[Plura-list] Free Tacocat game, Adafruit's open source PPE, coronavirus jubilee, Private Kit, Italian mayors enforce quarantine

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Tacocat, a free print-and-play game from the Exploding Kittens team:
Super smart endgame!

* Adafruit offers open source PPE manufacturing: They're retooling and
available to help

* It's time for a coronavirus jubilee: Debts that can't be paid won't be.

* Medicare for All is an economic stabilizer: Private health insurance
turns recessions into depressions.

* Private Kit, a free/open app to give you control over your location
history: Doing contact tracing without invading privacy.

* Italy's mayors berate quarantine-breaking citizens: "Does your dog
have an inflamed prostate?"

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming
appearances, current reading

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🛰 Tacocat, a free print-and-play game from the Exploding Kittens team

Need a game to play while stuck at home? Elan Lee and Matthew Inman,
creators of Exploding Kittens, have just released a free, print-and-play
game called Tacocat, which we just played at home, and it's *fun*!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15UT6cElLNpxHG4er68DLxXwSrqbOTq2JFNFYzrmfO8I/edit#heading=h.8osmzd2mkump

It's a card game that's a bit like War, but with tons of little
strategic gracenotes, including a totally brilliant endgame that makes
the win up for grabs all the way to the very end. It took a couple of
hands to figure out this complexity, but once we did — wow!

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🛰 Adafruit offers open source PPE manufacturing

Some of the all-time heroes of the open source hardware revolution are
the folks at Adafruit, a woman-owned, 150-person OSHW company in lower
Manhattan. They've been deemed an essential industry and are retooling
to make PPEs.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/22/covid/

They're VC-free, debt-free and profitable, and they're paying their 150+
employees through the crisis. They're manufacturing open source hardware
face shields, ventilator components and electronics.

If you need manufacturing, design, logistics, or production support for
PPE projects, contact covid19 at adafruit.com.

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🛰 It's time for a coronavirus jubilee

The word "jubilee" comes from Hebrew for "trumpet," because every 50
years, the trumpet would be blown to signal the forgiveness of all
personal debts. New kings once routinely announced debt forgiveness upon
their ascending to the throne.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubilee-is-only-way-avoid-depression/

Forgiving debts meant that the workforce stayed intact and productive,
instead of falling into debt-bondage or mass migrating (think of Greece
and its mass exodus after the recent imposition of debt austerity by the
EU).

2008 represented a chance to write off bad mortgages. Instead, we
evicted. Today, wealth inequality is far worse than during the last
crisis. The new crisis has the potential to make inequality go
supercritical.

The decision of Germany's creditors to force the country to pay war
debts after WWI caused mass immiseration and paved the way for fascism.
After WWII, the allies wiped 90% of Germany's debts off the books,
triggering the nation's "economic miracle" and soaring prosperity.

As Michael Hudson writes in the Washington Post, if the US can afford a
$4.5T quantitative easing package, it can afford jubilee for student
debt. And private creditors who wipe out bad loans – ballooned by fees
and penalties – will long have been made whole on the principal.

Leaving the "accruals" (fees, etc) in place, "actually subsidizes bad
lending."

"Debts that can't be paid won't be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out."


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🛰 Medicare for All is an economic stabilizer

The pandemic is revealing the extent to which private health insurance
makes a bad situation worse. At the exact moment that we need *more*
coverage, people are losing their jobs (and their coverage).

As Nathan Tankus writes, Medicare for All would be a great,
countercyclic automatic stabilizer – buffering economic shocks for
faster recovery. The current US system is an accelerant, making bad
situations worse.

https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/medicare-for-all-is-a-great-automatic

Losing your job (and coverage) due to coronavirus, then losing your
savings due to a broken ankle or a kitchen-knife slip? That's a recipe
for turning deep recession into a new depression.

In discussion with Matt Taibbi this week, Noam Chomsky makes the point
that private health care treats excess capacity as uneconomical and
inefficient: "You should have just enough beds for what you need
tomorrow. You shouldn't prepare for the future."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/noam-chomsky-covid-19-useful-idiots-podcast-970047/

Under the finance sector's theory of shareholder capitalism, maintaining
an extra hospital bed is a form of theft from your investors.

Neoliberalism treats all redundancy and resilience as "waste" and
neoliberal raiders delight in selling it off.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#righttoresilience

Whether that's the corporate raiders who bought up newspapers and
restaurant chains and sold off their real-estate and rented it back –
leaving them grievously vulnerable to rent shocks – or the airlines'
hub-and-spoke system that means one airport outage tanks the system.

Our supply chains – offshore, dependent on single points of failure –
and the use of DMCA 1201 anticircumvention rules and other dirty tricks
to suppress independent repair and third-party parts manufacture turn
the devices we rely on brittle, making emergencies into crises.

What's worse than having your only computer go down at the start of a
pandemic lockdown? Having your only repair depot shut down for the
duration with no way to retrieve it.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/21/apple-store-repairs-coronavirus/

As Chomsky says, neoliberalism leaves us totally unprepared for a
crisis. "What we're good at, what our leaders are good at, and have been
very good at for 40 years, is pouring money into the pockets of the rich
and corporate executives while everything else crashes."


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🛰 Private Kit, a free/open app to give you control over your location
history

Private Kit is a free/open location-tracking app that does not expose
your location data to third parties (including the app's authors) until
you explicitly authorize it.

https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/private-kit

It's intemded for use in pandemic mitigation, "allowing you to share
information with health officials accurately and quickly," but only when
you explicitly opt in, and only for as long as you remain opted in. The
authors' paper on this is "Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy
in an Epidemic," which digs into the reasons that potential (or
confirmed) carriers might be reluctant to participate in
contact-tracking, and how privacy tools can help.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nwOR4drE3YdkCkyy_HBd6giQPPhLEkRc/view

It also discusses the rise of blackmail scams in South Korea in which
criminals demanded payments not to falsely accuse businesses of being
sources of new coronavirus infections (!!).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives

Private Kit allows for user location-history sharing directly with
health authorities, without requiring third-party (carrier, app maker)
intervention, aggregation or other high-risk activities.

This is an *excellent* example of the principle that "privacy" isn't the
same as "secrecy." Privacy isn't "Nobody knows your business but you."
It's "You decide who gets to know your business."

http://privatekit.mit.edu/

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🛰 Italy's mayors berate quarantine-breaking citizens

Our household can't stop marveling at this highlight reel of Italian
mayors berating their stubborn residents for denying the quarantine
orders. It's magnificent.

https://twitter.com/GiuliaRozzi/status/1241859350060093442

"We will send the police over. With flamethrowers."

"I can't formally ban you from leaving your house, Fine. I will ban you
from setting foot on public land."

"Where the fuck are you all GOING? You and your dogs!* They must have
inflamed prostates!"

"You can't play ping-pong. Go home. Play videogames."

"How can I spell it out? You can't stay in the streets. We need their
girlfriends here. With clubs."

"Getting in your mobile hairdressers?! What the fuck is that for? Don't
you understand that the casket will be CLOSED?"

"I saw a fellow citizen jog up and down the street, accompanied by a
dog* who was visibly worn out. I told him, 'Look, this isn't a movie.
You are not Will Smith in 'I am Legend.' You have to go home."

*Dog walking is a popular pretense for breaking quarantine.

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🛰 This day in history

#15yrsago Reflex: brilliant, page-turning sequel to Jumper
https://boingboing.net/2005/03/23/reflex-brilliant-pag.html

#10yrsago: Secret ACTA fights over iPod border-searches
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-de-minimus-proposals/

#10yrsago: Demonstration against Digital Economy Bill tomorrow at
Parliament, London <a
href="https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/>https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/

#5yrsago: Backchannel: computers can talk to each other with heat
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/stealing-data-computers-using-heat/

#1yrago DCCC introduces No-More-AOCs rule
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/22/house-democratic-leadership-warns-it-will-cut-off-any-firms-who-challenge-incumbents/

#1yrago British schoolchildren receive chemical burns from "toxic ash"
on Ash Wednesday
https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/08/children-end-hospital-burns-heads-toxic-ash-wednesday-ash-8868433/

#1yrago Procedurally generated infinite CVS receipt
https://codepen.io/garrettbear/pen/JzMmqg

#1yrago Video from the Radicalized launch with Julia Angwin at The
Strand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbdgdH8ksaM&feature=youtu.be

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🛰 Colophon

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Alice Taylor
(https://twitter.com/wonderlandblog/), Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The
Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of
my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of
design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British
think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland:
it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs.
Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a
magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they
cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into
Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt
Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to
it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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