*The American dream has been sold and replaced with a Ponzi scheme meant to benefit the investor class.… The American education system has become a way of forcing lower-class citizens into a form of indentured servitude.*

In a previous political note I wrote:

The fascist calls for store robbers to be shot: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/30/donald-trump-california-speech-robbers-shot How about election stealers and voter suppressors?

The point I intended was to show the conclusion that the fascist's own logic would lead to about how to deal with criminals like him. I expected it to be obvious that I disagreed with his attitude towards shoplifters, but just in case, here I say so explicitly.

I disagree with fascist thinking. Neither shoplifters nor election underminers deserve to be summarily killed. People don't deserve to be killed for those crimes even if they have been convicted, because the death penalty is unjust in itself. What we should do to them is give them fair trials, and if we find them guilty, punish them in accord with their actions.

Rigging or undermining an election is a far graver crime than shoplifting. Also, we should excuse shoplifting when poor people are stealing the necessities of life. To put an end to shoplifting we should correct its root cause: poverty. The government should help everyone to have a decent life without stealing.

Highlighting the fallacy in the seductive argument for "effective altruism".

Actions such as fraud, and abuses that are not actual fraud but neighboring to fraud, do have bad consequences: they undermine society's reserves of rationality and trust, just as surely as the corrupter and his followers do. The calculations of "effective altruism" don't measure this harm so they cannot include it in the conclusions.

Russia's internal "security" apparatus proposes to require all web sites in Russia to store visitors' geolocations and "payment information" to give to the state later.

It is not clear to me whether this would require all web sites to _collect_ that information, or only require them to store it and hand it over if they collect it.

In the US, large companies record this information if you ever transmit it to a site which uses it. I don't want those companies to get such data about me. Fortunately my free browser, IceCat, does not know or send my geolocation, and using the Tor network prevents sites from figuring out from my IP address.

As for payment information, most sites impose use of nonfree JavaScript code in order to pay (fsf.org being a happy exception), and I refuse to run that. For that reason, in addition to my privacy, I never pay for anything over the internet. Never!

*Chairman Sanders Releases New Report Showing Major Nonprofit Hospital Systems Exploiting Tax Breaks and Prioritizing CEO Pay Over Helping Patients Afford Medical Care.*