Nowhere in the interview does the architect say that this is an original idea. She explicitly mentions that it is a growing trend, in fact. And also the words "micro" and "mini" don't appear at all in the article.
This is cool because she did a stunningly beautiful job on an 11,000$ budget. Her aesthetic sensibilities are, from the looks of this project, almost perfectly aligned with mine... but I have none of the talent to create something so beautiful in any medium unfortunately. Wow!
I moved to Cambodia on a whim 4 months ago and I have ~14,000$ in the bank. Given my current monthly expenses (100$ rent, 200$ food, 50$ miscellaneous), I'll have the next three years to work on projects and coding (more than enough time) without worrying about making money.
Like others have said, money is not the limiting factor for most people in regards to moving half-way around the world. Being 12,000 miles away from my parents is very hard though; this move was something I absolutely needed to do, but I know if something were to happen to them I would completely regret my decision to come here.
Even if we accept that the NSA is comprised solely of benevolent actors practicing perfect discretion, and will remain so for the indefinite future, the mere act of collecting "everything" is an enormous hazard. OP recognizes as much:
CBS reported that in 2007 the US suffered an "espionage Pearl Harbor" in which entities "broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information."
What's to stop this from happening again to the NSA? They couldn't even implement audit trails internally -- there should be huge doubt as to the agency's competence in securing their data.
Also, OP, did you not hear about parallel construction? How do you rationalize your statement that the NSA "is not a law enforcement agency" in light of this?
some people won't end up in jail for buying/selling/consuming drugs but those are just like little drops in the sea.
No. At any given time, around half of the men and women incarcerated in the US are there for non-violent drug offenses. To date, 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges.
A situation where the demand becomes bigger (because it's not illegal anymore) will only put more fuel onto their war.
This is just obnoxiously wrong. How can you not understand that drug cartels won't even be a part of the picture after legalization? It will be LEGAL! It will be exactly the same as any other commodity. Beyond that, available evidence suggests that rates of drug abuse decrease when punishments become less draconian (see Portugal).