Why did this immediately cause me to liken cancer to Metroids?

Can someone better clarify the logic in this sentence:

"A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children.""

I think I see the point about the legal battles being simply wasteful, however there seems to be another angle in which actors interested in pressing the antitrust issue are viewing tech companies as a wealth of tax revenue (or antitrust fines) to be extracted to which the Federal government is entitled. Thoughts?

Once a Government Office/Agency is established, they don't tend to go way very quickly or easily; the combined inertia of budgets, associated jobs, and mission statements keeps these offices operating regardless of their ability to produce anything that really justifies their existence. Is the creation of such a department a sign that such programs are indeed the future?

(A short list of defunct Agencies = https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_defunct_or_renamed_United_States_federal_agencies (how did one get to work for the "Board of Economic Warfare"?!?))

Ah, nothing new, but the practice of referring to aspects of the legal code that don't compliment a particular position as "loopholes" never gets old, sort of like referring to things like nausea, diarrhea, death, etc as "side effects" of a drug instead of just "effects", or "the way it is".

A few quick thoughts: - the government is dividing people into classes of "threat" and "non-threat", although with the evidence that vaccinated people can still transmit the virus, there is something of a porous boundary between the two - people in the threat class will be denied access to certain services & amenities - as with spending money on plexiglass barriers, hand sanitizers, and other measures, this will present a compliance cost for businesses in some form or another - this is a cultural softening of attitudes on restricting access & participation; in the context of the virus, this may even make sense, but in so far as the technologies & processes to facilitate such control & restriction are developed and implemented here, it will make them easier to implement for other use-cases in the future. The future use case and designations of what the government (or whomever) may consider to be a threat or not and how to divide society accordingly is the unknowable here. Swallowing this pill now will ease societal adoption towards future implementation, which, piggy-backing off the infrastructure employed here, will make such arguments & uses possibly more justifiable in the future. Alternatively, this experiment may end in such failure that it will be abandoned, but... my feeling is that this is a tool that governments *want* to have available, and that the idea will not die easily.

If a lot of what makes a neighborhood vibrant in the first place is the relationships formed between the people who actually live there, what will this do at the margin to augment or disrupt that interconnectivity that makes people want to visit those neighborhoods? Will this just become a form of economic tourism into sterile "non-spaces", or amount to very little that Air BnB hasn't already brought about?

I think that for all the concern re: privacy vis a vis technology, we have a situation in which, on the one hand, we hold up authoritarian china as the model of dystopian surveillance and control that we ought to be very wary of, but all the while the other hand is very slowly & incrementally culturally massaging our attitudes and warming us up to the ultimate acceptance of just such a reality. ie many people who work in tech are wary of the surveillance applications, but then simultaneously work to develop products whose fundamental mission is to use data of all kinds to establish increased visibility / legibility - and ultimately control - in any variety of fields. Many of these are positive developments that create new markets & efficiencies, but have the added effect over time of slowly & inevitably bridging the gap between the two hands such to bring us to a place of ultimate cultural acceptance of the former. Resistance will soften as other "benevolent" applications of the technology proliferate and we won't even notice how this brings the two hands closer together until we find ourselves embracing the former as good & inevitable (and maybe remembering that not too long it was the cause of much concerned handwringing).

I think everyone is missing the prevailing logic of government contracting: the less the thing works, the more jobs it creates.

Probably a good move to cap the, um, mining reward at 10 Ggool / day so as not to incentivize people to collect pet (or other) waste for deposit into the BeeVis...

Although your diploma may say "Film School", the real lesson is actually a very painful one in economics (and a warning to others to avoid making the same mistake).