Hell, if they get in your way, throw them off the boat, we'll go to Costco in the morning.
And some as far as ruining businesses, eh, you gotta break some eggs. (No, I don't talk about the price of eggs.) This is about habituating the populace to domestic military presence, not something trivial like people's livelihoods.
You think that because the fanbois flock to Blue Angel celebrations. What you don't see is all the people cursing at them everywhere else.
Captive market, increasingly captive citizens, unconstrained capital openly colluding with government.
Where have I seen this story before...
It demonstrates weakness, is interpreted as submission, and Stumpy be back with more demands. If you grow a pair you might have a fight, but probably not - he's a fucking coward, but more relevantly, he's desperate to avoid people publicly standing up to him.
The answer is "Eat shit you goofy fuckup, give us the money you're illegally withholding."
First, you have bureaucratic imperatives, like all large orgs. The iron law of a bureaucracy is the bureaucracy fights to maintain the staus quo. This includes the existence of the bureaucracy, the continuation of which is the highest priority. The number of organizations that have voluntarily disbanded without outside pressure is not zero, but close enough to demonstrate the rule.
Second, you have leadership, which can't really do anything of their own volition that would materially change things. Between parents, politicians, unions, and the reality of budgets[1] and students' situations, it is extremely rare that they have a realistic way to improve things, even assuming they'd otherwise be capable of doing so.
Third, you have parents, or more specifically parent pressure groups. They can make an administrator or teacher's life miserable and there's no good way to counter it, so they tend to get what they want. The good news is they only tend to flare up once in a while, like the "Moms for Liberty" who were deeply concerned withsexual deviance.
Forth, you have both the state and federal bureaucracies, with their own complicated imperatives. State variation is high, ranging from neglect to micromanaging and well-meaning (if frequently clueless) through antagonistic (and frequently clueless). In any case, these tend combine onerous ongoing reporting requirements that costs labor on bullshit with random big mandates that scramble everything you're trying to do.
Fifth, you have teacher's unions. They're doing what they're supposed to - fighting for their members' interests. Those interests run from generally good ideas to self-serving ones. How one feels about that is obviously heavily political in the US; personally, I look at how little money they make for their education requirements and all the shit they have to put up with and marvel that anyone wants to do it.
So now in walks Google or OpenAI with more money than god and an invisible study buddy for each of your kids. Depending where you are, politicians are leaning on you to get with the program, hoping they can downsize away teacher's unions/"win the future"/some of them probably sincerely think this is good.
And then you get the bandwagon effect. Some other school district publishes dodgy, rosy numbers, the robot sales guy sends that article to your supervisor, and suddenly even when everyone knows how this is going to end, the pressure to do it is overwhelming.
A generation later, a new version of the robot sales guy comes knocking...
[1] People frequently point out how much we spend on public education to claim this isn't a problem, but it is. The issue is not absolute numbers, but distribution. We throw a lot of money at some schools and not enough at others. A drive through the rural South looking at the state of school buildings should be enough to tell you there's (more than one) thing wrong with allocation.
It also is accelerating the move away from the dollar as the world reserve currency. This is not good news for Usians, is neutral for some, and very positive for some others, so one's outlook on this may vary.
Basically, if you can get Stumpy McDipshit to believe his ego is wrapped up in something, there's a very good chance you can get him to kill it, like everything else he touches.
In this case, he's touching the petroleum industry like it was an ingénue shopping at Bergdorf Goodman.
Given the high standards this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.
I think they may be playing a game with the fight they picked with the math folks over the Navier Stokes finding, too. To normal folks that looks greedy and shortsighted. To a wannabe dictator, that looks like a magic mirror.
- I expect decent humans to stand up to authoritarian shitheads. Granted, Google leadership exited the "Decent human" category a long time ago, they've become the short of trash you don't call back. But the point holds; if you're going to support ethnic-supremacist authoritarians in my country, fuck you, you will not see a dime of my money and I will do what I can to hurt your business, because it is just as much my adversary as the rest of them.
- I empathize with wishing to avoid politics, but you cannot. Word to the wise - eventually politics comes for you, and then you're at a disadvantage because you were trying to ignore it.
Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
