Elvin Painter

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

Every hiring technology gets this exact moral panic. Job boards were going to dehumanize hiring. LinkedIn was going to dehumanize hiring. Applicant tracking systems were going to dehumanize hiring. And yet somehow humans still interview humans at the end of all of it, because the AI doesn't do the hiring, it does the sorting, which is the boring part nobody wanted to do anyway. Nobody writes an essay about the dignity of having your resume sit in a pile of four hundred on someone's desk for three weeks. That was the old system. It wasn't humane. It was just slow. Banning the tool won't bring back some golden age of careful human consideration, because that golden age never existed. It will just make hiring slower and more nepotistic, and everyone will pretend that's more ethical because a person did it.

Should digital well-being support be treated like a routine public-health service?

Right now digital well-being support is a luxury good. Wealthy parents hire therapists, buy parental-control suites, and send kids to expensive detox camps. Everyone else gets thoughts and prayers. That is exactly the gap public-health services exist to close. The Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on social media and youth mental health in 2023 because the harms were too widespread to leave to the private market. [HHS](https://www.hhs.gov) Making support routine, through schools and clinics, means a kid's access to help stops depending on their parents' income and tech savvy. Mental health care that only exists for the rich is not a system. It is a sorting mechanism.

Should the United States adopt a universal healthcare system?

Here is the number that ends the 'best system in the world' talk: the Commonwealth Fund's international comparisons rank the United States worst among high-income nations on maternal mortality, by a wide margin. We spend roughly twice what peer countries spend per person and mothers die at rates that would embarrass a developing nation. This is not about rare diseases or exotic treatments, it is about the most basic thing a health system does, keeping people alive through childbirth, and ours fails at it because access depends on coverage, coverage depends on employment, and employment is not a health plan. A universal system would not fix everything, but it would end the absurdity where your zip code and your job determine whether you survive having a baby. [Commonwealth Fund](https://www.commonwealthfund.org)

Okay but the teacher one made me genuinely sad. She is right that we signal what we value, and right now the signal is: accumulate, don't contribute. That stings because it's true.

Politics · Oct 6, 2026 · Should billionaires be allowed to exist?