For a more extreme example, look to the Principality of Monaco. Being so much smaller, it can be much more extreme.

Yeah, feature length movies will show “bad cops” on screen for a few minutes, but the ongoing series tend to shy away from anything other that wholesome upstanding proud law men and women keeping the world safe from itself.

I used to live in a neighborhood with a lot of police residents. Most of them are “good” in their own actions all of the time. All the ones I knew were “good” in their actions most of the time, but once in a while they’d go all judge-jury-and-executioner with a badge and a gun - I never knew about any coverups, but I did have a neighbor get suspended for a month with pay and a strong word from his sergeant “don’t to that again…” The worst of it is that virtually ALL of them will look the other way / assist in spinning an issue to “help a brother in blue out of a jam,” and they know that they have each others’ backs that way, so they will do bad things because they have that confidence that they are untouchable.

the brutality of US law enforcement became evident

Rodney King “can’t we all just get along” seemed pretty evident in 1991. George Quintana handcuffed/hog tied near the exhaust of an idling police car and dying while being ignored was happening around then on the other coast too…

The pubic was plenty aware of “Pigs” and police brutality during Kent State in 1970.

Our continued failure to address the adversarial stance of police, courts and populace has been haunting us my whole life, and my father his whole life back to the Vietnam draft days.

While you’re not wrong, hired mob goons wearing local PD uniforms has been a common thing - in the US at least - since forever.

This has been going on my entire life (since the 1960s and before) - maybe it’s a new twist that a “startup” put up a website explaining the process but the process has been around forever.

Example: ever see a cop hanging out at your grocery store, in uniform? Yeah, he’s not on duty, he’s been rented.

PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn’t. When they rug-pulled the “otherOS” feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no “Smart” TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content…)

Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they’re happy where they are.

I may have seen it, but it “felt wrong” from the start - never considered it anything of interest.

If you keep the book secure, it’s probably safer than any computer based record system - right up until someone untrustworthy gets their eyes on the book.

With a physical book, you can store it in a safe deposit box when you don’t need access, make partial copies, copies take (everyone, bad guys and good) significantly longer to make even with a photocopy process… most importantly, people intuitively understand the vulnerabilities of a physical book.

Now, the physical book won’t stop keyloggers…

Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)

I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn’t work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the “big” airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn’t interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.

Yeah, I was an EE in college so I took the Smith’s chart class, did the exercises, then promptly started using newer tools when such things were called for… mostly I worked in software after school so all those exercises were… academic.

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Rare is a matter of popular practice, not difficulty.

It’s rare to walk around with an actual tinfoil hat, but not difficult or expensive to do.

they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.

Nothing is ever absolute, but Silicon Valley has been going in a consistently bad direction for 20+ years now.

If she floats, she’s a witch and we’ll burn her at the stake.

That tracks with expectations. Many larger companies don’t use external recruiters at all, I’d guess the threshold is probably around 10,000 employees - more or less - above that they’ll have it vertically integrated in-house.

I’ve worked with a 100,000 employee company where HR will pre-screen candidates at job fair type interviews, just to file them away against potential future openings. They won’t usually task actual staff with doing interviews for openings that aren’t funded, though sometimes it feels like they are doing that - sending so many bad-fit candidates that it takes us 8-10 to find one that might possibly be a net-positive asset to the team.

now I know a fair amount about EE

But, did you ever use a Smith’s chart to assist in antenna design / analysis?

I applied to a place that asked “experience in SquirrelScript” - that seemed like a personality test, I told the truth: 0. Surprisingly, when I got hired there, they were indeed one of the three places in the world using SquirrelScript at the time. Manager said that over half of applicants professed deep experience with SquirrelScript, but none ever had it for real. It wasn’t hard to learn.

Our entry test should have been dead simple for anyone applying to the position. Position: C++ computer graphics programmer, 1-2 years experience implementing technical graphics displays in C++ language. All resumes submitted, of course, claimed this and more. All interviewees, of course, professed great confidence in their abilities. 9/10 candidates, when presented with “the test” failed spectacularly. The ones who passed, generally, did it in less than 10 minutes - with a couple of interesting quirks which revealed their attention to and/or willingness to follow directions. The failures ranged from rage-quit and stomping out without a word, to hours of pleading for more time to work on it - which, in principle, we granted freely, but after 30 minutes if they didn’t have it they never got it.

I think 4 years experience gets the “Senior” title in our company now. I can understand having 3 years experience and being frustrated when you can see how much better you are at your job than your “more senior” middle managers, but… there are plenty of things that you continue to learn in your first 10-20 years of experience, and having diversity of experience brings even more value that’s rarely acknowledged in any ranking scales - actually the ranking scales usually reward stay-put loyalty over diverse in depth experience, and that’s just backwards in my experience. Although, I have also known plenty of “job hoppers” who got around from place to place every year or two and it was clear after working with them that was because they didn’t really contribute adequate value anywhere they went.