I lived in Los Angeles briefly in 1986. While I lived there, my dad sent me this book:
It talked about landscaping to minimize fire, flood, and mudslide risk, but my key takeaway was, “Only a moron would live in Southern California,” and I moved away before the end of the year.
It was a government publication, so the PDF is available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr067/psw_gtr067.pdf
I have an idea for reducing surveillance capitalism:
Every time a company sells (or gives away as part of a commercial transaction) any information about you (name, location, unique identifier, website you visited, etc.), they have to mail you a postcard telling you what they sold and who they sold it to.
Bonus: Boosts the post office as well!
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.
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.
I’m a bit surprised that the billionaires are so blasé about a fascist taking over the government. Yeah, yeah—maybe their taxes will go down. But maybe not—Trump only cares about his taxes, not theirs.
More to the point, don’t they know what’s been happening to the billionaires in China and Russia these past few years?
I do not understand why anyone would want their drivers license on their phone (iPhone Driver’s License Support Expands to Iowa). It purely facilitates a cop taking your phone away and doing who-knows-what to it.
Maybe on a burner phone….
I bet a few letters of marque and reprisal issued to privateers could put a stop to that.
Russian Oil Flows Through Western ‘Price Cap’ as Shadow Fleet Grows – The New York Times
Cory Doctorow points out a key—and helpful to us—aspect of Project 2025:
These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking “LOOK AT ME” sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.
Source: Pluralistic
If you live in Illinois, and care about vulnerable people, consider signing this petition for mask mandates in healthcare facilities: https://chng.it/WdnkRXGkXx
In a NYT op ed, Mitch McConnell reminds us to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s:
“Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced isolationists after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
Source: Mitch McConnell
Too bad he couldn’t say:
“Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced insurrectionists after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
I just asked my senators and representative to oppose a law that would allow laws to be copyrighted, allowing standards bodies to control access to things like building codes—rules that we all need to follow.
Click that link to join me in doing so. (Link only useful to people who live in the U.S.)
