VoliCon

dumb :)

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A guy named Jonah accidentally built the most useful website on the internet.

It's called Privacy Guides.

This is the website Google would rather you not find, Meta actively lobbies against, data brokers have tried to discredit for years, and the entire advertising industry treats as a direct threat to their business model.

It has been online since 2019. It takes no affiliate money. It runs no ads. Journalists cite it. Security researchers trust it.

Here's how it works.

Privacy Guides is a curated recommendation list. The site itself sells nothing.

It just tells you which private tool actually replaces every surveillance product in your life, tested by security researchers and updated every month, organized into 40+ categories with the exact reason each pick was chosen.

→ Browsers that block trackers and ads by default
→ Email providers that cannot read your messages
→ Search engines that do not build a profile on you
→ Password managers you can self-host
→ VPNs that accept cash and Monero and log nothing
→ Messengers with end-to-end encryption Signal-tier or better
→ Photo apps that do not scan your camera roll
→ Health apps that do not sell your data to insurance companies
→ A custom Android OS called GrapheneOS that strips Google out of your phone entirely

The site is run by a non-profit called MAGIC Grants. Every recommendation goes through a public forum review, a GitHub pull request, and criteria published on the site so anyone can audit why a tool was chosen. No company can pay to be listed. No affiliate link exists on the entire domain.

Google can't shut this down. Meta can't shut this down. Amazon can't shut this down.

The entire $600 billion surveillance advertising industry is built on the assumption that you would never spend one afternoon on this website.

https://t.co/BQJjD1jANC

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

and they'll fire your ass if you try and take any of it home

[Emily Spanton @whatdoesntkillu]

DYK: Canada cut the rural emergency radio station

Multiple communities have said they had little to no warning to evacuate and many lost internet and phone access long before they lost power.

@MarkJCarney must reverse his cuts to emergency comms.

https://t.co/HkKmLB240O

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

This week 20,000 pigs burned to death in a factory farm fire in Ontario.

They haven't let photographers inside. But here's what another pig factory farm looked like after it burned.

It's hard to imagine the suffering of these intelligent, sensitive animals — trapped, without any means of escape or hope of help, as the flames engulfed them.

It's harder to imagine the greed of an industry too cheap to even install sprinkler systems.

[Sitareh | ستاره 🇮🇷🇨🇦 @feeniesworth]

To put it into perspective, this is the map of Ontario showing where the wildfires are. I am having trouble breathing in TORONTO. At least a 14 hour car drive. Over 1359km. Ontario is bigger than Egypt, Japan, France, Germany, etc. this is absolutely catastrophic

[Tyler Watt 🇨🇦 @tylerwatt]

Are you serious with this post? Hundreds of hospital nurses fired this week in Ontario. Like I’ve said to you numerous times in QP, you are doing nothing to retain nurses.

The student nurses in your free tuition program won’t be even able to find a job in their area, per contract, and will have to pay back the $40k in tuition. Get your head out of the sand, Minister. #onpoli

[The Last Farm @TheLastFarm]

Death to data centers

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

Record profits and tariffs are two of the main drivers of our current inflation crisis. Not only are businesses keeping prices high, retaining all their profits, now they're getting our money back in the form of tariff refunds. We won't see a dime of it.

[zupa grochowa @Grochowa2]

The skies are orange, people are fleeing wildfires in boats, other parts of the country are flooded, housing is still unaffordable, food bank use is skyrocketing, healthcare is crumbling, all while Canada spends on the military and AI, but it’s okay, we have a “strong economy”

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

There are no words for how horrifying this footage is. They shot him in the head, after shooting at him six times, and then slammed his head to the ground. These details don’t matter to the sanctity of life and the criminality of this execution, but this was a legal resident who was not even their target. Barbaric.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Stop deadheading these 3 flowers and let the seed heads stand. Each one has an important role for your neighborhood wildlife.

Coneflowers. Goldfinches are one of the only songbirds that feed their nestlings seeds rather than insects. They hit coneflower seed heads from August through January. The hollow stems shelter native bees through winter. Cutting these back is a food source and habitat lost.

Black-eyed Susans. Same story as the coneflowers. The seeds feed chickadees, sparrows, and goldfinches through fall. Leave the dried heads standing and they become a natural bird feeder.

Native sunflowers. Chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and goldfinches all work sunflower heads through winter. A native sunflower left standing is as useful as a full feeder of mixed seed, and it costs nothing to maintain.

If it bloomed for you this summer, let it stand through May next year. Your neighborhood wildlife will thank you.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The U.S. has paid companies $81 billion in tariff refunds so far this year.

In February the Supreme Court ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, and the government paid out most tariff refunds after that ruling.

There is no requirement that companies pass those refunds on to the consumers, although they frequently passed tariff costs on to consumers.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Before you call someone to take down that dead tree, consider who might be calling it home.

A standing dead tree is used by over 85 species of North American birds for nesting, roosting, and foraging, according to the US Forest Service. Cavity-nesting birds can make up 40 percent of the bird community in some forests, and almost all of them depend on dead wood that they either excavate themselves or inherit from a woodpecker.

Woodpeckers excavate cavities in soft, decaying snags. They use each cavity once, then move on. What they leave behind is immediately claimed by everything else: screech owls, wood ducks, flying squirrels, bluebirds, chickadees, nuthatches, wrens, kestrels, saw-whet owls, hooded mergansers, and bats. A snag that a pileated woodpecker worked in one season becomes housing for the next twenty years.

Below the surface, the same tree is an insect hotel. Beetle larvae channeling through decaying wood attract brown creepers, nuthatches, and woodpeckers. Native bees nest in the dry beetle galleries deep inside the trunk. Salamanders and small snakes shelter under the bark as it loosens.

The rule is simple: a dead tree that poses no hazard to structures or people is more ecologically valuable standing than cut. If it's near the house, remove it. If it's at the yard's edge, against the fence, in the back corner somewhere, leave it. Let it fall over on its own time.

[ꪝe @_wej01]

My UBER driver in Baltimore told me he just got out of an ICE facility, that he spent 8 days in Washington and 51 days in a facility in Arizona. His wife reported him missing, cops had no idea ICE had taken him. He said, “She thought I was dead.” He’s an American citizen. Took them that long to realize it. This is just one guy. There’s thousands...

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

Just tell them to buy less lattes, maybe bomb a few less kids.

[bONGO 🌹 @wariocolosseum]

these companies need to be dismantled for their crimes against humanity and the environment

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Europe's most awarded zoo just turned its parking lot into a power plant without removing any parking spaces.

Pairi Daiza in Belgium covered 80 percent of its 7,000 parking spaces with 62,750 solar panels, creating one of the largest solar parking lots in Europe. The installation produces 20 megawatts at peak output, more than the entire zoo consumes. The surplus charges electric vehicles on site and sells the rest back to the grid.

The parking lot still functions as a parking lot. The panels sit above the cars, shading them in summer, keeping them dry in rain, and generating electricity from space that was already paved and already occupied.

No wilderness was converted. No farmland was taken. No new land was used.

The US has an estimated 800 million parking spaces. Most of them are uncovered asphalt sitting in direct sun, generating nothing, absorbing heat, and contributing to the urban heat island effect in every city they're in.

A 2023 analysis estimated that covering existing US parking infrastructure with solar canopies could generate enough electricity to power roughly half the country.

[Neena Jha @DrNeenaJha]

So far we know that Data centres:

🌊 Deplete our fresh water
🐝 Kill off bees
🐮 Affect animal fertility
🔉Cause significant sound pollution
🌲Destroy the environment
🤖Take over human jobs
🌍Risk our children’s futures

ENOUGH with billionaires’ greed!
STOP ALL data centres!

[Dark Brian Fella: It's Slava time. 🇨🇦🇺🇦👊 @The_Brian_Life]

Canadians, pay attention. Similar devices are cropping up everywhere in urban and suburban areas. I see them all over Oshawa now accompanied by a warning from the police. This one near Taunton & Harmony. I'd like to know what data these cameras are collecting, how it's being analyzed & used, & whether or not any of this is in violation of the Charter, @DRPS..?