kozak_

I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.

First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.

Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.

But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.

Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the old gentleman is looking for roads that no one uses and are unusable to add to an official Vermont map?

What is the practical aspect to this if the entire point of the Act was to clean up the legal landscape from unused roads?

Reminds me of some other quotes from the past.

"There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States."—T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission commissioner (1961)

"Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'"—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006

You have the right to use coarse language, but if you take advantage of that right in some businesses, they reserve the right to ask you to leave.

Same thing here, you have the right to pick your sexual orientation, but this law codifies the right of the business to say "we reserve the right to not serve you because it deeply offends us".

You might not agree with them but understand that for some folks and the deeply religious, this goes against their conscience and against their beliefs. This law is meant to allow them to say "NO".