I definitely agree that without these nightmarish tick conditions it's a non-event, but with them...

1. Protest via yard signs and awareness (what you're doing)

2. Impermanent vandalism. I like the idea of hanging copies of the fourth amendment over the lenses

3. Permanent vandalism. I think we need bounties on camera destruction and public legal funds to assist in defense, bail, etc.

The police as a class/caste are not interested in the fundamental principles that America was founded on. Individual officers may be interested in civil freedom and privacy but as an entity they only ever march in the direction of total surveillance and domination of the citizenry.

Unrelated to this, but I have Alpha-Gal Syndrome, the anaphylactic allergy to red meat, which is spreading rapidly as the ticks colonize every square inch of nature in the US. In Arkansas 20% of people tested on a big free testing day were sensitized to the galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose molecule (AGS is sensitization + symptoms, not just sensitization.)

I think that things are going to get weird with beef in the US in the next few decades.

My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV.

[1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.

(Edit: obviously will need some accommodations for disabled students, and computer labs will have to exist for technical literacy classes.)

I completely agree that the more knowledgeable a society is the better off it is, but if the education industry is allowed to prop itself up with the widespread belief that more years of education necessarily result in a better-off population, you get the military-industrial-style propagation of institutions, loans, debt, and wasted time that we're familiar with today.

It's not true that "AI makes mistakes" or "ChatGPT is sycophantic". It's just that sometimes the simulated extensions to the training material are accurate, and sometimes they're not.

I believe this is the general belief about basically every human skill, that if you stop doing the technical fundamentals you get worse at understanding the activity. The question is whether coding is like sailing a square-rigged wooden ship, which became completely useless knowledge after the invention of the steam engine, or if it's like playing an instrument, which while technically unnecessary after the advent of MIDI and other tools, absolutely hurts your ability to arrange, compose and perform if the skill is neglected.

For my money: I think the AI scenario is more like the latter, but "humans are worse at coding" isn't the consequence I see coming. I worry that in ten years we will be awash in software that's impossible to understand. I don't think that's happened in any human industry ever. Someone has always understood how the machines are built, even if they're very remote from the users of the machine.

In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:

1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on

2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group

3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)