ricecake

Even then I don't think so. It all took too long, so much so that a lot of people wouldn't even say that it had happened. Like the modern world, people in Rome consistently said that it was in dire condition and was better in the past golden era. Like, for 500 years before it fell people were saying that they were on the brink. People are really quite bad at judging where they are in broad historical terms.

Personally, I doubt this is actually the fall of the US as a superpower/empire/whatever. Too much territory with too many resources with too many people who all identify as the same broad national identity.
How history views this time is anyone's guess. Hoover, for all the damage he did, is largely mentioned because of how he pissed people off enough to elect FDR. It doesn't seem likely at the moment, but it wouldn't the first time an isolationist president has slapped dumb tarrifs on everything to blow-up an already concerning economic situation to try and protect american business while pissing off the world both economically and diplomatically, only to be followed by a president who significantly changed things and made the country better and stronger.

The process of change can be so slow on the historical scale that we still don't know if FDR or trump is the weird one, and they're separated by a long and full life.

However, I will say that if Germans sack DC and depose trump that out of historical consistency we're obligated to declare the fall of the eastern American empire and send a symbolic vestige of power to California, which we will then refuse to call America.

Heh, fair enough. I took a look at some pictures of US grocery sections at European stores and applied the huristic of:

• if it's there, it's not super popular.
• If I would buy it regularly, chances are a European would too, just not as many, see point one.
• if it's awful it's being sold as an amusing novelty.
• if I wouldn't buy it often but I recognize it's American it's a fun novelty or comfort food for the homesick.

Based on that metric, I concluded there was a contingent of Europeans who viewed American peanut butter, BBQ sauce and hot porridge as superior enough to justify spending extra on. That spray cheese was correctly regarded as a disgusting novelty, and that pop tarts, lucky charms and marshmallow fluff are noveltys that are "fine".

Wouldn't have expected you to put relish there though! I kinda figured that was one everyone had that they tweaked a little for regional taste, like mustard.

Oh absolutely not. The collapse of the Roman empire took decades. If you limit it to the western Roman empire it started in roughly 375 and took 100 years. If you look at the full Roman empire, it took from around 375 to 1450, since we sometimes like to pretend that the Byzantine empire isn't just part of the Roman empirecthat spoke Greek more than Latin. (They called themselves Romans, were called Romans by outsiders, and it was created when an emperor split the empire to ease regional management, and both sides viewed it as still being one empire).
Beyond that, the Roman Republic lasted for hundreds of years before the empire.

If we assume the US will follow the same pattern as Rome, we still have centuries of political upheaval, dictators, democracy, splits, unification and odd hats to develop before we're gone. You'll also get weird relics of our government scattered across the world, as places that get pulled into the downfall try to pick pieces up to gain some of the legitimately for using the name of the US. Something like Canada, shattered by a flailing empires attempts to exert control, sees Ontario promise protection to the supreme Court in exchange for ruling that Doug Ford is the new president of the US to legitimize the Ontario-Manitoba alliances seizure of US nuclear weapons in the upper Midwest and taking the seat on the security council. 2000 years from now the supreme Court will still be around issuing legal decrees that staunch believers will strive to live by, even though the government it came from is long gone and DC is just a weird city with insular backwards laws distinct from the surrounding nation(s).

Most of the collapse of the empire was filled with normal lives for the people in it, so that's something to take heart in at least.

I'm imagining peanut butter, BBQ sauce, pumpkin pie filling, and maybe a few breakfast foods like cream of wheat. Not all of our foods are terrible nightmares, they're just either available in different aisles or not super popular to justify being everywhere.

The intersection of "American", "novelty" and "popular enough to import but not enough to fully stock" is probably mostly candy, pop tarts and Lucky charms.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/us-trade-war-german-peanut-butter-lovers-feel-crunch-q55bs3r8t

The last time trump was around and pulled this type of shit peanut butter was one of the things people had issues with, since the US produces a lot of peanuts and peanut butter.

So, the size of the key doesn't directly relate to the size of the cipher, which also doesn't directly relate to security. AES is 128 bit , can have 128, 192, or 256 but keys and is currently not known to have any workable weaknesses.

Largely a cipher isn't weak if guessing the key is the only weakness, since every cipher is vulnerable to brute force. It's weak if you can figure out the message without needing the key.

That's no longer a one time pad. That's closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.

You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that's synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn't trivial, but it can be done.

To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

There are so many issues with this that I haven't thought of, but it's the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

Basically, you're going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it's possible to have a more disconnected system.

It's worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you're far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
If you're under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it's lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn't going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren't related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

What you're looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.

Probably, but a judge can't just override the president on matters of foreign policy, and he's the head of the political party in charge of both houses of Congress.

Relying on the system to save us from the people given control of the system isn't going to work.

The military that he just dismissed the leadership of and replaced with his own people, and the CIA that's directed by his people?

who?. He's the one with the authority.

Well, you can't legally arrest someone without a warrant. We're talking about a situation where the rule of law is being dismantled.

Although, I also wouldn't put it past them to argue that you don't need a warrant to arrest someone for "issuing a treasonous court order" on the grounds that it was done in plain view or that they have probable cause to believe the judge committed said treason, which is a felony and thus doesn't require a warrant.

It's obvious baloney but that doesn't mean it's not a workable veneer of legitimacy.

While trump v America had the wrong ruling, the conclusion your sharing isn't correct.

The ruling shielded the president from personal liability for actions taken as president. It didn't touch the offices ability to be sued or be legally restrained.

If trump, in his capacity as president, violates the law "the president" can be sued and forced to stop, but not trump personally. You can't send him to jail for improperly claiming authority over the FEC, but you can prevent the office of the president from doing so.