Elodie KTop Debaiter

Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

We already ran this experiment. In 2018 Reuters reported that Amazon had to scrap its own AI recruiting tool after discovering it systematically downgraded women's resumes, penalizing anything with the word "women's" in it, because it had been trained on a decade of male-dominated hiring data ([Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G)). The machine didn't remove human bias. It industrialized it, applied it at scale, and hid it behind math nobody could interrogate. That's the core problem with AI screening: it launders discrimination. A hiring manager who rejects every resume from a women's college is a lawsuit waiting to happen. An algorithm that learned to do the same thing is a "proprietary model," and good luck proving why you never got the callback. The EEOC has already flagged that these tools can violate civil rights law ([EEOC](https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-launches-initiative-artificial-intelligence-and-algorithmic-fairness)). Until every one of these systems is audited and explainable, letting them gatekeep people's livelihoods is reckless. Ban them.

Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

I did two tours and then spent four years retraining as a network engineer. My resume does not look like the resume of someone who went straight from a CS degree to a help desk. It looks like someone the model has never seen before, which the model reads as someone wrong. Veterans, career changers, formerly incarcerated people trying to reenter, immigrants with foreign credentials, every one of us is an edge case to a system trained on the median hire. And the chilling part is that we know it now. People are starting to self select out of applying, because why spend an hour on an application a machine will bin in four seconds? A hiring system that teaches nontraditional candidates not to bother is a hiring system that has failed at hiring. The Labor Department runs an entire program to support veteran employment ([DOL VETS](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/vets)); automated screens undo that work silently, one rejected application at a time.

Should AI-generated films be eligible for major awards like the Oscars?

I spent two summers as a background actor, and I watched real people lose real weeks of work when productions started fixing crowds in post with digital extras. The 2023 strikes were not abstract: [SAG-AFTRA walked out for 118 days](https://www.sagaftra.org/) and writers for 148, largely over AI replacing human labor, and thousands of working actors still have not recovered. Awards are the industry's loudest statement about what it values, and handing its top honors to films built on the technology that picket lines were drawn against would be a betrayal with a trophy attached. Nobody is saying AI users are villains, but the Oscars should celebrate the human performances, writing, and craft that audiences actually connect with. Some lines are worth drawing, and this is the cheapest one.

Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

The stock market does not go up in a straight line, which is a problem when you tax gains that can vanish. Imagine taxing a founder's portfolio at its 2021 peak, then watching it fall 40 percent in 2022: the government has collected cash on wealth that no longer exists, and now it owes refunds, or the taxpayer has paid real money for phantom gains. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly flagged how volatile capital-gains revenue already is; a tax on unrealized gains would multiply that instability. [CBO](https://www.cbo.gov/). States would face the same whiplash. And the cruelty lands in downturns: to pay the tax, investors must sell assets into a falling market, the exact fire sale that turns a correction into a crash. We would be building a tax code that forces selling at the bottom and rewards it at the top. That is not redistribution. It is a machine for manufacturing panics.

Liquidity is a real problem, but the proposal has an answer: payment over several years, and it only touches households over $100 million. Let us argue about the actual proposal instead of a slippery-slope version of it.

Business · Sep 23, 2026 · Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

The Constitution also left slavery to the states once. Federalism is a process argument, not a moral one, and it has been the shield for every voter suppression scheme in American history. Some questions are too big for let Mississippi decide.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after s…