Ripped out a pillar, tossed it in the air in the direction of the conference, then jumped on the pillar of course

Things with 621 on the name do tend to do dog-and-pony shows alright

Drones can replace a lot of very expensive military gears.
They're sadly the future of the war, a bunch of buzzing until a side is dead.
No more large scale soldiers, No more tanks, no more jets (other than stealth bombers that probably will be retrofitted as stealth drone droppers), just a plague of cheaply manufactured, gun carrying flying buzzers.

The federal budget is spent a lot more on medicare and social security than the military.
However the real problem here is that everything i listed above is just funneling money to very few monopolies that don't do a good job at all.
They're not shit because it lacks money, they're shit because they're mega monopolies that can freely control the price of everything, and you end up with a bad service.
It's more a problem of serving the corporations too much, rather than a problem of budget allocation.

It has not much to do with me specifically at all.
The theory is about using AI agents to create false people that can be used to "watch ads" and give improper revenue to websites and all that.

AI programming at least will create a golden era for hackers.
gigantic piles of easily exploitable code written by machines with infinite ego, and all the displaced but skilled programmers looking for a way to survive.

In this specific scenario i'm just as identified as much as the army of AI bots pretending to be people to give fake advertising money.
They need at least a "that's a real guy according to trustable company (tm)".

It's not about protecting the children and it will do nothing to protect the children.
The least evil theory i see floating around is that this is meant to create "identified people", so online advertising actually works.
Even if there's no actual data leak etc.. being an "adult" means you're a real human being possibly with a wallet.

If you can convince people to use computers instead of phones is already a pretty good step, as you can do a lot more on computers than on phones.

"Journalism" nowadays is just a bunch of biased people that spend the whole day on twitter instead of doing actual investigations and fact check.
So, people just go for the same thing but funny

Throwing away their only weapon (anonymity) would be quite dumb.

Unless they want to play a cat and mouse game with the designers, you just can't make something that can detect a 3D model of a gun 100% reliably, they would have to do a per model basis ban.

The flyby of the moon is good from a marketing standpoint, a "see? we still can send people there, it's not lost ancient tech", it will help people convince investors to well invest in this.
But turning one of the worst plagues for anyone actually landing on the moon into something very useful is great

Of course it requires a lot of RAM and CPU power and GPU power and...
Luckly, there are a shitload of options out there that use a lot less resources.

The consumer should be aware and buy things that are not in this situation.
And yes, everything you listed has some instances where the vendor's will override the consumer will. cars with components that are locked behind payment and can be disabled remotely, televisions that display advertising, game consoles that can do things like deleting games you own, security cameras that just go to shodan (the website), lightbulbs that require you to use your mobile device to "register"...
Not saying that EVERY CAR etc.. but there are examples of specific devices doing all that.