Let's be very clear that the real situation is that you wish that much of what NSA does is illegal and unconstituional. Unfortunately the law, courts, and Congress are against you. Your wish is just that, a wish, and it isn't coming true any time soon.

It's a shame you can't identify who the real monsters are. The real monsters are putting truck bombs in crowded city streets, crucifying children, and stealing women by the thousands for rape, forced marriages, or to be sex slaves. Some US citizens agree with those ideas, and even go overseas to help the monsters. Those monsters believe it is their duty to force their "civilization" on you. On top of that are several countries that would love to cripple or destroy the US. The NSA is part of why the real monsters and evil countries are held in check.

You know what frightens me?

I am an American by birth and residence, and for a flash moment I hesitated to (a) click on your link and (b) make this comment, because of what unseen long-term effects doing so might have on me personally and those I love.

Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...

All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.

Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.

Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.

I'm also hoping this whole thing "that, when unobserved, the photons exist in all possible states simultaneously" eventually goes away.

It has to be that we can't know what state it's in, not that it's actually in all of them. Can't it? Please? At some point, this quantum stuff should stop being magic.

That said they'll have to pry my steering wheel away from my cold dead hands before I cede control to the computer. That is why self-driving cars will take a while not technology.

...next thing they're going to get rid of cash.

"Money" is not the same as "paper".

Sure you can print more money but if you don't back it with a loan or some other kind of security it will lose value and then you will need to spend more for everything else thus no money created, only more paper printed with no net effect of "more money".

Sure trickery can temporarily make it seem like you have more money to pay for social security or whatever but it can't in the long run.

If you want to pay for things with public funds you need a decently balanced budget or you will become Greece sooner or later.

But it's important to note that the Social Security Program will run out of money, and soon. By any honest accounting, it did in the 90s - there's nothing but IOUs left after that pool of funds was looted by Reagan/Bush/Clinton. It's all just fresh taxes now for outgoing payments.

And, sure, it will never run out of dollars, but so what?

"But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy" - Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Neither would Blues, or pretty much any major iconic genre. Depending on how this case is construed it's basically going to kill homages and the like. FUN paying tribute to 99 luftballoons with a line in the lyrics? Better get that contractually approved.

According Wikipedia, South Africa's post-apartheid economy was mostly shaped by the World Bank's trickle-down theories:

Social security seems to be set in stone even though everyone knows it's broken and going to run out of money. These govt programs seem to gain entropy and never stop or get fixed.

Sending political prisoners to asylums on a regular basis?

Shooting people who try and leave your country?

Covering up gigantic nuclear power plant meltdowns until there's so much radiation that denying it ceases to have a point?

So here's me saying that I don't really agree with you on your assertion.

The government gives big corporations tax dollars to kill people and destroy their property. Since it is done with secrecy, citizens can't have any control. Killing people is the most profitable business in the United States. And... Many of the citizens joke about the killing. Don't they realize that killing people is theft from their pocketbooks?