I think it's an investment in ergonomics, like a good chair or a good table. If your job involves staring at text 8 hours a day, $50 for a good font that relaxes your eyes and your brain is pennies well-spent.
This goes double for any contractor who can just write it down as business expense.
It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.
The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.
To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.
We live in times. There is always something: just in Europe, in the 50s and 60s we had the Cold War (and on the other side of the Iron Curtain, outright invasions); in the 70s we had terrorism and economic shocks; in the '80s we had Libya, Lebanon, heroin, AIDS, Chernobyl; in the '90s we had genocide in Yugoslavia, big market crashes and sovereign debt crisis, the war in Kuwait; in the '00s we had 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq; you can go on and on...
The reality is that, as long as we don't start firing nukes, we'll all be alright in the end.
I've anecdotally heard that, as a reaction to that kind of issue, they've shifted all the way towards the other end of the spectrum. But who knows if it's actually true at all levels.
The problem is that it's not a binary choice, and the current situation in Israel is making it extremely difficult for regular institutions to work with defence businesses without avoiding damaging associations in public perception.
Formally-protected cultural heritage is disproportionately located in Europe compared to other continents, if anything because we effectively invented the practice. Italian, French, Greek, Egyptian museums store more artefacts than they can expose at any given time - we're talking 2x-3x.
Not everywhere. In some countries there is no bargaining system, and criminals will just fess up because they want to unburden, or because they might as well get famous on their way down.
But it is true that most national states will have a dialogue with organised crime, and privilege the pursuit of this or that interest over blind punishment. Greater good and all that.
Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security, and then they'll just purge anything "revolutionary" from services. The endgame currently getting pushed by the big players is pretty obvious.
It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is. Major platforms won't be able to host it but anyone who wants it will trivially be able to torrent the latest model and do whatever they want.
Other countries won't care and let people reverse engineer away.
New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.
This goes double for any contractor who can just write it down as business expense.
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