At this point, that mostly seems like extraneous details that would most just lend themselves to rationalizations for people who still don't want to accept the current reality.
That narrative certainly had appeal in decades past when we appeared to be headed towards totalitarianism from the other direction. I was there for it, then. But then the corpo gloves gleefully came off, and the main thing that remains of the prior dynamic is referencing it as a soothing strawman.
Personally I think we should just put a pause on using the word "conservative" as it no longer references any coherent political group in the US, and if it does it actually refers to a contingent of the opposite party from what it used to. Rather I think we should be using "reactionary" or "fascist" in its place - both terms having been embraced by Moldbug/Yarvin, who seems to have been one of the main thought leaders of this radical populist destructionism.
But this doesn't mean I can't read something that has been written still using the word "conservative" as a lazy synonym for Republican, suspend my particular frustration about the terminology, and understand the point the author is making.
> famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders
More concretely, famous for supplying bulk data to the surveillance industry for a nominal fee. That is ostensibly the goals behind this development - all of these companies demanding phone numbers for "verification" and snake oil "2FA" want to reliably dox 100% of their users rather than just 80%.
The other half of this is there is so little choice that a voter does have. On the national level it's just over one bit of information per year. Over 12 years - 3 presidential races, 6 congressional reps, 4 senators. I'm not counting primaries because while they can shape policy, they can just as well unshape policy from people voting strategically ("electable"). And a voter can only vote in half of the primaries, so primaries are already part of the dynamic ushering people into these packaged sports teams of the major parties.
In addition to the obvious fixes like Ranked Pairs voting, I'd say we need a Constitutional amendment bringing back independent agencies with their heads being directly elected rather than merely picked by whomever wins the presidential race. For example you shouldn't have to balance your guess of how you think one president will treat the ATF vs the NSF. Or the President shouldn't have any power over the Attorney General, as it's the Attorney General who should be prosecuting a criminal President, rather than merely being a lapdog in the criminal conspiracy. A race for each agency would also create focus on each agency head's actual results, rather than how the current guy is using a round-robin of all these different departments to create a tough-looking spectacle in one area, only to move on to another one when the actual results start becoming apparent.
We also need the right to recall for all national politicians, for obvious reasons.
The article doesn't even touch on the fact that on these types of keyboards, the F-keys often have bastardized keycaps rather than the regular profile. For example on the Microsoft keyboard example, they're much smaller and probably have crappier travel.
The fundamental problems here are the product design pushes to make everything smaller and also to add gimmicky features that seem like they'd be useful but with the constraints just end up taking something else away - note that the examples of good keyboards are made from standard full size keycaps. The rise of bespoke keyboard designers that using off the shelf switches/keycaps is a constraint that pushes away the other two trends.
I'd think you can get mechanical keyboards with reasonable wireless functionality these days. If the range isn't long enough, run an active USB extension cord around the room and put the receiver under your couch. Laptops are of course the age-old space where keyboards are scrutinized to death.
> It seems like almost no executive order is possible if you need a unanimous agreement of 700 people.
No "executive order" of the type commonly thrown around these days, sure. It's quite easy for "700 people" to agree on settled law when those people are federal court judges. Where the law is not settled, the President should not be making up dictatorial "executive orders" that are intended to be applied with the force of settled law. Legal ambiguity bears a cost, and that cost should fall onto the government itself rather than people being illegally harmed.
With the political mandate for immigration reform, all of these things could have been straightforwardly accomplished through the appropriate avenue of Congress - in fact there already was a bipartisan immigration bill well on its way which was killed! The sensible way to see these brash unilateral executive dictats are for the purpose of creating a mere appearance of addressing the problems, while ultimately just setting the stage for deliberate failure.
That narrative certainly had appeal in decades past when we appeared to be headed towards totalitarianism from the other direction. I was there for it, then. But then the corpo gloves gleefully came off, and the main thing that remains of the prior dynamic is referencing it as a soothing strawman.
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