"Criminals having vacations and nice things" wasn't a great framing, "criminal enterprises continue to have revenue to reinvest in more crimes" is the better one.
Alternately they may not believe starving out the criminals will actually work and so foresee different consequences. Like when Google penalized SEO, and so spammers used their networks for extortion instead of spam. Similarly if we killed ransomware, the machinery built to conduct these attacks would not just lie fallow. It's capital that will continue to be leveraged to generate returns. We may not like the next business model they come up with.
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
This is a very narrow framing, and that is what I am trying to get at. Obviously it would be absurd to deliberately provide welfare to criminal enterprises. But our adversaries get a vote in what happens. There is a level of risk at which you are forced to pay the ransom.
If we don't get trapped in this false binary we might consider other options. I think the takeaway from my comment should be, if you want to make it illegal to pay a ransom to these groups, then you will also need to dismantle their infrastructure and organization. Otherwise you're just putting the ball in their court and hoping they'll fumble it. It's not that we're "scared," it's that that isn't a strategy.
Per the IRA after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always."
Those user's traffic is cleanly separable at the destination, so this attack is always possible from some vantage point and isn't a defensible position. So malicious exit nodes are the real threat. Your reasoning would apply better to guard nodes.
It's 2026 and people have had a lot of exposure to AI writing and have developed views and preferences. That's equally a genie that can't go back in the bottle.
Regardless, when people claim not to have generated something they demonstrably did, that damages their credibility and suggests the document is unreliable.
It's one of those cases where cringe becomes creepy. When someone is putting on a really transparent performance, and to the rest of us it broadcasts their insecurity, and they ought to know that but don't - it's eerie, it's mired in an uncanny valley. Too much to be a joke but not enough to plausibly work. When I see her back in the day with the turtleneck and the affected voice, it gives me the willies.
That said no it is not particularly important. But striking and memorable. The voice is the most striking part but I don't think it would land with me if not for also the turtleneck and the other Jobs knockoff stuff.
If the price of housing the rises, the cost of living will rise, employees will demand raises, and the cost of providing services will increase. Even if housing prices remain flat, there will be inflation leading to the same result.
But I agree that pinning all hopes of class mobility or comfortable retirement on perpetually increasing housing costs cannot work for very much longer.
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