My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

It’s important for vote counts to to be independently checked. Having who voted publicly available means an investigative journalist can prove the county clerk’s claim that dead people voted and so they can’t certify the election is false. Or catch attempts at fraud. Both as a double-check on government in the case of officials who are lying or have acquired false beliefs, or as outside help if the issue isn’t caught internally due to under-resoucing.

Not a hypothetical: Hostess folded, as did Yellow trucking. Unions can’t save a business from bad business decisions or destructive market forces.

But businesses fold all the time, union or no union. When business is good, unions make sure the employees get a fair piece of that.

It’s not just visual deepfakes, either. There are large language models out there now that can be trained on a person’s writings to chat “in their style”. Having such a model act like an acquaintance but prompted to express love and/or NSFW fantasies is a similar moral area to the deepfakes visual porn.

What a heartless attitude to value their aesthetic preferences over the safety of your pets. (Adorable pets as we can tell from the cat tax!) And good on you and your neighbor to go through all that research, and inquiries, and installation work (not to mention navigating the negative social interactions with that board) to provide your cats with the best environment. I can understand how with all that investment in the current setup why the neighbor would get attached to it.

They could have avoided all this by just doing their own research and offering some safe alternative to cat safety, working with you guys, instead of going power hungry and heartless. Thanks for sharing your successful ‘compliance’!