chicken

Not even since

1. It's not a crime, it's a civil offense, so the only people looking for you are, in theory, copyright holders, not cops.
2. Teenagers actually do get busted for small amounts of weed sometimes, no one is getting busted for piracy since 10+ years outside of a small handful of copyright trolls (so if you torrent the porn videos associated with their companies without a vpn).

Consumer level piracy is like the lowest tier of illegal (assuming US). VPN actually does confer perfect security in this specific circumstance, zero chance of consequences.

The government can already identify you, and your identity is easy to steal.

Fixing both of these problems would be better than just one.

I think it would be better to do everything with accounts that are not necessarily permanently connected to a person's identity. Any government mediated, definitive system for identifying people is way too risky from a general privacy and freedom perspective.

Right now we treat social security numbers like one, but

They were never meant to be used that way. The solution is to stop using them that way. We do not need a digital-compatible id system in the US.

I'm glad courts seem to be hostile in general towards these sorts of copyright trolls.

so many refuse to believe has faults

Maybe it's because I don't use Twitter but I haven't actually seen any of this in years. Every single mention of Elon Musk I see is negative. From my perspective, Twitter was trash long before he bought it, even if he's made it worse and keeps twisting the knife. All this complaining seems like a deflection by people who are addicted and need to keep rationalizing their continued use of the platform despite it being increasingly intolerable to them.

The failures on January 6 are particularly stunning. Anyone who has been to an anti-war or other protest at the Capitol can tell how heavily guarded the Capitol is. Anti-war protesters are arrested for merely being on the Capitol steps. There is no scenario in which people at an Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) march would have been allowed to breach the Capitol and send members of Congress into hiding.

On top of that, much of the planning for January 6 was done in plain sight. Anyone vaguely paying attention to the news had some inkling of what was afoot. It makes the police response all the more perplexing.

I feel like this would benefit from more detail. The argument seems to be that the FBI should have prevented the Jan 6 insurrectionists from gaining access to the capitol building, given its extensive surveillance powers. That their failure to do this, their failure to prevent 9/11, and their attention towards left wing protestors is evidence that the organization is misusing its powers and not doing anything useful.

Did the FBI have investigations into the Jan 6 protestors going before the event? My understanding has been that they got in because there were just so many people refusing to follow instructions, not enough guards to begin to control a crowd of that size, and they didn't go as far as to start shooting them at first. Would they have shot left wing protestors doing the same thing before they got in the building? Would they have arrested them prior to the event on the basis of posts online talking about getting into the building? Or is maybe that just not how the FBI works? I don't really know. I agree with the article that there should be more investigation into what they do and more oversight, and maybe not allowing the executive to have as much ability to wield it as a political weapon, and changing the law so they aren't exercising so much unaccountable power over American citizens.

Yeah that did seem pretty rude.

I explicitly acknowledge this. You have not contradicted my argument.

Sometimes. It's a spectrum; what people take seriously depends on their social environment, so you can get people who have absorbed arguments like that and maybe aren't very rational but still are capable of listening and have worthwhile things to express.