Perhaps, you're right. Police State isn't the right term. In my mind at least, "police state" isn't comprehensive enough.

Saudi Arabia is a rich totalitarian religious monarchy. That's a more precise description.

And this part doesn't tell the entire story.

It isn't just politics that you're leaving to the king, but it's also your personal autonomy. After all, what good is a large bank account if your husband has ultimate control over that that account. And what good is gynecology if you can not escape a husband who beats and rapes you, and who makes those gynecological medical decisions for you.

And don't get me started on the topic of immigrants (or Saudi Arabia-born immigrants). I know they do not count for you. But if an employer is allowed to beat, rape, steal the wages, and hold the passport or their immigrant staff, preventing their exit from the country. That's problematic as well.

Can't it both at the same time?

After all, didn't most monarchies start out as police states initially?

Assuming you're not an immigrant, which are represented by 38.3% of the population. Assuming you're not a woman, which are represented by roughly half of the population. And assuming you're not Shia, which are represented by 10-15% of the population.

You make it sound like programmers were the problem.

But these things need to be negotiated at the highest level. It's not like you can just ignore PCI compliance and payment standard practices. If your own lawyers don't shut you down, the payment processors will, and those guys don't mess around.

No, if you want to make such a change, you need leverage, you need to have personal access to the big wigs at Visa International and the other payment networks, and you need to pay those guys extra in order for them to allow you to bypass the existing payment rules.

If you don't believe me, just observe the payment security practices at a McDonald vs. a mom and pop restaurant. The rules they have to comply with are very different.

Is Trump one of those "worse people"?

Because honestly, I don't understand why 30% (or more) of the population still seems to support the guy.

It's already there. The right has had a long history of ostracizing people. Maybe it wasn't called cancel culture, but it's essentially the same thing.

Have a gay teenager? Throw that kid out onto the streets and let that kid become homeless. Not religious? Or the wrong religion? You'll be shamed and shunned by your family and your local community. Selling the wrong magazine? Or showing the wrong movie? Boycotted. Taking the knee during a game? Boycotted and the President uses the power of his office to get you fired and blackballed by the entire league.

Also, have you ever tried to correcting someone on Parler or on a Trump related subreddit? Right wing moderators are very quick to permanently ban anyone who doesn't parrot their existing viewpoints. So much for "free speech".

He did run. He left the US and went to the Bahamas.

Maybe he just didn't bribe the Bahamas authorities enough money.

Waze (for driving at least) is great, but you need to go in the settings and turn off a lot of the extraneous information.

If people don't do that, I understand people not liking Waze.

Yes, because that's what the Saudi-Musk partnership is all about.

It's about freedom of speech and anti-authoritarianism one dismemberment at a time.

It's not about protecting the robot, it's about protecting the police officers.

See this example:

I was responding to someone's post.

Basically, that person was saying that there was no censorship on Slashdot.

And there is.

That's because on Slashdot, other users with mod points will fact-check your posts and decide if you're trolling or not.

Now, we just need our own trolls to run for political office and spread lies about Mark Zuckerberg

We'll see how well that works.

So you or your loved ones have never been in a natural disaster where the cell phone towers were down? Or you or your loved ones have never been in an area with spotty cell phone coverage?

Somehow, I doubt that.

What would you suggest instead? Wait 20 years for the government to come up with its own implementation of the same system?

Not only that, but that will incentivize companies not to report their breaches and this will drive everything underground.

And then, even after the ransomware event is over, the ransomware people will still be able to personally blackmail the executives indefinitely, because now they will be risking jail time for having paid the ransom in the first place.