Huh? They go hand in hand, without the surveillance wouldn't have to worry about the coercion and threats and why do the surveillance unless looking for dirt.

Some of our governments look at what the USA is doing and salivate and of course the rest of the 5 eyes play right along.

The surveillance puts a damper on free speech, it's hard to freely communicate knowing the government can be listening in. This is especially true for dissenting political speech, whether you're part of the opposition party or more extreme the possibility that the government can be listening in dampens. The government is quite capable of screwing you if you come to its attention as a threat of any kind. Whether digging into your tax situation, spreading mis-information or setting you up for a criminal investigation.

Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.

Coal, oil and similar do basically disappear. If we got blasted back to the pre-industrial revolution, that lack of easily available concentrated energy would make it much harder to industrialize.

In Canada, it is legal, at least as long as you don't do photography in a voyeurism or criminal harassment manner as citizens are exempt from privacy legislation, at least for personal, journalistic or artistic purposes and the feds have only become involved when drones are operated around airports and over a certain height.
Constitutionally it is clear that regulating airspace (above a certain height I believe) is a federal responsibility and so is criminal law. So the feds could pass a law criminalizing drone use. The Province also has quite a bit of power and can regulate drone use, especially when it comes to privacy, a constitutional right according to the way our Supreme court has interpreted our equivalent to the 4th amendment. So far I don't believe any regulations have been passed.
Of course the other problem is enforcement, which apartment did that drone fly out of?

What do you do when, as recently happened in Vancouver, drones start hanging out of peoples high rise apartments looking through the windows. Shooting the drones isn't a solution as they'll fall down on a crowded street.
The problem is when rights conflict.

The service jobs are already full of foreign workers though legal under the foreign workers program. Seems Canadians don't want to be abused for less then a living wage whereas you can hire a Filipino, put them to work in the wrong restaurant rather the one that they're legally allowed to work in and then threaten them with deportation to keep them on their toes. Gotta have cheap Timmies and coffee

Are there really taxi unions? Around here taxi drivers are lucky to make minimum wage. There are truckers unions and last year both unionized and non-unionized container truck drivers went on strike as the race to the bottom had gotten to the point where they couldn't maintain their vehicles, buy fuel and eat.

Often commercial vehicles cut too many corners, kill people and regulations come about. Also as the sibling mentions, those who don't want to compete on the cost cutting and want to operate safe vehicles usually lobby for a level playing field.
I'd hate to be in a business where the only way to make any money is to be totally unsafe. Tires, brakes etc cost money and eat into the bottom line.

it's like being a nuclear power, actually using the hefty bargaining chip is a form of suicide, perhaps like a suicide bomber where you take out the enemy while dieing (with the advantage you get to see the results before dieing) but still a suicide. As long as the space power is dependent on the Earth, it is suicide to piss off the Earth powers and it will be a long time, if ever, before anyone can support a space age technological society independent of the Earth.

They're both theoretical economic systems that in the real world do not scale up much beyond the village level. Communism attracts the authoritarian types to government and capitalism attracts the corruptible types to government, both with some cross over.

I don't believe that algae are capable of doing the nuclear reactions required to produce hydrogen, we have what we have and probably had much more in the distant past. Besides once the oceans boil, it's hard to imagine much algae surviving.
The Sun is steadily getting hotter due to getting denser due to increasing percentage of helium. The standard model predicts roughly a billion years (some say half that) until it's hot enough to boil the oceans. After that one theory is that we get a runaway green house effect, basically Venus. Much different then Mars which as you point out, has too little gravity to hold a decent atmosphere as well having a protective magnetic field to stop the solar wind from stripping it.

That's just the cash. There's also the cars, boats, houses, businesses etc. About a year ago the CBC had a show on this including an interview with a motel owner who had his motel forfeited due to renting out a room to a drug user. He was as innocent as could be and eventually got his business back after much hassle but it seems forfeiting houses is also common. Interestingly they only go after stuff that is paid off.

Venus is a better example of an Earth sized planet that has lost all its hydrogen, no water and most of the oxygen tied up with carbon. Only about a billion years until the same happens to the Earth as once the oceans boil, the photo-disassociation will accelerate and the Earth doesn't have enough gravity to hold hydrogen or even helium.
BTW, that methane that you mention turning into water usually started as water before some life form converted it to methane.