Something I'm big on in life is that the worst thing you can say to someone is that you don't understand them. To not understand someone is to deliberately not

Something I'm big on in life is that the worst thing you can say to someone is that you don't understand them. To not understand someone is to deliberately not give the issue thought because you're so deeply embedded in the idea that you have enough background on an issue to decidedly say that you are right and that the reasoning behind your stance is flawless, and thus that they are wrong. I believe that everyone's beliefs and actions are understandable. They might used flawed logic, or they might value things differently than you, but I believe 100% that everyone on this earth uses reasoning for every action and opinion we have. But when it comes to politicians trying to ban encryption and automakers trying to ban me from editing bits on a memory chip that I got as a part of purchasing one of their cars, I really am unapologetic when I say I really don't understand them. I completely and utterly lack an ability to get into their heads. It would be fascinating to lose my knowledge of everything I know about computers for a day and give these issues thought. To have computers be mystical voodoo magic would be an amazingly different world. If I had to give it a guess, that's probably what I'd say. Politicians and automakers and middle aged Edward Snowden haters all lack an idea of what is possible and what is unpractical when it comes to computers. They lack an appreciation for just how much commonality there is between the computer running a McDonald's register and the one making sure their car doesn't kill them. Politicians think we can just "ban" encryption, as if this isn't some mathematical concept with freely-available professionally made implementations. They think Apple has gone to great lengths just to implement their end-to-end iMessage encryption... when in reality they almost certainly took the path of least resistance and merely stand on the shoulders of giants that collectively implemented encryption for them. PR reps for automakers think of code in such an abstract way that they think modifying it must be terribly difficult and thus inherently malicious, when in reality their programmers stood on the shoulders of giants and used the same common interfaces that every programmer uses. Hacking their car was probably done by a curious man decompiling the firmware which they pulled off via JTAG or a test clip. They think Edward Snowden must have been sneaking around in underground tunnels with a ski mask and plugging his laptop into servers, when in reality this was just a drive that was mounted on a machine he used. Tl;dr: Programmers all pretty much follow the path of least resistance. The general populations lack of background makes them think that things are much more difficult and thus deliberate than they really are.