicians who have refused to admit that the value of any degree is entirely in what knowledge & skills they represent--and if they represent merely that you were capable of being present and breathing more often than not, then that will set their value. (And admit that more teachers isn't worth letting quality drop. I have had a teacher who should never have been allowed around kids. Seriously, I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if I discovered that a mannequin rescued from a dumpster was better at teaching than she was...)

To quote an old joke that seems less funny right now: What we, white man?

If you were right, the middle class wouldn't be getting squeezed out, and we wouldn't be having problems with food security.

Yep. Otherwise I figure we're really safest assuming that--intentionally or not--the main result of the plan is a significant shift of money to whatever part of the 1% has successfully secured the parasitic relationship...and whatever services are provided will be quite possibly worse. Government has less built-in incentives to actually care about people, which is part of why socialist states have typically ended up being just feudalism with a socialist-flavored facade and more robber barons.

If somebody wants to give out free stuff with other people's involuntarily-contributed money, don't trust them or the (offer of) free stuff.

Actually, the statues define what the process for giving somebody who left stuff the proper opportunity to reclaim it before it's yours, and function to protect you from, say, being accused of theft later because you had mystery junker somebody left in your yard removed.

Arguably, a GPS tracker should prompt taking your car to the nearest police station and having them remove it, especially if it doesn't have an easily-visible sticker IDing it as theirs. Private citizens don't get to stick GPS trackers on other people's vehicles. Either they will remove their property from yours, or stick it in an evidence locker & be looking for the owner. Not your problem as long as they don't leave it in place. (If they do, especially after claiming they removed it? I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, but: use gloves to stealthily attach it a random cop car.)

Well, it can make a difference if your bosses prioritize you being physically present vs you being productive...and if they favor the first, if they want you looking productive during downtime even if you've run out of tasks currently needing addressing. In some ways, if you're hourly, the best arrangement is "Be here, but if you're out of tasks to do then just do something while waiting for the next batch to come in." (I got paid a few days ago to spend several hours just reading a book, because I needed to be there but had run out of work tasks.)

With that setup you can get very close to a copy paste, though, as long as you make sure that it is a work of parody. Maybe Henry shall bring to PigWarts his prodigious talent...for math and logic, and the Dato Lord is defeated by that. (Behold the power you know not: basic addition!)

That would not let them claim ownership--all that means is that they can require the mod be pulled from the market. They would have been better off probably by having the standard license explicitly saying that it doesn't give you permission to make/release mods--if you want to allow mods at all then you make a mod license available.

If it is released for free-as-in-free-beer and users have to buy a legit copy of the game to use the mod, in general they probably will not be able to claim ownership of the work even if all the mod does is allow them to put baggy pants on their PC--the court is very reasonably going to ask just how something that requires buying a copy of the game causes sufficient damages to award you ownership of the mod. (The more trivial the mod, the more likely that bringing the case will annoy whichever judge gets stuck with having to yeet it out.)

This is also a pretty bad PR move; they would be better off having gone with something that explicitly said that mods are required to get a license from them and then stipulated in the license that they reserve the right to revoke it at any time for any reason. (I would also have the noncommercial license given out like condoms at an orgy.) You get the same level of control, without alienating people who you want to have giving you money.

Given that apparently some of the people are getting stiffed on payment, I think that does count as a tribulation. Considering that scam postings almost certainly cost Amazon money as well as intangibles, long-term I think it would benefit them to require payment be placed in escrow either before the job is listed or before you can receive any work product. They can talk to their legal department on the best way to CYA on the escrow requirement, and make their legal department less depressed on being typically paid to do boring stuff & be ignored. (It might be possible for them to branch out and offer escrow services themselves, or just serve as a 3rd party who will handle verification.)

Some of this also may be not entirely legal for Amazon to be involved with at all--I would sincerely doubt Amazon would want to be a test case for any claim of "Not Our Circus, Not Our Monkeys" on their liability for CP. The sensitive information might well also be a liability they won't want to deal with--just because you can possibly afford the lawyers doesn't mean you can afford the PR. Maybe they should consider having 'screening task postings' as an ongoing task they pay for themselves...with perhaps bonuses for people with good accuracy rates in flagging, and that part of the cost to post a task in the first place.

See the book recs. (The movie versions of Solaris are not a substitute for the book, here.) Try some of the harder SF that deals with first contact. OG Star Trek had an episode which kind of dealt with the whole idea that if we're looking for carbon-based life, we're going to not necessarily notice life that isn't...and then proceeds to ignore that silicon-based life is about as likely to think Kirk is edible as we are likely to think a chunk of granite is delicious noms. Part of the backstory of Babylon 5 is a war that was pretty much caused by Earth's first contact team severely misreading the aliens being alien-polite...and starting a war. Oh, and Futurama had an actually rather good take on what could happen if aliens really were somehow watching our TV and weren't as friendly as the ones who did so in Galaxy Quest. It's going to be quite awkward if first contact is by an alien war fleet that is here to let us know that they really weren't happy about Heil Honey I'm Home getting cancelled... (There are technical reasons why this is very, very improbable. The TL;DR is that their reception will be too lousy & even if it somehow isn't then the TV signals will actually very effectively encoded by its very nature.)

We also have a long, long history of screwing up with different cultures of our own species and of being lousy at noticing life on our own planet because of our assumption that life looks like us and intelligent life acts like us. Those twin assumptions are probably the only thing we can reasonably expect aliens to have in common with us. The thing is, the more it looks like us, the more it is going to need the same resources--which isn't good for getting along.

Shhh. Most people don't like being reminded that the Coast Guard is part of the military. If you wanna really freak them out, remind them that there are parts of the US where your local search & rescue teams are part of the military. And then there's the minor fact that the Navy is useful when a place gets hit by a natural disaster, what with the fact that they're mobile platforms that can be anchored offshore...and there are outright floating hospitals in the Navy.

Besides, I suspect that we can generally expect nothing that will talk to us to be automatically friendly--resources are limited, and the more likely they are to notice we exist the more likely it is that they want the same resources we do, and unless we luck out and it turns out we both want something the other considers trash, we should probably be prepared in case they aren't interested in peaceful coexistence. Our odds are going to be better there the harder it is for us to even mutually notice each other as existing; humans tend to expect alien life to look like Terran life, and there is no guarantee it will. Pick up Stanislaw Lem's trio of books on the topic--Fiasco, Eden, and Solaris--all dealing with first contact with decidedly different alien(s?).

Certainly we shouldn't assume they are part of Western culture's sphere of influence, too, and therefore share that culture's script for peaceful meetings and its assumptions on what a peaceful meeting looks like. I mean, seriously, why would aliens be infected by the culture of a portion of a small planet circling a minor star at the edge of a galaxy, especially when that planet would only just now be making contact with them? Closest we can expect to that is a Galaxy Quest situation, where our mass media kind of made first contact for us & they had no problems with massively appropriating culture from that...

...On the bright side, unless their norms are very strong against screwing with species who haven't yet hit some milestone we've yet to hit like 'independently developing working FTL drives,' they probably would have let us know by now if we had managed to offend them somehow via our mass media. Probably.

If they won't let people buy just what they want directly, and insist on continuing the Balkanization of streaming services? People will either quit watching or go back to piracy, because they simply can't afford all the subscriptions.

It sort of feels like Hollywood executives are obligated to have spent at least the past two decades in a Faraday cage under a rock & the sort of stupidly greedy that causes things like being confused as to why it doesn't end well when you yeet the pie into the trash mid-tantrum over not getting a bigger slice of it.

Sadly, I am not sure we can be particularly optimistic that we can get them to join us in the current century, never mind the current decade.