You forgot to finish with "with liberty and justice for all." :-)

I was with you up until the point you said "you're all citizens of the same country." Technically true, but the North and South have always been -- I'll say it -- enemies. The intensity of the conflict rises and falls but they were enemies in 1783 and they're enemies in 2018. The only reason the North and the South are still the same country is because a half-million soldiers died in what we call the Civil War, and the secessionists lost. We can blather the rhetoric of "shared values" and a "common heritage" ... if our heritage is so common, why the controversy over Confederate flags and monuments?

The Electoral College is really derived from the apportionment of representatives in the House and Senate. In principle sparsely-populated states get more Representatives and Senators per capita, to protect rural, minority interests. We all get that. Whether it's a good idea is debatable -- it was necessary to get the Southern states to join the Union when it was constituted. Bear in mind that the Constitution was written four years *after* independence. Giving the agrarian states disproportionate power was a compromise to prevent the North and the South going straight to war as soon as they were finished fighting the British.

In practice, the result is an invitation to gerrymandering and a powerful incentive to suppress the non-elite from voting. When you're already enjoying disproportionate representation in the House, you can stretch that advantage by gaming the district boundaries and being selective about who gets to vote in key districts.

So yeah, the Electoral College was a questionable idea to begin with and it's been abused since. It works great for some Americans, though, and those Americans have disproportionate power and a lack of democratic scruples ...

I don't get why we Americans think it's better to keep trying to live with our frenemies on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line instead of agreeing to an amicable split.

If you want to be guaranteed of having a job for 5 years or more, I recommend looking outside the US. Even CEOs don't get a guarantee like that.

No. Without speaking for GP, I don't believe in tampering with tax rates to reward or punish particular behaviors. I do believe in charging all companies equal tax rates on their profits so we can have public infrastructure and a social safety net. What it looks like is the social safety net needs to expand as low-wage workers are displaced. The question of our time is, who should pay for that? I submit it should be the people who can afford it -- the shareholders of companies that are the most profitable (I am looking at you, Apple and Google, and your offshore tax havens).

He's complaining about the hypothetical situation where the encrypted phone would have made a damn bit of difference in the case. I do not grant that a single one of those "what ifs" is more than a scare tactic. It's as urgent a public safety risk as all those Japanese spies in WWII -- oh wait there weren't any and the government interned 100K people without legal basis. Because, what if.

Sometimes doing what you think is right requires knowingly doing what someone else thinks is wrong.

TL;DR it is easier to break stuff than to make stuff.

Knowledge is easy to obtain, at least compared to building a microprocessor factory. The hardware you need to hack a remote system is pretty modest: you can run Metasploit on a three-year-old laptop.

I am only speculating but a national scale intelligence service should be able to smuggle in the hardware from China and/or South Korea. As to recruiting the personnel, one thing totalitarian regimes are good at selecting and training talented people. People will study very hard if the penalty for failing a test is to have their toenails torn out with pliers. If necessary, their spooks can forge South Korean passports and they can educate the hackers overseas. To ensure they return, simply hold their family hostage.

One could make a pretty good spy novel out of this, actually. Probably the reality is less exciting than what I imagine.

Most of the colleagues I've seen retire kept their cards close and then retired suddenly due to some external trigger: the end of a project, departure of their boss, an odious policy change or the like. The attitude was, I'll keep working until the next thing happens that annoys me, then I'm gone.

If that is how things go at your company, you're in a bad company.

If you're not in a bad company and your boss isn't a dick, then you're doing him/her a favor to start talking about how to pass on your knowledge and experience to colleagues.

I like your enthusiasm, and I love the idea that people who don't want to retire shouldn't have to.

I do plan to retire, not anytime soon, because I already have answers to what I plan to do with the next 50 years. A full-time job gets in the way of dating strippers, I mean, landscape painting and community volunteer service.

There's a fundamental difference between disclosing a security secret on which a system depends (such as a garage door keycode or an RSA public key) and pointing out that the system is flawed and can be exploited without knowing the secret. To extend the analogy, if every garage door opener from a company can be opened with keycode "1234" then in my opinion (shared by many others) the manufacturer was fraudulent when it sold the doors as if they were secure, knowing they were not.

In other words, any "security" system with a back door is a fraud. Full stop.

Not sure what the repercussions are of passing something that denies the FCC has the ability to choose what to do, but if you actually think about things long term it seems like a super-bad precedent to set in terms of choices other agencies make being overridden in similar ways.

As far as a precedent goes, that ship has sailed. As Sen. Schumer said in TFA (and TFS), this process is established by law and either party can and does use it. When I think about how it works, it seems kind of cool -- the regulatory agencies can pass whatever regulations they think best but Congress can overrule them at any time. Why, it's almost as if "Congressional oversight" means something! In fact, it's exactly as if Congressional oversight means something. I am somehow encouraged that Congress is empowered to do its job (regulating interstate commerce, Article I, I believe). Until I think about who is *in* Congress. ;-) And I agree with parent, it can be bad for Congress to block a regulation I agree with. ;-) Schumer said the same thing. It's a win for democracy in general, though.

Renting a house is paying someone else's mortgage. Landlords aren't renting for kicks: they want to make money ON TOP OF paying off the mortgage and taxes, and maintenance costs, etc.

Certainly landlords aren't entering the market to lose money, but their motivations are slightly more complex than that. Several of the people I know who own rental properties are looking at them as revenue neutral in terms of cash flow. It's just that the cash is flowing from tenants' wallets into landlord's equity. When the landlord has enough equity in the rental property, he can get a mortgage to buy another: you do that several times over ten or twenty years and you've accumulated quite a net worth! So parent is correct, the tenant is paying someone else's mortgage and the landlord is getting a healthy benefit from the deal, but it is not necessarily as bad as the landlord actually trying to make day-to-day income off the rent. You would need quite a few properties to do that! (I know a guy who does have more than 10 properties but he inherited them -- and managing them looks a lot like having a job.) My landlord friends consider it a success when they break even, which is most years.

For it to be a contradiction it needs to remain untouched even after we touched it.

Schrodinger's gummybear?

Rightly so! It's not the principle of shareholders having rights that bothers me. It's that in this case, I don't want those shareholders controlling what I can and cannot see.

I'm curious what leads you to that conclusion, when in fact what has always brought true freedom to the average human is technology, not law.

That is a remarkably good point! The printing press was technology that eventually brought about (in my opinion) huge social changes like the scientific method, democracy, free markets, and universal suffrage. Plus lots of propaganda, hate, and war, because there are always jerks who will ruin it for everyone. All in all, the printing press was instrumental in creating even the idea we call "freedom."

I think we're all in agreement that the Internet is of comparable importance to the printing press.

With the printing press, freedom is served by letting anyone own and operating a press. Deregulation. Even if it means that people we disagree with (Communists, flat earthers, Microsoft) get to print things.

If we could have a similar decentralization for ISPs as is possible for the printing press, where everyone (even annoying people who are WRONG) gets to have/be an ISP, technology would be able to promote freedom.

In other words, net neutrality.

Because the Internet relies on backbone infrastructure, if you want to be an ISP, you need to either interconnect with an existing network, or rebuild the entire Internet from scratch. Let's say that second option is unrealistic, because it totally is.

The only way anyone can create a modern-day printing press, also known as an ISP, is if they can get big network owners to carry their zeroes and ones. Without censorship, conditions, or extortion.