oren_thrall

I guess the key difference is totalitarianism. Totalitarian governments are so all-consuming, and the deceptions that sort of society uses are just profoundly different, because of the way such a deception must be approached.

With everything stemming from one big organization, the question is never if the government did it, but which government agents are the ranking officials responsible, and what are they up to?

When you have a non-totalitarian government, where officials are lesser celebrities if at all, and maybe such a government that acts as a referee for the rest of its citizens, the way it behaves gets weirder, and less predictable.

I guess it's satisfying if you aren't into thought provoking media.

Everyone looking at their phones. Who else?

I think we have yet to see the worst of it for now. But make no mistake, huge sections of jobs are going to evaporate if not by 2019, then in the decade thereafter.

Not just elevator operators and dirigible pilots. A massive chunk of economic activity is going to look silly in a decade. Pretty much everything regarded as a summer job for high school teenagers is game, and that leaves a considerable number of normal, employable adults out in the cold too.

Magazines are pretty much already dead, and everything that went with them shrank. Music and movies have imploded hard enough to show signs of serious stress. Shops, department stores and big box retail are off balance, and will fall over before 2030.

It's going to be pretty rough. Think about your first job, and the summer jobs your high school classmates had. Will your kids hold the same jobs? I doubt it.

I generally get the feeling that people were way more wreckless before the 80's. The level of technology at the time is surprisingly low. Card catalogs and the dewey decimal system represented a nominal level of information technology, rendering many audit trails nearly opaque.

Of course, physical, structural security was bad too. Break a window and climb on in, just repair the window when you leave and maybe that'd be enough to capture some records. If it wasn't a bank or a prison, a building probably wasn't a fortress unless it was extra special.

People cared a lot less about how life turned out 40 or 50 years ago. Alcohol, tobacco, diseases everywhere, and medicine was kind of terrible. You get a feel that risk taking was normal.

Now, people clench up at the thought of breaking any rules. Call it the new technological superstition. We don't believe in god, but we believe in logs.

Solve a murder? In what sense?

By finding the killers? I doubt that very much.

By identifying the corpse? This alone doesn't quite solve the murder, but only unravels the depth of the incident. Really, to do so, someone has to spill the beans, much less than help discover a thread that cracks the case.

Sounds like what you're really doing is inviting a leak. I don't see what else would work.