The dream I have is someone making a phone that is purpose-built to be secure against state actors. Unfortunately, this makes very little economic sense, and probably won't happen (maybe if some rich person started a foundation or something?). The phone would need to have pretty restricted functionality and would not be generally appealing to mass market consumers.

As it stands, securing a mass market modern smartphone, even from just remote attacks, is just intractable. We should not bury our heads in the sand and wishfully think that if they just spend a little more money, close a few more bugs, and make the sandboxing a little better, somehow iOS 16 or Android 13 will finally be completely secure against state actors. The set of features being shipped will grow fast enough that security mitigations will not someday 'catch up'.

This is the next best thing! The more we can give users the freedom to lock down their devices, the more the vision of an actual solution comes into view. This is the first step towards perhaps our only hope of solving this someday - applying formal methods and lots of public scrutiny to a small 'trusted code base', and finally telling NSO group to fuck off.

Even this dream may not pan out, but at least we can have hope.

Housing absolutely should be a profit center. Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone.

High housing costs aren’t a failure of the free market - they’re a failure of central planning at every level of government.