Agents in the US would just be normal citizens asking for money/crypto. You'd need to find fools to deceive, but a lot of people fall for scams to get small gains. Many hard drug users in particular are often rather self centered in my limited experience.
Or if you wanted to attack refineries, you could possibly select some climate change activists to do it for you?
Or find angry children to do it. Make things go bang for fun.
Our industrial infrastructure appears to be vulnerable to me (as a superficial opinion).
The real fix is to help poor people in other countries to like the US. And work hard at avoiding doing things that radicalise dangerous haters.
It seems to me that there a large and well-established drug smuggling industry that might be quite interested in Iranian drone technology and has long-established logistics competence regarding transport into the US from distant countries. (I searched for 'fentanyl precursors' now, some search results named very distant sources.)
Your implication is that RMS was spending that money on himself for luxuries.
Are you sure the money wasn't being charged by his foundations (or given indirectly - e.g. used for his living expenses)?
Hard to know what his intentions were unless there's a link to something where he explains himself e.g. he could easily just be valuing opportunity costs.
I didn't specify or imply what he spent the money on, only that he demanded compensation for his time and energy, and at quite a hefty (well-deserved) price. Whether he did that as himself or under GNU Project or FSF auspices is also immaterial for purposes of this discussion. People both for and against open source seem to believe there's an implication that developers' time is free as well, and I'm just showing that the most dogmatic advocate for free software of all believed otherwise and put those beliefs into action.
Savings is an insidious lie to ourselves. It makes zero sense to an economy. X people working, and Y people not working leads to the outcomes you see as obvious. Trying to say some people are not saving enough becomes meaningless when looking at a whole economy. Or you are saying that people should increase their time worked or reduce their disposable spending which is saying they hardly deserve any rewards for their hours.
As someone who has legitimately tried to save enough for my retirement, it is obvious that my savings will be taken away through government taxation changes (the "tax the rich" movement will insidiously spread to taxing middle class savers in New Zealand). The government can't afford to pay for retirees so it will grab resources from whoever has them which I expect to be the "savers" you mention.
An economy can reduce spending on retirees, and increasing the retirement age is the most convenient way to do that.
The proper way out is to increase the productivity of the economy.
Perhaps you are not acquainted with the common retirees that are skimping on all expenses - trivial things like enough heating or food. I have a retiree friend living in his car (and still working hard).
Once people get the idea saving just makes you a sap the numbers will get dramatically worse. This is my argument against needs-based pensions: If I only get a pension when I don't have money, trust me, I will not have money when I retire.
Taxation cancerously grows on all constraint edges. In this case you could calculate it as implicitly increasing to something nearer 90% ‡ (5 years retirement out of working from 20 to 80).
Voters want more of everything, and our systems encourage everyone within the system to want more.
We don't vote for reducing budgets, and politicians who try to economize get wasted. Everybody wants unlimited health services and the compromise we all select is to increase various tax takes.
Note everybody in the developed world is given relatively similar amounts of time. Yet most of us value our time poorly, since it is a resource we cannot replace.
‡ 90% taxation sounds silly, but it is closer to the truth than looking at $ or working hours. It is hard to choose what to measure - perhaps quality of life or alternatively (total disposable hours versus total waking hours). And choosing the basis of what is a fair amount of resources one person should receive is completely intractable.
There are also heaps of people that love getting phonecalls, or love to get a nice voice message.
There's a whole other world of people that call and enjoy calling!!!!
Why let a subset of people rule your behaviour towards others not in that subset?
When people call, I try to encourage that. Unless I'm busy or they're too needy, so I don't answer.
I am especially encouraging towards anyone that struggles with text messages (one of my oldest friends was illiterate, and I've got other friends that would call themselves dyslexic).
I undermine that by messaging when I should call, because I like the written word.
Try not to blame the people working at the coal face. Developers lack influence in most companies, they are told what to do by product managers and the rot often gets worse further up the hierarchy chain. Developers mostly know what is wrong and don't like the shit they are doing. Imagine the anger of working on Server 2012 (Windows Server 8) with the default Metro UI - that idiocy had to go right to the top.
How independent are developers at Microsoft - are they in charge of product design decisions?
Most -- frankly, almost all -- developers I talk to at big companies like the things they are working on. I totally am happy to not blame a developer who disavows the stuff they are doing and shrug at me saying "a job is a job: this isn't the greatest market to find a new one", but that just isn't the reality of most of the people who are working at these big companies.
