Mirshe

Yes, because the bigger plan is to make sure they don't need to vote again. By "they", I don't just mean the public - the GOP Congress knows their days are numbered, because the overarching Federalist and Heritage Foundation plans are to rule by decree and turn the president into a monarch in all but name.

I don't even think it's trying to win electoral support, I think this is him shoring up so that when Trump falls out of his chair finally (either dead or 25th'd), Vance looks like the "reasonable" face of the religious feudal aristocracy that his backers want him to build.

Enough to fill the black void in his soul.

Many states also don't (usually) require old plates to be turned in when designs change. My state's gone through two design changes since I started driving in 2010 and I still have my original plates. I've seen people driving with plates from the 80s.

Not just that, red states have also, side-by-side with the feds, dismantled their own oversight and public safety. This used to be the sort of thing your local Health Department could and would catch and deal with alongside federal HHS, but 40 years of ripping THAT copper out of the walls too means the whole thing folds in on itself when something happens.

Nah, there is a segment of the American right that truly believes that the poor should live like a Gilded Age beggar. You own nothing, you sleep in a box, and maybe, if you're lucky, the soup kitchen will have some bread that's not moldy. I had a coworker tell me I couldn't be poor because I wasn't homeless, because "only homeless people are really poor".

Not to mention the payload reqs on this. All the radiation shielding and heat management is gonna need a new Sea Dragon-sized rocket.

Pigeon, I agree. Raptor beaks are a lot more curved and pointy, and look more like a meat hook. He probably can't fly, the pinions don't look developed enough for it yet - young birds like this will often fall out of/leave the nest but still be fed and cared for by their parents on the ground for weeks until they're old enough to hunt for food on their own, especially when they get to this size.

The sheer scale of globalized business means this is largely a non-issue for the company. You burn down their factory in New Jersey, there's 10 other factories in other countries they can lean on to make up the shortfall. The owner likely hasn't ever been physically in the factory (possibly even the country itself), so you can't do the old Wobbly "how about you sign this contract or Mr Pistol gets angry". Even if you manage that, the executive board will have a new CEO by the end of the month, and a flock of lawyers will find every way to tear that contract to shreds, or they'll simply shut down your plant (if you're in the US or a Western nation) or hire death squads to murder you and your union organizing friends (if you aren't).

least AI-able jobs

It looks like it to the parents and the board, which is all that matters. Most of them don't ever see the hours of putting together a curriculum, or answering questions, or grading essays and putting homework together and trying to keep kids interested. They just remember (wrongly) "well you get up and talk about stuff from a book, what if we fed that book to a machine and it said that stuff instead for the price of your salary, once."

Yeah, I was expecting them to have finally sent Carol Spinney, or like, the janitor.

About a third to two thirds of literally everyone who wound up kidnapped into this camp, yes.