Site original : Richard Stallman's Political Notes
Senator Warren and Rep. Andy Levin propose federal funding to increase Covid-19 testing and contact tracing as the base for freeing the US of the disease.
This would be a great step towards the task of world-wide eradication.
Many governments have increased the use of location tracking by portable phones, in the name of Covid-19, even though that location data is not precise enough to be of any use for contact tracing.
However, human rights organizations are fighting back.
As for me, I don't want to carry a personal tracking device. And they can be used also as listening devices. I have never had one and I never will.
My not having one also assures I will never use the other systems that piggyback on a mobile phone to track or identify people. No contact-less payments. No use-a-text-message-to-log-in.
Please join the resistance against pressure to use systems that track you. Just start saying no, even to some of them, and mention this in your mail signatures, your profiles, etc.
Releasing prisoners convicted (or merely accused) of nonviolent crimes not only protects them from Covid-19. It helps protect the whole community.
The article mentions the figure of "5,000%", which always tends to mislead.
Percentages are a clear way of stating the difference between two figures only when the percentage difference is under 100%. For an increase which more than doubles the figure, using percent to represent it is a method of exaggeration. Instead of saying "5,000% more", say "50 times as much." That is a big increase indeed, but has nothing to do with 5,000.