Large parts of the US economy cannot recover as long as people are worried about catching Covid-19. Even if US states allow them to reopen, not many people will make use of them.

The article mentions a restaurant reservation service called OpenTable. I've read it gouges restaurants, so that overall they are worse off due to its existence, but no restaurant can afford to reject it while its competitors don't.

That is a reason to boycott OpenTable, but the strongest reason not to do business with it is that it identifies customers and feeds the surveillance industry. Once I stepped into an interesting-looking restaurant and learned that the only way to dine there was to reserve via OpenTable. Which implied that I would never dine there.

When I make a restaurant reservation, I do not identify myself in a way that a database could track. Usually I give a false name — which will not alter how much I pay for the meal. And I pay only in cash.

Poland says that people can trust its centralized quarantine tracker because the data will be saved for "only" six years and only the Polish government will have access to it. That doesn't make it very trustworthy.

On the one hand, 14 days of location tracking data, which on each occasion reports that you are in the same place (at home), is nothing to worry about in itself. If I were in quarantine for a few weeks, infected with coronavirus, I would not object to being tracked for that period.

I would not let them do it with a portable phone, though, because that device can also listen and transmit at any time, and it can be tracked by others aside from the quarantine authority. I would not install a nonfree program on my computer to do it, either.

I would invite the government to lend me a portable phone with a broken microphone for the duration of my quarantine. Then I would uncover its camera when agents call me through it. I would not care what software they have installed on their phone while I borrow it, as long as it could not do anything except the job it is officially supposed to do. If they wanted to hear my voice as well, they could call my landline at the same time.

On the other hand, the general defeatist attitude in the quotation at the end, "They know all about us, so why resist their systems to know all about us," is a very important mistake. All we need, to force systems to be redesigned so that "they" won't "know all about us", is to throw off the defeatism and start demanding they do so.

*'Halt This Madness': US Drove Last Year's Over $1.9 Trillion in Global Military Spending.*

*Without 'Transformative Change' to Global Economic Systems, Humans Risk Causing More Deadly Pandemics.*

One thing we need to change is the operation of factory farms for meat.

Agribusiness demands reducing the controls against disease, which means moving in the wrong direction. Thus, the US under the saboteur is cutting back on meat inspection, which is crazy, since it will promote the spread of antibiotic resistance.

You don't need to have any preexisting conditions to die from resistant bacteria.

(satire) *[The bully] publicly accused New York health officials Monday of inflating the state’s Covid-19 mortality rate by including African Americans in their calculations of the total dead.*