burnafter185

Well, I think to be fair to this, we had ought to look at the expansion of government agencies. The ATF, NSA, CIA, FBI, FDA, and so on and so forth are all additions to power. It's not a far reach to assume that granted some new ability to "remedy" some social ill, that establishment of some new agency is probable with implied powers and the necessary and proper clause. And it's really not necessarily just the IRS, but setting a precedent, there are various agencies that have been leveraging data-broker deals to track individuals. The more agencies jump on this the closer we get to crystallizing the behavior. If that's the case, it seems like a considerable hazard, which in the end could lead to some real consequences in the future. We've seen democracies turn into empires, and emperors of all kinds inherit those powers. This is the sort of gravitas no man, nor government had ought to be permitted to wield.

They've also got a network of servers to help reduce latency in P2P games, which is actually pretty impressive to me. I don't know how effective it is, but as a GAMER any solution to latency is a great boon.

Yuval Noah Harari in "Sapiens" has an interesting take on religion. Essentially they form a fictional narrative that deigns this and that. In doing so they create a system which can thread together far larger groups of people, we're thought to be near maximum capacity in dealing with 150 people (according to Dunabr's number). But the fictional narratives of religion (and later government, laws, corporations...) help us to identify our personal relationships, and also help us to ascertain expected behavior, both of self and of other. Thus we can drastically expand interoperability between individuals and groups. This is of course entirely contingent on belief, which basically serves the argument issued in "The Social Contract". He defines this as inter-subjectivity.

I think it's a pretty interesting take.