Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 27, 2026 11:10 AM

@ Bruce,

With regards,

“This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity.”

No it’s way way worse than that.

The game is to “keep the customers away” by amongst other things wasting their time and other resources…

In effect corporations force you to speak to AI that is designed to never allow the customer to get through the system… Thus never gets issues acknowledged let alone resolved.

That way the corporation saves a lot of money and make ludicrous claims about how good they are…

It’s the sort of sleazy behaviour you expect from the likes of the big tech companies but now on steroids.

Clive Robinson • March 27, 2026 5:47 PM

@ Winter,

With regards,

“Historically, the rent seeking class only disappeared temporarily after the whole economy was a smoldering crater. Examples are the plagues, WWI, and WWII.”

Actually the “economy” being cratered was a relatively small almost side effect to the main event of millions of deaths of men and society as a result being cratered due to a lack of labour.

This actually resulted in major changes to society that the “First Estate” tried mostly unsuccessfully go unwind back to before the deaths.

Thus labour was subject to “supply and demand” and the old ways of being tied to the land got broken. Worse the “trade classes” rather than the “labouring classes” ended up being able to “pick and chose” and eventually for protected groups known as Guilds who basically acted on mass for their members interests, not the religious-political “First Estate”.

The power base of politics was untill fairly recently “guard labour” often not the brightest or most honest of people they were often the first to succumb to the effects of war and disease by th nature of their work.

Skilled artisans however were often less effected and seen as worth more, even what many would these days think was not a skill. That is making arrows was in fact way more skilled than most these days realise. Getting consistency in not just the arrows but the bows is something few can do today even with high tech systems and materials.

You put a flight of a thousand arrows in the air you want them to “be on target” for flight after flight as heavy horse and light infantry covered hundreds of yards often up hill to attack well dug in pike men and the like with swords but mostly little armour other than a layered wooden disk with leather and sometimes thin metal strips or chains (mail) designed to turn the edge of a cutting weapon into effect a blunt force club with the blow spread out over a larger area.

In many cases worse than the way Rome organised and deployed forces a couple of millennium before.

But a “Kings Decrees were not sent out by the “men at arms” that formed the guard labour there just were not enough of them and for the most part they were ill educated thugs.

This is where the “men of the Church” came into the picture. They were in effect “lawyers and their scribes” taking “the message of deity” as decided by the “Godhead” of a “Kings divine right” that was promulgated by the lowly priest from the pulpit in every village church. Extracting a form of enforced “rent” in the form of 1/10th of income we still see in a number of European and other Western Nations.

Sensible “Kings” kept “Bishops” and their “rent bases” as diluted and segregated as possible to stop power being built up.

These men of “religion” actually fought quite vicious wars amongst themselves in ways that were mostly not visible to either the Guard labour or land tied common folks or even those of Court.

However whilst priests could preach, illuminate and in some cases administer basic medicine to the masses they did not directly take up arms against each other. They were in effect “building empires” to not just distribute but control the message from the Kings Court thus be “humble advisors” with immense hidden control and little direct risk.

It’s why I talk from time to time about the “King Game” how it came to be and the power of the faux word of deity. But the real target of churches were not “men” but “women”. Like modern cults the idea was to “brain wash children” through their mothers into a “belief system” long before their minds were capable of resisting.

It’s one of the reasons we are seeing Women and Religion being the mainstay of US Conservatism, and thus starting a “brain washing system” that is carried forward into Education.

I will note just two things at this point, that you’re aware of as are many not from the US,

1, It is why the Founding Fathers insisted on separation on Church and State.
2, Why religion has fought back directly through conservative politics and civilian governance.

Which can easily be seen as the reason things are just weird to those not brought up in the US system.

I think many outside the US are now coming to terms and understanding the “cult of personality” that increasingly is highly toxic.

And why I talk of the “Make America Fascist In Anger” MAFIA “Don” Boss that the Executive effectively is currently and it’s close association with toxic / faux religion.

Sadly such Toxic Cult of Personality backed by Religion is being increasingly seen in many other places some blatantly so and just as corrupt as the faux-Kings and Empire building dictators and tyrants of large criminal enterprises.

It is this “toxicity” that starts the wars of conquest and domination that are the more obvious signs that cause the “economy” to become a “smoldering crater” you refer to.