Thanks for sharing. I can definitely see how life can be better in a richer and more progressive place. I guess a major factor for choosing where to live should be whether people there are hopeful for the future.

Just curious, why do you prefer those countries over Japan? Anything lacking there?

Firefox for Android has always worked great for me. I prefer it because I can install the same privacy plugins as for desktop. And they also have Firefox Focus is also great.

I only use wooden spoons, spatulas and cutting boards myself. And fire retardants are obviously damaging to health, so throwing out black plastic is a good idea. But I don’t think the article gives any good reason to avoid plastic in general. “Potentially harmful plastic compounds” sounds a lot like “compounds with zero evidence of being dangerous but they sound scary”. Happy to be proven wrong though.

The risk of the payment system getting shut down and people being unable to make payments for a while is real. And it is one good reason to be less reliant on digital payments.

But there is also the risk of bad actors, which could also be e.g. Russia, getting access to decades of payment history through a hack, if everything is digital. Having that data for every citizen of a country could enable efficient profiling of people in the country using big data analysis technologies.

The kind of thing you could find out with the transaction data is who are working in the military or security police, who is sympathetic to Russia and at the same time vulnerable to work with foreign governments, and potential blackmailing material relating to people in these or other groups. I’m sure the analysts working for the bad actor can come up with even more useful things to look for in the data.

There are of course a lot of other data sources that bad actors are interested in and that are easier to hack, but the financial history seems more comprehensive source of information than most other ones.

If you are using Mastercard in the US, Google will be getting transaction data all the same: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040