Pretty much exactly this. You stick useless people in these important roles so they can’t get enough traction to try for your chair, but you also want people who are at least smart enough to do whatever you tell them to do. Patel is actually a smart pick, he’s just too dumb to know how to push around actual field agents and only knows how to push around analysts and media.

Additionally, a lot of hospitals and doctors in those states are being very shaky about providing prenatal or neonatal care because of the potential of opening them to liability if a baby dies.

Literally actually yes. Thiel and his ilk think Sauron just didn’t have enough focus on PR.

For the love of God, Montressor!

Yeah, if they’re wanting to do the old castle thing, they forget castles had funny things like ways to produce food and unblockable access to clean water.

He might look it, but not feel it. There’s a LOT of eyes looking at the big chair and saying “wow Trump is doing a shitty job, I could easily do better if only he’d move out of the way.”

They got Capone on tax evasion, etc.

Ehhh, the idea predates Cyberpunk pretty well. Digital immortality was a theme in some sci-fi going all the way back to the 50s with Asimov’s “The Last Question” (though that was more Matrix-style consciousness upload).

Bingo. You use ML to narrow down results, not to give you answers. I have a friend who uses ML models to analyze radio telescope data, because it’s really good at the mind-numbing work of throwing out noise and junk from broadcast satellites and known radio sources. Then you go through the narrowed stuff to see if anything in that is more interesting.

It’s the question between sifting a million hits or a thousand.

This isn’t always just limited to produce either! Several CSA farms near me do livestock as well, from chicken to lamb to venison and everything else.

Lions Led By Donkeys did a well-researched 4-part podcast on the Rwandan genocide, I highly recommend it.

The French, I think, literally handed over a diplomat’s wife and children to be killed in front of the entire convoy AT THE AIRSTRIP.

Might be a nurse, too. I have met some nurses who very clearly weren’t taught to do things like solve problems or think critically.

Could also honestly just have been “man I don’t wanna do the paperwork for something like this.” Never underestimate the laziness of the average man.

All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that’s $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).

So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.

That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.

So someone else also pointed out grand jury members in TX are appointed positions of “respectable” members of society.

Sadly, this just sounds like the Good Old Boy Network doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

A lot of PDs and federal forces get taught by the IDF, who are notorious for targeting genitalia and eyes.

I too would like my public execution be at an unknown (to me) time and place. Like Burgess Meredith in The Obsolete Man.

He’s the one kid at your birthday party who’s upset they’re not getting attention too.