I think a simpler argument would be that small web is not a good fit if your content is sensitive in the place you are publishing from. It’s meant for public publishing. If you need encryption, use a different distribution mechanism.

That is not the only protection that HTTPS offers. US ISPs used to inject ads into HTML HTTP responses.

Can all this performative love for unencrypted HTTP just die already. You’ve all forgotten what it was actually like, and what the drawbacks actually are. This is so tiring.

The act of reading can also be sensitive.

Things do work according to the rules here.

But the wealthy write the rules.

The US is still mostly a Rule of Law country, in the sense that courts enforce the laws as written most of the time.

But which laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President are mostly determined by financial donations more so than public opinion.

With enough money you can define what corruption means.

Campaign contributions are called bribery in every country on earth bar one

Knowing nothing my guess would be he wants all the benefits of corruption accruing only to himself.

Do you really think “extrajudicial” methods will improve social trust in the US?

Wow Americans really dislike Americans! (Pew link)

For a while before the US and other democracies left them in the dust.

Mathematics and Physics maybe but not in a way that benefited the broader society overall.

> Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it.

This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now.

A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in.

Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”

> A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt...

Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.

They always have. I would guess the majority of people employed and salaries paid on a given project basically goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort spread across people.

Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter network since the straightforward exchange of cash for services has broken down, so you need to know the right people with skills or access to, and something of value to offer them in return.