Month: April 2020

I’ve been in North Carolina since February, so my experience has been limited to the local response, and watching chats and online reports. It’s my belief that if there wasn’t 24hr coverage of this “pandemic”, and a massive overreaction by governments, very few people would be personally affected. The response to this contagion has been far worse than a virus of this type could even hope to accomplish.

The virus: It’s similar to the flu in its ability to spread, and kill anyone too weak to defend against it. We have never had the ability to track cases of any other virus spreading like we do today. Imagine if the Flu Map existed, and we tracked the spread of a a random flu strain across the entire world. My assumption is that it would look much worse than the current Corona map. The technology, propaganda, and fear mongering have created a global panic around a disease that has similar traits as the annual flu.

It’s been over a week since NC closed all bars, restaurants, and many other businesses.

Ok, i started this post in late March with the above, and now it’s April 26. I quit writing then because I knew I wouldn’t post it since it was still early and many facts and potential was unknown.

Well, I’m back to finish this, and the facts are now out and unknowns are now known.

I just hit South Carolina today for a couple reasons. OBX in North Carolina is closed to visitors, which means the coast in NC is nearly untouchable. The SC governor just announced that the coastal beaches could reopen anytime they choose, which makes them one of the first in the country. This also stakes their claim as one of the states in the US with rationality and low tolerance of BS.

I’ve spent most of April in NC where mandatory shut ins started right after St Patrick’s day. I wasn’t personally affected much because

• I have been telecommuting full time for over 3 years
• I still travel to wherever i want (my home is mobile, and always with me)
• I cut my own hair
• I wash my hands
• I have a decent immune system
• Most of my free time is just spent alone in my trailer anyway

I do miss being able to dine out, visit bars, and play at casinos. I feel like that’s not much to complain about compared to many others that have lost their jobs or been unlucky enough to actually get sick from this virus.

I hope this finds you with minimal disruption to your life as well. This experience has been educational for me at least. I’ve observed many interesting reactions and discovered some things about myself.

My initial reaction was anger that the governments of almost every state followed in line, like rooks on a chessboard. I expected many states to stand their ground, and at least use logic and sense to rationalize their decisions. However, i believe there were big financial incentives that persuaded even the freeest states to shut down lives.

I’ll get in to my hypothesis on the severity of the outbreak now, so’s not to bore you.

The virus is hardly different from any other version of coronavirus. This one has killed people like others, but the pandemic style approach was a very serious overreaction with extremely dire consequences.

The economy was doomed far before this even started, and i think the inevitable collapse of the dollar will be a net positive thing once it happens officially. The value of the dollar has been declining for over 40 years, largely due to an uncontrollable federal reserve fiat printing machine.

Every dollar created costs a tiny fraction of value to disappear from the dollar in your pocket. The problem is that these tiny fractions add up very quickly when multiplied by trillions of fresh new dollars.

Is saving the economy really worth the risk of death?

Well, I guess there’s always risk of death… And i could care less about the economy. I believe the risk posed by this virus should not have caused anyone to lose their job, but that’s because the risk was low and unemployment is potentially devastating.

This was an experiment. Maybe not initially, and maybe not even intentionally, but it at least has become one. I’ve actually imagined Bill Hates coming out with an admission to the world that you have all been part of the largest psyop in history, and that they thank you for your participation and the wealth of data that they were able to obtain.

It’s just a funny dream I have, but could you just imagine the reaction?

Now, the experiment has shown us

• Allegedly, over 60% of the US population believe media, don’t question what they’re told, and believe the government should control their freedom
• The state governors will fall like dominoes if the price is right
• The states with the higher chance of freedom are the ones that did not ‘order’ people to do anything

Maybe they started out with good intentions, but as usual: power corrupts.

Google updated their Terms and Services on 3/31/2020, and made it a point to notify everyone months in advance. This caused some suspicion as usually companies try to get you to accept new terms as slyly as possible. Google published a notice on their home page to be sure every single person had no deniability for not knowing what they are about to do.

What is it that they’re doing? I can’t say for sure, and I’m sure there’s a 10% chance that it’s not totally malevolent. I chose not to take my chances, and decided to delete anything remaining in Google’s servers. This is where the fun starts.

Sure, they are fairly open about your option to “Takeout” and move to other services. I’m sure they realize that almost no one is going to do this, but they give you that guise of an option.
That is available here https://myactivity.google.com

I downloaded all of my data, and turned off web history and cleared everything from the MyActivity screen. This took a while, and I did keep my Maps data because I have yet to find an alternative for that service.

Hangouts was where it gets really interesting.
I have been using Hangouts as my primary mobile phone since it’s inception… even before. It started as Google Voice, and prior to Google’s purchase – was called Grand Central.
It is an incredible service that gives you a free local phone number, linked to your Google account, that will allow incoming and outgoing calls, texts, transcribed voicemails, cross platform, multiple device options to text from, international calling, and more.

The service is (was) great, and still works… but at some point Google decided that “Not being Evil” was too hard, and they’ve even removed that from their policy.

Now, since I’ve been using this service for at least 10 years, I’ve got over 6,000 calls and messages stored in my history. Since I’d like to remove my data from G servers, I’d also like to delete all calls, texts and voicemails. This is not a part of the MyActivity mentioned above, so I went to Hangouts. In here, I could delete messages 1 by 1, but in the Phone I could select 200 at a time. This is not a technical limit, it’s a process that Google chose to implement to dissuade you from doing this. Well, I painfully did it this way anyway.

But, what about photos? With Hangouts, when you send a photo to someone else, it is uploaded to Google’s server, and a link to the photo is sent instead of the bits and bytes of the actual photo. Well, I’m sure I’m not the only one that has texted a photo to someone that you’d prefer not to be stored in Google’s archive forever.
If you’ve ever sent it with Google – Check this link

https://get.google.com/albumarchive

I found 10 years of history containing every single photo I’ve ever texted to anyone.
Google – this is utterly creepy, and you know for a fact it’s completely unnecessary. It’s an obvious deliberate choice to handle pictures this way. (No other message service handles photos this way).
Also, every one of these photos are available to everyone in the world, without logging in to anything. If you have the link to the photo’s location, you can see it.

Back to the call logs and messages. Luckily I was able to find this blog that discussed some of the options, and that led me to some scripts that would let me automate the tasks. Keep in mind, Google could add a Delete All button pretty easily, but their motives are just something that I wouldn’t understand.

I used this Powershell script to perform the 3000 mouse clicks it would have taken to delete over 6000 call logs.

[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“‘Microsoft.VisualBasic”)
[Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::AppActivate(“Google Voice – Call history – Mozilla Firefox”)
[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“‘System.Windows.Forms”)
while ($null -eq $null){
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait(“*”)
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait(“a”)
[System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys]::SendWait(“#”)
sleep -Seconds 3
}

Within about an hour my robot cleaned up everything. All 6000+ are still sitting in the Trash folder, but Google claims that that will be deleted permanently in 30 days.