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When OS X was introduced, asking on Apple forums how to run as root was almost a daily question.

Most consumers don't care about security, making it easy to disable just opens the floodgates of their systems.

Yeah but as a counterpoint, most Hacker News users have used Linux at one point, which lets you run commands like `rm -rf /` as root. I think it's fair to allow power users to easily disable these protections.

Ironically, coreutils introduced[1] a requirement to add `--no-preserve-root` to `rm -rf /` way back in 2003, so that particular example doesn't really support the counterpoint you're trying to make.

EDIT: clarity

[1]: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/34e3ea055721ec...

That's because it was abused to troll inexperienced users.

"How do I do X? Just run this as root." Sometimes slightly disguised, but more often not.

I think the bigger problem is it is not very hard as a power user to unknowingly try to delete /

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