You forgot an additionnal option:

Increase the sketchiness of the task assigned.
Once the mark raise suspicion, answer "Yes, that's indeed a scam. If you don't like that, we could tell the police all the fine details of what you've done up to this point.... Or you could just shut up, abstain from asking to many question and the money will keep coming in."

It also doesn't have to be on your taxpayers' back to fund the tax cuts, subsidies and government contracts that supports the mega-corps that are most responsible for the environmental damage that needs to be investigated by said research.

i.e.: Yes, Papua New Guniea -- random example -- isn't funding that much environmental research.
On the other hand Papua New Guniea isn't either one of the biggest emitter of CO2, user of oil, hoster ExxonMobil, or supporter of conflict in the middle east to gather even more oil, etc.

Important: ...and exposed the result of these plugins via a standradized library (libpurple) further down wrapable in standard framework telepathy.
Making it possible to interface with those just by calling DBus.
That's the standard API I was refering too.

(e.g. on SailfishOS, before it got supported by the official distro, you could merely install Rakia and get VoIP working in the calling app).

Depends. Breakage increased as company became aggressice in trying to keep their users locked in.
At one end of the specrum I never a problem with ICQ back when Pidgin was still called GAIM.
It did work reliably back when Facebook was putting efforts in supporting XMPP to attract users into its clutches.

Skype (-QT, not web.) is one of the first that seemed to start insisting on changing its protocol whenever too many 3rd party managed to reverse engineer it.

At the other end, you have modern day Facebook Messenger (its own weird API with a f-up mix of JSON and XML), WhatsApp (bans you if it seems you're trying to reverse engineer it or try to run a 3rd party client*), and Apple is putting all their engineering efforts into fucking Beeper up.

*: ...until EU punched them in the face with DMA. Now "WhatsApp business" is a thing (it's an officially documented stable API mostly used to send corporate communications) and it's possible to register your Matrix bridge as a web client in WahtsApp.

There's the corner case (big auditoriums) where the projector can be upgrade, and probably has been for something that also supports HDMI.

But the wiring between the lectern in front of the auditorium and the projector pod in the ceiling is part of the building and would require tear downs and rebuilds which in turn would require complicated paperwork and expensive procedures.
So some places decide to keep the cabling in place until building renovation are due when they could piggy back the cabling upgrade.

One solution that some go for is to keep VGA as the standard even if the projector could do better, and add converters at the lectern (a large collection of what-ever-to-VGA dongles attached on a keychain).

A different solution is to keep the wiring but carry a more modern signal over it (some projector even support getting HDMI or so signals over their VGA port so you don't need to put a wiring adapter at the projector's side). It surprisingly works (lot of place have over-specced their VGA wiring and it's mostly good enough for HDMI signals). This is also the origin of the reason why passive HDMI-to-VGA cables are a thing on AliExpress (and Amazon I guess?)

The way this class of problem has been solved in the past on Linux phones is by trying to handle accounts with a standardised API.

Palm/HP's WebOS had the very advanced Synergy, and Jolla's SailfishOS has a simplified version as Accounts.

It's these system's job to handle logging into servers on one side (Google Account, etc.), and exposing standard APIs to apps on the phone on the other side (mail, contact list, messages, upload of photos, etc.) Phone used to come with a set of standard account plugin (Google, Facebook back when they used to have an API, Microsoft Exchange for business settings), and a couple of standard apps (Mail, Camera, Chat, etc.).
The user can install additional plugins to handle additional type of accounts (e.g. anything with a libpurple and/or telepathy plugin can be added as a chat provider to the system chat app).

The main problem of this approach is that most online platforms have aggressively moved away from having open API and on locking you to only be able to perform actions from whithin their APP (e.g.: Facebook shut down their XMPP access, you MUST chat only exclusively from their Messenger app; Slack doesn't expose anything useful), and Android is geared heavily toward this type of interaction (the camera app doesn't handle "Upload to an arbitrary account", instead it opens a list of apps which can use JPEGs).

Efforts like EU's Digital Market Act might help tip the tendency back toward more open platforms.

Dropshipping doesn't involve forwarding parcels.
The parcel never went through the reseller's hand.
It went straight from the Chinese dispatcher to the buyer.

The western reseller is merely a customized front-end shop.

At best, the Chinese themselves could relying on a parcel forwarding service that can split or joins shipment for various taxation reasons.
(e.g.: stuff bought from AliExpress often transits through the Netherlands here in Europe).

You forgot that the US is not the entire world.

Not every countries politics boils down to who can throw the most money to a few select oligarchs.

Unlike the US, some countries which call themselves democrarcies ARE actual democracies, in the sense that it's the people (demos) who take decision and exercices power (cratos).
I happen to live in one of those countries which don't limite the entirety of the population influence onto politicis to playing a round of "who wants to be an oligarch" every couple of years, and there are several others around which complements the so called "representative democracy" with various levels actual popular influence.
(see the petition system that exists EU-wide)

Yes, the US might suddenly decide that AI output is copyrightable if the few oligopoly media mega corps throw enough money into politics while at the same time holding against the massive strike which are very likely to errupt against such effort. Everything seems to be on sale to the highest bidder in your country, including politicians.

The rest of the planet will most likely NOT follow this trend.

The only reason that the US has managed in the past to export its very weird copyright laws (such as DMCA) is by bullying the rest of the world under threats of tarrif: signing similar laws was the only way to access free market with the US.
Given that nowadays stupidly high tarrifs with the US will happen anyway, the US lost its only bargaining chip to push completely stupid copyright law onto the rest of the world.

And this means that you'll be able to happily torrent, all these without any (copyright) legal recourse from those companies.
Remember: only the output of members of the H. sapiens specie is copyrightable. Not even selfies by apes are. And AI output certainly is NOT.

It means that today you can rip out this sound-bytes and share them freely and remix them. Nobody can sue you for copyright infringement.

When 999% or 99.9% of the production process is AI, it means that more than 90% of a movie or videogame is torrentable without any possibility of being successfully sued for copyright infringement.

Depends on how low you set the bar for that evidence.

There has been some fMRI (== functional MRI; using MRI to show activation of brain regions. MRI == (nuclear) Magnetic Resonnange Imaging, a type of non-ionising imaging of the brain) exploratory imaging of religious people, but on very small groups (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Farticles%2FPMC2686228%2F).

There are meta analysis regarding the relationships between genes and religiosity. (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS2352250X20301925)

There's a lot of things you can measure with a PET scan, including on a dead salmon.

I think you forgot a zero (or two).

Yeah. Just trying explaining to France that their nuclear energy production shouldn't realistically exist.

Oh, hai!

(Note: rabid proponent of nukes AND renewables solar/wind/hydro)

I don't need to relocate, my government is already issuing us iodine tabs.
We are already living in the (very) general vicinity of nuke power plants.

Impossible? No.
Unfathomly low probability? Yes.

Have knowledge about security been vastly improved? Yes.

(Think about air travel safety for another example of some tech that is acutally much safer that what could think from a few hyper-documented black swan events).

Also, remember that the whole idea is not to compete against renewable with nuke, but to add nuke alongside renewables against fossils. And fossils are the opposite: tragicomically underestimated slow and diluted killers.

It's not a Cook's exclusive. It just that Job's reality distortion field was better at making you forget complete failures.

e.g.: during John Sculley's tenure:
Apple Newton Pad.
Completely failed.

It took Palm to show how to do PDA rights, and it took Handspring Visor (by former Palm people) to make him understand that the future was in connected mini computers you hold in your pocket, not in a big blucking transparent TV-like block on your table.

Another failure, during Steve Job's tenure: anything with a decent battery life.

PDA used to be thing you could keep in your pocket for days or even weeks.
Nokia dumb phone were notorious for how long their battery could last.
The first iPhone could barely survive a couple of hours between charges, and we're now barely back at a state where a smartphone is expected to be charged overnight every night, and this seems entirely normal to most people.
I blame this one on Steve's RDF.

(And of course, Cook kept the trend with the crap he introduced:
- Earphones: those didn't even use to have batteries, but Apple realised that by having the courage of dropping a phone jack they could dramatically increase the marging on Apple branded earphones while planning a much shorter obsolescence on their batteries.
- Same with smartwatches: The original Pebble could be worn for days to weeks between charges, mostly like a normal watch. Under Cook it became normal to need a small magnetic dock on your night stand to put your phone, your earphones and your watch every single night).

Same reason why the same phones try to be as thin as possible when the case will double its thickness anyway:
Reviewers.

95% of phones are reviewed without a case, by tech reviewer who review tons of products and whose eyes will be attracted by some shiny designs that don't mean anything for 95% remainder of users such as bezel sizes, image wrapping along the curved edges, front camera in a tiny notch to reduce top bezels, etc.
While completely missing important feature like battery life (desk/coffe shop job with plenty of charging options around), or durability (They will also at max daily drive a phone for a couple month before moving onto the next flagship product they are asked to review).