Federalism is a red herring. For every case of "federalism is good because it let the states do this good thing" you can find a case of "federalism is bad because it let the states do this bad thing".
Right - we don't know. Even with mass-surveillance, you don't know if they're a criminal, because criminals can look innocent, and innocents can look criminal. That's why you need to do more than just look at the whole world and look for any pattern of criminality - you need targeted detection and analysis.
An example is cops stopping and searching you. If they're looking for a murderer, and they stop people coming out of Home Depot, and find a shovel, lye and rope in your trunk - hey, looks like a murderer! But it also could just be any customer going to Home Depot to get gardening supplies. So they can only stop people if they have probable cause: a reason they specifically think this specific person is the murderer.
(The other reason for probable cause, which is just as valid today as it was during the Framers' time, was to protect innocent civilians from unreasonable search and seizure by the Government, as well as protecting personal privacy. Mass surveillance violates all those principles.)
Or you could just, like, not update things immediately just because you can. It's wild that we now refer to it as a "cooldown" to not immediately update something. The sane way would be each user upgrades when they feel they need to, and then updates would naturally be staggered. The security risks of vulnerabilities are magnified by everyone rushing to upgrade constantly.
I think it's a bit more complex than that, because sometimes even the people outside that bubble still don't want to rock the boat because they're comfortable enough, or worry that things could get even worse.
Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:
> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook).
On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
That is a warning sign if ever there was one.
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