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Uses the US National Weather Service for data. The UI is basic but it has all the maps. Probably overkill and too complex for normal people but good for weather watchers, amateur meteorologists and pilots.

You’re not just voting for politicians, but judges, sheriffs, school board members & many others. Often, you’re choosing the lesser of 2 evils and rarely will you match policy-for-policy with your best candidate, but in what other way do you have to express your opinions?

I research all candidates on my locality’s ballot and bring notes on who I plan to vote for. I sometimes can vote absentee, which is even better.

As I’ve found in many elections, I’m the minority. That’s ok because I believe that when the polls are close, it can pull the candidates closer to my views as they try to appeal to the groups that may give them a few more votes.

I haven’t heard about the terrible longevity. They even top the consumer reports list for EVs. What sorts of longevity issues are there?

I had to scroll way too far down the pageto find this (i trynot to duplicateanother’s comments). At the core of some of thescummy advertisements is profiling, enhanced by privacy violations. Remove the abikity to track you around the internet and IRL and advertisements become less obtrusive.

The other side of the coin is that it costs so little to add adverts to a web page, so why not collect a little cash to help offset your hosting costs? Remove the profiling and Google & friends don’t have a leg to stand on, so then when you visit a cooking blog you see ads for kitchen utensils. No biggie. Looking for auto repair articles? Check out this awesome wrench! At least you now don’t go to show your mom some wedding venue you’re thinking about renting alongside an ad for ED meds from the dark market.

Thanks for posting the contents of the image. This is especially important for folks using a screen reader and the source content is behind a paywall or login link.

I mail a lot of gmail users. Is there a plugin to filter all my outgoing email to inject 0-width Unicode or replace all chars with a visibly equivalent character to prevent LLM training on my data, as I am not a GMail user?

This just means that it’s not about protecting citizens or vulnerable individuals. The fact that the law won’t say the true reason likely means that the real reason is unpopular or at a minimum something that nobody can get behind.

I saw something in The Oatmeal line ago about pairing abstract ideas with concrete ones. IIRC, the example was to tie Bald Eagle extinction to Twinkies (in the US, presumably) such that if bald eagles go extinct, so do Twinkies. It’d be useful to pair the right to privacy with another right, such as the right to free speech (in the US, for example). That way, if these types of laws pass, so would free speech, something that most people seem to value.

I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

Consumer reports recently added a privacy rating to their car ratings. I glanced at it a little last year. I think it rated if you could opt out and the reach of the sharing.

I do have to say that I’m generally disappointed with the discussion on this topic every tine it comes up. The majority of responses go contrast to the question. “Don’t buy a car” or “fix up a junker” are generally not helpful if you’ve already decided that your top priority is to have a newer car. Another thread actually recommended to move to another country where you could walk everywhere. Seriously.

Most often a car purchase is a complex decision making process where you need to weigh multiple, often conflicting priorities where privacy is only one aspect. I get the impression that if people followed the advice of the majority of these comments, they’d be living in a tent off grid, hunting for food to stay alive, but living their privacy dream.

My SO calls this diarrhea of the mouth. It’s quite the affliction.

I understand your point, but there have been some successes in bringing these issues to light: City committee rejects Smart Street Lights surveillance policy in San…

There are others as well, I can’t find them now in the sea of articles. There are also large oranizations that can help to get a community organized.

I think the key is to tone down the message a bit to bring the “normies” into the conversation. Talk about a waste of tax dollars, talk about why you should care about privacy when you have nothing to hide. Talk about how these devices are misused and abused for personal gain and rarely assist in bringing criminals to accountability.

Most people don’t care about privacy but may care if their tax dollars are squandered or if their daughter had a stalker.

There are individual solutions, but of limited success. The most effective method is policy change and the most effective way to change policy is with a collection of people.

Form a concerned community member group, grow the group, approach local politicians and city council members, requesting change.

Check out the deflock and EFF web sites for inspiration.

This is the hardest but most effective method. I was able to change a speed limit in the neighborhood and close a road that was being abused as a traffic light bypass by bringing concerned community members together.

Point taken. It was probably a bad example. I was trying to find an example of something that would be an unpopular topic rare hat would ultimately benefit the community.

I saw somebody suggest that the voting buttons should be used to indicate whether the comment benefits the discussion or not.

I suppose the same would be true of the original post; does the post benefit the community.

For example, posting a blog of why Mitsubishi is the best car maker to a photography forum is a downvote, true or not. Posting that veganism isn’t a sustainable lifestyle to a vegan sub is an upvote, but you’d better be ready for some backlash.

Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have “gone down the rabbit hole”. It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70’s and she “got out” and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can’t find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.

My takeaway was that you can’t come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They’ll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.

If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I’d be super happy.

I think what we’re dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There’s a lot of people who want to do something but either don’t know what to do or don’t agree on what to do. It’s one way that a minority population can stay in power.

What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.

You’re both right. I’d do the same to jump ship before the enshitification sets in. Often, I’ve seen how innocuous policy and feature changes creep in and before you know it, the switching costs are too high.

I had an app on my phone and one day they removed the export function. I only used it for backing up my data but when they raised rates and started slamming with ads, I wanted to leave but could not take my data with me. I ended to just uninstalling and starring over elsewhere.

Also, this is exactly what happened to reddit. They cut the api first so it was harder to take your communities and saved stuff with you.

I find your parents’ mindset interesting. They trust the big companies but not the government (I assume the list is a government list). Do they know that the big companies harvest data and make it available for sale, even to the government? It’s a loophole.

I’ve been using Noscript on firefox for a while. It basically blocks any JavaScript (and other stuff) unless you specifically allow it. It’s not something that I would recommend for a casual user, because it breaks lots of sites. By using it, I’ve discovered how much nonessential stuff is jammed into your browser. Most of it is analytics and tracking. One home improvement store has over 25 scripts when less than a quarter are needed for a functioning site.

Some of the biggest offenders: offenders:

• home improvement stores
• car dealerships
• some big box retailers

Also, a shoutout to decentraleyes, a plugin to use local copies of JavaScript code so that it’s not downloaded (and reported back to) Google.