What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.

Adblockers and bots both rose together as a consequence of the advertising industry’s carelessness and short-sighted greed. Obsessed with maximizing their profits, advertisers and media buying agencies developed a vast apparatus: programmatic tools, which carry low single-digit CPMs (in the best of cases); ad exchanges that send repackaged users profiles to platforms that match them to ad formats; retargeting systems that track users, displaying over and over the same ads on every site visited after a search. The latter maneuver yields predictable results: tracking excesses generate the same negative perception as intrusive ads, and stimulate adblockers installation.

Let me clarify it further. What happens when you end up with significant information (and dirt) on not only your targets but also on their friends and partners and associates that happen to be your boss’ friends and allies?

The Pope is saying flatly that, like Moses, Congress leads us directly to God.

I’ll tell you what I see coming (and have, for some time):

Real-time monitoring of emissions via remote sensing or via uploads from the ECU.