I worked for US companies for over a decade, and travelled there multiple times a year. I worked remotely from my home in the UK as a software engineer and and CTO, including as CTO of a YC startup for a number of years.
I would not travel to the US any longer, it's just not worth the risk. From the outside it's how I imagined Germany looked in the mid 30s, but streamed live in HD.
For context I'm a white British man, and whilst I wouldn't go out of solidarity and disgust at the treatment of people who don't look and talk like me even if I wasn't worried about myself, right now I would also be seriously concerned for my own safety. I wouldn't trust rogue ICE agents to know exactly what things are permissible on an ESTA visa waiver vs B1 vs B1 in lieu of H1B.
Genuinely and without hyperbole, if you have the ability and means to leave for a different country, you should consider it in case it becomes something you can no longer do in the future; even if you don't believe your government will prevent you, I suspect other countries will start making it a lot more difficult for US citizens to get visas in the coming years.
There are economic and regulatory factors involved, it is more complex than people being resistant to change which no doubt makes up part of it.
In the UK, for example, automatic cars are more expensive to buy and insure [1]. They also tend to be more expensive to learn how to drive as instructors mostly have manual cars to teach with.
This incentivises new drivers towards manual cars, especially as younger drivers are more likely to be in lower-paying jobs and therefore more price conscious.
There is also a separate license category for automatic cars. If you have this license you are not allowed to drive manual cars, whereas the manual license entitles the holder to drive both. Therefore most new drivers opt to learn manual for the flexibility and the cost reasons.
It sounds like you have some additional constraints that you didn't make clear in your original question.
You said, "Tell me how to do something worth doing with ETH and I'll be impressed."
Also, you need things that you can do without capital, and that fit a specific risk profile that you haven't elaborated on. It sounds like you're assuming that making these yields are too risky for you, so are you looking for zero risk, or can you accept some risk?
Can you specify up front your constraints?
Here are two things you could do with ETH right now:
1. You could use it as the coordination layer for a decentralised git repository, that is fully distributed and censorship resistant. Hopefully you can see how this could easily be adapted to many similar use cases: https://github.com/cardstack/githereum
2. You could purchase flight delay insurance that pays out automatically if your flight is delayed: https://etherisc.com/
We’re building a software platform to handle the compliance aspects of running a drug or medical device company. Compliance is an ongoing activity for companies in this space, and annual costs per company range anywhere from $100K to $100M. Being deemed not compliant can be devastating, preventing a company from selling any new product for months and sometimes years.
In lieu of hiring costly consultants or employees to address this problem, customers provide our platform access to their data, and the platform outputs documentation in the manner that FDA and other regulatory agencies are looking for.
By using our software platform, customers will cut their annual regulatory costs by 50% (on average) and reduce the risk that their products will not get approved for sale.
Why wouldn't this be protected speech under the first amendment? As long as the newspaper believes it to be true, why wouldn't they be allowed to publish it?
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode