> hasn’t been amended in any meaningful way since 1971

Already inserting subjectivity into the discussion to support it's premise. I'm not going to like this article.

> It’s always been hard to amend the Constitution. But, in the past half century, it’s become much harder

Yes, systems find stability, turbulence finds a local minima. Of course a lot more happened early on than later, if you expect a flat, linear, normal distribution of changes to something over time you don't know enough about what you're talking about to be talking about it.

Maybe the constitution has lasted 200 years precisely because it is hard to modify. A constitution should be harder to change than just passing any old piece of legislation. If it's just as easy as passing any law it's not a constitution, just another law.

If you think it's hard to amend the constitution, just wait until a constitutional convention convenes in DC in the next 5-10 years, we are almost there, something that hasn't happened since the Continental Congress, it's going to happen soon and it's going to be very interesting. I hope they ratify the equal apportionment amendment.

Professionals...

A state has an asset. They can assess the population of a certain animal, assess its growth rate, assess the impact it can have, both to human populations and to the ecosystem, and determine how many need to be culled each year to prevent negative impacts.

Now it has a choice. It can get people to pay to do it for them, or of can tax you and pay someone to do it. They can consider the animals assets or liabilities.

A government that would turn something very valuable from a source of revenue to an expense is an incompetent government full of bumbling idiots that have no business governing a territory of natural resources or a population of human beings.

Its like fish bait. You set these feeders out to get them to hang around an area so that when you're ready to hunt you have an easier time finding them. Hunters don't feed anything near the amount of food mass needed to increase the wild population, this idea of an ecological imbalance due to feeding is wildly inaccurate, its like saying fishermen increase fish stocks with fish bait.

There's Briar, its peer to peer and pretty great.

XMPP/Jabber with OMEMO encryption, it runs on federating servers.

Session is a fork of signal that doesn't require phone numbers, there's some cryptocurrency something or other in there I don't quite get, but I don't believe you need it to send messages.

There's Tox, another p2p sort of thing.

Then there's threema, wire, and a bunch of others im not all that familiar with.

Matrix is great, but it leaks a ton of data.