The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

If speed limits were enforced, they would be abolished tomorrow. They only continue to exist because most people can break the speed limit for years without getting a ticket.

If drivers received a fine every time they broke the speed limit, politicians houses would be burning down the next day and the law would be abolished the day after.

You know why encryption is legal despite Bush and Clinton's best attempts to prevent it?

Because Gen-X kids risked a decade in jail for breaking Federal law to ensure the code got out there and everyone had it. It simply became impossible to regulate because anyone anywhere in the world could download the code and run it.

Today programmers won't even say 'no' when governments demand they ID all their users.

Because it's not about age. It's about eliminating anonymity online.

There were laws requiring that escaped slaves were returned to their owners. I presume you would have obeyed those laws, even though they were immoral.

> You live in a country with laws.

A country with laws, yes. A country with law, no.

It's ludicrous to tell people they should obey the law when none of Epstein's clients have been arrested and probably at least half of the business owners in the country would be in jail if the laws on employing illegal aliens were enforced.

If an escaped slave had turned up at your house in the 1800s asking for help, would you have followed the law and sent him back to his owner? From your post, I'm guessing you would have.

I know a few Christian Nationalists. None of them are pushing for "Age Versification" and most are against it because it's clearly just another step toward The Mark of the Beast where people won't be allowed on the Internet unless they bend the knee to Satan.

This push is coming from the communists and WEF-bozos who want to eliminate anonymity on the Internet. Literally everyone who's been following this for long knows that.

Which is why you see support for it from both "left-wing" and "right-wing" governments. They both have the same hands shoved up their behinds.

At the same time, "but I don't like this law" isn't going to protect you from punishment if you break it.

Fight unethical laws with every fiber but you're going to be far more effective if you Chesterton's Fence than if you just stomp your feet and whine.

That was just an excuse. They had years to cut the prices before the tariffs happened. And cutting prices quickly used to be the standard.

"Did you really think we want those laws observed? We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against. We're after power and we mean it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Anecdotally, the only crashes I've ever had on MacOS were due to HDMI and cheap USB dongles. Find a combination that works and you're not going to have problems. I've been a consistent MacOS user since 2017.

Haven't had a single issue in years, on Apple Silicon.

These things include:

- booting
- rebooting
- using basic high quality hardware (asus/mb/msi boards w/ corsair/crucial memory, nvidia GPUs, seasonic PSUs)
- installing drivers

I've seen crashes on W10/W11 on each of these, sometimes (often) requiring "repair" that fails, and a reinstall (of the OS). Multiple machines.

I just won't do it anymore.

On linux, sleep/hibernation is more like a Polish revolver with one bullet loaded. When it works, it works. When it doesn't, it really doesn't.