If you're rocking tech money there are many good places to spend it. The metro area has some beautiful wealthy neighborhoods, especially in northern New Jersey, which have fine old housing stock with large plots and good schools. Many good boarding schools are in easy range of the metro area.

The news focuses on the usual urban hellholes but many metro areas were never heavily industrialized and remain surprisingly refined. Passenger rail is well developed and built the burbs long before automobiles were more than a curiosity.

Tech money can also buy into Pennsylvania which is in easy reach by rail. If you're a tech worker expecting to make bank I suggest not living IN NYC but in rail commuting range instead.
I quite enjoyed relaxing on the train vs. driving.

Many people want the US disarmed. Many others do not. Even wanting that data center there in the first place is bizarre.

No, but CSAM can be on a phone. So can a list of assassination targets, an app that detonates an explosive, stolen classified data, Stuxnet-like malware...there are PLENTY of actually-problematic things that could be on a phone. ...for the record, that doesn't mean that this person had any of those things on his phone (and I'm inclined to believe that he didn't), just that digital contraband exists and it CAN exist on a phone.

Camera proctoring can reduce cheating.

Fantasy solutions must be ritually recited these days due to social fashion but humanity was never good which is why there is only technical, not "moral" progress (vanity is not progress).

Government is bad because humanity is bad and always was bad.
We are bestial apex predators who happen to be good at technology. Our race tends savage and stupid, intelligence being neuro-divergent. That dictates reality.

Having much of anything on one's phone is terrible security because spyware can easily exfiltrate it without user knowledge, so I don't do that.

Having stuff that matters on your phone is like storing drugs in your car, you can but nothing makes that smart. At most a phone used when crossing borders should be a distraction whose storage holds plausible files like ebooks and does not have an email client etc. If one must an alternative is storing encrypted, useful files elsewhere for later downloading with nothing on one's phone.

Making one's phone a central information repository is silly
with or without possibility of formal inspection. Wishful thinking is not security. The world was always a very bad place so choose wisely without passion.

In the US they're corrupt by nature and will only cooperate when terrified.

Coerce them to serve the people by any means necessary and without empathy, compassion or mercy. They are selling out the commons in return for power.

In a just society the public would use them to decorate lamp posts. The system is beyond fixing without pitiless aggression which I can only hope accelerates.

gets cash and adds leverage for advantageous leave use

Four days leave atop thirty days normal leave per year plus whatever specialty bonus is basically a tip. Wise troops would delay taking leave until their final enlistment is up so I did. The more I had to carry forward the better.

Not everyone gives a shit about long deployments, self for example. Troops who simply don't care about long deployments (there are more than a few of us!) but do want to accrue leave as leverage to take leave (so their unit doesn't look like ass for not permitting it) in large chunks can use the additional days to their advantage.

My objective from the day I enlisted was always to accrue as much leave as practical (normally 90 days/year) to carry forward to the end of my career so I could bolt three months early (plus the custom of "commanders days" where G.I.s were allowed to disappear then show up to out process than take formal leave).

I also used it accrued leave in conjunction with offering to take long leave outside the holiday season so others in my work center could spend time with their kids. These customs go back to long before I enlisted.

I do STRONGLY suggest that anyone who considers themselves at all sensitive not join the armed forces because that's stress they don't need.
Sensitivity and war do not go together and never did. Not everyone is suited to every career civil or military and there's no shame in not fitting, just wisdom in
choosing wisely!

It's not that sensitivity is a fault, it's that it's simply not optimal and opens the door to stress-induced discomfort and emotional damage. I knew in childhood I'd fit the Air Force which I did with the goal of retiring young and debt-free which I also did, but it's not for everyone. The fewer young people who enlist the better for all concerned because ONLY enlistment and retention create meaningful institutional pressure to raise pay and benefits!

When you serve whatever cretinous hack our dimwit (intelligence is not a choice and is, arguably neuro-divergent!) voters self-inflict you are doing other taxpayers a favor for which you should be compensated! Uncle Sugar will get his use out of you so get your use out of him! There aren't many "idealistic" reasons to fight for a nation (which means people) this contemptibly stupid. The price of not having (even more expensive and like the last time a social disaster) an active draft is to pay the fucking troops.

The USA really is a business, not a country. That's just human nature.