Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.

This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.

Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement. But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.

What is your explanation? I suspect that it's something along the lines of: "people waving foreign flags are signaling their intention to invade the US", but that you don't want to say it overtly because it's obviously a racist talking point from right-wing media.

I'm confused, you consider yourself quite liberal but you think it's bullshit for Mexicans in the US to celebrate their heritage?

If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly?

The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.

It could change in future devices, but currently there's not much stopping you from doing whatever you want with your Pixel's software.

There's another way of sharing in cryptpad though, which is for each user to create an identity/account. Once those you're collaborating with have accounts, documents and folders can be shared by granting access within cryptpad's UI. No secrets have to be circulated.

Yes, that's one indicator of how the incentives are structured, though there are other factors to consider too - mostly regarding where the money comes from and who is involved in the decision-making.

Perhaps you find it dystopian that people make predictions about future behavior and use them to inform their decisions about who to trust. It's very common though, and is the basis for the concept of reputation.

For some people/use cases, the threat of developers rug-pulling a tool you depend on is not a big deal as long as it's good right now. But in many situations the tool which has less features but also less incentive to rug-pull wins out.

Over time, because security and cryptography were beneficial to business and government, cryptography got steadily increasing technical investment and attention.

On the other hand, since privacy as a social value does not serve business or government needs, it has been steadily de-emphasized and undermined.

Technical people have coped with the progressive erosion of privacy by pointing to cryptography as a way for individuals to uphold their privacy even in the absence of state-protected rights or a civil society which cares. This is the tradeoff being described.

But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.

People in the US are so accustomed to working class people being universally disempowered that we find it perverse and "upside down" that some workers could actually have the economic force to make demands and have them met. Meanwhile employers routinely make arbitrary demands and have them met. It doesn't even occur to anyone to argue about them, because it's recognized that employers simply have the power to demand whatever they want from their employees, and that this is natural and reasonable.