At least in the US, this all has exposed a lot of the problems with various systems, some of which are still not getting very much attention. And there are structural problems this will lay bare, such as the injustice as well as economic stupidity of not having public single payer healthcare. There is unacceptable inequity.

So shouldn't anger and resentment be justifiable?

I guess I'm not sure what the author is looking for. For everyone to pretend the problems laid bare by the epidemic don't exist?

My guess is the next wave of this is when the lockdowns are lifted because the economic costs become too much to bear, and then the deaths and illness still increase — when people realize you can have a lockdown and still afterwards have a growth in cases because there's no vaccine or herd immunity. I suspect things will return to normal and become better in many ways, but become very unfamiliar and worse in others.

A lot of these "elective" "nonessential" services are really preventative.

This was plainly brought into view for me with a dental procedure I had to cancel/reschedule. It's deemed non-essential, but is necessary to prevent me from losing an entire tooth or two. If it's not done reasonably soon it's only a matter of time before it turns into an emergency dental procedure.

The ribbon bar was when I started noticing this mess. I liked the extended tab concept but the UI was inconsistent because some things were accessible through the tabs but others you had to go through the button, in a way that has never made sense to me.

I do blame monopolies for this in part. When some single thing dominates (office suite, web browser, whatever it is) the comparator shifts. It's no longer "how do these 6 things compare", it's "is what's new here entertaining enough and not too much of an inconvenience to cause me the pain of abandoning an entrenched tool?" So then users convince themselves the improvements are progress because it's always implicitly compared to the alternative of struggling against the lack of choice of other products.

That's not all of it by any means, but I do think it created a context for what's deemed acceptable ux-wise.

MacOS isn't all it's cracked up to be though and is maybe another historical source of this mess. I use osx daily and it's much, much, much too easy to lose track of open windows. Dialogs open and you don't even know they're there, and you find windows open that you thought were closed weeks ago.

This doesn't happen with a lot of other OSs, or at least used to not happen.

My favorite UX has always been through KDE, although I haven't had the opportunity to as much as I used to because of work reasons.

Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? It seems in general like they have a clear bias toward "taking the security system at its word", even when common sense would dictate otherwise in any particular case. It's sincerely puzzling to me why national security entities seem to get treated so differently and I wonder if there's some legal precedent or consideration I'm not aware of.

Like in this case, I fail to understand how releasing the number of requests would have any security bearing.

If what you mean is why do most of the judges tend to rule the same way in this area, it's due to precedent, they don't really have a choice. The balance (or lack of one) you note was mostly established by higher courts years ago.

No judge wants to be responsible for a future terrorist attack or degrading intelligence capabilities against other foreign adversaries, regardless of whether the threats are real, perceived, and/or imagined. In this case, releasing the numbers might shine light into their capacity for investigations. In other words, sometimes security/capability gains more from perception than reality.

That was my explanation for awhile, but at some point the logic of the security arguments started to seem patently flawed. Also, judges seem to be ok with all sorts of judgments against domestic (state and federal) entities. It's almost as if when national security is mentioned, everything is thrown out the window. It's like a magic codeword or something and I don't understand the legal basis for it.

You make a good point re: investigatory capacity, but it seems even that is fuzzy and could maybe be handled through other means (aggregating time periods or using some kind of required delay).

I think the issue is we’re trying to explain something irrational (a fear that something might happen) with logic. Judges make similar judgements in protective/restraining order cases. They would rather err on the side of caution, because as someone else mentioned, the downside to allowing the invocation of national security has a perceived minimal downside (minor inconvenience), vs. the downside of a terrorist attack taking place is much more catastrophic. Anyways, don’t think anyone is wrong here, just some theories.

I can’t imagine what “terrorist attack” would depend on knowing the exact number of requests, and fails if only a rounded number is known. Can you suggest any possible scenario?

It’s not about a specific attack or their being a direct connection between the number and an attack taking place. It is about concealment of the capability/capacity the Government has to counter those attacks. I could see releasing the number giving insight into the limited capability the government has to initiate, process, and follow-up on these types of Orders. Who knows, though.

I agree. Kind of like Pascal's Wager[1], but for terrorist attacks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

When the government pays your salary and controls your workload and picks whether you get promoted...

My first guess would be that they are following the law as written, as is their job.

And it's hard to challenge such law as unconstitutional because no right to privacy is explicitly written into the constitution.

I guess you can level the blame at Truman. Eisenhower himself tried to warn us against going down this road, but the game had already been rigged against us.