A grocery store near me /always/ has meat marked down 50% because it’s expiring. It is complex and difficult for grocers to accurately predict how much stock they will need. So they take the sloppy approach of ensuring the stock on something never runs out. They prefer to mark down by 50% than to lose a sale due to not having stock.

Of course this is because they have prioritised profits above environment, health, and animal welfare. It’s more socially responsible to, e.g., let the chicken breasts run out when there are still chicken legs. We need to stop giving a shit when meat eaters might not get exactly what they want.

Indeed I benefit personally.. first the meat industry is subsidised by the gov. Then my price is further subsidised by the discount thanks to the meat buyers who pay regular price. But it’s a fucked up situation socially. Meat should not be pushed like this.

So new rule:

All meat vendors must keep inventory, purchase stats, and a state-defined set of relevant criteria for prediction. They must calculate the stats such that there is an expectation of running out of every kind of meat product before the next shipment. They must track their fuckups (expiry and markdowns) and report to the gov -- who can then examine the accounting and micromanage the meat orders.

When I’m in the Asian shop, there are 10s if not 100s of different ramen noodle brands and flavors. Asian writing all over. Sometimes there’s English like “Vegetable”, “Curry”, “Tom Yum”, or other things half of which I do not recognise. WTF is “Vegetable flavor”? When they write “flavor”, it adds a degree of uncertainty of what you’re actually dealing with.

So I have to resort to reading the fine print. It’s a disaster. 3—4 different groups of ingredients broken down by the various packets. Few producers are kind enough to boldface the significant things like fish and shrimp. Then there’s “may contain shrimp”, which means it doesn’t actually contain shrimp, it was just processed in a place that has shrimp and some may get in accidentally.

Anyway, it’s a shit-show. Reading all the fine print in the shop is labor intensive and faulty. I get home and realise - oh shit, it actually contains shrimp. I missed that amid all the speed reading in a hurry. Fuck me.

Well, fuck them. New rules:

• For every animal product intentionally added to a package of ramen noodles, they must put a standard pictoral representation of that animal in a 8×8mm square on the front of the pkg.

No, vegan food producers do not need a mandate to mark their stuff vegan. Fuck meat. It’s the animal industry that must be burdened with mandatory labelling.

New rule inspired by this story:

https://slrpnk.net/post/33460329

If an animal needs relief from itching or pests/insects, and they can serve themself by merely having access to tools, they must be given the tools to do so.

Motorola and Hewlett Packard directly contribute to the IDF. That makes them ethically controversial (amid countless other nefarious things they do). A large portion of the population supports Palestine morally.

Microsoft /should/ be targetted as well because they finance Anyvision (facial recognition used against Palestinians). But it’s a more indirect detriment and ditching MS requires competency that governments lack.

So new rule: public libraries and government agencies must go through some serious red tape if they want to procure Motorola or HP products. They must prove that there is no viable alternative.

Public libraries and gov agencies must declare every Microsoft product they use in a central database along with rationale. This will be reviewed for opportunities to reduce MS patronage.

According to the linked research, car consumers cause direct and significant injury to urban cyclists through emissions.

So, new rule:

All urban cyclists are entitled to gratis high-quality respirators and gratis periodic filter replacements. The cost shall be exclusively sourced from car consumers (parking tax, fuel tax, registration, etc). It shall not be funded by any tax that cyclists pay into (e.g. income tax, property tax).

Car consumers must also finance future research as to whether the respirators are working. Perhaps also fund a study on whether EVs should be excluded or whether kicking dust up into the air makes them a significant culprit.

“Notwithstanding” is probably the most irritating English word I have encountered. The prefix “not” implies that you can take it to mean the opposite of “withstanding”. But what does withstand mean? That’s fucked up too.

For whatever reason, I grew up thinking that to withstand meant how it sounds -- to “stand with” something. To tolerate it or accept it. But it’s also counter-intuitive. All my real life encounters with withstand seem to contradict the dictionary, which actually says to withstand something is to resist it. WTF? Thus:

“notwithstanding” ≠ “to not stand with”

I had an embarrassing moment where I used “notwithstanding” in a legal context to mean to something like possibility A does not tolerate possibility B. But it means the opposite of that. “Notwithstanding” is a synonym for “nevertheless”.

Anyway, I wonder if other folks have been burnt or confused by this word, or was it just me. In any case, fuck that word. It commonly appears in legal documents and likely causes confusion and misinterpretation.

So new rule:

All words matching the “*withstand*” glob are hereby banned from legal statutes and contracts. Anyone who drafts a contract with that word shall automatically be subject to the interpretation that works against them in any contract dispute.

FTP servers always just worked. No bullshit, garbage, or hoops to go through. Governments are now distributing documents that should be public access to everyone, but just like the private sector web-distributed docs bring in an infinite number of enshitification possibilities which make document access limited and exclusive.

For example, see the 1st item on this post. HTML PDFs are sometimes not even real PDFs anymore.

Some people have lost access to legal statutes because some foolish backroom jackass working for the gov decided to proxy gov websites via Cloudflare.

The EU has an “open data” law and an “accessibility” law. It’s a good start but these laws are vague and easy to disregard and weasel-word out of enforcement. It’s likely impossible to define a law that captures all possible varieties of enshitification, dark patterns, and exclusivity of access.

I do not think there are many ways to fuckup anonymous FTP. An IP firewall is perhaps the only variety of shenanigan we might expect.

So new rule:

All government distributed docs must have an FTP distribution. Outsourced distribution still carries with it the FTP requirement. If the gov wants to also do an HTTP distro, fine. They can do whatever Cloudflare enshitified shenanigans they want and exploit the fact that countless pushovers will dance and solve CAPTCHAs. But there still must be an FTP pathway to all docs.

Future review:

Three years after enactment of this policy we will review and possibly consider allowing Gemini to be used in lieu of FTP.

After my bicycle was stolen, the police could not be bothered to look at video surveillance recordings around the scene of the crime. Yet surveillance remains a form of oppression against everyone as police fixate on victimless crimes (drugs, undocumented people, traffic violations, etc).

So new rule:

If police refuse to review surveillance video at the request of a victim, the video camera must be removed.

Ryanair, Southwest Airlines, Flixbus, Greyhound, various train line operators all have anti-bot anti-scraping policies and tech. Those motherfuckers just don’t want their prices to appear next to their competitors.

So new rule:

Anti-scraping mechanisms are automatically hereby declared anti-competitive. Offenses shall be finable to 4% of the company’s annual revenue (like the GDPR).

Electronic forms created by government agencies always have a field requiring an email address. Paper forms usually require an email address -- as if to assume everyone is online and happy to share their email address.

The forms never disclose who the gov agency uses for their email service. It’s usually Microsoft, one of the most objectionable and controversial data abusing corporations in the world.

So new rule:

When the gov demands an email address from someone, the demand must disclose all 3rd parties who will handle mail sent to the email address that you supply.

Failure to comply with 3rd party disclosure automatically renders satisfaction of demands for email address as legally optional. When a 3rd party is defined as a surveillance advertiser, the satisfaction of demands for email address is also legally optional.

When an electronic form refuses to advance without an email address under legally optional circumstances, it’s to be deemed as an unlawful denial of public service. Victims are automatically entitled to damages plus legal fees.

There is no greater injustice with traffic than cyclists having to wait for cars at a red light. If everyone were on bicycles, there would be no waiting because every intersection could be a traffic circle. It is only because of cars hogging up road space that traffic lights are needed. So cars are imposing their own burdens on cyclists.

It’s very common for cyclists to run red lights. Lawmakers are sometimes wise enough to realise when a law is violated very frequently, they can conjecture that perhaps the law itself is the problem. Frequent violations often lead to liberation.

#FuckCars

So new rule:

Cycling-specific traffic lights with a red indicator must be replaced with a yellow signal, to indicate that cross traffic has the right of way but that it is legal to go when there is clearance.

When there is no cycling-specific path and cyclists are sharing the same traffic light with cars, then red lights take a new meaning for cyclists: red means yield. Running a red is only an offense if a cyclist actually impedes or collides with traffic that has a right of way.

Opportunities to detect cyclists on a path and alter light signal timing so that the cyclists do not need to stop must be considered by civil engineers. Signal timers must optimise for cyclists, not cars, whenever the two are at odds.

“Carne” means meat. A carnival is a celebration of meat and consumption thereof. We have evolved to be smarter. We have come to realize meat is a significant cause of climate change and we must acknowledge that we have always turned a blind eye to the needless suffering and detriment to animals.

At some point we must acknowledge the uncivility of obtuse mindless celebration of meat consumption. Some people need meat for various dietary and economic constraints (fair enough) but the shameless promotion of meat remains an embarrassing display of failure of our wisdom to advance. The public sector will take a new direction to show a socially responsible use of public resources.

So, new rule:

There shall be no public events called “carnival” or that which involves more than 50%¹ of food vendors selling meat. There can be events called “veganals” or “carnegone”, where the majority of street food is plant based. ¹The 50% threshold will drop 1½% every year.

The applicable jurisdiction is public property. That is, people can still privately have a private carnival on private property as long as it does not make the slightest use of public resources or public money. E.g.

• public roads cannot be blocked off or used for queing
• public property cannot be used to host the carnival
• medical and fire resources must be privately hired
• cleanup and waste disposal is paid for with private money
• business expenses for meat itself is not tax-dedictible

25 years from now: we revisit the law to review whether we have reached a point where 80% of the meat market does not come from animals (e.g. lab grown), in which case carnivals can be restored to celebrate social and technological advancement.

So new rule: retailers of appliances like washing machines must sell everything needed to hack-repair the machines they sell. Thus, they must sell:

• DMMs (multi-meters)
• oscilliscopes
• logic analysers
• ESR meters
• Bus Pirates and Flipper Zeroes (if a machine has a serial port)
• ISP programmers (if a machine has an ISP)
• Arduinos or clones thereof (to replace unhackable PCBs)

Additionally:

• Retailers must also supply at no cost docs on how to generally create an Arduino replacement PCB for each appliance.
• Retailers must organise free training for the public on how to use the repair/hacking tools.
• Retailers must deploy a host to publish any reverse engineered data supplied by consumers.
• Retailers must finance independently hosted support group forums organised for each appliance model (or each family of similar models). The retailer must not have moderation powers in the forums.

When looking at bathroom fixtures like thermostatic shower valves and faucets, prices are all over the place with high end brands charging a high price next to cheap generics for a 10th of the price.

Sure it’s fair enough that quality costs more. But bathroom fixtures have no specs. Are you paying $/€ 300 for the brand and style, or does the valve actually function better? The text on the box of a 90% cheaper product is the same. 38° is 38°, right?

So of course I buy the cheapest valve as no product info distinguishes the options. Then after installing it, I find that it does not maintain temp, as if the valve does not move linearly with the wax cylinder. I have to increase the temp well beyond 38° to chase the right temp throughout the shower. At the end when I return to 38° it feels the same. WTF.

Then the cheap faucet valve has non-linear pressure. There is a tiny range in the movement of the handle where 90+% of the pressure and temp changes which really tests your motor skills. WTF.

I’m not exactly annoyed that a cheap product performs like one. I’m annoyed by the lack of transparency. The box did not tell me that 90% of the pressure and temp change happens inside of a small portion of the overall handle movement.

How should consumers know that? Fuck this idea that you have to blindly pay more for some blind increase in quality.

So new rule:

• faucet and shower valves must show a line graph on the box of the handle motion with the water volume and temp. Performance deviations are claimable under warranty. Energy ratings must also account for the controllability of the valve. If a faucet tends to blast hot water because it acts more like a switch than a dial, the energy rating should be poor.

• Any products where price is the sole indicator of quality and performance because of lack of performance specs are banned.

update: chef’s knives have a similar problem. You are judging the quality from the appearance with no practical way of knowing how long it can hold a sharp edge. There needs to be a rating system for dullness extent after so many cuts.

California’s state secretary along with many other state secretaries impose a Google reCAPTCHA on people trying to lookup a business’s registration records. This forces everyone to perform uncompensated forced labor for a private privacy-offending tech giant. Google reCAPTCHA has been found responsible to have forced 819 million manhours of labor of a 13 year span.

So new rule:

• If a CAPTCHA is used as a barrier to access public information and the public makes a Freedom of Information Act request, it must be fulfilled at no cost and even postal costs must be covered by the agency doing the processing.

Some facts:

• vehicle idling wastes about 3 billion gallons of fuel each year in the U.S. and generates around 30 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
• Some drivers prefer to let the engine idle for 20 minutes or longer to get everything—including the cabin—really warm, but the fastest way to warm up an engine is by driving
• Cars newer than ~1995 are fully lubricated within 30 seconds of starting.

Some opinions:

• Comfort and convenience is the only reason to idle-warm a post-1995 non-diesel ICE car.
• The reckless proliferation of cars is due to the comfort and convenience they offer to addicts of comfort and convenience. Anything to reduce the comfort and convenience of cars is in itself ecological.

So new rule:

• If someone is idling a non-diesel ICE younger than 1995 for more than 30 seconds, they get a fine equal to the local value of 25 Big Macs (e.g. ~$250 in the U.S.), or 25 hours of community service.

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.