You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler.
You're the only one who made that assumption. Let's look back at what I actually wrote.
Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Look at what I bolded. This might look familiar since I just copied and pasted it from your post. You couldn't even be bothered to read what you quoted.
Can you name one?
The Texas voter ID law. You even quoted me on that.
Now the only question is: did khallow bother to read those three paragraphs.
It's rich to be accused of "not bothering to read" when you've quoted me and twice in the last post alone to this point have demonstrated that you can't even meet your own level of criticism. As to your three paragraphs, they're still bullshit. Claiming as you do that:
I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide.
Voter ID is not enforced by the cops. Your original claim has been shown to be bullshit, but you're still digging the hole.
Either you're joking about lynching, which would be both racist and horrifying, or you've changed your mind. I'll assume the latter because I feel like being a nice guy.
It's no skin off my teeth either way. You've demonstrated yet again that you just don't understand what's going on by continuing to trot out this non sequitur.
Just count all what USA has "spent" on the influence and wars in the Middle East.
Or dealing with the consequences of the "bad weather" on the east coast.
Those are non sequiturs since they don't have anything to do with energy. Most of what the US spends, whether it be in the Middle East or elsewhere is due to corruption and bribes. Similarly, there's been no actual linkage between the usual weather that the US east gets and global warming.
Unless the prices rise so sharply that the rise destabilizes governments.
Hasn't happened yet. And I don't see how it could be any worse than artificially rationing a plentiful substance. That can destabilize governments too.
there are many many things we can learn from the ideologies that are as relevant as ever
Such as killing a hundred million people should be bad?
Of course rethuglicans and conservatards will whine but with any luck their days are numbered and stuck in the 20th century
Who's the conservative? The person trying to create an adventurous 21th century economic system or the person still fighting 19th century problems that went away a century ago?
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies.
It's worth noting here that the US has gone through many a "major reshape" of the sort described above: whale oil, free range cattle, precious metals, etc. It didn't generate a lot of drama.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Then you would have at least considered the merits of doing nothing. Think for once. Your original complaint was that energy was too cheap and it results in "wasteful" behavior.
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
The only problem here is that you are completely ignoring what else is going on. Energy-wise, society is not about optimizing energy use. It is about applying that energy to do productive things. Spending considerable effort just to optimize slightly use of a very cheap resource is a waste of the rest of society's resources.
Would you prefer to consume everything so that your children have nothing left to consume?
Note that isn't the actual problem here. The resources in question are cheap and plentiful. As they become less plentiful, they'll become more expensive. Then the price will rise and demand will go down. That's how markets work. And it'll be far more effective when it happens than rationing cheap resources for ideological reasons.
But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.
Or on the concrete around the plug melting. And how hard is it to design a plug that can still disintegrate even when heavily corroded?Wikipedia discusses the other safety features you never heard of.
A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
Molten salt-based solar thermal power can fail in the very same way.
Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
Nonsense. There's no serious technological obstruction to them now. The real obstacle is coming up with a design that is economical to construct and operate.
Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.
Yet another Slashdot poster who can't be bothered to follow their own advice.
BTW, the CBO projects the deficit out 25 years, and they don't see the problem you see [cbo.gov] with obamacare.
So what? It isn't their job to see the problems unless someone instructs them to actually look for them. The primary mechanism is via prior assumptions. They have to assume whatever they're instructed to assume. As a result, the CBO is a propaganda organ of Congress.
They aren't going to be estimating the growing cost of Obamacare subsidies, for example. They can't estimate the political incentive to increase Medicare/Medicaid spending when the price caps on those programs become too inadequate for the programs to function.
But even in their case, there's only so much lipstick they can put on this pig:
However, budget deficits would gradually rise again under current law, CBO projects, mainly because of increasing interest costs and growing spending for Social Security and the governmentâ(TM)s major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, the Childrenâ(TM)s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies to be provided through health insurance exchanges).
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Please stop being an idiot. This is a valid argument. Hitler was able to do things like take over a major world power, invade other countries, and kill lots of people because he had the power to do so. Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Naive to the point of idiocy. If County Sheriffs did have the sort of power you imply, there would be such problems.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
Now, you're going full blown stupid. Just how many IDs do you really think people lose? It's not going to be enough to throw an election. And I do think there is almost no one who couldn't find time during the week to get their ID problem fixed.
BTW, if there were actually hundreds of thousands of ineligible Democratic voters don't you think somebody would have noticed?
I sure do. I present Texas's voter ID law as proof that people did indeed notice.
You do realize that over the 60 years or so lynchings went on only 4,000-4,500 black people died? That works out to about 70 a year. As Florida was a truly hellish place to live prior to AC, very few of those were in that state. When it comes to government-sanctioned murder a little bit goes a really long way.
I guess we better do something about those lynchings then.
That's a huge observation. Another is that the Obamacare insurance increases the isolation of the consumer of health care from the cost of their health care. For example, if I were getting individual health insurance on Healthcare.gov, I would qualify for the subsidy. That means that I can pay a fixed amount of my salary (a bit over 5% for the "silver" plan) for health insurance such that no matter how much health care costs climb, my total health care costs are capped. That's nice until you realize a) it creates a price inflation system like student loans did for higher education price inflation, and b) somebody pays for that.
When these subsidies grow big enough to threaten funding for basic services like road systems, national defense, and the other entitlements that the US has, then something will be done. Inflation isn't going to work because the costs will outpace inflation no matter how much you inflate. But dumping people on Medicare/Medicaid (which I think will turn into another fine disaster as it caps prices of health care given under the Medi* system, but not the cost of health care) or restricting their access to medical care (say via the "death panels") would.
When I compare Romney's plans and Obama's plans, I'd say most of the theory is the same.
One rather big difference that tends to get overlooked is that the former is legal since individual states have powers granted to them by the US Constitution to do things like the individual mandate while the federal government doesn't have that power.
So when you're doing things that are inherently illegal, what obstacle is there to more breaking of the law (such as an arbitrary delay of the employer mandate or granting waivers for various parts of Obamacare to political allies, for example)?
Well, if you look at how Japan screwed up the powerful economy it had in the 70s and early 80s, they aren't going to have a lot of reserve for future problems. They'll need to do something or that debt and related problems will catch up with them.
It's good that the Japanese are funding this, because at the rate European and US basic research funds are going, I doubt we'll be able to detect much of anything by 2016...
If any of this was important to you, you could try funding it yourself with the help of like-minded people. My take is that everyone in the world right now is going through an entitlement binge. That's going to mean less public funding of basic research and other such stuff, globally.
I suppose we could just give up and let whoever still can suck from the public teat do all the research, or we can just find other sources of funding and keep going. Assuming, of course, that this actually is important to you.
What I thought made this pretty pointless is that one gets pretty close to that every two weeks with new and full moons. Even when the Sun and Moon aren't lined up well, it's not that much of a difference.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
As to your other two claims, let us note the actual restrictions of the Texas voter ID law:
Procedures for Voting
When a voter arrives at a polling location, the voter will be asked to present one of the seven (7) acceptable forms of photo ID. Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter's name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters ("OLRV"). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.
If the name does not match exactly but is "substantially similar" to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.
If a voter does not have proper identification, the voter will still be permitted to vote provisionally. The voter will have (six) 6 days to present proper identification to the county voter registrar, or the voterâ(TM)s ballot will be rejected.
What you won't see here is the supposed means by which Republicans will stay in power. For some reason, coming up with a photo ID is strongly discriminatory against Democrats? I think it's because a good portion of them can't actually legally vote.
And stand your ground laws? They aren't killing a lot of people. For example, Florida has seen a tripling of self defense shootings from one dozen to roughly three dozen a year and many of those shootings fall under normal self defense law (such as the well-discussed Martin Trayvon shooting, for example).
I think this is enough evidence to confirm that you truly do not understand the issues surrounding freedom and why resisting illegal searches is so important to a democratic society - far more than a few self defense shootings or a gimmick for picking up a certain sort of vote fraud.
Ahh yes, the pretentious lazy school of US pro-freedom activists.
TL;DR "this is going to be a waste of every reader's time - be thankful I'm warning you ahead of time."
Granted people who could refuse to protect their citizens from their other citizens, then call it freedom when the victims turn into refugees, and still convince the world that Federal intervention is the main threat to American freedom could get away with it. But those people are not Federal employees, they're you.
Looks like the pretentiousness is well placed in your case. I see no evidence here that you "understand freedom". The federal government is composed of people with too much power like the "other citizens" it's supposedly protecting its citizens against. For example, it's not southern US bigots of a century ago who are spying on the world's communication today, but a large, unaccountable agency of the federal government.
Let's do math. Let's say your intelligence operation does this once a month. Let's say there's a ludicrously high 99% chance the business doesn't talk..99^69=49.98%. This means that after 69 months there's a 50.02% chance that somebody's snitched.
I don't think even one in a hundred government espionage cases gets talked about in a public sense. First, they have to know it happened and second, they have to be willing to talk to a public outlet. And let's also note that just because someone "snitched" doesn't mean you in your cocoon would hear about it.
That's true in formal logic. But formal logic is renowned for being useless in real-world situations because it only works if you have perfect knowledge of a) which facts are relevant to which case, and b) you have perfect knowledge of what those facts are. Formal logic is particularly useless in judging policy because policy-makers are allowed to deceive each-other.
TL;DR version: I don't have a clue what the US government is doing nor anything relevant to say, but I'll write a lot of words anyway.
My view is assume that the federal government is doing the worst it can with the power it has, and leave the onus of proof that they aren't to the government.
Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics.
Here's an example of your cluelessness. The NSA is not US intelligence. There are numerous other bodies, particularly, the CIA and military intelligence which can perform economic and industrial espionage which would fall outside of Snowden's very limited domain.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
After the fact and it's not "easy to detect" by you who is completely out of the loop. And the business usually doesn't complain about it because a) they don't have evidence aside from a suspicious coincidence that industrial espionage happened, and b) they can lose business if they rock the boat.
Slashdot Mirror
You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler.
You're the only one who made that assumption. Let's look back at what I actually wrote.
Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Look at what I bolded. This might look familiar since I just copied and pasted it from your post. You couldn't even be bothered to read what you quoted.
Can you name one?
The Texas voter ID law. You even quoted me on that.
Now the only question is: did khallow bother to read those three paragraphs.
It's rich to be accused of "not bothering to read" when you've quoted me and twice in the last post alone to this point have demonstrated that you can't even meet your own level of criticism. As to your three paragraphs, they're still bullshit. Claiming as you do that:
I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide.
Voter ID is not enforced by the cops. Your original claim has been shown to be bullshit, but you're still digging the hole.
Either you're joking about lynching, which would be both racist and horrifying, or you've changed your mind. I'll assume the latter because I feel like being a nice guy.
It's no skin off my teeth either way. You've demonstrated yet again that you just don't understand what's going on by continuing to trot out this non sequitur.
Just count all what USA has "spent" on the influence and wars in the Middle East.
Or dealing with the consequences of the "bad weather" on the east coast.
Those are non sequiturs since they don't have anything to do with energy. Most of what the US spends, whether it be in the Middle East or elsewhere is due to corruption and bribes. Similarly, there's been no actual linkage between the usual weather that the US east gets and global warming.
Unless the prices rise so sharply that the rise destabilizes governments.
Hasn't happened yet. And I don't see how it could be any worse than artificially rationing a plentiful substance. That can destabilize governments too.
there are many many things we can learn from the ideologies that are as relevant as ever
Such as killing a hundred million people should be bad?
Of course rethuglicans and conservatards will whine but with any luck their days are numbered and stuck in the 20th century
Who's the conservative? The person trying to create an adventurous 21th century economic system or the person still fighting 19th century problems that went away a century ago?
And what exactly happens to all of those "doctors" with $400,000 student loans who now cannot work as doctors?
They default and their lenders take a bath. And yes, I think the exclusion for student loans should be taken out of bankruptcy law.
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies.
It's worth noting here that the US has gone through many a "major reshape" of the sort described above: whale oil, free range cattle, precious metals, etc. It didn't generate a lot of drama.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Then you would have at least considered the merits of doing nothing. Think for once. Your original complaint was that energy was too cheap and it results in "wasteful" behavior.
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
The only problem here is that you are completely ignoring what else is going on. Energy-wise, society is not about optimizing energy use. It is about applying that energy to do productive things. Spending considerable effort just to optimize slightly use of a very cheap resource is a waste of the rest of society's resources.
Would you prefer to consume everything so that your children have nothing left to consume?
Note that isn't the actual problem here. The resources in question are cheap and plentiful. As they become less plentiful, they'll become more expensive. Then the price will rise and demand will go down. That's how markets work. And it'll be far more effective when it happens than rationing cheap resources for ideological reasons.
But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.
Or on the concrete around the plug melting. And how hard is it to design a plug that can still disintegrate even when heavily corroded?Wikipedia discusses the other safety features you never heard of.
A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
Molten salt-based solar thermal power can fail in the very same way.
Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
Nonsense. There's no serious technological obstruction to them now. The real obstacle is coming up with a design that is economical to construct and operate.
Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.
Yet another Slashdot poster who can't be bothered to follow their own advice.
BTW, the CBO projects the deficit out 25 years, and they don't see the problem you see [cbo.gov] with obamacare.
So what? It isn't their job to see the problems unless someone instructs them to actually look for them. The primary mechanism is via prior assumptions. They have to assume whatever they're instructed to assume. As a result, the CBO is a propaganda organ of Congress.
They aren't going to be estimating the growing cost of Obamacare subsidies, for example. They can't estimate the political incentive to increase Medicare/Medicaid spending when the price caps on those programs become too inadequate for the programs to function.
But even in their case, there's only so much lipstick they can put on this pig:
However, budget deficits would gradually rise again under current law, CBO projects, mainly because of increasing interest costs and growing spending for Social Security and the governmentâ(TM)s major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, the Childrenâ(TM)s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies to be provided through health insurance exchanges).
Even they admit there is a problem.
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Please stop being an idiot. This is a valid argument. Hitler was able to do things like take over a major world power, invade other countries, and kill lots of people because he had the power to do so. Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Naive to the point of idiocy. If County Sheriffs did have the sort of power you imply, there would be such problems.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
Now, you're going full blown stupid. Just how many IDs do you really think people lose? It's not going to be enough to throw an election. And I do think there is almost no one who couldn't find time during the week to get their ID problem fixed.
BTW, if there were actually hundreds of thousands of ineligible Democratic voters don't you think somebody would have noticed?
I sure do. I present Texas's voter ID law as proof that people did indeed notice.
You do realize that over the 60 years or so lynchings went on only 4,000-4,500 black people died? That works out to about 70 a year. As Florida was a truly hellish place to live prior to AC, very few of those were in that state. When it comes to government-sanctioned murder a little bit goes a really long way.
I guess we better do something about those lynchings then.
But hey, let's keep sitting here talking about horrible jobs with ovens and the salaries we should pay
Ok, we will, since you asked so nicely. So what salary do you think an oven stuffer should be paid?
That's a huge observation. Another is that the Obamacare insurance increases the isolation of the consumer of health care from the cost of their health care. For example, if I were getting individual health insurance on Healthcare.gov, I would qualify for the subsidy. That means that I can pay a fixed amount of my salary (a bit over 5% for the "silver" plan) for health insurance such that no matter how much health care costs climb, my total health care costs are capped. That's nice until you realize a) it creates a price inflation system like student loans did for higher education price inflation, and b) somebody pays for that.
When these subsidies grow big enough to threaten funding for basic services like road systems, national defense, and the other entitlements that the US has, then something will be done. Inflation isn't going to work because the costs will outpace inflation no matter how much you inflate. But dumping people on Medicare/Medicaid (which I think will turn into another fine disaster as it caps prices of health care given under the Medi* system, but not the cost of health care) or restricting their access to medical care (say via the "death panels") would.
When I compare Romney's plans and Obama's plans, I'd say most of the theory is the same.
One rather big difference that tends to get overlooked is that the former is legal since individual states have powers granted to them by the US Constitution to do things like the individual mandate while the federal government doesn't have that power.
So when you're doing things that are inherently illegal, what obstacle is there to more breaking of the law (such as an arbitrary delay of the employer mandate or granting waivers for various parts of Obamacare to political allies, for example)?
Well, if you look at how Japan screwed up the powerful economy it had in the 70s and early 80s, they aren't going to have a lot of reserve for future problems. They'll need to do something or that debt and related problems will catch up with them.
It's good that the Japanese are funding this, because at the rate European and US basic research funds are going, I doubt we'll be able to detect much of anything by 2016...
If any of this was important to you, you could try funding it yourself with the help of like-minded people. My take is that everyone in the world right now is going through an entitlement binge. That's going to mean less public funding of basic research and other such stuff, globally.
I suppose we could just give up and let whoever still can suck from the public teat do all the research, or we can just find other sources of funding and keep going. Assuming, of course, that this actually is important to you.
Did you poll any Sonderkommando before making that generalization?
Check the pay next time before you open your mouth. That "job" has no salary and you get to die when your usefulness is over.
But you go ahead and tell us what the salary should be for shoving people into ovens.
I'll idle my SUV in observance of your holy work.
What I thought made this pretty pointless is that one gets pretty close to that every two weeks with new and full moons. Even when the Sun and Moon aren't lined up well, it's not that much of a difference.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
Illegal searches do kill people.
As to your other two claims, let us note the actual restrictions of the Texas voter ID law:
Procedures for Voting
When a voter arrives at a polling location, the voter will be asked to present one of the seven (7) acceptable forms of photo ID. Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter's name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters ("OLRV"). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.
If the name does not match exactly but is "substantially similar" to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.
If a voter does not have proper identification, the voter will still be permitted to vote provisionally. The voter will have (six) 6 days to present proper identification to the county voter registrar, or the voterâ(TM)s ballot will be rejected.
What you won't see here is the supposed means by which Republicans will stay in power. For some reason, coming up with a photo ID is strongly discriminatory against Democrats? I think it's because a good portion of them can't actually legally vote.
And stand your ground laws? They aren't killing a lot of people. For example, Florida has seen a tripling of self defense shootings from one dozen to roughly three dozen a year and many of those shootings fall under normal self defense law (such as the well-discussed Martin Trayvon shooting, for example).
I think this is enough evidence to confirm that you truly do not understand the issues surrounding freedom and why resisting illegal searches is so important to a democratic society - far more than a few self defense shootings or a gimmick for picking up a certain sort of vote fraud.
They did this for our own good. Note in the link the use of the phrase "verbal KY".
It's a natural division of labor. Democrats set policy and draft legislation. Republicans rubberstamp it and clean up the resulting mess. Duh.
So that's why he took it off the table straight away, right?
I imagine he took it off the table because such a proposal would have failed hard.
I had assumed that the work was large performed by Americans
Canada is American too even though it isn't part of the US. And CGI might have a US subsidiary for the contract work.
Ahh yes, the pretentious lazy school of US pro-freedom activists.
TL;DR "this is going to be a waste of every reader's time - be thankful I'm warning you ahead of time."
Granted people who could refuse to protect their citizens from their other citizens, then call it freedom when the victims turn into refugees, and still convince the world that Federal intervention is the main threat to American freedom could get away with it. But those people are not Federal employees, they're you.
Looks like the pretentiousness is well placed in your case. I see no evidence here that you "understand freedom". The federal government is composed of people with too much power like the "other citizens" it's supposedly protecting its citizens against. For example, it's not southern US bigots of a century ago who are spying on the world's communication today, but a large, unaccountable agency of the federal government.
Let's do math. Let's say your intelligence operation does this once a month. Let's say there's a ludicrously high 99% chance the business doesn't talk. .99^69=49.98%. This means that after 69 months there's a 50.02% chance that somebody's snitched.
I don't think even one in a hundred government espionage cases gets talked about in a public sense. First, they have to know it happened and second, they have to be willing to talk to a public outlet. And let's also note that just because someone "snitched" doesn't mean you in your cocoon would hear about it.
That's true in formal logic. But formal logic is renowned for being useless in real-world situations because it only works if you have perfect knowledge of a) which facts are relevant to which case, and b) you have perfect knowledge of what those facts are. Formal logic is particularly useless in judging policy because policy-makers are allowed to deceive each-other.
TL;DR version: I don't have a clue what the US government is doing nor anything relevant to say, but I'll write a lot of words anyway.
My view is assume that the federal government is doing the worst it can with the power it has, and leave the onus of proof that they aren't to the government.
Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics.
Here's an example of your cluelessness. The NSA is not US intelligence. There are numerous other bodies, particularly, the CIA and military intelligence which can perform economic and industrial espionage which would fall outside of Snowden's very limited domain.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
After the fact and it's not "easy to detect" by you who is completely out of the loop. And the business usually doesn't complain about it because a) they don't have evidence aside from a suspicious coincidence that industrial espionage happened, and b) they can lose business if they rock the boat.