Or just require logins, and require a modest microtransaction of $1 to create a login, or explicit administrator approval. Longtime actual users and contributors will be exempt through the administrator provision, and bots are free to create $1 accounts (which are bannable for abuse) thus funding the project. New actual users probably woud not be bothered if the rationale is explained.
If it's really worth it for them to crawl endless random URLs until the sun burns out its fuel, make them pay for the privilege.

What happens if you slam the door? Cause all the electrics to go haywire?

Because the Democrat Party (tm) finally saw the writing on the wall and the biggest supporters told his crusty old ass that if he ran he would 100% guarantee a trump victory, and he ultimately withdrew at the 11th hour. The important part is: it did not stop him from TRYING.
Maybe you forget about the part where the party basically had to have a fake as fuck primary due to low confidence in him (normally it would just be assumed), and when he was finally convinced not to run they had to push Kamala in as a nominated candidate, ultimately doing an end run around the democratic process--nobody outside of super delegates voted for her in a primary. The Democrat Party (tm) does not embrace democracy.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

Eh? This is incorrect. Perhaps most fictional murders are premeditated, because that makes for a more interesting mystery to solve, but in real life, the vast majority murders are impulsive, spontaneous acts that happen during arguments, fights, or emotional outbursts (often with the help of alcohol and/or readily available weapons).

You're right, they'll run the numbers and take whichever path maximizes their net profit -- but shuttering (or even heavily modifying) a facility that they've just invested $$$$ into is unlikely to be found to be their most profitable option. More likely they'll try to sell memory chips at a profit of +$.25 per chip in large volumes, because when you've got is a giant hammer, hammering lots of nails is what you can do best.

I wonder if anyone will start selling home systems capable of using cast-off data center RAM? It might be worthwhile if there's lots of that sort of RAM floating around for cheap.

The technology that was highlighted in that movie originated around that time or a bit before. It goes by several names, but WAMI (wide area motion imagery) is kind of the generic term; it allows a forensic tech to rewind and track objects (people, vehicles) after an event. With AI and persistent vision, bottomless data center storage, it will allow everything / everyone to be tracked at all times. People don't know that this is already deployed over many large cities; essentially global hawk drones with high resolution hemispherical cameras constantly flying patterns, watching everything.

Sure, a company could use an increase in productivity to allow their workers to work fewer hours while getting the same amount accomplished... but capitalism doesn't work that way. Instead, the company will use the increase in productivity to get more work done in the same amount of hours as before... or if they don't, their competitor will, and thereby obtain a competitive advantage over them.

This is especially true for salaried employees, where the cost of the employee to the company is the same regardless of how many hours the employee works, and it is therefore in the company's financial interest to maximize the return on its salary "investment" by getting as much output from the employee as possible in any given pay period.

Nothing says low pressure social interaction like having a camera all up in your face while you try to eat drink and be merry, amirite?

I've got a co-worker like that; every email I get from him is just him copy-and-pasting text from his pet AI, and when I reply, he forwards my email on to his AI to read and generate the next reply for him.

Which raises the question... exactly what value is my co-worker providing there? Sooner or later management will notice that they are paying six figures of annual salary to what is essentially just a very slow meat-based email relay, and they'll lay him off and just have me communicate with the AI directly instead. There's a fine line between "all in" and "all redundant".

It all depends on one thing: Will your speech-driven AI agent reliably accomplish the tasks that you told it to do? If so, great, we've entered the glorious Star Trek future. OTOH if it screws up, even just 5% of the time, it'll be kicked to the curb, because a "timesaver" that you have to stand over and supervise to make sure it doesn't go wrong is no timesaver at all.

Let's be real. They blew the school up because it was a school, and most likely a lot of the leadership / military families sent their girls there. And our leaders are evil bastards, working for evil bastards on behalf of other evil bastards. It's an exercise for the reader to determine the nature of those evil bastards.

If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.