New Rules (proposals of laws that will fix problems)

The postal service has a near monopoly of sorts on registered letters. So naturally they charge high prices, at least in some regions, e.g. the cost of a Big Mac.

To save money, I hand-deliver letters and ask for a signature. Most businesses go along with this and sign for delivery just as if I were a postal worker. But there are some baddies. And it’s not mom-pop shops. It’s banks and utility companies who refuse to sign for a delivery based on who is doing the delivery. They say they would sign for a post office-delivered registered letter. But they discriminate against individuals.

When a legal matter ends up in court, the winning party is generally denied their costs in registered letters. So when a bank or utility company refuses to sign for letters not delivered by the post office, it drives up non-recoverable costs. It’s also anti-competitive because the post office has no pressure to charge a reasonable price.

Refusing a post office registered letter usually means the recipient is still legally responsible for the contents of the refused letter. But individuals are at the disadvantage of being unable to get the benefit of the refusal (no witness to the refusal).

So new rule:

• refusal to sign for a letter triggers a liability of $/€ 250.
• an NGO, consumer protection agency, or the post office shall be designated to proxy refused letters to record the refusals and give recipients a 2nd chance to avoid the fine.

I started looking at 2nd-hand mobile phones just to see if I could find a dirt cheap one for tinkering with a sustainable OS like pmOS. It’s a disaster because the market has bent over backwards make phones look pretty for people who are really into vanity. In most cases I can see what the make is (but not always). But rarely is the model printed on the exterior. So if I am rummaging through a box of 500 smartphones, I’m fucked if I have to remove every back cover to look for a model. Often there is no model at all even on the inside (E.g. LG phones). And even when it is, they often use an encoded model number that does not match the package printing of what model the phone is known as (the model name). Some backsides have no removable cover either.

Vanity people are dressing their phones up with cosmetic cases/skins anyway, so new rule:

• Every electronic device must have the make, model number, and model name (if different) all printed on the exterior as part of a green policy to make 2nd hand devices quickly identifiable.
• The print must be big enough for the naked eye.

The status quo of tracking how good a machine is by how many years it lasts is sloppy and inaccurate. If that were the only measure of car reliability, we would be working ½ blind in trying to work out how long cars are lasting and predicting failure unreliably. The ultimate non-ecocidal trend needs to be to build things to last. Progress is hindered by our shitty metrics. Consumers pay a lot more for Miele machines on ½ blind faith that they will save them money. But they cannot be certain that paying double will yield them double the service. If consumers could more accurately measure the service they get out of a machine, there would be more pressure on the producers to compete on price-per-load. As a consequence, there would be more incentive to offer parts even beyond whatever right to repair law imposes because when repair extends life in a measurable way it wins the price-per-load over a lifetime competition.

Washing machines have internal scales so they can refuse to run when overloaded. So in addition to load count they could even be tracking how much fabric in weight they have cleaned.

So new rule: washing machines and dishwashers must collect metrics and must disclose them to consumers in a way that does not depend on a cloud connection or smartphone.

Jars are used to contain tons of different things, and require different form factors to do so. That said, I have a hard time seeing any benefit to the incredible range of dimensions on the types of lids products currently use (often different than each other only by millimeters). Standardization could improve reuse tremendously.

So my proposal is this:

• Establish around five diameters for jar openings that best fit the many use cases.
• Standardize the threads.
• Jars can be whatever shape, height, width you want but their openings must conform to those standards.
• Ideally these standard sizes will include the existing canning jar dimensions.

Then, with the production of home canning rims and lids that fit those dimensions, all jars used in commercial products can be canning jars.

I'm not proposing this IRL because I know it would require a lot of changes in industry and assembly lines and I'm not sure how that would balance against the benefits of standardization. But the current system seems unnecessarily wasteful, even if glass is easier to recycle than many materials.

I could not fetch a user manual because of protectionism, enshitification, and red tape.

The problems:

• The current right to repair laws obligate vendors to supply documentation. Yet many manufacturers are in walled gardens or deploy an access restricted website. If someone must compromise their privacy rights (data minimisation in particular) as a precondition to getting a manual, that’s effectively not a right but rather an exclusive privilege to repair.

• Some manufacturers operate under unknown short-lasting generic brands and support vanishes before the need for it even arises.

• There are several 3rd party enshitified middlemen pimping manuals that you cannot download unless you solve CAPTCHAs and disclose personal information. Then these shitty motherfuckers “optimise” search results so their booby-trapped manuals get higher search ranks than manufacturer websites.

So, new rules:

① The government shall form a public library for manuals. It shall comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 21, thus be open to ALL people without restrictions. It shall electronically publish all manuals it receives. If it receives a paper manual for which it has no electronic version, it shall scan it and make the electronic version available.

② Copyright protection is reduced in scope to exclude manuals. Manual creation is an obligation of producers of products and thus needs no incentive of copyright. Copyrights only serve as an obsticle to rights to repair.

③ Manufacturers shall send a copy of product manuals to the library established under rule ①, on paper or electronic. If an electronic manual includes or requires code execution (e.g. JavaScript) then it is not a document (it’s an application), thus a paper version must be supplied to the library regardless of whether an electronic version is submitted.

④ Gatekeepers who deploy web search services (Microsoft, Google) must ensure links to the library established under rule ① and manufacturer websites outrank 3rd party enshitified data-abusing manual suppliers. If the 3rd party manual supplier blocks archive.org from mirroring manuals, gatekeepers must de-index those 3rd parties entirely.

⑤ Manufacturers who restrict access to their own website must give an informative access refusal message. “403 Forbidden” is not informative. It must state why someone is blocked and give them options.

⑥ Manufactuers must respond to written requests for manuals even if it comes by postal mail and costs them postage. (As incentive to make their website functional)

⑦ The government shall establish a consumer protection agency that:

• Enforces these rules
• Collects metrics on failures to repair
• Publishes statistics on repair successes and failures by brand

Corporations in the US operate like criminals in the sense that they will willfully break any law that is unenforced or has no enforcement mechanism. For example, there is a law requiring credit bureaus to disclose the source of information they collect to the data subject it pertains to. But they blatantly ignore the law because enforcement is nearly impossible. The penalty for concealing info sources is $1k. Theoretically every credit bureau in the US is liable for a statutory penalty of $1k for every consumer they have a file on. But they escape this because case law shows that a consumer cannot win damages unless they can prove damages. How do you prove you were damaged by not knowing who the source of your credit file info is?

So new rule: if a corporation breaks a law, you only need to prove that the law was broken, not damages, and you can claim $1k for your small claims court action effort.

FedEx is known for shipping:

• shark fins
• hunting trophies
• slave dolphins

Shark fins are rightfully illegal in environment-respecting animal-welfarist countries. FedEx does not give a shit.

A FedEx defender once argued: “but FedEx is respecting your privacy by not inspecting the contents of your pkg.” (Nevermind the fact that there are photos showing a FedEx shop with hundreds shark fins in open crates in plain view.)

It was a partially fair enough argument though. But still failed to acknowledge that FedEx could ban shark fins in their policies and respect privacy at the same time. No obligation to snoop but also no obligation to pay insurance claims when the content is declared as shark fins.

Now that FedEx has been caught allowing police to do a warrantless search on packages containing cash, the “FedEx respects your privacy” argument debunked.

When police search for cash and keep it, it actually undermines law enforcement. How would you catch a tax evader? Of course you would record the cash transaction and let it happen (after all, paying cash is not a crime in the US.. only places like Europe). Then 2 years later you would see if their tax return accounts for the cash. When the police take the money for themselves, they are actually preventing crime prevention.. working against the purpose they were hired for, because they cannot catch a tax evader by doing a money grab a year before the crime is committed.

So new rules:

• police must stop using cash-sniffing dogs to arbitrarily fish in shipping facilities for pkgs that do not even contain any contraband.
• police must train dogs to sniff for shark fins because shark fins are contraband, and it’s not like drugs (a crime against one’s self) it’s a crime against the environment and wildlife.

My data has been exposed in data breaches at least 3 times now (probably more). Every motherfucking corp breached thinks they can offer credit monitoring service and that this somehow compensates victims. Bullshit. You don’t remedy data leaks by exposing data even more.

If I sign up for the credit monitoring, then yet another psychopathic entity¹ gets my sensitive data creating more opportunities for breaches. Then these motherfuckers put the credit monitoring site on Cloudflare, which foolishly forces the exposure of more data (IP address) to yet another reckless entity.

¹ all corporations are inherently psychopathic

So new rule:

Breach victims who opt out of credit monitoring get $100. They can spend that on a credit monitoring service of their choice, or just pocket the money as compensation for their time, stress and inconvenience dealing with the situation.

Victims also get an automatic right to have their credit reports deleted. They never rightfully gave consent to the credit bureaus to collect the data in the first place.

When people call their bank/CU, they often have to navigate a shitty menu with missing options, wrestle with a poor quality signal, subject themselves to voice-print collection without consent or choice, only to reach an operator who potentially lacks competence and who might decide to spontaneously interrogate with irrelevant but intrusive inappropriate questions that waste the both the customer’s time and the customer’s phone credit. If they go online, they must wrestle with Cloudflare bullshit, cookie walls, and a shit-ton of 3rd party JavaScript.

The fix should be: write a letter. What should happen: you clearly and precisely articulate your request. It should be passed along and reach someone who can read and execute the request. Instead of re-explaining the situation to 3 different people and getting transferred around, you are off sipping on a mojito while they pass your letter around until it reaches a competent banker.

What really happens: some lazy as fuck jackass reads some part of your clear, well-articulated letter which makes a simple request that they should be able to handle. Then they press a button that spits out an email or postal letter that simply says:

“Call us.”

Mother fucker. I took the time to give you all the info in exact unambiguous perfect English, in writing, and some presumptuous lazy mother fucker makes assumptions about my phone situation an my patience with using their bullshit system.

Who is serving who? Recent generations of subservient consumers are happy to solve CAPTCHAs for suppliers and also provide irrelevant info. In recent years the consumer is expected to bend over backwards and work for the supplier. And strangely, it’s working (for the corporate overlords).

So new rule:

If a bank/CU does not respond to a letter with a letter, or a portal msg with a portal msg, it is legally deemed as a refusal to perform the task requested. If the bank/CU is contractually expected to act on a request, the customer need not dance for the supplier. The customer gets an automatic statutory reward of $500 or actual damages, whichever is greater.

This might be a bit controversial. But it’s a bit revolting that USians do not generally even know what a passive house is. I asked an award winning real estate agent if they had ever bought, sold, or even encountered a passive house. I then had to explain what a passive house is. The realtor said: no, I don’t think a single passive house exists in the state.

That was around 2022. The US does quite poorly on the GHG footprint per capita. And embarrassing that it does so poorly despite its wealth. There is also a massive trend of working from home. Which means instead of heating one insulated building with 1000 people we are heating 1000 separate buildings many of which are not insulated.

So new rule: every new build must be a passive build.

There is a housing shortage in the US right now with prices out of control. This means we can probably expect lots of building projects in the near future. It’s important that new builds be energy conserving. A passive house is also more costly, but the increase of housing supply will still lower housing costs overall anyway.

BTW, IIRC some more forward thinking countries already have a passive house mandate in place.

(update) I guess the housing shortage calls for motivation to build new homes. So:

Amendment: if you earn more than double the per capita income, you must pay double the property tax for any non-passive house you both own and live in. Don’t like it? Go build a passive house so your non-passive house can become affordable housing.

When a cashless restaurant or bar lets you consume first and pay your tab after consumption, there are many things that can go wrong:

• customer is only willing to pay cash and was unaware of your cash-hostile policy (e.g. they don’t want records made of their alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana consumption)
• customer is only able to pay cash (e.g. they have no bank account due to countless reasons) and was unaware of your cash-hostile policy
• customer intended to pay by card but their card is spontaneously unexpectedly dysfunctional for countless reasons

In some cases the customer may not have a functional bank account in the foreseeable future. Banks are skiddish, scared shitless of regulators but not in the slightest scared of customers they refuse, so they will discriminate against prospective clients in various situations. I’ve been shown the door a few times when trying to open an acct. Banks are also becoming increasingly enshitified (e.g. shut down their website and force customers to use a closed-source app distributed exclusively via a surveillance advertiser who will gladly sell to debtors where you bank). People should have a right to be unbanked by choice, if the banks do not make that choice for them by refusal of service.

So, new rules--

If you choose to charge customers after they consume your product/service and you insist on cashless payment, you give up some collection rights if something goes wrong:

1. You cannot charge interest or penalties while you wait indefinitely for payment.
2. You cannot report debtors as bad debtors and harm their credit worthiness profile.
3. You cannot file court actions against your debtors.
4. You cannot contact them to nag them to pay electronically.
5. If Visa or Mastercard gives you $/€ 10k as an incentive to refuse cash for 1 year, you must pay debts of customers who failed to pay electronically using that money (and in effect cancel their debt).

You can:

1. Find a 3rd party who is willing to proxy the payment (cash → proxy → bank → creditor) with no cost to the cash payer, and no obligation on the payer to produce docs or share info.
2. Contact your debtor to arrange to receive a direct cash payment, minus their delivery/transportation costs.

Facebook hi-jacked generic technical words that had pre-existing meanings:

• “Meta”, which previously defined an abstraction of something about that thing, often referred to as “metadata” in tech jargon (data about the data).
• “Threads”, which previously defined a tree of related commentary.

Twitter hi-jacked:

• “X”, which previously symbolized a conventional variable/placeholder.

Google hi-jacked:

• “Gemini”, which previously referred to an emerging new protocol that actually frees people from abuses by the tech industry by creating a web of documents, not apps. It started in 2019 and Google already sabotaged the new protocol for not serving Google by naming their AI chatbot “Gemini”.

This creates confusion and complexity in conversations. It forces corporate branding into our subconscious in a manipulative way by the mere act of thinking about generic concepts. You cannot speak of /threads/ anymore without Facebook’s product interfering or benefiting. It also sabotages free world technology by cluttering top search results with irrelevant garbage. A search for “Gemini” in /any/ search service is now dominated with Google’s AI chatbot.

If you want to search the web for “Gemini”, now you must use this query string:

gemini -google -ai -chatbot -site:google -site:google.com -deepmind 

(edit) Cloudflare also hi-jacked “Cloud Firewall”, which was originally the name of a Firefox plugin that helps you detect and avoid tech giant websites (including Cloudflare). CF named one of their own services “Cloud Firewall” to bury search results linking to a tool to avoid CF.

So, new rule:
If a corporation/legal person wants to trademark a generic word that’s already in use in a technical context, or even use it for a different purpose without trademarking, they must contribute us$ 250 million to repair the damage to the language. They must hire an impartial NGO to develop new branding and use clever catchy wordsmithing to remedy their damage. The corporation behind the hi-jack cannot be involved in the technology behind whatever they hi-jacked.

Status quo, defect description and rationale:

Animal-based products are the cause of unacceptibly high greenhouse gas emissions. Spending public money on products that harm the worldwide public by increasing climate is an abuse of public money. Countless animals also suffer cruel treatment when they are used as products.

Some minority of people have allergies and medical conditions that complicate nutrition and make vegan diets impractical or impossible. These people cannot be marginalised. For the purpose of supporting their human rights, animals shall be sourced from humane suppliers verified to a much higher standard than legal bare minimums for commercial farming.

Lab-grown meat still originates from an animal and also still has significant emissions. But for the purposes of this rule lab-grown meat is regarded as vegan enough (“legally vegan”).

Farmed insects have negligible emissions and negligible cruelty. Insect death is unavoidable in plant farming anyway. Thus insects are also considered “legally vegan” for the purposes of these new rules.

New rules:

• public schools, prisons, and government sanctioned workplace cafeterias shall not serve non-vegan food to people who do not have a medical exemption.
• military MREs (meals ready to eat) and military cafeterias shall not serve farmed meat to service people who do not have a medical exemption. Meat from legal fishing of non-overfished species and hunted wild game is tolerated.
• when government employees and contractors submit receipts for reimbursement (e.g. for travel or temporary duty), non-vegan items shall not be treated as tax-free or reimbursed to people who do not have a medical exemption. Receipts that do not indicate whether the food is vegan or not are unsubmittable.
• per diem allowances that do not require itemized receipts for costs below a threshold remain unaffected. But per diem rates should be adjusted for vegan food costs, which could be more or less than current per diem rates.
• suppliers of farmed animals for medically exempted people shall ahere to a high standard of humane cruelty-free farming and this shall be verified.
• farmed meat/cheese that reaches the day of expiry may pass for “legally vegan” for the purposes of these new rules if and only if the price is reduced by at least 60% (zero waste without incentivizing ecocide).

Commercial software makers are exploiting designed obsolescence extract wealth and when hardware is involved this comes to the detriment of hte environment by needlessly generating copious e-waste.

So new rule: when a copyright holder decides that their non-free software is no longer profitable enough to maintain and distribute despite the continued useful existence of the hardware it runs on, they shall publish the source code regardless of time left on their copyright. The copyright shall be relinquished and either converted into public domain, or reassigned under a FOSS license to a free software custodian. To the extent that the docs, SDK, and test artifacts are also owned by the copyright holder, those must also be released to the public.

Alternatively, if a copyright holder prefers to keep their code secret, they may elect to port an existing FOSS project to the hardware that their obsoleted software otherwise renders useless. They must finance the porting effort to the extent of reaching comparable functionality as the original factory state of the device.

This use-it-or-lose-it component is missing from the #rightToRepair legislation being implemented.

The government is funded by tax to serve the whole public. If the gov must spend public money on software that the public will execute, the software is inherently created from involuntary contributions. Therefore the government has a duty in the very least to ensure that the software gives maximum utility and value back to the public who funded its creation.

So new rule: Gov-distributed updatable software must grant the four freedoms to the public.

JavaScript counts

When a website pushes JS to your browser that you must execute for the site to function, it’s not a document. It’s an application. And if it comes from the government, it must be FOSS.

Browsers count

If the government is going to put public resources on the web, the government has a duty to some extent to equip the public to use it. A service that demands people use commercial software is bundling and illegaly circumvents this new rule. Therefore the gov. must ensure that a FOSS toolchain exists by which their resource is accessible. If they merely direct/suggest use of Firefox, that’s fair enough so long as the gov ensures their web app is always compatible with FF and the gov picks up the ball to maintain FF should Mozilla fall.

Phone apps count

The gov. shall not put a non-FOSS app on Google Playstore because it’s an abuse of public money. The phone app must be FOSS and must be accessible to all people including those without Google accounts (which needlessly requires mobile phone service).

Social phones

The FCC in the US provides discounted phones to low-income households through a “Lifeline” program. The discount shall only be available on the purchase of 100% FOSS phones, or dumb phones (where the software is not updatable). If no 100% FOSS phones exist, the government must do the necessary to make one available. If the cost of a FOSS phone defeats the effect of the Lifeline, it’s on the gov to fix that by introducing a cheaper FOSS phone or increasing the subsidy.

Italy is the only wise adopter

Italy has a “public money → public code” law. AFAIK, no other country has been so wise. Though Italy is still too relaxed. All code efforts financed by public money must have published code, but the gov can alternatively use public money to buy licenses on existing proprietary COTS software. So Italy has not progressed enough.

Inspired by Article 21 paragraph 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):

“Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

When a government puts their website inside Cloudflare’s walled garden, various demographics of people are excluded from access to a public resource. This manifestation of elitism violates people’s human rights because everyone is equally entitled to public service.

An unusually smart web admin can change the Cloudflare settings to allow Tor access, but this only fixes the denial of service for one of the marginalized groups and does nothing for the other groups being discriminated against (e.g. VPN users & people behind CGNAT). Cloudflare also harms the environment by encouraging websites to push heavy bandwidth-intensive content (videos and images) which wastes energy.

Therefore, new rule: government websites must be made reachable to all people who that government has an obligation to serve. This includes all public resources such as public schools and public libraries.

If they cannot handle the requirement for reasons like lack of funding or incompetence, they must take the website offline so all people in the target jurisdiction have the same level of access. If the web service gets attacked and suffers availability loss, that’s fair enough because all people are equally denied access and equality trumps the convenience of a few.

Consider how all food has a CO₂ footprint and a lot of it is being consumed and then from there it’s metabolised into stored energy (fat). That’s like a waste of stored unused energy. So an emissions price was paid in creating that energy storage where it just remains unspent. Then if they drive a car, they create new emissions without first using the readily available zero emissions lipid energy.

So new rule: no car until the excessive energy reserves stored on the body are depleted. I’m one of them. Living by my own law, I peddle my fat ass around town on a bicycle.

Exceptionally, they can have an EV but it must be charged by man power, such as an exercise bike with a reverse motor to charge the battery. The power plug must be incompatible with charging stations.

Banks and credit unions spam me with ads of their services, some of which are quite high volume. I never gave my express informed consent. I may have consented to this buried in some fine print, but certainly was not asked for consent in a manner that would make me consciously aware that my inbox will be attacked with ads.

My problem is not really the annoyance. I can probably go through some opt-out hoops. The problem with banks specifically is security. Every time the bank e-mails you for any reason, both the metadata and the payload data are sent in-the-clear, thus enabling all handlers of the email to know where you bank. This info is valuable to both debt collectors and thieves.

So, new rule for non-GDPR regions of the world:

Banks that e-mail customers must very loudly obtain your unquestionably informed consent. The bank must give you a separate doc that says:

“Bank X will certainly send a flood of spam, and that flood of spam will disclose where you bank to all email providers and potentially ISPs and e-mail forwarding providers. All recipients free to sell that data to debt collectors. Show that you wholly agree to this abuse below by hand-writing out ‘please feel free to abuse my e-mail address’ and signing that statement.”

There must be a picture of a big eye or a zorro mask or cyber criminal with a hoodie next to that agreement (inspired by cigarrette box rules).

I believe if that level of transparency were in play, people would not agree and banks would either have to offer an email-free option or they would lose business.

#fuckBanks