Fine; but Cuba is one, at least as far as I know, that doesn't have a significantly built-out Internet structure, even though the hardware to do so is pretty far down the road to commoditization. They're very late to the game, and this should (ok, could) afford them some advantages. So what I was trying to say (and apparently, saying badly) was that it will be interesting to see how they go about it.
It'll be interesting to see how they choose to go. Perhaps they'll actually get something set up that is owned by the people, as their social system alleges a strong preference for.
It'd be fascinating to see how it works without big corporations in there making choices for them on a constant basis, if they can manage to avoid that.
Somehow, though, I keep coming back to the fact that no socialist or communist system has ever been seriously tried without some kind of de-facto dictatorship making the end goal impossible to reach. Equality is fine until the idiots who disagree want to be equal, too... All systems seem to have that particular fundamental problem. Equal unless different, otherwise ostracized.
My cynical side tells me palms will be greased, corporations will heavily engage, and your Cuban surfer will have a pretty typical bill to pay. Be delighted to be proven wrong, though.
But let's suppose you're right for a moment. This is your shell game. These are companies responding to the incentives you put in place. This is your supposed problem that you created. You have two choices as I see it: eliminate the welfare that leads to these alleged subsidies or suck it up.
I am right. But it's not my shell game, although it certainly is a problem that affects me. You naively assume that I, or more generally, the voting public, have control. I/we do not. First, we cannot craft legislation. This is not a democracy. It is, nominally in form at least, a republic. So we can only vote for representatives. However, the great majority of representatives are immediately and completely suborned and corrupted by corporate influence in the form of campaign support, straight-up bribes, assurances of employment, special deals, speaking engagements, and so on. The companies and other rich, well-connected entities actually set the rules. It is their shell game. It's a shell game called oligarchy masquerading as a republic-in-place. Only the politically naive still believe that it works by shuffling the representatives around. If it affects corporate earnings in any significant way, the tiller is taken from the representative's hands, and the course is set by the corporations themselves. That's how it actually works. I appreciate the warmness and fuzziness that might be grasped by imagining that the government is operating as a republic, but it just isn't so.
I think this is the most obnoxious part of the welfare state. The tool that created the unintended consequence gets used again and again, creating more and more unintended consequences as it goes. There never is any learning from failure by the masters of the tool of welfare. It's always the fault of all those counterrevolutionaries/greedy corporations/Tea Baggers/whatever who don't behave the way they're supposed to behave.
You think this because you subscribe to an illusory model of how things work. Until you become aware of the actual levers and forces of power that are in operation in and upon our government, the actual causes and effects, you will remain bewildered by the surface picture.
If the minimum wage were raised. (1) Business profits will drop -- as they should. (2) Government assistance will drop -- as it should. (3) The real costs of goods would be exposed -- as they should be. (4) The ability to lower taxes arises -- as it should.
Here's the problem: (1) will never be allowed to happen due to (2) (and the actual execution of (4) isn't very likely either.) The reason 1 will never be allowed to happen is that everything from lobbyists to "fact-finding" trips to post-political career sweeteners and far-flung friends and relatives and purveyors of opportunity will be sudden winners in the game of luck, all working to enrich the legislator. They will almost all fold, just as they always do, and the corporate choices become the legislator's choices. And in the process, a great hue and cry will arise from the bewildered, such as yourself, crying "throw the bums out", completely oblivious to the fact that the next set will act exactly the same, because the incentives being offered amount, in the end, to the ability grasp great wealth and power through the auspices of the corporations. There are very few poor legislators by the time their time in congress is over. This is why. Aside from internal corruption like voting themselves the ability to engage in insider trading, of course.
We can't change the game and we can't quit. The finger pointing between left and right is no more than a source of amusement to the corporations. Unless it's a purely social issue, they own enough of the playing field to positively control it. Should it happen that they don't, they will acquire more. They are rich and can concentrate their efforts. We cannot. We have nothing to offer that is legal other than election (generally from pre-selected party members, worse yet), and should we try to play it their way, enriching them and empowering them, even assuming we could, we'd be meeting the FBI immediately.
So who had TV in 1960? Not the poor, I'll tell you that. A phone from the year 2000 is still one hell of a lot better than the phone I had in 1965.
Sure, at some point, what we have today moves out of our economic grasp. But you simply cannot sensibly deny that the standard of living, lifespan, and contentment of the lower levels (not the lowest... that's another problem entirely, a legal one) are continually rising.
Money is a proxy for exchange of work. If the work is being done by automation that does not require exchange, money is not required.
o Mining: automated o Agriculture: automated o Livestock industry and/or artificial meats: automated o Manufacturing: automated o Ordering: Network based, zero cost o Network maintenance: automated o Transport: automated o Delivery: automated o Power: Solar and storage based, instead of local fuel-based
So what's left for you to do in this production context?
Consume. That's all. Outside of that, enjoy yourself. Hump a lot (robot partners or real ones.) Consume entertainment. Sleep. Exercise. Pursue hobbies. In a word, enjoy your leisure.
Also:
o Firefighting: automated o Policing: automated o Emergency response: automated o Medical care: automated o Scientific advance: automated o Travel: automated
And of course:
o Repair of automation: automated
Only things of inherent scarcity would still have value; land, spectrum, that sort of thing. Those are going to be the initial "crunch points" in any transition we attempt to make. There will be others, such as extreme consumption (hand build vehicles like Lambos, huge domiciles, yachts, like that.
Well said. Except for one thing. It's not the government who pays them. They're just like a banker, they're just handling the money as it passes by. (Poorly, but that's another post.) We pay them. So the burgers do indeed cost more, it's just that the cost is hidden by moving the payment to the tax collection step.
You couldn't be more wrong. Corporations vote through extremely powerful multiplying proxies variously described as bribes, campaign contributions, assurance of later employment and so on, often via extremely powerful channels known as "lobbyists." These votes carry more weight by far than any collection of constituents. You can change the players, that is, vote congress in and out repeatedly, but this does not affect how corporations and the rich control the actual legislative outcomes in any significant way. It just changes who gets the bribes and so forth.
It's like your server changing at McDonald's. New guy or gal, they're now getting the the income the previous employee no longer receives, and they're still telling you "I'll see to it you get a great burger, sir!" but you're still getting the exact same burger. Every time.
Of course, this control isn't actually a voting process, instead they represent a much more direct and effective mechanism of control (direct meting out of money and power and opportunity), but the effect is that your vote and my vote isn't worth a plugged nickel in controlling what legislators do, or don't do. It's just like being outvoted, only much more consistent and effective. The only time your vote appears to matter is when you are voting for the same ideas the rich and the corporations are pushing.
There are very, very few legislators who retire poor. Funny thing, eh? Oligarchy: Look it up, read it, and weep.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
And guess who pays for all this? Not walmart or pizza hut or subway... no, we do.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support. If the pizza server and walmart employee earned an adequate wage, this would show up in the price of goods. They don't want that. So instead, your taxes go up, the politicians shrug, and the walmart family is one of the wealthiest in the country, more than a little bit based on those indirect compensation boosts they don't have to pay.
What you're missing is that they think eliminating the need for THEM to be a slave to somebody is a good thing, as long as YOU are a slave to them. Because that, in a nutshell, is the situation that wealth concentration creates.
I should be rich.
You should do what I tell you to do, and I'll reward you miserably for it. Or not at all, if that can be managed.
Ahhhg. Soylent Green was "bad movie all the way down."
Read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room" so you can (a) have a wonderful read and (b) see what a corrupted, idiotic mess Hollywood made out of a perfectly good story.
Soylent Green is the poster child for the message of a scene in The Majestic. Here's a great summary from the Intertubes:
The movie begins in a Hollywood story meeting in the early 1950’s. Before we see anything we hear a group of studio executives (hilarious vocal cameos by some of Hollywood’s top directors) eviscerating a script by casually throwing in every possible movie cliché. As they call out “How about a dog!” and “The kid should be crippled!” the screenwriter sits there, stunned into silence. Finally, he musters up a diplomatic, “That’s.amazing.”
We need to ask whether ownership of production will survive a radical change in economic fundamentals.
For things to be valuable, they have to be scarce. Things would no longer be scarce. This implies some kind of change in the economics that isn't accounted for by the idea of owning production.
Further, artificially restricting access to non-scarce items probably won't fly. They'll probably try it, but once these technologies are out of the box, they're almost certain to lose control of them.
Scarcity is "natural" only for things that have inherent hard limits. So property / elbow room, scenic vistas, spectrum, those sorts of things.
Just a few things have to arrive to disrupt the heck out of our present economic structure:
o non-destructive local energy sourcing and storage (from solar, primarily... plenty of that to go around.) o adequate robotics to provide household maintenance o custom and template-based production of objects on demand from generalized raw materials o custom and template-based production of foodstuffs on demand from generalized raw materials
These, taken together, would utterly change the lives and lifestyles of human beings with access.
Art can be an expression of joy; of nothing; of interest; of form; of function... and it can still be art, even *great* art, no matter if some particular critic or consumer finds it unworthy, or not. It can be found in paintings, weapons, carved shells, code, fiction, sexuality, clothing, history, religion, philosophy, architecture, pottery, bonsai, the manner of one's death, kitchen appliances, on stage, in music... and a whole lot of other places... and all of it can arise with -- or without -- struggle. Struggle is not a required foundation, it's just a circumstance that in some part gives rise to some artworks, as can be said for virtually any facet of the experience of life, of the nature of reality, of the nature of fantasy.
Your view of art is so narrow I'm surprised you even admit there is any.
AI will be ahead on all of these curves if they see sufficient benefit. And just like our current masters who would just as soon we sat drooling in front of the idiot box, the best thing you will be able to do for an AI is stay out of its way. It will have things to do and likely those plans don't include you. Order another pizza in, bank your government dole, and watch the next episode of "My Favorite Robot." Hump regularly, take your high-end, ultra-high quality AI-produced drugs, and learn to love your new freedom to do nothing.
No, I didn't claim anything of the sort. I only asked how you didn't know that was the case, which is something else entirely. You need new reading glasses. Or remedial reading classes. Or something.
Just a little information -- what we know -- showing our government at work, cavreader. Now, I don't know how you will characterize this information, but I know how I do: Directly and unequivocally indicative of a systemic breakdown of respect, regard, and understanding of liberty and justice that extends broadly across all areas of law enforcement.
Now, you want to talk nonsense about legal protections in a system where the vast majority of defendants are pressured into plea bargains against a completely uneven scale full of extra charges, almost certain financial ruin, threats of extended incarceration, and outright lies from the police and prosecutor, where the police don't have to defend anything in court -- and which can be, and at times have been, followed up by ex post facto laws increasing punishment after conviction -- fine. But don't expect me to take you seriously, because you obviously don't have even the slightest idea what you're talking about.
In this context a legitimate law enforcement reason means a warrant would indeed be needed.
Are you mad? They don't even insist on warrants when they can't meet the requirements of the 4th amendment, preferring to focus cluelessly upon the word "unreasonable" and ignoring the litany of probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation that were put there to explicitly define what "reasonable" is. They just break your door down, and shoot you -- and your pets.
And you think a law that doesn't even say a warrant is required will somehow stumble in its application on needing them?
I don't think you understand how the justice system works here. Or perhaps you're not from here.
What makes you think the government has a polynomial prime factoring algorithm?
What makes you think they don't? What makes you think they even need one? What makes you think they don't hire, and utilize, some of the most powerful math-heads out there? What makes you think that something that can't be broken today won't bring you to the vale of tears days, months, even years later, if that's what it takes? What makes you think they don't have, or won't have, some kind of quantum computing device that obviates encryption entirely? What makes you think they didn't log every keystroke you typed, thus making encryption a complete non-issue? Wait, what, your system is "pure"? You know they can tell what you're typing by the sound, right? Finally, what makes you think they won't come right to your home or place of business or your favorite club, hustle you into a dank basement somewhere, and waterboard you or pound your toes to mush with a hammer or actually, eventually, read your mind electronically and get what they want that way? Got any relatives you treasure? What about the recipient(s)? Now there are (at least) two points of human weakness.
And... you do know that "they" have access to quite a few technologies that "we" do not, right?
I would seriously bet on the idea that if you demonstrate you think you need to encrypt your stuff by simply doing so, all you've managed to accomplish is get on a list of "we'll get back to this suspicious character later."
Right now, if you've got something secret that you don't want the government to become aware of, just don't say it or otherwise communicate it. That's your very best chance of actually keeping it a secret. It may be your only chance.
You want to be found dull-eyed, emaciated, sitting in a disheveled heap, squishing around on your own excrement? The three seashells ensure that you'll only be found dull-eyed, emaciated, sitting in a disheveled heap -- clean as a whistle.:)
Really, the prison system is just slavery by another name.
As is explicitly provided for in the 13th amendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
(emphasis mine)
So if you don't like it, the legitimate path towards getting rid of it is amendment, as provided for in article 5.
Personally, I think the problem is far too many laws making crimes out of things that should never have been construed as criminal. And that can be approached one issue at a time if you can simply bring pressure upon the state or federal legislators. Sure, that's hard, but it's not nearly as hard as trying to pursue amendment, which seems to be basically impossible at this point in time.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine; but Cuba is one, at least as far as I know, that doesn't have a significantly built-out Internet structure, even though the hardware to do so is pretty far down the road to commoditization. They're very late to the game, and this should (ok, could) afford them some advantages. So what I was trying to say (and apparently, saying badly) was that it will be interesting to see how they go about it.
It'll be interesting to see how they choose to go. Perhaps they'll actually get something set up that is owned by the people, as their social system alleges a strong preference for.
It'd be fascinating to see how it works without big corporations in there making choices for them on a constant basis, if they can manage to avoid that.
Somehow, though, I keep coming back to the fact that no socialist or communist system has ever been seriously tried without some kind of de-facto dictatorship making the end goal impossible to reach. Equality is fine until the idiots who disagree want to be equal, too... All systems seem to have that particular fundamental problem. Equal unless different, otherwise ostracized.
My cynical side tells me palms will be greased, corporations will heavily engage, and your Cuban surfer will have a pretty typical bill to pay. Be delighted to be proven wrong, though.
I am right. But it's not my shell game, although it certainly is a problem that affects me. You naively assume that I, or more generally, the voting public, have control. I/we do not. First, we cannot craft legislation. This is not a democracy. It is, nominally in form at least, a republic. So we can only vote for representatives. However, the great majority of representatives are immediately and completely suborned and corrupted by corporate influence in the form of campaign support, straight-up bribes, assurances of employment, special deals, speaking engagements, and so on. The companies and other rich, well-connected entities actually set the rules. It is their shell game. It's a shell game called oligarchy masquerading as a republic-in-place. Only the politically naive still believe that it works by shuffling the representatives around. If it affects corporate earnings in any significant way, the tiller is taken from the representative's hands, and the course is set by the corporations themselves. That's how it actually works. I appreciate the warmness and fuzziness that might be grasped by imagining that the government is operating as a republic, but it just isn't so.
You think this because you subscribe to an illusory model of how things work. Until you become aware of the actual levers and forces of power that are in operation in and upon our government, the actual causes and effects, you will remain bewildered by the surface picture.
If the minimum wage were raised. (1) Business profits will drop -- as they should. (2) Government assistance will drop -- as it should. (3) The real costs of goods would be exposed -- as they should be. (4) The ability to lower taxes arises -- as it should.
Here's the problem: (1) will never be allowed to happen due to (2) (and the actual execution of (4) isn't very likely either.) The reason 1 will never be allowed to happen is that everything from lobbyists to "fact-finding" trips to post-political career sweeteners and far-flung friends and relatives and purveyors of opportunity will be sudden winners in the game of luck, all working to enrich the legislator. They will almost all fold, just as they always do, and the corporate choices become the legislator's choices. And in the process, a great hue and cry will arise from the bewildered, such as yourself, crying "throw the bums out", completely oblivious to the fact that the next set will act exactly the same, because the incentives being offered amount, in the end, to the ability grasp great wealth and power through the auspices of the corporations. There are very few poor legislators by the time their time in congress is over. This is why. Aside from internal corruption like voting themselves the ability to engage in insider trading, of course.
We can't change the game and we can't quit. The finger pointing between left and right is no more than a source of amusement to the corporations. Unless it's a purely social issue, they own enough of the playing field to positively control it. Should it happen that they don't, they will acquire more. They are rich and can concentrate their efforts. We cannot. We have nothing to offer that is legal other than election (generally from pre-selected party members, worse yet), and should we try to play it their way, enriching them and empowering them, even assuming we could, we'd be meeting the FBI immediately.
So who had TV in 1960? Not the poor, I'll tell you that. A phone from the year 2000 is still one hell of a lot better than the phone I had in 1965.
Sure, at some point, what we have today moves out of our economic grasp. But you simply cannot sensibly deny that the standard of living, lifespan, and contentment of the lower levels (not the lowest... that's another problem entirely, a legal one) are continually rising.
Money is a proxy for exchange of work. If the work is being done by automation that does not require exchange, money is not required.
o Mining: automated
o Agriculture: automated
o Livestock industry and/or artificial meats: automated
o Manufacturing: automated
o Ordering: Network based, zero cost
o Network maintenance: automated
o Transport: automated
o Delivery: automated
o Power: Solar and storage based, instead of local fuel-based
So what's left for you to do in this production context?
Consume. That's all. Outside of that, enjoy yourself. Hump a lot (robot partners or real ones.) Consume entertainment. Sleep. Exercise. Pursue hobbies. In a word, enjoy your leisure.
Also:
o Firefighting: automated
o Policing: automated
o Emergency response: automated
o Medical care: automated
o Scientific advance: automated
o Travel: automated
And of course:
o Repair of automation: automated
Only things of inherent scarcity would still have value; land, spectrum, that sort of thing. Those are going to be the initial "crunch points" in any transition we attempt to make. There will be others, such as extreme consumption (hand build vehicles like Lambos, huge domiciles, yachts, like that.
Well said. Except for one thing. It's not the government who pays them. They're just like a banker, they're just handling the money as it passes by. (Poorly, but that's another post.) We pay them. So the burgers do indeed cost more, it's just that the cost is hidden by moving the payment to the tax collection step.
You couldn't be more wrong. Corporations vote through extremely powerful multiplying proxies variously described as bribes, campaign contributions, assurance of later employment and so on, often via extremely powerful channels known as "lobbyists." These votes carry more weight by far than any collection of constituents. You can change the players, that is, vote congress in and out repeatedly, but this does not affect how corporations and the rich control the actual legislative outcomes in any significant way. It just changes who gets the bribes and so forth.
It's like your server changing at McDonald's. New guy or gal, they're now getting the the income the previous employee no longer receives, and they're still telling you "I'll see to it you get a great burger, sir!" but you're still getting the exact same burger. Every time.
Of course, this control isn't actually a voting process, instead they represent a much more direct and effective mechanism of control (direct meting out of money and power and opportunity), but the effect is that your vote and my vote isn't worth a plugged nickel in controlling what legislators do, or don't do. It's just like being outvoted, only much more consistent and effective. The only time your vote appears to matter is when you are voting for the same ideas the rich and the corporations are pushing.
There are very, very few legislators who retire poor. Funny thing, eh? Oligarchy: Look it up, read it, and weep.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
And guess who pays for all this? Not walmart or pizza hut or subway... no, we do.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support. If the pizza server and walmart employee earned an adequate wage, this would show up in the price of goods. They don't want that. So instead, your taxes go up, the politicians shrug, and the walmart family is one of the wealthiest in the country, more than a little bit based on those indirect compensation boosts they don't have to pay.
What you're missing is that they think eliminating the need for THEM to be a slave to somebody is a good thing, as long as YOU are a slave to them. Because that, in a nutshell, is the situation that wealth concentration creates.
I should be rich.
You should do what I tell you to do, and I'll reward you miserably for it. Or not at all, if that can be managed.
Ahhhg. Soylent Green was "bad movie all the way down."
Read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room" so you can (a) have a wonderful read and (b) see what a corrupted, idiotic mess Hollywood made out of a perfectly good story.
Soylent Green is the poster child for the message of a scene in The Majestic. Here's a great summary from the Intertubes:
I, for one, would like to be the first to welcome our new primarily welcoming overlords and underlings.
We need to ask whether ownership of production will survive a radical change in economic fundamentals.
For things to be valuable, they have to be scarce. Things would no longer be scarce. This implies some kind of change in the economics that isn't accounted for by the idea of owning production.
Further, artificially restricting access to non-scarce items probably won't fly. They'll probably try it, but once these technologies are out of the box, they're almost certain to lose control of them.
Scarcity is "natural" only for things that have inherent hard limits. So property / elbow room, scenic vistas, spectrum, those sorts of things.
Just a few things have to arrive to disrupt the heck out of our present economic structure:
o non-destructive local energy sourcing and storage (from solar, primarily... plenty of that to go around.)
o adequate robotics to provide household maintenance
o custom and template-based production of objects on demand from generalized raw materials
o custom and template-based production of foodstuffs on demand from generalized raw materials
These, taken together, would utterly change the lives and lifestyles of human beings with access.
It'll be interesting to watch, anyway.
That is unmitigated, blinder-driven nonsense.
Art can be an expression of joy; of nothing; of interest; of form; of function... and it can still be art, even *great* art, no matter if some particular critic or consumer finds it unworthy, or not. It can be found in paintings, weapons, carved shells, code, fiction, sexuality, clothing, history, religion, philosophy, architecture, pottery, bonsai, the manner of one's death, kitchen appliances, on stage, in music... and a whole lot of other places... and all of it can arise with -- or without -- struggle. Struggle is not a required foundation, it's just a circumstance that in some part gives rise to some artworks, as can be said for virtually any facet of the experience of life, of the nature of reality, of the nature of fantasy.
Your view of art is so narrow I'm surprised you even admit there is any.
And *I* am a bloody Philistine, lol.
AI will be ahead on all of these curves if they see sufficient benefit. And just like our current masters who would just as soon we sat drooling in front of the idiot box, the best thing you will be able to do for an AI is stay out of its way. It will have things to do and likely those plans don't include you. Order another pizza in, bank your government dole, and watch the next episode of "My Favorite Robot." Hump regularly, take your high-end, ultra-high quality AI-produced drugs, and learn to love your new freedom to do nothing.
Or be recycled.
You are promoting the idea that there is safety in a situation for which you have no data.
Only a fool would follow you there.
No, I didn't claim anything of the sort. I only asked how you didn't know that was the case, which is something else entirely. You need new reading glasses. Or remedial reading classes. Or something.
Indiana will simply legislate that all superconductors are performance-invariant.
Problem solved. See how easy that is?
You don't know if they've solved (the last part of) Kryptos. You just know the public hasn't.
The difference between what you think you know, and what you actually know, is often quite significant.
As for the "magic" straw man, not worthy of a response.
Hysteria, eh? Well, let's just drag a few facts out. Here we go:
o Straight-up misconduct
o Botched paramilitary police raid data
o Judge, jury and executioners in blue: The death penalty -- without a court
o Warrants "not required" data
o Seizure of property without warrants details
o $2.02 billion dollars in cash and property seizures for/in which no indictment was ever filed
o Other illegal horrors
Just a little information -- what we know -- showing our government at work, cavreader. Now, I don't know how you will characterize this information, but I know how I do: Directly and unequivocally indicative of a systemic breakdown of respect, regard, and understanding of liberty and justice that extends broadly across all areas of law enforcement.
Now, you want to talk nonsense about legal protections in a system where the vast majority of defendants are pressured into plea bargains against a completely uneven scale full of extra charges, almost certain financial ruin, threats of extended incarceration, and outright lies from the police and prosecutor, where the police don't have to defend anything in court -- and which can be, and at times have been, followed up by ex post facto laws increasing punishment after conviction -- fine. But don't expect me to take you seriously, because you obviously don't have even the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Are you mad? They don't even insist on warrants when they can't meet the requirements of the 4th amendment, preferring to focus cluelessly upon the word "unreasonable" and ignoring the litany of probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation that were put there to explicitly define what "reasonable" is. They just break your door down, and shoot you -- and your pets.
And you think a law that doesn't even say a warrant is required will somehow stumble in its application on needing them?
I don't think you understand how the justice system works here. Or perhaps you're not from here.
What makes you think they don't? What makes you think they even need one? What makes you think they don't hire, and utilize, some of the most powerful math-heads out there? What makes you think that something that can't be broken today won't bring you to the vale of tears days, months, even years later, if that's what it takes? What makes you think they don't have, or won't have, some kind of quantum computing device that obviates encryption entirely? What makes you think they didn't log every keystroke you typed, thus making encryption a complete non-issue? Wait, what, your system is "pure"? You know they can tell what you're typing by the sound, right? Finally, what makes you think they won't come right to your home or place of business or your favorite club, hustle you into a dank basement somewhere, and waterboard you or pound your toes to mush with a hammer or actually, eventually, read your mind electronically and get what they want that way? Got any relatives you treasure? What about the recipient(s)? Now there are (at least) two points of human weakness.
And... you do know that "they" have access to quite a few technologies that "we" do not, right?
I would seriously bet on the idea that if you demonstrate you think you need to encrypt your stuff by simply doing so, all you've managed to accomplish is get on a list of "we'll get back to this suspicious character later."
Right now, if you've got something secret that you don't want the government to become aware of, just don't say it or otherwise communicate it. That's your very best chance of actually keeping it a secret. It may be your only chance.
Further, the presumption that because it falls under the umbrella of law, it is somehow made "ok", is utter nonsense from word one.
hey y'all, watch this... gimme my transcranial magnetic stimulator -- you can have my beer.
You want to be found dull-eyed, emaciated, sitting in a disheveled heap, squishing around on your own excrement? The three seashells ensure that you'll only be found dull-eyed, emaciated, sitting in a disheveled heap -- clean as a whistle. :)
As is explicitly provided for in the 13th amendment:
(emphasis mine)
So if you don't like it, the legitimate path towards getting rid of it is amendment, as provided for in article 5.
Personally, I think the problem is far too many laws making crimes out of things that should never have been construed as criminal. And that can be approached one issue at a time if you can simply bring pressure upon the state or federal legislators. Sure, that's hard, but it's not nearly as hard as trying to pursue amendment, which seems to be basically impossible at this point in time.