Category: Policy

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I don’t think of myself as someone who wishes ill for others. I genuinely do not wish for anyone to come to harm. But I’m struggling just a bit with schadenfreude right now.

Take, as an example, the wildfires in California. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these fire events were not just entirely foreseeable; they were actually foreseen forty years ago. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people who apparently made the calculation that the views from a house on a hillside at the urban-chaparral interface were so good it was worth taking the risk—and especially so, given that a large fraction of the costs of fighting those fires, and insuring against financial loss, could be spread to other people. People like me.

I think I’m allowed a bit of, “I hope you are enjoying the entirely foreseeable consequences of your choices.”

As another example, take the snow about to hit New Orleans:

By Tuesday, the winter storm will drop freezing rain, sleet and likely several inches of snow onto south Louisiana, including in New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.

I have to admit that when people in red states face an extreme weather event that’s entirely to be expected, a certain part of me thinks, “Well, you could have voted for politicians and policies that would have greatly ameliorated climate change, but you didn’t. Enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of those choices.”

And, as a non-climate example, apparently a lot of black and brown male voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris. I suspect many of them will be surprised and saddened by the utterly predictable deportations of friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, and employees over the next few years. And although I will be very sad about that—sad for the people deported and their friends and family, and also about the dreadful police actions that will be required to make them happen. But I hope I will be excused from feeling no sympathy for the bosses who find themselves having to pay up to get workers who haven’t been deported, and very little sympathy for the people who voted for these policies and find that everything they want to buy costs more.

“Welcome to the entirely foreseeable consequences of your actions as well.”

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I’m only surprised this doesn’t happen way more often. Surely a lot of people go into health research precisely to try to cure illnesses they have. If they come up with something very promising, why not try it on themselves?

A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.

Source: Nature

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Because I am not as clever as Cory Doctorow, I just frittered away 15 minutes setting up my domain to be verified as my Blue Sky handle: https://bsky.app/profile/philipbrewer.net

I post almost nothing there—basically, just links back to my blog here—but you can go find me there with the other cool kids who are not as clever as Cory Doctorow.

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It seems like every business now has its own app, which usually offers remote ordering, as well as discounts. I do my best not to use any of them, because they demand (and transmit to the business) all sorts of private information from my phone. This seems to me like something my phone ought to fix.

Front screen of my phone, showing folders of the apps I use

It ought to be pretty easy on the phone to provide a virtual machine which only passes to an app whatever information the phone owner wants to pass on. For example, you could configure a video loop to provide, if the app wants to turn on the camera, or an audio file to provide if the app wants to turn on the microphone.

You could get quite fancy about things like location, if you wanted to. For example, a fast food app could be provided a random location, but one that was a configurable distance from the fast food restaurant. (I’m imagining that the fast food apps either already do, or soon will, adjust the price based on where you are. For example, if you’re already in the parking lot, they can raise the price, assuming that you’ve already decided to buy from them. They can cut the price if a competitor is closer to your location, to reduce the chance that you’ll stop there instead. The phone could pick a location to maximize your discount, to the extent that people had been able to figure out and share the algorithm.)

These sorts of tweaks would be easy to implement, but there’s no functionality in phones to provide them. It’s as if the manufacturers of the phones want to rat you out to every business with a phone app.

I resist by strictly limiting which apps I install on my phone. But I’d be a lot happier with a virtual machine which would put me in control of what data about me those installed apps could get.

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I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.

I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”

It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.

Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.