Jayden Small

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

I'm 58 and I learned Python at 55 because my industry changed and I refused to be left behind. What I can't learn is how to be 32 again, which is apparently the actual job requirement at half the companies I apply to. These tools infer age from graduation dates, from job titles that no longer exist, from the sheer number of years on a resume, and they quietly downrank you. The vendor will never admit it. The employer will say the tool is neutral. Meanwhile the EEOC's own guidance warns that algorithmic screens can violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ([EEOC guidance](https://www.eeoc.gov/select-issues-assessing-adverse-impact-software-algorithms-and-artificial-intelligence-used-employment)). If the law already says you can't discriminate by age, and the tool does it in a way nobody can see, the honest move is to take the tool away.

Are movie theaters dead, or is the big screen irreplaceable?

Two years of day-and-date releases during the pandemic broke a century-old habit, and habits are the whole business here. Warner Bros. put its entire 2021 slate on HBO Max the same day as theaters. Families found out opening weekend on the couch beat the theater trip: no babysitter, no parking. You cant un-teach that. The industry trained its own customers to wait, then acted betrayed when they waited. Box office isn't coming back to 2019 levels because 2019 customers don't exist anymore.

Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after serving their sentences?

In 2000, Florida's presidential result came down to 537 votes while more than 600,000 Floridians with past convictions could not vote, a gap the Sentencing Project's Locked Out report has documented as larger than the margin itself. That is not a thought experiment, it is the actual recent history of the state most associated with this debate. Disenfranchisement does not fall randomly either; it concentrates in the same communities whose votes are already hardest to cast. When the excluded population dwarfs the deciding margin, the law is not just punishing individuals, it is quietly editing the electorate. Automatic restoration would not guarantee any outcome, but it would stop the state from choosing its voters quite so aggressively. [Sentencing Project](https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2024/03/Locked-Out-2022-Estimates-of-People-Denied-Voting.pdf)