Right-wing politicians demand deregulation of many industrial activities, including construction, to "eliminate red tape." However, the regulations were adopted to save the people's lives, and deregulation often leads to deadly accidents. Building codes in the UK, and especially in London, are an excellent, terrible example.

The end result is that deregulation benefits businesses (that do or invest in the activities that have been deregulated), while the harm tends to fall on poor people, such as the residents of danger-prone buildings, the inhabitants of "cancer alley", and the drivers that work for Uber.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to pass the Billionaire's Minimum Income Tax.

The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.

If you phone, please spread the word!

It would ensure that every household worth over $100 million is paying an effective tax rate of at least 20% on their total income each year.

Local governments in the UK have apartments that they can rent out or sell, People who bought them now face bills for major renovations that are far more than they can possibly afford.

The UK's new online identification requirement will effectively require all discussion platforms and search engines to verify the age of each user. The obvious way to do that is a repressive and tyrannical way: by making each user show government photo ID.

I reject commercial communications platforms, because they already deny users' freedom in various ways — instance, by demanding to identify the user and/or running their code in the user's computer. However, there are commercial search engines that currently do nothing wrong to the user. Will this law make them all engage in repression? Does the age verification requirement apply to search engines?

GNU Taler can be used to give people a way to verify their ages to a web site without giving the site any way to identify them. But this is not entirely finished yet.

The goals of this bill mostly seem valid to me; indeed, they may not go far enough. For instance, TikTok's practices seem to reduce teenagers' attention spans; should those practices be banned? I am not sure. However, the internet is a threat to democracy if tracks what people do and where they go.

US citizens: thank the Attorneys General who are defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Supreme Court.