The status quo is people driving poorly.

It’s not people driving poorly, as much as it is horrible city planning, poor traffic design and, perhaps most importantly, not requiring people to be educated enough before receiving a driver’s license.

This is an issue seen practically exclusively in underdeveloped countries. In Europe road accidents are incredibly rare. Nobody here even considers self-driving cars a solution to anything, because there’s nothing to solve.

This is nothing but Tesla (et al.) selling a ‘solution’ to an artificially created problem, that will not solve anything and simply address the symptoms.

It’s difficult to prove anything like that. From independent research we know that Intel, and likely AMD too with their counterpart, can remotely control your PC via IME. But they’ve never done that yet or have done so very secretly, because then a lot more people would know and that would be problematic.

Personally I think it’s reasonable to suspect that Microsoft has full capability to severely cripple your system at any given time. Maybe not ‘brick’ as that may be impossible without proprietary hardware inside the machine. However, even a simple Windows installation can mess up your UEFI. Given that, do you think that all those millions of fully secret lines of code cannot render you unable to use your PC, even if just temporarily?

Something you should understand about the 4-day workweek.

From the studies conducted so far we know it seems to increase overall productivity. Which means companies, or at least some, would make more money if they implemented a 4-day workweek. So then you may ask yourself: why haven’t they? Don’t they want to make more money?

Not necessarily. It all comes down to relative wealth. A 4-day workweek would benefit them, but it would benefit regular people more. And so the divide in wealth/power/quality of life would shrink. So technically they’d be richer, but they’d feel poorer, because we’d get closer to their level, even if by just a bit.

Ah yes, the long awaited sequel to Tim Apple.

I thought they didn’t care about the identity and just kidnapped whoever they felt like. Do they really need this?

To be more precise: it is actually beneficial for big corporations if you pirate their media, as opposed to you having never been born. The sole act of you ‘consuming’ their media is positive for them, since you’ll almost definitely see their logos (advertising to you), and you may spread the word to people who may pay for it (advertising by you).

As you said, it’s all pretty much propaganda to brainwash us into trying to be ‘good citizens’ (obedient consumers).