The thing is, though, I don't think they care about *protecting*. They care about surveillance.

Was your most prized possession the base station for your security system?

The unfortunate thing is that while the coalition of bigots is fragile, it is only fragile under conditions where Liberalism has already been defeated.

So we can never really take advantage of that fragility: they'll only fight each other if we've already lost. S o we have to beat 'em all.

Interestingly, the people I have talked to since treated it like any other job, but I bet believing in the mission helps a lot with retention, and that seems like something which might be a lot harder to do these days.

Aha: so it's been studied a lot and while the precise numbers might vary, the pattern is pretty consistent. (Incidentally, "since, like, [just before] Obama" would be the time frame that my experiences mostly come from.)

I'm curious about the survey of backgrounds, though, just because I had always assumed they were anomalies. (I don't think either of them were really from, y'know *military* families, although we were all Scouts together.)

I have a circumscribed view because I am from am "everyone goes to college" strata, but the person I knew who hated recruiters did for the reason you gave.

But of the two I know who enlisted, one wanted to be a doctor-medic, while the other seemed sort of adrift, when I knew him.

My FAVORITE example is every time McKinsey or whoever writes a report about how 30 million jobs could be automated in the next decade.

(Which is to say, a somewhat below average rate.)

By any reasonable historical standard — including that of the technology industry! — ChatGPT should be pulled from the market and its product managers and executives held accountable for creating a product that ROUTINELY tells teens to kill themselves. This is a basic, common sense standard.

Honestly, I doubt any of them are potentiometers anymore. The only question is whether they detect precise positions or merely whether they are being spun one way or the other.
I was figuring more for buttons, though, where there's not as much of a question of symmetry, just how many and how big.

I am supposed to be a 'words' guy, yet I find that I lack the words to fully express the sense of rage and betrayal that I feel, having been raised to believe in the beauty of the United States as an - imperfect - pluralistic republic, to see these quislings try to turn it into a boring ethnostate.

And they don't require a hardware redesign if they discover they screwed something up late in the design-to-production pipeline!