Shoshana Zuboff gets the point that the question of "who owns data about you" is a distraction — such "ownership of data" is inadequate to restrain surveillance capitalism.

She also gets the point that "consent" is merely a formality for the people who don't have the moral strength to say no. (You and I do not need to be so weak!)

She does not seem to be aware that a nonfree program is almost surely a surveillance device.

The Chinese government seems to be convinced that China's diminishing population is a bad thing.

The only putative reason cited in this article is that taking care of old people will be a lot of work. Yes, it will, but younger adults could take care of more old people if they are taking care of fewer children. Anyway, In 30 years, robots will do a lot of that work. In addition, a larger fraction of people over 60 will be able to work. The natalists do not respond to these points.

I suspect that an additional unstated reason is that a bigger population could make China more powerful internationally. That is not a moral justification to increase any country's population.

Some claim that the one-child policy had no significant effect after 1981. Others claim that continuing it reduced the birth rate even more. Those claims cannot both be true.

Now that Chinese are becoming somewhat prosperous — which they deserve, as everyone does — China is starting to drive worldwide production of some goods, much as the US and Europe do. That is part of why we are exhausting our planet. We need to reduce the Earth's human population to achieve sustainability.

So we need to reject the idea that the population must not fall.

Australia passed a law that it can bring its prisoners on Nauru to Australian territory for medical care. However, to make sure this almost never happens, Nauru has prohibited all telemedicine for those prisoners.

I can't believe that Nauru would pass any laws to impede Australia from removing its prisoners from Nauru except at Australia's command. But Australia's government can claim that it did not order this, and no one can literally prove that claim is false.

This dishonest cruelty is typical of Australia's perpetual punishment for those who had the temerity to try to flee there.

Yazidi women, former slaves of PISSI, have started a female-only commune in Kurdish Syria.

Imagine if your medical provider could collect data from absolutely everything you did and everywhere you went. Then it could force you to do the healthy thing, all the time.