And yet you all are still using SMS two factor authentication. Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?

How does that help for a package of meat that’s leaking meat juice?

I think that there are no all or nothing questions in something like this. I think the lions share of ocean plastic comes from third world countries where ‘dump it in the river’ is the most common form of trash disposal. I think that reducing harm is helpful, whether it’s a little or a lot. I would agree that tackling small issues with extremism while ignoring big ones is performative. For example, telling people in California to take 2 minute showers while ignoring the giant agricultural operations are wasting millions of gallons a day on inefficient air spray sprinkler systems.

Focusing on us, I think keeping plastic out of our landfills is generally a good thing. We use plastic for millions of things in our society. It is simply not feasible to completely switch off plastic, not anytime soon and probably not ever. But reducing or removing single use plastics does an awful lot.

So I say let’s replace single use plastic starting in places where it can be done easily and cheaply, where there are readily available cost effective alternatives. That is especially true for plastic film, like plastic bags, that can’t be recycled in a normal recycle bin.
Use paper cups instead of styrofoam. Put your take out food in aluminum foil trays or cardboard clamshells. Use paper bags for grocery check out.

And for the vegetables and meats, I don’t suggest banning those because you would get a lot of pushback from both stores and consumers.

This is a good idea. Rather than trying to collect little penny fees here and there, just get rid of the stuff. We don’t need it, we have other options.

I would like to see most single use plastic grocery bags go with that. I think there need to be exceptions, for example produce bags or meat department bags. I haven’t seen a good replacement for those yet. But at the checkout, or for carry out food, just get rid of them.

I don’t think there’s nearly as many as you think. It’s a perception bias, the few that there are stick out a lot because they are hilariously stupid so you read about them a lot and it seems common.

Keep in mind that in the US, about half the households are armed. And the half that own guns own enough guns to arm the other half. There’s more guns than people in this country. If they’re truly was a significant overlap between very stupid people and gun ownership, the nation would be like a roadrunner cartoon with Yosemite Sam type a shootouts and people firing into the air on every street corner. That is seriously not the case.

They generally are.
Problem is there is a tiny little overlap in the middle of that Venn diagram, and that tiny overlap seems to be responsible for a great deal of problems.

Yes exactly. This is a big part of why some repressive countries are starting to require identity registration in order to participate in social media. Arresting people is unnecessary if you can simply stamp out non-preferred speech at the point of discussion.

All the crypto in the world won’t help if you do stupid stuff and have crap OPSEC.

A big part of that is stay under the radar. If I were NSA I’d be running a great many TOR nodes (both relay nodes and exit nodes) in the hope of generating some correlations. Remember, you don’t need to prove in order to raise suspicion.

So for example if you have an exit node so you can see the request is CSAM related, and you run a bunch of intermediate nodes and your exit nodes will prefer routing traffic through your intermediate nodes (which also prefer routing traffic through your other intermediate nodes), you can guess that wherever the traffic goes after one or two relay hops through your nodes is whoever requested it.
If you find a specific IP address frequently relaying CSAM traffic to the public Internet, that doesn’t actually prove anything but it does give you a suspicion ‘maybe the guy who owns that address likes kiddy porn, we should look into him’.

Doing CSAM with AI tools on the public Internet is pretty stupid. Storing his stash on cell phones was even more stupid. Sharing any of it with anyone was monumentally stupid. All the hard crypto in the world won’t protect you if you do stupid stuff.

So speaking to OP- First, I’d encourage you to consider moving to a country that has better free speech protections. Or advocate for change in your own country. It’s not always easy though, because sadly it’s the unpopular speech that needs protecting; if you don’t protect the unpopular stuff you jump down a very slippery slope. We figured that out in the USA but we seem to be forgetting it lately (always in the name of ‘protecting kids’ of course).

That said, OP you should decide what exactly you want to accomplish. Chances are your nation’s shitty law is aimed at public participation type websites / social media. If it’s important for you to participate in those websites, you need to sort of pull an Ender’s Game type strategy (from the beginning of the book)- create an online-only persona, totally separate from your public identity. Only use it from devices you know are secure (and are protected with a lot of crypto). Only connect via TOR or similar privacy techniques (although for merely unpopular political speech, a VPN from a different country should suffice). NEVER use or allude to your real identity from the online persona. Create details about your persona that are different from your own- what city you’re in, what your age and gender are, what your background is, etc. NEVER use any of your real contact info or identity info.

Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500. After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.