I suspect it’s any university degree that doesn’t have obvious “practical” benefits at this point (and even then).

They don’t care about crime at all, it’s just a dogwhistle for black and brown people. If anything, this is a benefit because it means they can inflict harm on more people they don’t like during the “crackdown”.

MP3 is fine if the bitrate is high enough and it was encoded with a semi-modern encoder. I still prefer FLAC so I can transcode it to whatever lossy codec I need without additional losses (usually Opus but there may be better codecs in the future).

It’s not paid but you could try self hosting searxng. Since it’s FOSS there isn’t the conflict of interest issue, although be aware it’s a meta search engine so relies on the quality of common search engines. And your IP could be traced if it’s not connected through a commercial vpn just like using the search engines directly.

Google is an AI company, even if that’s not all they are.

Look into the notion of the circular economy if you want to investigate this further, although it goes well beyond just recycling.