psd1

It's not vital at all. The authority cones from having people who will lock you up if you disobey.

The fact that the language is "flowery" is an attempt to convey strict semantics using human language. The Latin tenor of legal language in Anglophone countries is a historical quirk. The wigs are because the legal profession is inherently backward-looking and there was a time when such wigs were normal. The theatricality of all this is incidental; a court's authority depends on none of it; it's the men with batons and guns.

Every policy has winners and losers. There is no set of policy that any single voter supports entirely. Getting elected is a game of eliding over details so that you remain rosy-tinted and so that you don't get mauled on bikeshed details. Governing is a game of horse-trading to get as many policies that you like implemented with as few as you don't like.

In that context, no politician with perfect integrity can be successful. People with information but who lack nuance will always be outraged that their candidate sold out.

When you sarcastically call politicians scum, it adds no fucking information. The politician that you like cannot exist.

I have no difficulty with condemning anyone who joined Epstein in his crimes. I also have little difficulty in tolerating anyone who worked with him while unaware of his crimes. In between, there's an enormous grey area based on whether or not you shun people based on rumour. How many rumours went round your school, and how many of then did you believe?

> then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws?

Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.

Historically:

We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.

Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.

Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.

I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.

I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.

We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.

I scorn trump as much as the next socially-adjusted human, but this is overstated:

> he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years

America is still the most powerful military force and the largest economy, and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots. A beast that size keeps lumbering a long time after brain death.

Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore. Ignoble but not ignorable.

If we run the clock forward, then declining arms exports due to sovereignty concerns wool make the USian defence industry harder to sustain. But that takes decades to play out.

Total FUD. Nobody would tolerate that. I would not tolerate that.

If it adds more than 2ms to invocations, post your $profile script.

When there's a retail-grade desktop os built with capabilities as a foundational feature, it will want a shell with appropriate primitives and an ergonomic syntax for them.

Pwsh is not the last word on shells, but it does have automatic cast from string to FileInfo. Ergonomically, it kicks the shit out of legacy shells.

JOIN US. FEEL THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE.

Pirates of the Spanish Main, Pieces Of Eight popular conception wanted plunder, and gold was being shipped in fat galleons. Fiat currency was not available for them to plunder, because banknotes were not, in any significant commune, mined in Spain's new-world colonies and transported to Castile.

Pirates were not necessarily stateless. Drake sailed with a letter of marque. I'll grant there may be contemporary pirates off the horn of Africa who would be hard pressed to obtain a passport.

Blackbeard's thoughts on financial mechanisms are lost to us, sadly.

I think you're trying to explain that fiat currency is predicated on trust. Thanks; that cleared up some misconceptions.

Unfortunately, it turns out that crypto is also, on inspection, predicated on trust: chiefly, trust in the infosec of whatever party maintains your wallet. That trust has been violated maaany times. I've also personally formatted a disk holding a decent chunk of coin (fuck me for trusting myself).

A better analogy would be if gold could spontaneously vaporise and escape any container. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to contain - it would be a more accurate metaphor.

Sure, but is your system compromised because someone left a key in plaintext? Attack surface is finite and can be meaningfully reduced.

Well yes, people should be stakeholders of the state...?

I agree that high state control will give rise to a different kind of owner class. But that's a balancing act. Defence is widely agreed to be the state's business; industry is widely agreed to not, mostly, be the state's business. We're all in an Overton window, right?

I buy ex-corporate machines for my family; they always have pxe enabled. I've got a handful of optiplex micros running my home shit. All of those.

"The broad-spectrum surveillance and social-credit state predicated on technofascists working hand-in-glove with repressive government" is a bit of a mouthful. "Flock" is an elision.

That's technically cool; many nerds don't appreciate the wizardry that exists in finance. But this is really an ethical discussion. The "more people" are still the richest members of society, and society is far from fully meritocratic. Should we allow inequality to increase unchecked?

I can see arguments that the Walton family deserves to be ludicrously rich. I don't see why they should have access to tax avoidance strategies unavailable to Bertie the Janitor. I also don't see why someone merely Porsche-rich should have access to those, either.

Doesn't the NSA have wiretaps in every ISP? Gag orders, secret courts? Do i remember wrong: the NSA backdoored a cipher suite?

I'm comfortable with the idea of my own country conducting espionage. I can believe that China does it more; but the idea "we would never" is naive.

Survivorship bias explains that. The list of dictators-for-life does not include those who don't become dictators for life.

I'd suggest that term limits are party of a package that rests on strong public faith in democratic institutions. E.g. Macron is about able to hang on, but i doubt he could stay past an electoral defeat because he presides over a nation that won't tolerate it.