You name it, our government has done it, including coups, assassinations, coups, genocides, false flags, drug trafficking, human trafficking, willfully selling munitions to international criminals

Genocides — plural — is the worst accusation here, and warrants a follow-up question. What genocides (two or more) has our government committed — within our lifetimes?

They're going to make an example out of him and give him the maximum.

"They" who? A jury of his peers?

I doubt it...

Once the supply of customers flush enough to buy under more standard arrangements is saturated you are basically left between ignoring the demand for growth forever or deciding between handling...subprime...customers yourself or keeping the arrangement at arm's length.

This 'restricted mode' that Apple is vigorously denying will be used for lease enforcement suggests that the metaphorical arm is not that long and that Apple seems to be doing more than merely being willing to sell devices to whatever resellers; but it's not a huge surprise that they'd want the risk related to the debt and any shaking down handled by someone who isn't them.

There are also no shortage of concealable cameras...
A big pair of ugly glasses is obvious, you might as well be carrying a full size video camera. You can see it's there and behave accordingly. A pervert is more likely to use a small hidden camera.

It's entirely possible that they didn't actually care that much. It seems at least as plausible that the sort of people who would risk this sort of legal exposure over a non-issue were more motivated by an excuse to throw weight around and talk like a mob boss than actual concern. Nice to be able to put a hobby project on the company card.

I find it difficult to believe that 'influencers' are a good sign at a society level; but I'm a little puzzled by the degree of hostility to what is basically a degree for self-employed PR/marketing people.

As much as I'm not happy about it, PR and marketing are absolutely entire fields; and I'd assume that people doing those things whose client is themselves would also benefit from a dash of entertainment related law; contracts and accounting related to dealing with sponsor agreements; and the same sort of low-to-intermediate business stuff that routinely trips up musicians, artists, athletes, etc. who suddenly have some worthwhile amount of money/valuable copyrights/etc. but are either wholly dependent on 'agents' of variable quality and honesty or just end up getting screwed.

Following is massively easier than leading...

If someone else has already done something, then you know it's possible and just need to work out how. And the more information you have about the existing implementation the easier it is to replicate it, as even very minimal high level information is going to steer you in the right general direction.

If you're leading then you can't be sure what is possible, you could spend a lot of resources chasing dead ends.

Most of the theatres here have extremely uncomfortable seats. A small handful of them have decent seats and charge a premium for them.
They also try to sell you large drinks, which cause you to need the toilet, so you either sit there in discomfort needing the toilet or miss a chunk of the movie. If the movie is long then your drink will go cold (or warm) and not taste good.

At home i have a comfortable seat, i can adjust the volume to suit my needs, i can pause the movie if i need to visit the toilet or get another drink etc, and there's noone else there to distract me.

With the amount of whining I heard about how this version of the Odyssey was woke race treason engineered to poison western civilization I would have expected Elon to move faster than the copy cops when it showed up on his precious everything app. Is he developing a tolerance to the stimulants? Renting out datacenter space making grok sluggish?

Today I learned that 50k/year, in New York, is what Bloomberg considers "middle class".

Were they just hard up for anecdotes or is some sort of expectation management in effect?

never enter the US. Works great

Works great for all of us indeed.

Do be sure to take your phone to China with you, though. It just might heal your delusions about "multipolar world" and all that.

So any interaction with the Brownshirts of Fatherland Security?

That was true even before Germany's surplus WWI uniforms were distributed to adherents of a certain party...

I don't know if it's plain volume or some more subtle characteristic of the noise; but I'd suspect that there's more to it than noise alone; given how rare(and often slightly disconcerting in practice) genuinely silent environments are and would have been in evolutionary history.

Even in totally undeveloped areas where you and your little teeny band of hunter-gatherer pals are the only thing going the wind is always up to something; some combination of birds and insects will be doing their thing depending on temperature, if there's a body of water of any size or moving water you'll hear some flow or wave action.

Could be pure intensity; a lot of modern noise is quite intense close to its source; could also be something about how it is interpreted and how readily it is or isn't discarded as background vs. forcing some amount of constant active attention.

better to not have that data on you when you cross certain borders

How about any border? Even more generally, at any situation, when the ordinary rights do not obtain...

I wonder, what the long term consequences of obtaining — and using — this skill are, if any... Does it make one smarter? Or faster? Does it reduce — or increase — the risk of developing Altzheimer? Does it affect personality in any way?

Also, can the skill be lost — if not regularly used — or is it more like bicycle-riding?