Oh one one eight nine nine nine...
RegalPotoo
This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about
- The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
- Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren't based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
- If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don't be surprised if a country turns around and says "ok, you can't operate here". Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn't mean you get to ignore laws you don't like
To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:
- A physical device
- An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)
They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it's use outside of a prosecution. It's not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it's probably better than "no encryption for anyone".
I've been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn't really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he'd been getting a lot recently
Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn't matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn't worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it
For those interested in how they come up with the impact probabilities and why it's really important that JWST is looking at this, Scott Manley did a great video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Esk1hg2knno
Even if it's at the top end of the predicted range, an impact would be ~40MT equivalent. Enough to level a city, but not an extinction event by any means; plus the likely impact path is across central America, the Atlantic, central Africa and north India - not really regions that have the resources to respond to a threat like this. Personally I'm hoping it misses, because I don't see the counties that could do something about it stepping up right now, so you'd be looking at maybe 100 million people displaced from their homes and an insurmountable humanitarian crisis
Theoretically the contents of these lots would be insured, so if there was a sudden unexpected fire that happened to destroy all the cars Tesla gets a cash payout, unlike if they just sit there where Tesla has to take the cashflow hit of having paid to build cars that noone will buy