There is a reason why "anal" is part of "analytical" :-P

I'm used to it now. Especially with people who have good analytical skills. They really pay attention to details and I can get quite lazy with my speech/writing.

I've stopped using nbcnews.com because they went to this big box look. Then my primary source for local news in my home town switched around and now not only is it impossible to find stuff or read much information, almost all articles go to an autoplay video about the story. I have to wait for it to load and then pause it before I can start reading the article.

I'm pretty much down to the bbc site for news.

For anyone who ever hoped to see liberalism take hold in this country, it most certainly was. Unless the country splits into two (or more) new independent nations soon, it will likely be decades before we ever get a chance to actually reform the health care system or any of the other ridiculous social injustices in this country.

It's not a real conspiracy theory if you can't bring the Knights Templar into it in some way.

"Mutual of Osama is people you can 'count on' when the going's tough"

Now, I never claimed the Vatican was not a business. I went to my church's business meeting Sunday night, in fact. You're attempting to shift the question off of what the Pope legally, personally owns, and whether or not there is power other than temporal wealth.

I'm sure you're only observing, and neither approving, nor suggesting alternatives.

You make winning the last two Presidential elections sound like a bad thing.

Citizens shouldn't need to check the status of each company they do business with. That would be too much work for individual in the real world to ever do it.

If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.

I'm not really saying we shouldn't have a common set of protections; nobody is going to say "I'm pro-fraud." But we really do disagree on how low the bar can be, what risks (and expenses to insure against risks) are acceptable, and so on. And in the real world, everything is about risks, not absolute protections. One company uses a VISA merchant account, another just has a paypal account. Who are you to say one of them is wrong to accept Paypal's offer (or that both are wrong, since the company should just be waiting for checks (or cash) in the mail)?

People don't even know what the common set of rules is. I just assumed it was illegal for credit card companies to sell to third parties, information about what products I buy, but no. Go next door in one direction, and you'll find someone who is astonished that I could be so naive. Go next door from there, and you'll find someone else who still doesn't know, and is equally astonished for for the opposite reason.

Every time you see a piece of paper with a shitload of fine print, you are looking at direct evidence that nobody is satisfied that the lines are in the right places, and everyone is doing something about it, by sending out that fine print or by continuing to do business with the people who sent it to them.

You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives.

Experience says you can't.

You've had some unique experiences, then. Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold. Western Union, credit cards, and other more complicated (and more "rulesey") things were built out of dollars. Paypal, complete with its frustrating freezes (suddenly labeled "over-regulation" or "private regulation" by those burned), was built on credit cards and bank accounts. Your experience doesn't include any of this? (Or to call up my previous analogy, CPython and its wonderful garbage collection, is built atop C.)

And Bitcoin certainly isn't regulated.

Exactly. It's not, and it probably won't ever be (unless governments persuade people to adopt some blockchain policy changes). Yet, in the news today, Singapore says it intends to regulate Bitcoin exchanges within their jurisdiction. That's what I mean about building regulated things upon unregulated primatives. You might not understand Bitcoin, but if a government were to tell you that a particular Bitcoin escrow had that government's full faith and backing, then you might be willing to use that escrow, even if the funds were stored as Bitcoin. At the same time, there would be people out there, possibly having fun with Bitcoin and doing business with each other using that currency, without ever using that exchange and getting themselves stuck in the regulations.

Just like what happens with dollars.

Now ask yourself why, since the 19th century, we decided that government regulation instead of contracts was a better solution?

Now ask yourself why we decided, since the mid-late 20th century, that it had been a bad idea, and reversed it.

That happened across the spectrum, not even just for money. In Slashdot's favorite topic (no, not cars!), people are constantly going on about how copyright's terms got replaced by EULAs and even when there isn't a EULA, the legality of various actions is determined by "authorization" (by non-government entities), and I recently heard of something called "soft law" where the government is sort of involved in things and sort of not, all without having to bother with that old "Congress" nonsense.

As for money, I know people routinely make decisions about whether to use debit cards or credit cards based on chargeback predictions, where even debit card dollars are different than cash dollars in certain ways, and then some people are seriously into various "rewards programs" (or frequent flyer miles, or whatever) where they "earn" company currency that they spend (instead of dollars) on highly-restricted availability markets, whereas some other people actually convert dollars to company currencies, that they spend on files from Microsoft or Apple. (And I'm just scratching the surface on all the variants of company currencies.)

The idea that all money should be the same and have the same rules, might not be as old as my 19th century attitude, but it's old enough to label you as quaint and hopelessly out of date. And strangely, my 19th century view is more contemporary than yours. (I guess we do things in cycles. Laugh at me in 2060 when "neo-civil law" is the thing on everyone's lips.)

What happened is that we all disagree what the rules should be. So we agreed on one thing: we'll all go our seperate ways, sometimes as a conscious decision, sometimes with a whip at our backs, and sometimes by trickery. And yes, you (probably) agreed to also, every time you use one of these various cash alternatives. Bitcoin is just one more among the dozens, except interestingly, with the least amount of corrupt and co-opted baggage (so far).

Yeah encfs is great for live filesystems, no argument there. I meant for archiving and backups of things offsite, should have clarified.

I'll stick with SpiderOak and TarSnap Fully encrypted, zero knowledge from their end. A bit more money but good peace of mind.