Thanks to Galtisalie for taking 12/22, and for the rest of my ACM comrades who kept this going over the last two weeks. I was on a great road trip with my son. We visited family and friends, state parks, botanical gardens and an aquarium, had Christmas breakfast at Denny’s (the food was bad, and the company good), barely escaped a snow storm in the mountains of Los Angeles County, and attended my son’s first rock concert.
Along the way, we saw that inequality is as great as ever. Our hotel in San Francisco was a block or two away from high end shopping on one side and alleys of unhoused people living in tents on another. Not that San Francisco is an exceptional case. Trump lies, big surprise. California does not have the highest percentage of unhoused in the US, and every city I have ever visited in the US has profound disparities. We don’t have to all be identical, but there is no reason why we can’t feed and house every person.
Now, I will continue with a couple of updates. Discuss these or other topics as you wish.
On a side note, if you are still seeing a strange man in a red suit around your house, should you have one, consider telling him what I do. Or, maybe you can be nice.
Who are we dumping our garbage on now?
Here is an update on the status of strangling the world with plastic.
After China cut back on engorging its economy with recycling some of our waste, which also happened to pollute it with the remainder of the detritus that survived an arduous journey through recycling bins, sorting centers, rail cars, and container ships, humanity came to a conscientious consensus on how to best make, package, transport, use and dispose of stuff. Except, not. In actuality, the market looked for somewhere else to dump it. Hey, Malaysia, how about you? You look like you could use our magic recycling economy boost. Just show us where to dump off our garbage deliver your starting material.
While we are pushing for the circular economy to go local and global, guided, as it must be, by and for the public, we can try to follow the Union of Concerned Plastic Manufacturers advice to reproduce all of the benefits of a well regulated economy through fastidious cleaning, sorting, and proper disposal of all bottles, cans, paper, newspaper, boxes, bags, clam shells, wrapping, utensils, batteries, toys, electronics, furniture, pipes, conduit, appliances, building materials and vehicles.
Not saying we shouldn’t recycle. Am saying that markets alone aren’t working. What are the full lifetime costs of plastic and the rest of our waste anyway? Right now, we recycle a few select materials that can be cheaply made back into other stuff. Dumping remains common, in Malaysia or other targets markets. Pushing the responsibility to consumers and waste management does not address where we can save in manufacturing, marketing, and consuming.
It also doesn’t help to ignore the costs of plastic in our environment until the end. Getting to it before it became holy shit, we’ve got a shit ton of crap might have helped. No time like the present anyway.
Small, but encouraging progress on the cyber front
The California Consumer Privacy Act just became law in, you guessed it, California.
The intentions of the Act are to provide California residents with the right to:
- Know what personal data is being collected about them.
- Know whether their personal data is sold or disclosed and to whom.
- Say no to the sale of personal data.
- Access their personal data.
- Request a business to delete any personal information about a consumer collected from that consumer.[9]
- Not be discriminated against for exercising their privacy rights.
Now, we just have to work on other states and/or the federal government.
Throw the CA law on the pile with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and the UN’s inclusion of privacy in it’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we might have a little progress here, though there is still a long way to go, especially with Trump and Republicans seeking to stifle regulations against their latest dishonest and unethical means to hold power.
Of course, tech companies would be less likely to collect and sell our data if they didn’t depend on it for business models. But, then that gets into exploitation and money being central components of capitalism, which isn’t going away this year, so we’ll have to keep pushing for regulation. Even if we can manage the tech companies, we’ll still need to protect against invasive governments. China’s path to a totalitarian surveillance state relies on technology. Let’s try to keep that from spreading.
And, with that...
Happy New Year
Consider avoiding two digit years on your checks, contracts and such for this year.
Feel free to add your favorite holiday topics to mine in the discussion below.