it is bad to see 'good thing / bad thing' as the only available frame

Rejecting the premise: who says they fixed it properly?

I read it as an acknowledgement that while improvement is possible, the requisite effort will in reality never be expended

I don't think you get it, OC tried the trackpad in a MicroCenter. It's game over.

Thank you, point well made!

> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?

I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.

You know this isn't the only thing Michelangelo painted, right?

It doesn't seem to know how to handle pawn promotion. It told me it was an illegal move and that I'd lost the game.

> Also, it's pretty clear that cities are too large for our social apparatus

Citation needed? Humans have been living in cities for thousands of years.

Taking the Roman Empire as an example: Rome was by far the largest city in the empire at a total of ~1 million people. The others were estimated to have 500 thousand or fewer, with only 25-30% of the population living in a city at all.

Modern cities are enormous by comparison and our urbanization rate is completely flipped. 80% of people in the US live in a city, and we have 50 metro areas with a higher population than Rome had during the empire. Our largest metro area is New York/Newark/Jersey City at 20 million people, 20x that of imperial Rome.

And remember that Rome itself was an anomaly in its day, and the Roman Empire in general was an anomaly in European history.

At an extraordinary cost to human health. Sewage problems spread disease. Malnourishment due to only eating bread. The average height of a Paleolithic man far exceeded the height of a Neolithic man.

This is Berkson's paradox - Neolithic men may have been less healthy, but that could be because the hunter-gatherers died or stopped having children when they ran out of food rather than living off bread.

Cities of the past are nothing like those of today. Nor the lifestyle of them.

Highly recommend The Border Trilogy as well as No Country for Old Men. The Coen Brothers did a fantastic job adapting the latter, but it just can't compare to the book.

> Even if you read the code, you have to trust that the code you read is the code a service is actually using.

Don't forget to verify the code for the compiler to ensure that hasn't been compromised in order to inject an exploit into the binary at compile time.