Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press

The collapse of journalism and democracy in the face of the internet is not inevitable. To save democracy and the free press, we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons.

The digital commons shouldn't belong to any single mega-corp. It belongs to all of us. Help in the fight by running your own domain and POSSE your content to the silos.

7:20 am, Izumi-ward, Yokohama, Japan

Morning walk between the local elementary school and a farm.

micro.blog #ADayInTheLife photo challenge.

Pre-dawn 5km. Was hoping to find a shot for the micro.blog day in the life challenge while about, but it was too dark. Will try again later.

• It rained all week from Typhoon #14. Thankfully it did a U-turn as it got close to Japan and the winds never picked up.


• We've started planning a small trip to Moomin Valley Park next month. It's only an hour and a bit by car from our house. It's the only Moomin park outside of Finland. It will be my first time to Saitama prefecture and first time leaving the Yokohama/Shonan area since February. Looking forward to it.


• Nils gave a thought provoking talk that tries to answer the question:

Is it ethical to invest time into learning and using technologies from companies that pay little or no taxes?

Though I tend to naturally prefer community based tech (python, django, vue.js) compared to corporate open-source tech (swift, react etc..) I hadn't much considered the ethics. The gist is that taxes benefit society as a whole, so we can have collective goods like roads and schools. Also as these huge companies don't pay their taxes, it allows them to amass vast fortunes for an unfair advantage over smaller companies that do pay their taxes. This advantage puts these smaller companies out of business, reducing choice and the total number of good well paying jobs.

In terms of software when these large companies make these open source projects - what actually happens? People (non-employees) spend their time/free time learning and using their tech, improving their tech, and further entrenching the large corporation's advantage.

Rather than learning an evergreen skill, like JavaScript, and improving JavaScript for everyone people spend their free-time working for corporations like Facebook on projects like React by filing issues, fixing bugs, making components for, writing blog posts about and improving the image of the company - for free.

It seems so backwards, doesn't it?

Slow afternoon 30 minutes after a week of rain. Felt good to get back out there. 🏃

Watching trains again while a guy dressed as Spider-Man plays the violin.🚊🎻

Coffee and homemade orange scones are exactly what the doctor called for on this rainy day. 👨🏻‍🍳🧈🍊☕️

I started watching Long Way Up this weekend. What a fantastic show and fascinating journey see - from the tip of Argentina up to L.A. on electric motorcycles.

As a fan of electric vehicles the first few episodes are bittersweet as they figure out how the bikes and charging work. Cold weather shortens the lifespan of any battery, so starting the journey at the end of winter and traveling through remote areas without a solid grid increases the challenge to a new level.

Seeing the beauty of these towns makes me want to visit Argentina and Chile so I can see it with my own eyes. The flight from Japan would be brutal as most flights to South America from Japan transit in Houston or L.A. – so a 10 - 14 hour flight to make it halfway.

Harris County released a new ballot tracking website. It looks clean but is broken because it won't send your request if you're using uBlock Origin or Firefox Focus on iOS.

On mobile I get a helpful error message about I don't allow third party cookies. On desktop it fails silently. I know that devs behind it are doing their best. It must be quite difficult to build this simple-on-the-surface-but-regulatory-compliant-complex service on what is likely had a short deadline.

Technical nits aside, it does work as advertised. It took over a week after delivery but my ballot has been marked as received. Progress.