I do not know whether predestination plays a role, but wanting to damn people for all eternity (or at least the rest of their natural lives) is a common theme with religious fanatics.

Yes. The claims they want less recidivism are simply lies. It is known how to get these rates down. It is well-known that positive reinforcement works a lot better than negative. It is known that making it easy for people to reintegrate into society, most will go for it. But they want to be "tough on crime". That is denial of reality and that never gives you good outcomes.

On the plus-side, large prison populations are good for keeping our citizens in fear and laws that criminalize everything and anything allows you to get rid of inconvenient people easily. Of course, the rich and powerful almost never have any of those enforced against them, no matter what despicable and repulsive things they do.

US: 66% (Wall Street's numbers aren't those found in official statistics)
UK: 28.9%
Holland: 23%
Norway: 16%
China: 6%

US' conclusion: The rate is a complete mystery, we've no idea how to decrease it, let's do more of what we're currently doing differently to everyone else.

There is a slight possibility this may be flawed.

Indeed. As is creating criminals. Hence school-to-prison pipelines and other utter evil.

And in the Soviet Union everybody knew many of these were not real criminals ...

Indeed. But the religious fundamentalists want people to be damned forever (!) and hence that is the prevalent sentiment in the US. Guess what, people that get no chance to reintegrate into society do not do so. Also makes for a nice "us vs. them" world-view, something the fundamentalists absolutely love.

The potential is there, but I do not think it will happen. Respective research would find out things that are massively unwanted by the rich and powerful. Just think about research into the mindset of malignant narcissists and you should immediately see what I mean. Or the (very solid) results that conservatives are dumber than liberals. Or that most people cannot fact-check. Or the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Bottom line is that we already know a lot, it is just not used because society and the leaders it choses are not rational. Expanding that knowledge is not desired by too many people.

I do not think there are mysterious cases. There are just some where people chose not to cooperate enough for us to make a determination and that is their right.

Also note that there are quite a few "too important to jail" cases, see, for example some prominent stock scammers or rapists and child abusers or murderers/war criminals. These cases are probably the worst, because they give not-smart people the impression that you can get away with it. And hence overall ethics decline.

Nonsense, phase alternating lines (PAL) result in zeroing accumulating drifting signals, which Never Twice the Same Colour doesn't. Obviously, if you don't implement things in analogue electronics for real but have perfect digital noise and drift free representations, you're going to call bull shit about reality that you don't experience. Now, about SECAM.....

Your problem starts here. Right to privacy is a human right, and these were established as response to the 3rd Reich catastrophe. One characteristic is that you cannot lose a human right, regardless of what you do. It can be temporarily restricted if another thing has priority, but it cannot be removed. Hence people like you are into violating human rights and as soon as that starts to be a general sentiment, a state/group/organization is on a very dark path. Yes, you may be able to get some statistic to look better this way. But you have lost something far more valuable.

Some professional printers do have their spools in cartridges, and refuse to work without them...

5 axis printers using non-planar slicing are becoming more common in pro use, they allow you to print things without supports which would have required supports.

systemd might make sense for ephemeral VMs. That doesn't justify it for long-running servers or desktops.

Every silly error I see in automatic captions today is on Youtube and was created by an LLM. Why didn't it catch them?

I didn't find them to be so. The primary advantage claimed was that it eliminated init scripts. But init scripts are really easy on modern Linux because of the boilerplate, and there are still cases where you need scripts with systemd, so it didn't actually eliminate them — It only reduced their number. The other advantage claimed was that it implemented cgroups. Well, I'm using Devuan and that uses cgroups too, they are created and managed and destroyed with simple commands and you do not need any special tools for that at all.

systemd solves a non-problem, since scripts are a core OS feature.