Perfect human beings don’t exist. Apparently there’s a religion positing there was one perfect human, but we nailed him to a cross for interfering with business.

Here’s a thought. If you were able to get away with Almost Anything ™ and were surrounded by people praising your genius, dashing good looks and boundless generosity towards their persons, how long would it take for you to lose your moral compass, you think? You would pretty soon lose your frame of reference to the normal people, and your empathy would follow. And that’s assuming you’re not 2nd or 3rd generation ultra rich, in which case you never had it to begin with.

Succession is a very good TV series exploring the mindset of such people, if you want to see it in action. Otherwise, history is full of examples - such as Nero, the greatest poet to ever set fire to Rome.

I know there are exceptions, like everywhere else in life. But those tend to cultivate humility as a habit, like other people go to the gym.

Nevermind hackers. Look up “corporation in the middle” attacks, which is a prime example of subverting secure channels at scale.

If you don’t own the hardware, nothing you do on it is truly private. Ditto if someone else has admin access to your hardware (eg BYOD scenarios) . Inserting a root certificate into the OS is trivial in both cases.

I was thinking about the future. Think of a cornered Hitler with access to hydrogen bombs.

Wow that’s even scarier than what I had in mind. Good intentions all the way down.

The fucked up thing about humanity is that we invented our own destruction, put a shiny red button on top and wrote on it “do not touch”. As if there would ever be a scenario where pressing it would make sense. And seeing the rethoric coming out of Russia these days, I can’t help but wonder. Damn, I guess this is what my parents lived with at the height of the Cold War?