Obamacare isn't really good for anyone except the self-employed and underemployed. The bottom-of-the-barrel unsubsidized O-care option in CA for a family is about $650/mo.
It's interesting when someone from Switzerland claims the moral high ground about a country's past wrongs. Switzerland has a colorful history of Nazi collaboration and laundering of stolen treasure by the 3rd Reich.
Is that an unfair characterization of you as a modern Swiss person? Yes.
Just like comparing 1960s America to the present day. The U.S. may not live up to the ideals that are plastered over it's monuments, but it's certainly not contributing to your demise (whatever that means).
> Just leave. Go to ...
Spoken like a true Swiss. No, we all don't have the spare funds or network of employers to travel to a different country at will. Not to mention, SV is the epicenter of venture capital in software, not Zurich. Who are the VCs who would fund a startup's relocation to Zurich?
> contributing to a government
You can be forgiven for this, but U.S. citizens are perpetually bound to pay taxes even when residing abroad. The first $90k is forgiven, but the next must be taxed. Oh, and the state (e.g. California) doesn't play by these rules; it takes the full amount.
tptacek, maybe the USG as a whole controls some RSA keys, but the more interesting parts, such as NSA, wouldn't be able to get access to them without setting off some red flags. Not to mention, the USG isn't a monolith; NIST recently rejected Dual EC_DRBG. Employees at NIST publicly criticized the NSA's (alleged, but almost completely likely) decision to backdoor Dual EC_DRBG.
Like you said, for attribution purposes the NSA had to get its keys elsewhere. I'm asserting that it's not just attribution that's on their mind.
I also appreciate how the public unquestioningly believes that the Mars rover was in fact really on Mars. Especially, if one is to ask "qui bono", the answer that you'll get is that the administration is trying to direct attention from its police surveillance of Someone1234. I'm not saying that the Mars rover landing was faked, I'm just asking questions.
The culture of different government agencies varies widely. US-CERT is run by Carnegie Mellon University. US-CERT, incidentally is far older than the relatively new DHS. US-CERT, Mitre, and the rest are all about transparency and don't have motivation to hold onto really effective exploits.
However, if NSA discovers a ground-breaking exploit, and it's deemed low-risk to US systems, they'll probably keep it. But they certainly wouldn't disclose it to US-CERT or Mitre. Not to mention, since US-CERT and Mitre aren't in the intelligence community, they don't have a mechanism to keep information like that undisclosed.
I can't believe you put me in the position of defending Comcast from cheap shots.
The open wifi requires you to log in with credentials that are linked to a credit card and name. So any weird activity would be correlated to that login. Of course someone could use a stolen credit card, but at a minimum, "bad" traffic would be correlated to that account, not the open wifi that Comcast is allowing to take up your bandwidth.
> Governments regularly use all of these utilities as revenue-raising 'businesses', which they consistently strip of any capital that could be used for infrastructure improvements.
Is there any evidence of this? I was unable to find anything of value in a cursory web search. I found a couple of counter-examples, such as the Enron (NYSE:ENE)
scandal of intentionally causing blackouts and brownouts.
> worst services available
In many places, e.g. DC area, electricity (PEPCO) takes a long time to be restored and is objectively bad. However, regulated utilities are bound to serve rural and otherwise unprofitable customers.
> Roads are often subsidized for truckers
How do you get your food, iPhones, and button-up shirts?
> Water is subsidized for farmers and golf courses, and this often causes everyone else to suffer droughts.
Agreed that it is suboptimal for golf courses and manufacturers (including breweries) to use disproportionate amounts of water. Farmers? Maybe if they're raising livestock or other luxury food products. Causing droughts? How?