You’re not gonna have much luck. If you’re able to clone these kind of cards, its an honest security vulnerability and should be reported.

As an alternative, I’ve seen people suggest using a smartwatch, like the Garmin ones, that have a “wallet”.

Note its not just climate thats causing the water shortage. The article even mentions that a bunch of that water is being used for livestock feed like alfalfa. It takes ~620 gallons of water to make a 150g hamburger and ~859 gallons for a gallon of milk (1). And 56 percent of the water of the colorado river is used for growing livestock feed (2).

Climate change is important to have in the conversation about our rivers drying up, but we can’t forget about the elephant (or cow) in the room.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1470160X11004110?via%3Dihub

2: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html

Idk, that seems like a difficult technical and political challenge, so I don’t think that’s very likely.

However, what I think is much more likely to happen is cameras detecting copyrighted content and not recording it. Or automatic instant takedowns of copyrighted content when the video is shared. Then, all the government would need to do is play copyrighted music when they don’t want you to record.

Oh wait, this is already happening [1] albeit not commonly or to an extreme extent. But really, this is why we need to be very careful about technological enforcement of laws. It can lead to unintended (or intended) negative consequences to civil liberties. And its also why its critical for your devices to always be acting on your behalf, and not for the government or corporations.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/1/22558292/police-officer-video-taylor-swift-youtube-copyright

If he’s anything like me, he’d spend most of that time psyching himself up to actually talk on the phone

I love my current pixel 5. Ive had it for several years now, and the size is really nice. My battery is starting to show wear and the charge port doesn’t connect very well, although I probably just need to give it a good cleaning.

Unfortunately, Google will only push security updates until this October. Third-party OSes like Calyx or Graphine will keep the open source components patched as long as they can, but they can’t fix any bugs in the proprietary pieces.

Although its definitely more expensive, I keep thinking about grabbing a refurbished pixel 7 or 6, since google promises 5 years of security updates.

CalyxOS on a Pixel 5. Its nice and micro G works fine in most situations. When I have the time though, I’m probably going to try graphine os with sandboxed google play and see how that works for me.

This is pretty similar to what I do. Except I just use ngnix to forward http requests through the wireguard tunnel based on the host header. Although theoretically you could also use the TLS server name.

I wonder if you could do this as a community project. Everyone could pitch in to cover the cost of the VPS and join their server to the VPN for small self-hosted projects like a website.

I need to do more reading and thinking on this topic tbh. I used to have a utilitarian/reduction of suffering approach, but utilitarianism, if you really put it to the test, has some weird implications (Peter Singer, The Experience Machine, the ones who walk away from omelas, etc), so I’m exploring a deontological approach, based mainly on Kant, with some minor tweaks.

Here’s my current draft:

Act such that you treat sentient beings always as an end and never as a mere means.

The basic idea is that animals are beings with unique wants, needs, desires, and fears, so its wrong to disregard those by treating them as a mere means to an end.

I like this approach because it solves some problems with suffering based moralities (if I kill someone with no pain but I get joy, is that wrong?) And it also allows for mutually beneficial relationships with animals. For example, if I keep a companion animal, while respecting them as an individual, that’s okay.

It also, I think, is useful when talking about, say, wool. Technically, shearing wool from sheep reduces the suffering of sheep, but the wool industry treats the animals as a mere means to their wool, which is wrong (and that’s reflected in the way sheep are treated on those farms).

I do admit that it has some problems that need to be resolved. First, its difficult for me to argue that sentience is something intrinsically valuable. The difference between using someone as a means and an end simultaneously is also fairly gray. For example, someone could argue that killing animals isn’t using them as a mere means as long as you “respect the animal” and use them for food. Which obviously I don’t condone.

I think I need to read Korsgaard and a few other philosophers lol.