Short answer: Too many cooks in the kitchen, and too many of 'em motivated to make it more complicated.
A computer standard that is still widely avoided almost 30 years after it became official is a computer standard that should have been tossed in the bin before the ink was dry.
Seems like a strategically-placed bit of red tape would suffice to fix the problem. You gotta pass an in-person exam by an Icelandic public health nurse, then wait 3 weeks for an ID card. Or whatever.
If we could magically guarantee that our [starry-eyed|gullible|treacherous] political leaders didn't give back most of those property taxes before the DC even broke ground...
Anyone familiar with this? My cynical first thought is that their spouses are still allowed to trade, or there's no real enforcement, or some other loopholes.
That said it does give me hope for the USA if politicians are still willing to pass laws to prevent corruption among themselves. They just need to do that with a few other things...
For those unfamiliar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution . Which from the UK's PoV had lead to a hellishly long, expensive, bloody, and existential series of wars. Right on the UK's doorstep. The memories of which were very much living in 1832, to undermine the usual "can't happen here" motivated reasoning of the 1%.
And it took further horrors, including the Great Famine in Ireland, to get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_laws repealed in 1846. Which, arguably, was a far greater reform - destroying the economic foundations of most of the wealthy land owners, and greatly reducing how many poor folks lived on the brink of "if you can't afford the food prices..." starvation.
ADDED:
> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't...
Sadly, it's far more complex than that. While amoral billionaires and mega-corps get the headlines, late-stage capitalism has very efficiently allocated nice-sounding slivers of its loot to a huge number of minor stakeholders. Pretty much everyone who has savings (for retirement or whatever) invested in equities. Pretty much every homeowner. And pretty much everyone who still believes that they'll somehow manage to break into those "just sit there and watch your wealth grow" classes.
Bashing on the reporter is pointless feel-good. This is a massive vuln. It was 4 weeks after Kernel had a patch. They had no way to know if others parties had also discovered the vuln. Lord Knows how many millions of systems could already have been rooted. The reporter is not their minion.
If I call 911 to report a fire at an oil storage facility - and they ask me to alert the hospital, then phone the neighboring county's Sheriff Dept., and then...yeah. Either I'm way out in the sticks (and known to/trusted by the 911 operator), or else the 911 service is run by children.
A computer standard that is still widely avoided almost 30 years after it became official is a computer standard that should have been tossed in the bin before the ink was dry.
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