This wonderful story found by Jim B. must be rescued from the comment section. Oh, don’t you wish this woman could be your doctor!
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
… and on private property. Though I’m trying to move the blog away from knee-jerk reporting of Bad Government News, when S. sent this, I realized it said as much about the resilience of the victims and the obvious fear “their” government feels toward them (armored teams for code violations?) as it says bout the outrageousness of L.A. County bureaucracy. So read it and weep: “A County’s Private Property War.” You desert rats might want to take special notice.
I’m deadlining this week and into next. So a couple of blog entries I’ve been noodling may have to wait. One was to be about attitudes of independence. Rather than making you wait, then drowning you in prose, I thought it might brighten your day (and seriously compress your reading time!) to have the great links I planned to build the story around. Here goes: Windfall. And its backstory. What do you do when your neighbor’s storm-fallen tree creates havoc in your backyard? Stop calling them victims! says a woman who created a summer of joy for herself and her…
… Or at least I hope. A man I know just discovered — to his delight and horror — email apps that help create newsletters, then extensively track who’s opening the mail, when they open it, and what links in it they’re clicking on. “All without their knowledge, and completely legal.” He’s delighted because that can help keep his business competitive. He’s horrified because … well, who wouldn’t be? These things aren’t new and they can be thwarted by receiving email only in plain text format and not clicking on emailed links. When I questioned the ethics of a company…
… to help people in other countries route around gov censorship. Once you get past the irony, do you get the sense that the fedgov will rue the day that it created these? (NY Times link. Tip o’ hat to PT.)
I said I was going to de-focus on bad news and its attendant blogistic knee-jerking. But once in a while the reality checks are too stunning to ignore. Here’s how bad it’s getting: The U.S. Department of Education sends a S.W.A.T team to kick down a door and terrorize a family — for defaulted student loans. (NOTE: Original link is now 404. Thanks to dsd in the comments, here’s another link, with photos. Check his other links, too.) Facebook is at it again. Keep your photos OUT of Facebook, guys. How you’re going to prevent Granny or your best buddy…
This is a follow-up to last week’s “Middle-Class Shrug” blog. —– We hear about economic “pressure on the middle class.” Business media tell us the middle class is being squeezed. Popular media try to break our hearts with profiles of couples who have fallen out of the middle class and into desperation. But the picture they paint is incomplete and distorted. The “squeezed” mostly remain an abstraction. The “fallen” families beloved of the media are, as often as not, a misrepresentation; they’re usually folk who made dumb decisions (mostly by buying houses they couldn’t afford at prices they should have…
A friend emailed this and I had to share. NB: It might not be safe for your nine-year-old to read. —– Harlequin romance — 2011 edition He grasped me firmly, but gently, just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear.”Just relax.” Without warning, he reached down and I felt his strong, calloused hands start at my ankles, gently probing, and moving upward along my calves, slowly but steadily. My…
A few weeks back (thanks to alert blog readers) we read about the notable “shrug” of “Mad Men” ad-man and restauranteur Jerry Della Femina. And surely Della Femina fits the typical profile of a Randian shrugger (i.e. he’s self-made and rich). But what about the rest of the world? A lot of us here have already shrugged in various ways. We’ve left “respectable” jobs to move into the backwoods. Some have given up entirely on “official paperwork.” We’ve done our best to keep a low profile and make a low economic impact. But face it, when we dropped out most…
We all know John Gilmore’s famous dictum: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” True, but with governments doing what they do (and with more bandwidth being centralized in the hands of fewer, larger ISPs), routing around damage isn’t necessarily an automatic thing. From C^2 comes word of a new book (available free in HTML, pdf, and epub, available for purchase in dead tree format): How to Bypass Internet Censorship. Forgive it for opening with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights; to some people in the world, that’s an improvement over what they’ve got locally. I haven’t…