Predictions for 80% of the working population in the next decade:

1. Work for most people will not be with the same employer over the long term.
2. Most jobs will be like day labor in construction.
3. Employers will rate employees and share ratings with other employers in a confidential database which the employee has no access to. (California labor code section 1050 will be repealed, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act will be severely gutted)
4. There will be a large proportion of workers who will be deemed unemployable.
5. Working time will increase from 40 Hours to 60-80 hours per week with no increase in pay (The Fair Labor Standards Act will be gutted).
6. Vagrancy laws will come back.
7. Debtors prisons will come back.
8. Prisoners will be sentenced to hard labor again for crimes they committed. Prisoners will start breaking rocks with sledgehammers in prison again under threat of corporal punishment.

In other words, a reset to 19th century labor relations, but with AI monitoring everything.

Discard 2, hire 2 more.

Ah, the age of precarious employment.

Did you know that in the USA you can be fired for any reason (good, bad, or no reason) As long as it isn't an illegal reason? (It's called Employment-At-Will and its the law of the land in every state except Montana)

How can you prosper in such an environment when you are on a constant incessant treadmill to improve your value to the company? Not to mention stacked ranking where you have to compete with your colleagues and if you are in the bottom 10% you are handed a pink slip.

Then they'll introduce autocracy.
Then they'll offer free euthanasia.
Then they'll offer money to die with dignity.
Then they'll return to draconian (The real kind) law, where every infraction, misdemeanor, or felony is punishable by death (See Larry Niven's Sci-fi stories for an example of this.)
Then they'll eliminate retirement income and heath care subsidies. This will force most retirees to choose either crime (Punishable by death) or Euthanasia.
Then they'll euthanize anybody who is not productive.

In the end, the population could shrink to 1/10000 of what it is now (800 million).

There is no way UBI will ever be supported. The core people in power will never let it happen. The reasoning is: Why feed people who don't contribute to the interests of the corporations or government.

that their 0-days are being found and patched?

Go the the small business hardware stores and lumber yards. They won't have the cameras for a little while until Flock offers to install them for free.

More like Dune's Heart Plug

What if the federal government scrapped the gasoline tax and instead tracked you with ALPR's (Automatic License Plate Readers) to determine how much you use the roads. They would know where you went on every trip. They would charge you the segment cost as the crow flies between each ALPR.

I think this is where they are going with this.

You might even be double or triple charged. Once by the feds, and again by the state, and maybe even the city or county you live in.

Folks, It's going to get very expensive to get from point A to point B in the future. Just look at the cost of new cars, and auto insurance.

Except when they make that illegal. They could do do by requiring a license to operate such a data collecting operation.

Regulatory capture combined with rent seeking.

If only the players had the balls to refuse to buy subscription games and instead read books, learn another language, or have a hobby like learning to play a musical instrument.

But no. The human mind craves instant gratification. The activities above take time to produce meaningful results.

The suppliers of these games know this. Their wares would be worth much less if there wasn't such a huge demand for activities which yield no personal enrichment dividend.

In the current make-up and structure of the US government.

Sure, this bill may pass and be signed by la presidenta, but the next administration might likely pass another bill to weaken it or repeal it.

Of course, they could try to make it constitutional amendment to make it harder to water down or repeal.

This of course leads is to what I think may be the Achilles Heel of the United States government. Each new administration and and each new congress can't seem to come up with a sensible plan, then leave it alone for the long term across election cycles.

The way we are going, we are probably going to become an authoritarian regime. When this happens, then maybe there will be some long term planning which might stick, but at what human cost?

First the nuclear power plant, then the data center. This will be rammed down the throats of the residents whether they like it or not.

Monied interests are just too powerful in the United States.

With the subversion of the elections by gerrymanders, this is only going to get worse.

C-level executives always seem to have an excuse which prevents them from hiring the staff they require. Also they also cover their butt when saying why they didn't meet investor estimated earnings. A lot of these statements are made to protect from investor lawsuits.

  I understand that we live in a "lossy" universe in which the Second Law of Thermodynamics always gets its cut of released energy. However, it seems there is another loss path which is greater than the background loss in the universe, and that is the salaries and the perks that companies dole out to their senior executives.

I despise the whole concept behind Facebook.

You're basically submitting yourself to a continuous session under the data harvesting fluoroscope.

Sorry, I never signed up and never will sign up.

Socializing live by going out to real physical events is much better for you.

Science fiction it is.

Sal9000: Will I Dream?
Chandra: "Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why".

to publicize Linux security breaches more vigorously then IOS or Microsoft security breaches. Closed source OS providers have historically had more vulnerabilities, but the US government tends to look the other way.

Why would they do this?

They want closed source solutions to be adopted over open source solutions.

The future the government wants is to ensure each user of a personal computer can be ID'd and tracked. Age verification is the wedge to force this onto every PC. Open source operating systems get in the way of this.