Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Surely, if someone requires a social worker and a therapist, it is an indictment against that person being a normally functioning, mentally healthy individual. Something was up with him which caused the parents to seek out that sort of help.

Your long winded analogy is flawed on so many levels. Let me correct it for you. We will stick with the Americans vs Aliens scenario:

The Aliens and Americans were part of the same country for quite some time. The aliens had originally conquered America, and America became intertwined socially, economically, culturally and even genetically. One day, the aliens government fails, they spin America off into its own country, and left some of its people behind, as they have been there many generations. The Americans then treat the aliens as second class citizens, Balkanized into a section of the eastern seaboard, near the aliens mothership. They will not acknowledge the alien culture or language, even though it's quite similar to standard Murrican. To the uneducated outsider there is barely a difference racially, culturally, linguistically, but nonetheless they see a difference.

The American government proceeds to supply its militias and tacitly supports them as they shell, machine gun and harass the aliens. Aliens are killed by the thousands over many years, all the while the world turns a blind eye. The new alien government in the mothership scolds America and warns they will use their death ray to attack America if they don't stop.

America does not stop, and the violence escalates. In response, the aliens hover their drone ship over Boston harbor and use their ion canon to capture the area. The americans are completely unprepared and are easily overwhelmed.

Some peace accords are made, but they are soon forgotten, and America resumes punishing the aliens but now they're armed with more advanced weapons supplied by the rest of the worlds militaries.

The aliens continue to warn America, and posture their clone army, and the attacks continue. This time, the aliens deploy their mothership and launch a ground invasion.

That was at least 500% more apt than your analogy.

Ukraine is a proxy being used in a proxy war, just like all the other proxies of the Cold War era, even the politicians and governmental leaders behind it publicly admit to such.

The protocol did its job over five years too late; that's how long it took the cheat to be discovered, after affected model years were already driving on the road. It was only discovered when a university researcher figured that the cars had drastically better mileage than computer models suggested they should, given the emissions controls--then they put NOX sensors on the car and figured the ecu was running lean and making more NOX than was allowed.

Better late than never and all, but the testing protocol enabled that cheat. I think that was his point.

I'm not so sure; the upcoming generation is used to micro transactions. They'll pay a few bucks for purely cosmetic avatar additions to their games, more bucks for DLCs, and insane amounts of cash to excel at gacha / mobile games. If they made the VW logo simply glow gold to virtue signal their wealth, some people would jump at the opportunity to participate; and that is where VW is missing out. They need to have some kind of LED badge that turns on when you activate the "performance mode", like a glowing Type R sticker. That'll make the whales lactate.

I'm amused that you think when you hit the delete button on an email hosted on a cloud account like Gmail that it actually means it has been deleted.

Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.

So heâ(TM)s going to sue because he doesnâ(TM)t like the *editorial* recommendations?

Iâ(TM)m glad the self proclaimed defender of free speech is defending free speech.

And you would be wrong. Most states have mental health statutes which authorize physicians and psychiatrists and sometimes other authorities like the police to place individuals determined to be gravely mentally ill--to the point where they are a danger to themselves or others--on a 72 hour hold. The purpose of the hold is twofold: for observation and treatment and to get the courts involved in case a where longer detention is merited. It's also just 72 hours long to be relatively unburdensome to liberty at large, and to minimize abuse of authority.

Being placed on a 72 hour hold does put you on a list and often does make it difficult on those who want to maintain 2A rights and are in the need of acute mental health care--particularly combat veterans.

I'm self-hosting Vaultwarden on my LAN, a Bitwarden-compatible backend written in Rust. I have it running inside a jail on TrueNAS Core (which, alas, is now end-of-life). It hosts its own Web interface, but also is compatible with Bitwarden's Android app and browser plugins.

So far, it's worked out pretty well for me.

...Because no one uses Edge.

Clearly you have never worked in a large corporate environment that has shackled itself to the entire Micros~1 ecosystem -- Office, Outlook, Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, Engage, SharePoint... The whole ball of earwax.

You think that's bad? In the year 2035 they banned teeth in jolly ol' England. Too many drive-by bitings, you see. You will have a government loiscensed tooth-bearer masticate your food for you, and give you the old baby bird treatment. And you will be happy.

Sorry I think I meant to click reply on some ridiculous post by rsilvergun and you got caught in the crossfire. At any rate, I'm not sure this is a problem with or a feature of capitalism, which as an economic theory embraces competition as a means to provide the best goods and services at the best price. I see the situation an inverse of co--a fascistic (for lack of a better term) syndicate/oligopoly due to the corporate/government dynamic we enjoy.