Sorry. I have a point -- towards the end. Even if it's one that gets me downvoted:<p>In my personal life, I've been wrestling with the decision to "do the right thing" and, for example, pay for digital media I consume. Help a friend in need, who doesn't really reciprocate (because, "the children", among other things). Purchase the health care insurance that takes away money I could otherwise spend on immediate treatment.<p>In each area, I've felt increasingly screwed over.<p>Shrinking catalogs, and money I paid spent on lawyers ensuring ever-greater rent-seeking as opposed to actual access to content.<p>My friend's health on the rebound, while mine has suffered, including from the depression induced by their abandonment of our friendship once I was, apparently, no longer necessary.<p>A health care system that keeps jacking prices and trying also by legislative manipulation to push me out the door of coverage, regardless of my best efforts to work with it.<p>In all these matters, I'm coming to think that part of my failed response comes down to a simple matter: Don't pay. Stop paying the very systems and people that or who are screwing you over.<p>So, here we have the NSA, that is (who are) ever more showing themselves to be incompetent with regard to what we hope they would accomplish, and outright aggressive and abusive with regard to us and matters that we consider commercial contract law, not their business, distracting rather than helpful, etc.<p>Helping prop up private IP rights and rent-seeking. Domestic spying. Accumulating so much data on everything that they can't see the needle for the haystack -- so, grow the haystack!<p>I'm hardly one of these bullsh-t "Conservative" (that's with a big "C", to differentiate from the actual noun/adjective, "conservative"), "shrink/starve the government" types. Government plays an essential role: It is the definition of our collective organization and governance.<p>But in some areas, I really want to say, let's simply stop paying for this shit.<p>Because when we pay for it, we only make it stronger. Not the effective governance we aspire to. Instead, this incompetence that also threatens aggression against its own society.