Once we get honestly tired of sustaining the lives of those dangerous to the group, we can eliminate the costs, which soar above $80,000 per prisoner, per year.
Unfortunately, it's precisely those who would "eliminate" people who are dangerous to the group. Thus it's a choice between paying $80,000 per year to keep a monster locked up, or letting another roam the streets.
Just turn them to fertilizer and recycle them into a benefit for society, composting methods, mixed with community lawn cuttings and branches, could provide fertile refreshment of soils. Federal compost could be utilized in the depleted Napa Valley. Win,WIN!
it's moral for me to decide what people to with their bodies when i am forced to pay for their feeding and housing and healthcare when they destroy their lives with said substances
And I'm forced to pay for the enforcement of your decisions, so I have a right to veto them. Also, why limit ourselves to drugs? Bad diet and lack of exercise cause more costly health problems than all drugs combined, so do you also claim you have a right to decide what other people eat and how much they must jog weekly? For that matter, since insufficient sleep is linked to both costly accidents and illness, do you wish to also mandate bedtimes?
Also, since sites like Silk Road are apparently quite profitable despite requiring a high level of social funtionality to use, I wonder how accurate the stereotype of a dysfunctional drug user really is? Most people who use alcohol continue paying for their own expenses despite it being one of the nastier psychoactive substances in both physical harm and addiction potential according to Wikipedia, so why would, say, your average ecstasy user not accomplish that?
if substance abuse happened in a vacuum, it would be fine. but it does not. it has costs to society. this gives society the right to get involved
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Yours is an argument that lets anyone claim power over anyone else for any decision.
and nonaddictive substances like marijuana should be legal
but the people who sell the addictive substances like heroin, meth, and coke need hard jail time, for the costs their trade incurs on society
That might be a reasonable solution. However, that would first require people to stop talking about "drugs", since the concept combines such widely different substances as heroin, LSD and marijuana, yet excludes alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. Also, it would require dropping the a priori assumption that a mind-altering substance is bad when discussing whether a particular one should be banned. Even more importantly, you'd need to acknowledge that banning a substance is a serious violation of other people's autonomy and can only be done in extraordinary circumstances, not something you can do just to save yourself some money - unless, as I pointed out, you're also willing to let others dictate what you may eat and when you go to bed.
Why am I reminded of the people who turn the talk to child molesters when talking about homosexuality? Could it be that you're doing something similar here?
some things civilization will always be at war with. permanently
Mind-altering substances are unlikely to be amongst those. The very fact that you felt the need to provide a fallacious appeal to emotion above implies you don't believe it either and thus tried to give your argument weight it doesn't carry on its own. Some people use psychoactive substances, other people ignore it, and the moral busybodies who make it their problem don't really have any arguments besides circular reasoning ("only criminals do drugs!") or thinly veiled appeals to some vague concept of purity.
The only question is: how many victims does this particular form of puritanism demand before people like you will get off their high horse and stop trampling others underhoof? And how much human potential is wasted by making it harder to examine the workings of the mind and how it can be altered?
and if you form a world view without the concept of morality, your world view will fail and has no validity
So is it moral to decide for other people what they may and may not do to their own minds and bodies? And enforce your will through violence? Because it doesn't seem very moral to me. In fact it sounds suspiciously like you claiming ownership on them and declaring yourself their master.
Also, I find it hard to believe anyone would format their messages like you do yours unless they were under the influence of some rather potent substances, so is this just a very inefficient way of seeking rehabilitation?
Because elections are about selecting the lesser evil, and a candidate using crack is unlikely to even register on that scale, as long as they are functional enough to run their campaign.
They should have taken it over, and run it for a few months, track every transaction, and then come down hard on all the dealers. Or just sit back and bust the top seller every month
How? It's not like the sellers need to leave their street adress, and if they're halfway smart, they launder their Bitcoins before cashing them in.
They could potentially catch a few buyers by pretending to be sellers, but even then it would require them to have a stash when ordering because someone send you something illegal doesn't prove you had anything to do with it.
If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it mustâ"by definitionâ"be good for the group.
No. You are thinking of something that benefits every member of the group simultaneously, while what's under discussion is an action that benefits a single member of the group at the expense of the group as a whole, and can be done by any member of the group. It's classic prisoner's dilemma: if everyone defect, everyone are worse off than if everyone cooperated, yet any particular person is best off if they defect and others don't.
In other words, profits are private but losses public - that is the tragedy of the commons.
Speaking of iron domes, is there any particular reason why the cockpit needs to be transparent? A bunch of cameras and viewscreens should work just as well; for that matter, and a 3rd-person view would probably work even better. Let the computer worry about flying the plane, since it's already doing that, and free the pilot to focus entirely on tactical decisions. This would also allow such niceties as gyroscopic seats that always align the pilot for maximum g-force resistance, pre-inputting a plan to be followed in case of a pilot blackout, autoaim, sharing of research between manned and drone aircraft, etc.
It's whether or not the camps and mass graves last for weeks/months/years with an eventual victory for the people, or decades/centuries/millennia of suffering & death that will be historic in size and scope, that will be decided by whether or not people now decide to stand up and remove the criminals by whatever means necessary and strip the government of a large portion of it's power and wealth, and scrap the panopticon.
You forgot option #3: the entire country becomes a giant open-air prison. After all, if you can keep everyone under 24/7 surveillance, it's not like you need to explicitly jail them to control them. It's more profitable to leave them nominally free - that way, they still only have the options you allow, but must also compete with each other to fill your coffers in order to get table scraps to eat. Which is pretty much already implemented.
Why waste iron for chairs when poverty works just as well, and there's nowhere to escape to?
What bugs me about replicators vs transporters in Star Trek is that you can transport gold-pressed latinum and other various "too complex" molecules/DNA/etc but you can't replicate them.
They're copyrighted. You can transport them, because the transport destroys the original, but you can't replicate them. The replicators have built-in DRM to prevent that.
It's the same reason they need to build ships on spacedock rather than just making a huge replicator that spits them out faster than the Borg can destroy them, Star Forge style.
Meanwhile, the FOSS-using master race has reached singularity, ascended and become the Q Continuum. Now they like to torture the iFederation with their coming assimilation at the hands of WinBorgs.
It's okay to be disgusted with crimes that harm others.
The problem is the disgust with pedophilia tends to reach levels where it actually hinders doing anything effective to stop it, as such action often requires carefully thought-out measures, as well as threatens harm to innocents in the tradition of witch hunts.
There's another, related effect: outrage is addictive, so it's easy to get stuck on needing targets to hate, in the exact same way a crackhead needs crack but with the caveat that this crack is made from human blood and tears. That has a personal and social cost, and is behind many of the more irrational historical atrocities and current politics. It's unwise to feed that kind of habit, no matter how vile and deserving a target might be.
What you are asking for would drastically up the risks. Probably to the extent that the debt market would simply cease to exist. Instead of mortgages you would just have rental arrangements where if you went into default you were "evicted". There would be no car loans, just long term rental arrangements with an initial deposit. Etc
If debt market cannot exist when those who get the profits are also forced to bear the risks, then perhaps it shouldn't exist. And it's not like you won't get evicted and your car repossessed right now if you fail your debt repayments, so what purpose does it ultimately serve, other than inflating prices?
Mass bankruptcy is the method we as a society use for deleveraging. During a chapter 7 bankruptcy debt is destroyed and replaced with equity. During a chapter 13 debt is effectively destroyed by reducing the burden of payment. I certainly don't agree with the Biden Bankruptcy law which made bankruptcy more onerous but what you are proposing is effectively the end of debt.
If debt is destroyed by bankruptcy, how would my plan increase the risks any? If anything, it would lower them, since instead of bankruptcy you now get a simple delay in repayment. And the problem with mass bankruptcy is that it disrupts the economy severely. People lose their houses, businesses lose their customers which causes them to fail which causes people to lose their jobs, and the cycle continues. It's probably the least efficient way possible to manage the whole affair.
I certainly don't like how much luck has to do with our system, but you can fix that directly by making the job market less luck based.
And... how exactly speaking would you go about that? Have government guarantee everyone a job, Soviet-style?
Based on anything I know about international diplomacy I would be absolutely amazed if any country refrains from gathering data for ANY reason other than actual inability to do so.
You must not have followed news lately, then, since the whole outrage - whether real or opportunistic acting - over US spying implies there's a potential cost for data gathering operations. Even completely amoral sociopaths tend to engage in simple cost-benefit analysis before acting. Which points to yet another reason why even countries who aren't outraged might want to put more distance between themselves and the US: this whole affair shows remarkably poor judgement on NSA's part.
Even if every country is indeed evil, it still doesn't follow they're all stupid too.
By the way, how do you know that Brazil both doesn't do it, and isn't heading in that direction if they aren't?
The same way we know you aren't killing babies in satanistic rituals in your basement: we don't, we just have no reason to suspect it. And neither do you, you're just desperately trying to justify US government's actions for whatever reason. Care to explain why? Because, even for an excuse, "they might be thinking of doing it too" is beyond pathetic and bordering on pitiful.
There is a system in the USA which allows debtors who are unable to pay their debts to meet with their financiers and discuss a modified repayment program. That's called Bankruptcy Chapter 13. What you are asking for already exists.
No, it doesn't. Bankruptcy sides with the debtor by default while I'm talking about siding with the debtee by default. Basically, I'm suggesting that in order for the debtor to get a single penny they'd need to prove that the debtee's circumstances have changed and this was the debtee's own fault to the point of negligence - for example, you get fired and the debtor gets neither payments nor interest until you find another job and can resume payments, you were fired because you stole from the boss, that's your fault. Dealing with such risks is very much a financial professional's job, and made much easier by the assets he possesses, not something the average person should need to worry about.
The thing about bankruptcy and debtor-debtee relations is that they were built in a society that was a lot less leveraged than current one. Leveraging accelerates economic growth but it also causes instability - for example, job uncertainty - which people who aren't financial professionals can't be expected to deal with. So, either deleverage and accept less growth, or accept that most people are going to need a buffer against resulting uncertainty, both to make their personal lives more bearable but also to keep the economy from getting constant shocks from cascading bankruptcies which turn every downturn into a crisis.
But the current system, where you have a significant risk for personal bankruptcy simply for getting a house, is utterly broken. An economy where everything becomes a luck-based mission does not really serve anyone's interests.
If stocks crash people say "dagnabbit, lost a bunch of money", but they're not left in debt. When a debt bubble like real estate crashes, you're not just poor, you're also in debt. That makes it extremely difficult to get the economy running gain, as so much of people's money is being sucked up by loan payments.
You know, this could easily be remedied by distributing responsibility for debt more evenly between the debtor and the debtee. Right now it all rests on the debtee, who's options are to pay it all off or declare bankruptcy with all the associated unpleasantness; yet it's the debtor who's usually a professional financier, and thus should be rightly blamed for making a bad loan.
So, make up (very lenient) conditions that allow you to slash part of debt or suspend payments and/or interest until they change. Force the lender to apply them whenever possible at the threat of jail time if they fail to do so. Let professional economists, rather than Joe Average, worry about whether someone can pay back a debt in a particular personal and market situation, and take the loss if they fail at their job; who's the fool who thought betting the entire economy on Joe Hates-Math getting it right was a good idea in the first place?
Why should an electric company build a wind farm when it already HAS A NUCLEAR plant?
According to yourself: "So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants."
So, I dunno if you actually meant it, but getting a profit now rather than in 15 years seems like a huge incentive.
Computer sales use currency, but they are not themselves currency. A market segment can grow or shrink and supply and demand balance. People still need computers, and so there will still be a market.
Computers sales use currency, and that currency will get more computing power the longer you wait; in effect, your money will be worth more tomorrow than today, which is by definition deflation. And yes, people need or at least want computers today - and that goes for anything else they might buy.
A currency with built-in deflation has perverse incentives. Your money will be worth more if you don't spend it; investment is discouraged. By not engaging in commerce with your money, you enrich yourself.
How many people invest their money as is, rather than using it on coffee or other things they don't actually need? Remember, that Starbucks latte doesn't just cost you its nominal price, but also all the money you could had earned if you spent it on stock market instead. And yet I'm to believe that would suddenly start mattering to people if inflation went below zero?
Also, speaking of perverse incentives, inflationary currency actually encourages investment that has a negative return of investment, since that can still end up beating inflation. Such a business is doomed to failure, of course, yet inflationary currency incentivizes setting them up, thus wasting resources that could be used to set up more reasonable ones or even expand or maintain public infrastructure.
Compare that to all the real currencies, which have inflation; it will be worth less in the future. If you want to save it, you need to put it to some sort of use; for example an interest-bearing savings account where your money is actually be loaned out to other parties. And if you want better gain than that, you invest in something with either a higher risk level, or a more specific purpose.
And what is the actual result of this? Growth based on high-risk investments, where any bankruptcy makes every other investment even riskier, eventually resulting in a cascade failure, such as the current financial hulabaloo. Some people make out like bandits, if they are rich or clever enough to make their risks public while keeping profits private, but it's anything but good to people or economy in general.
Indeed, the built-in deflation ensures an eventual collapse, especially in the presence of alternatives currencies.
Of course it does. Never mind that deflation hasn't crashed sales of computer equipment - Moore's law means that you get better equipment with the same money or the same equipment with less if you just wait - but this time claims based on absurdly oversimplified economic models will surely give the correct prediction. Any year now...
It's really not much different than sending a guy out with a lineman's suit to climb a pole or enter a junction box to manually tap the line... just quicker and far less expensive.
Which is precisely the problem with it. Inconvenience and expense act as a natural filter to weed out needless surveillance. If it's trivial to tap a phone line, then phone lines get tapped for trivial reasons. That is the real reason why we have so much surveillance nowadays: it's cost-effective to record everything and let computers data-mine the recordings. The law didn't suddenly go crazy and start overreaching, it just gained far longer hands than anybody ever anticipated.
This is one area where you absolutely want every action needing to be justified to the beancounters. Otherwise you get SWAT teams sent to bust someone's door in in the middle of the night because someone thinks they might be growing pot, not because anyone's corrupt but because there's a potential upside (to the police department) of an arrest and no potential downsides, thus it's the rational choice.
The old unstated assumption that you can't catch a petty criminal who doesn't draw attention to themselves no longer holds, thus the balance of power between law and freedom has shifted. And not only that, but the very concept of privacy is quickly being eroded. We need to change our thinking accordingly and get rid of the hypocricy of demanding a squaky-clean public image that can be spoiled by a single Facebook picture of drinking beer, doing drugs or whatever, otherwise life becomes unbearable. Because the genie is not going back to the bottle, and being slave to the PR is not fun.
The way I see it, no one would be using encryption nowadays if Obama managed to be president in the nineties.
Maybe. But 90's Obama would only have 90's knowledge and technical capabilities. So for you to be right either Bush Sr. and Clinton had so much more moral backbone that they saw what encryption would enable but allowed it anyway, or Obama has so much more foresight he would have foreseen what neither of those two did. Neither option seems likely.
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Unfortunately, it's precisely those who would "eliminate" people who are dangerous to the group. Thus it's a choice between paying $80,000 per year to keep a monster locked up, or letting another roam the streets.
You aren't impressing anyone, you know.
And I'm forced to pay for the enforcement of your decisions, so I have a right to veto them. Also, why limit ourselves to drugs? Bad diet and lack of exercise cause more costly health problems than all drugs combined, so do you also claim you have a right to decide what other people eat and how much they must jog weekly? For that matter, since insufficient sleep is linked to both costly accidents and illness, do you wish to also mandate bedtimes?
Also, since sites like Silk Road are apparently quite profitable despite requiring a high level of social funtionality to use, I wonder how accurate the stereotype of a dysfunctional drug user really is? Most people who use alcohol continue paying for their own expenses despite it being one of the nastier psychoactive substances in both physical harm and addiction potential according to Wikipedia, so why would, say, your average ecstasy user not accomplish that?
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Yours is an argument that lets anyone claim power over anyone else for any decision.
That might be a reasonable solution. However, that would first require people to stop talking about "drugs", since the concept combines such widely different substances as heroin, LSD and marijuana, yet excludes alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. Also, it would require dropping the a priori assumption that a mind-altering substance is bad when discussing whether a particular one should be banned. Even more importantly, you'd need to acknowledge that banning a substance is a serious violation of other people's autonomy and can only be done in extraordinary circumstances, not something you can do just to save yourself some money - unless, as I pointed out, you're also willing to let others dictate what you may eat and when you go to bed.
Why am I reminded of the people who turn the talk to child molesters when talking about homosexuality? Could it be that you're doing something similar here?
Mind-altering substances are unlikely to be amongst those. The very fact that you felt the need to provide a fallacious appeal to emotion above implies you don't believe it either and thus tried to give your argument weight it doesn't carry on its own. Some people use psychoactive substances, other people ignore it, and the moral busybodies who make it their problem don't really have any arguments besides circular reasoning ("only criminals do drugs!") or thinly veiled appeals to some vague concept of purity.
The only question is: how many victims does this particular form of puritanism demand before people like you will get off their high horse and stop trampling others underhoof? And how much human potential is wasted by making it harder to examine the workings of the mind and how it can be altered?
So is it moral to decide for other people what they may and may not do to their own minds and bodies? And enforce your will through violence? Because it doesn't seem very moral to me. In fact it sounds suspiciously like you claiming ownership on them and declaring yourself their master.
Also, I find it hard to believe anyone would format their messages like you do yours unless they were under the influence of some rather potent substances, so is this just a very inefficient way of seeking rehabilitation?
Because elections are about selecting the lesser evil, and a candidate using crack is unlikely to even register on that scale, as long as they are functional enough to run their campaign.
Does that mean workaholics should be forbidden to work, since they get high from it?
How? It's not like the sellers need to leave their street adress, and if they're halfway smart, they launder their Bitcoins before cashing them in.
They could potentially catch a few buyers by pretending to be sellers, but even then it would require them to have a stash when ordering because someone send you something illegal doesn't prove you had anything to do with it.
No. You are thinking of something that benefits every member of the group simultaneously, while what's under discussion is an action that benefits a single member of the group at the expense of the group as a whole, and can be done by any member of the group. It's classic prisoner's dilemma: if everyone defect, everyone are worse off than if everyone cooperated, yet any particular person is best off if they defect and others don't.
In other words, profits are private but losses public - that is the tragedy of the commons.
The ghost of Ayn Rand should find her own existence disturbing, since ghosts are supernatural.
Speaking of iron domes, is there any particular reason why the cockpit needs to be transparent? A bunch of cameras and viewscreens should work just as well; for that matter, and a 3rd-person view would probably work even better. Let the computer worry about flying the plane, since it's already doing that, and free the pilot to focus entirely on tactical decisions. This would also allow such niceties as gyroscopic seats that always align the pilot for maximum g-force resistance, pre-inputting a plan to be followed in case of a pilot blackout, autoaim, sharing of research between manned and drone aircraft, etc.
You forgot option #3: the entire country becomes a giant open-air prison. After all, if you can keep everyone under 24/7 surveillance, it's not like you need to explicitly jail them to control them. It's more profitable to leave them nominally free - that way, they still only have the options you allow, but must also compete with each other to fill your coffers in order to get table scraps to eat. Which is pretty much already implemented.
Why waste iron for chairs when poverty works just as well, and there's nowhere to escape to?
They're copyrighted. You can transport them, because the transport destroys the original, but you can't replicate them. The replicators have built-in DRM to prevent that.
It's the same reason they need to build ships on spacedock rather than just making a huge replicator that spits them out faster than the Borg can destroy them, Star Forge style.
Meanwhile, the FOSS-using master race has reached singularity, ascended and become the Q Continuum. Now they like to torture the iFederation with their coming assimilation at the hands of WinBorgs.
The problem is the disgust with pedophilia tends to reach levels where it actually hinders doing anything effective to stop it, as such action often requires carefully thought-out measures, as well as threatens harm to innocents in the tradition of witch hunts.
There's another, related effect: outrage is addictive, so it's easy to get stuck on needing targets to hate, in the exact same way a crackhead needs crack but with the caveat that this crack is made from human blood and tears. That has a personal and social cost, and is behind many of the more irrational historical atrocities and current politics. It's unwise to feed that kind of habit, no matter how vile and deserving a target might be.
If debt market cannot exist when those who get the profits are also forced to bear the risks, then perhaps it shouldn't exist. And it's not like you won't get evicted and your car repossessed right now if you fail your debt repayments, so what purpose does it ultimately serve, other than inflating prices?
If debt is destroyed by bankruptcy, how would my plan increase the risks any? If anything, it would lower them, since instead of bankruptcy you now get a simple delay in repayment. And the problem with mass bankruptcy is that it disrupts the economy severely. People lose their houses, businesses lose their customers which causes them to fail which causes people to lose their jobs, and the cycle continues. It's probably the least efficient way possible to manage the whole affair.
And... how exactly speaking would you go about that? Have government guarantee everyone a job, Soviet-style?
You must not have followed news lately, then, since the whole outrage - whether real or opportunistic acting - over US spying implies there's a potential cost for data gathering operations. Even completely amoral sociopaths tend to engage in simple cost-benefit analysis before acting. Which points to yet another reason why even countries who aren't outraged might want to put more distance between themselves and the US: this whole affair shows remarkably poor judgement on NSA's part.
Even if every country is indeed evil, it still doesn't follow they're all stupid too.
Is that supposed to be reassuring or worrying?
The same way we know you aren't killing babies in satanistic rituals in your basement: we don't, we just have no reason to suspect it. And neither do you, you're just desperately trying to justify US government's actions for whatever reason. Care to explain why? Because, even for an excuse, "they might be thinking of doing it too" is beyond pathetic and bordering on pitiful.
No, it doesn't. Bankruptcy sides with the debtor by default while I'm talking about siding with the debtee by default. Basically, I'm suggesting that in order for the debtor to get a single penny they'd need to prove that the debtee's circumstances have changed and this was the debtee's own fault to the point of negligence - for example, you get fired and the debtor gets neither payments nor interest until you find another job and can resume payments, you were fired because you stole from the boss, that's your fault. Dealing with such risks is very much a financial professional's job, and made much easier by the assets he possesses, not something the average person should need to worry about.
The thing about bankruptcy and debtor-debtee relations is that they were built in a society that was a lot less leveraged than current one. Leveraging accelerates economic growth but it also causes instability - for example, job uncertainty - which people who aren't financial professionals can't be expected to deal with. So, either deleverage and accept less growth, or accept that most people are going to need a buffer against resulting uncertainty, both to make their personal lives more bearable but also to keep the economy from getting constant shocks from cascading bankruptcies which turn every downturn into a crisis.
But the current system, where you have a significant risk for personal bankruptcy simply for getting a house, is utterly broken. An economy where everything becomes a luck-based mission does not really serve anyone's interests.
You know, this could easily be remedied by distributing responsibility for debt more evenly between the debtor and the debtee. Right now it all rests on the debtee, who's options are to pay it all off or declare bankruptcy with all the associated unpleasantness; yet it's the debtor who's usually a professional financier, and thus should be rightly blamed for making a bad loan.
So, make up (very lenient) conditions that allow you to slash part of debt or suspend payments and/or interest until they change. Force the lender to apply them whenever possible at the threat of jail time if they fail to do so. Let professional economists, rather than Joe Average, worry about whether someone can pay back a debt in a particular personal and market situation, and take the loss if they fail at their job; who's the fool who thought betting the entire economy on Joe Hates-Math getting it right was a good idea in the first place?
According to yourself: "So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants."
So, I dunno if you actually meant it, but getting a profit now rather than in 15 years seems like a huge incentive.
Computers sales use currency, and that currency will get more computing power the longer you wait; in effect, your money will be worth more tomorrow than today, which is by definition deflation. And yes, people need or at least want computers today - and that goes for anything else they might buy.
How many people invest their money as is, rather than using it on coffee or other things they don't actually need? Remember, that Starbucks latte doesn't just cost you its nominal price, but also all the money you could had earned if you spent it on stock market instead. And yet I'm to believe that would suddenly start mattering to people if inflation went below zero?
Also, speaking of perverse incentives, inflationary currency actually encourages investment that has a negative return of investment, since that can still end up beating inflation. Such a business is doomed to failure, of course, yet inflationary currency incentivizes setting them up, thus wasting resources that could be used to set up more reasonable ones or even expand or maintain public infrastructure.
And what is the actual result of this? Growth based on high-risk investments, where any bankruptcy makes every other investment even riskier, eventually resulting in a cascade failure, such as the current financial hulabaloo. Some people make out like bandits, if they are rich or clever enough to make their risks public while keeping profits private, but it's anything but good to people or economy in general.
Of course it does. Never mind that deflation hasn't crashed sales of computer equipment - Moore's law means that you get better equipment with the same money or the same equipment with less if you just wait - but this time claims based on absurdly oversimplified economic models will surely give the correct prediction. Any year now...
As opposed to all the fascists who are staunch supporters of freedom and personal liberties?
Which is precisely the problem with it. Inconvenience and expense act as a natural filter to weed out needless surveillance. If it's trivial to tap a phone line, then phone lines get tapped for trivial reasons. That is the real reason why we have so much surveillance nowadays: it's cost-effective to record everything and let computers data-mine the recordings. The law didn't suddenly go crazy and start overreaching, it just gained far longer hands than anybody ever anticipated.
This is one area where you absolutely want every action needing to be justified to the beancounters. Otherwise you get SWAT teams sent to bust someone's door in in the middle of the night because someone thinks they might be growing pot, not because anyone's corrupt but because there's a potential upside (to the police department) of an arrest and no potential downsides, thus it's the rational choice.
The old unstated assumption that you can't catch a petty criminal who doesn't draw attention to themselves no longer holds, thus the balance of power between law and freedom has shifted. And not only that, but the very concept of privacy is quickly being eroded. We need to change our thinking accordingly and get rid of the hypocricy of demanding a squaky-clean public image that can be spoiled by a single Facebook picture of drinking beer, doing drugs or whatever, otherwise life becomes unbearable. Because the genie is not going back to the bottle, and being slave to the PR is not fun.
Maybe. But 90's Obama would only have 90's knowledge and technical capabilities. So for you to be right either Bush Sr. and Clinton had so much more moral backbone that they saw what encryption would enable but allowed it anyway, or Obama has so much more foresight he would have foreseen what neither of those two did. Neither option seems likely.
It's almost as dumb as building them at the bottom of a gravity well and then worrying about meteors falling in and wrecking the place up.