Some parents of sailors on the Moskva know their children are alive. A few have been told that their children are dead. But many others can't get any information.

The drastically wasteful business of "fast fashion" is accelerating into even more wasteful "ultra-fast fashion".

Its predatory marketing sets up a competition of consumption which wealthy "mean girls" can use to sneer at and exclude other girls. It amounts to an addiction, but an addiction of social groups rather than individuals, so that your social circle would pressure you do join in.

It seems to be bad for almost everyone, except the few who win the game and don't get in money trouble, and the few business owners that succeed.

I wonder what happens to the now-unfashionable purchases of a few months ago. Are they given away to frugal people?

Payment companies and stores save money by pushing people to pay using digital systems, but if we don't maintain the use of cash, we will all lose.

Long before there was any system for digital payments, a think tank predicted that those systems would be every repressive regime's dream.

The main reason I insist on paying only cash to buy products is not my own privacy -- though I appreciate that too -- but rather to defend the privacy of the heroic journalists and their heroic sources, the whistleblowers.

We all depend on them, for our freedom.

Please support the defense of cash. When you leave the house, bring a reasonable amount with you for the day's purchases, and use the cash at least sometimes.

If at a store you don't have enough cash, that doesn't mean you have to pay with a card or give up. You can go to an ATM, get cash, then return to the store. With that method, the bank learns only where you were when you got the cash, and the store doesn't learn anything about you.

Beware of the defeatists who predict that surveillance is (or will become) so complete that there is no use even trying for privacy. They get a perverse pleasure from urging people to despair and give up. You can tell them, "On something important, only fools give up without a fight."

Industry groups representing companies that systematically eliminate privacy are taking control of the development of state laws that supposedly aim to protect privacy.

These laws are mainly based on trying to limit how companies can use data once collected. That approach is inherently inadequate: it may reduce certain annoyances but what it can't provide is actual privacy. To do that, we must limit the collection of data. and that can only be done by limiting what kinds of data systems can be designed to collect.

There is evidence that Ukraine has used cluster bombs in fighting the Putin forces.

It appears that Ukraine used them on Putin's military, not on civilians. But regardless of who the immediate target is, cluster bombs tend to harm civilians later, because the bomb-lets lie around and can be set off later by civilians, even children.