I gave up on this years ago when I realized the only valuable things coming to my email were transactional emails, anyway. The rest is... newsletters and shit.
If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.
Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.
Newsletter that I didn't subscribe to? One strike, you're out (unsubscribe and occasionally report as spam).
Updates from sites I care about (e.g. bank, HOA, etc) that come more than once a year? Create an email filter (gmail -> filter messages like this), skip inbox, never mark as important, apply label XYZ.
These simple hygiene measures don't take more than a few minutes each week and save tons of time and focus.
> Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.
Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.
"his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally -- he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS." -- Cory Doctorow
Yeah but we can't expect them to be able to handle a problem that ( checks notes ) many other kinds of business have been solving since the earliest days of commerce.
I'd be more sympathetic to this argument if all that info weren't a couple subpoenas or search-warrants away at most—in fact, the government can often just pay for access to these things, usually with the implicit threat that if access isn't granted at a reasonable rate, the business may find itself in some trouble. Like, if we banned private parties from collecting tons of info about us, then maybe that concern would have some merit, but we don't, so it doesn't.
Point is, they don't need a national ID to pin you to some cell phone records that place you at location X at time Y, to get your CC usage data, to find out pretty much anything they like, to connect that to a license plate, to snag toll and other photo records of the vehicle from various sources, et c., and the only reason there are any restrictions whatsoever on that ability isn't because we don't have a national ID, but because we're not yet living under a tyranny. Difficulty IDing people isn't the limiting factor.
The public-private hybrid ID we have now is terrible and also carries all the same risks under tyranny as a national ID, which is at least not-terrible.
It's not like having a national ID would mean all the spying-data companies collect on us would automatically be shared with the government—more than it already is, anyway. It'd be the same as now, except with fewer ID-related problems for people.
Yes, the government can trace people right now, if people are not protecting their identity. Because there is no ubiquitous ID, it is still possible for you to protect your identity in almost every part of society. But that possibility will rapidly disappear when a ubiquitous ID arrives.
The difference between rounding up people or not is often just whether it is logistically feasible. Right now, even if they collect every kind of data from every business, it would be a nightmare to attempt to collate it all, because it comes in so many sources with so many differing fields that may be out of date or inaccurate or wrong and would have to be normalized etc etc etc. Impractical to do on a very large scale. Except when there's a single identifier they could look for, which would completely solve the problem for them, and make it easy to round people up.
Companies that sell data to the government without the consent of the public is a huge problem we need to deal with, for obvious constitutional reasons (4th amendment).
This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries: the French tend to regard overseas territories as more vitally part of their country than Americans do. Not sure why, possibly it was a deliberately-cultivated attitude by the government at some point, or maybe the difference arose organically. Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.
Actually, now that I think about it, the sense of "Metropolitan France" is very similar to the term "the continental United States"
American here, I’d disagree about Hawaii and Alaska but agree about the non-state territories. The non-state territories being unable to vote and not having representation in the legislature means that they don’t get as much attention in national politics, so they’re less top of mind. (Yes, both of those situations suck and I wish we would change them.)
The restrictions are tied to geography not persons.
A Puerto Rican in California is entitled to all the benefits of US Citizenship whereas a Californian in Puerto Rico is not. Mostly these are related to welfare and elections. This would be the case for the Californian or Puerto Rican living anywhere in the world outside the US.
You retain voting rights of the last jurisdiction you lived in within the US (states or territories) after moving abroad.
So a Californian that moves to, say, Germany can still vote by mail as though they were in California.
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You're mostly correct about the loss of welfare benefits, though. The only exception being that you do remain eligible for Social Security retirement, although some people may not consider that "welfare".
It's remarkable that you said all of this, I'll be generous and say that someone else completely made up the part about the Jones Act and you just heard them and repeated it.
So a regular (ie mainland) US citizen has to file taxes (& pay if earnings 108k+) of living anywhere in world. Does this stay true if same citizen lives in these territories you refered?
> This is a difference in attitude between Americans and French when describing their countries
I'm not sure that's true - it appears to involve a legal distinction. I see many references to Algeria having been an "integral part of France" where other French territory wasn't. But I don't actually know what the terminology means. Anyway, I'd begin by looking to the legal status France tended to give to overseas territories, rather than the attitudes of the French, to explain this.
> Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.
And this is a perfect case in point; Americans do consider Hawaii and Alaska to be really parts of America, because they have the legal status.
What there is, is a blindspot about territories. Just look at the flag: that there are parts of the United States which aren't States kinda doesn't compute.
Toys—even Lego—are damn near free if you aren't picky and will accept whatever you can find used. Often they're literally free. Kids often outgrow toys before they're worn out or broken, and for some reason people hate giving used toys as gifts so there are just tons and tons of them always being dumped on the used market, with relatively little demand.
You could set out with a $20 bill and outfit a 6-year-old with a totally adequate set of toys, from scratch, by just walking a neighborhood on a yard sale day.
I don't get it either. Every single non-Ikea flat-pack thing I've assembled has had much worse instructions than Ikea. Plus usually been more expensive and lower quality than the Ikea equivalent.
An aid for anyone else who found the usage "knowledges" unfamiliar and distracting:
Knowl"edge (?), n.
2. That which is or may be known; the object of an act of knowing; a cognition; -- chiefly used in the plural.
There is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges.
Bacon.
Knowledges is a term in frequent use by Bacon, and, though now obsolete, should be revived, as without it we are compelled to borrow "cognitions" to express its import.
Sir W. Hamilton.
To use a word of Bacon's, now unfortunately obsolete, we must determine the relative value of knowledges.
H. Spencer.
- Webster's 1913
I figured it was some probably-from-critical-theory-because-aren't-they-always liberal-artsism, but looks like it's just an unusual-bordering-on-archaic sense.
>I figured it was some probably-from-critical-theory-because-aren't-they-always liberal-artsism, but looks like it's just an unusual-bordering-on-archaic sense.
I don't think that's correct (and the age of the dictionary quoted probably isn't helping); if you search Google Scholar for "knowledges", even since the year 2000 you get about 85,000 results. It's a term of art in sociology and anthropology fields, and marginally within philosophy too. It points to multiple understandings of the world which are disparate enough to be their own 'system' of knowledge; multiple such systems are known as knowledges.
> In fact, they (partly) ate passenger pigeons out of existence.
Mann's 1491 suggests this may be a myth, as passenger pigeon remains are nearly non-existent in native refuse piles, so they don't seem to have been a normal part of their diet (at least, before contact). Rather, he paints both their incredible abundance and subsequent demise as consequences of contact with Europe: the boom in the passenger pigeon population may have been a sign of an ecosystem experiencing a catastrophe, resulting from large areas of cultivated land falling out of use as entire cities were depopulated by disease, causing a temporary but enormous increase in easy, available calories for animals positioned to take advantage of it, and of course their decline and extinction is entirely a post-contact event.
[EDIT] I misread you as having written that the native people contributed to the demise of the pigeons, but I think the info's still broadly relevant so I'll let the post stand.
If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.
Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.