Brett Hetherington's Blog: "First thought:" My Substack page, page 14

"iSpy with my little eye: Apple’s u-turn on privacy sets a precedent and threatens everyone’s security"

Image credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 3.0 US)"Apple has just announced significant changes to their privacy settings for messaging and cloud services: first, it will scan all images sent by child accounts; second, it will scan all photos as they are being uploaded to iCloud. 

With these changes, Apple is threatening everyone’s privacy, security and confidentiality...

EDRi [ [European Digital Rights]  and other civil society groups have been warning of the risks of these proposed technological ‘solutions’. 

Despite the laudable goal to protect children, these changes in fact introduce measures that make everyone less safe by creating a ‘backdoor’ into our private lives. 

With Apple blessing these privacy-invasive technologies and the adoption of the recent interim CSAM legislation, we are deeply concerned that these practices will be normalised and promoted further by other companies and by policy-makers. We call on Apple to abandon these proposed changes and to step up against corporate and government surveillance."

Read more here.

Maria says not so fast! -- A voice from rural Spain

 (Definitely worth reading to the end...)

"Last Wednesday, I went to refill my blood pressure medication. The pharmacist told me that the prescription had run out, and that I needed to renew it. So, when I came home, I went online and tried to make a phone appointment to renew my medications. But there was no opening until today, Tuesday. 

Last night, I got a call from a phone number with so many digits, that it was either the health service, or the bank. It was the local clinic, telling me that my appointment to renew my prescriptions was cancelled, and that it would be rescheduled for the 3rd of August, next Tuesday. The problem? There were no doctors in the afternoon this week. 

Excuse me? No doctors? There are no substitutes for doctors who are on a much-needed vacation? Or who are sick themselves and can't come to work? Exactly. There are no subsititute doctors. At the end of July. With tourists teeming all over the place. With the probability of more than one serious accident happening in the afternoon. Oh, but the receptionist (substituting, himself, for the regular one) explained that in that case there was a doctor on call. One doctor..."

Read on here.

"Let there be profits" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

  

September 14, 2010, 5pm. I’m pacing in little circles outside an office on Carrer Igualada in Vilafranca del Penedes.

I’m the last person in a queue.

There’s half a dozen people in front of me and we are waiting for the door to this electricity company to open. (Does it really matter which energy company? Is there any real difference between them?)

Finally, we are inside the tiny waiting room. The four seats are taken so I stand next to another customer. We are “esteemed clients” a sign on the wall says.

After 20 minutes I get a seat and after another 25 minutes I am sitting in front of a harassed employee named Xavier. We have come to know each other’s faces quite well over the last 6 weeks since I’ve had to persist in my visits there every week. He is always polite, sympathetic and vaguely sad. He shrugs a lot. I tap the bones under my eye. (They’re called sockets too aren’t they?)

November 2, 2010. The electricity in the house we bought (with a bank mortgage) in a small town near Vilafranca back in August is flicked into life. Here it’s called ‘la luce’ or ‘light.’ Let there be light. Please.

Fast forward almost a decade to May 4, 2020. A few months into the Covid emergency, this power company reports “a more than doubling of first-quarter net profit to 844 million euros compared with 363 million in the same period last year.”

January 2021. Media report: “Electricity bills increased by 26.7% in the first days of the year compared to the same period of 2020, according to consumers' rights association Facua.” This follows frequent power outages across Catalonia, with municipalities affected including Barcelona's lowest income neighbourhoods of Raval, Badalona and Torre Baró. 

June 5, 2021. A demonstration in the Catalan capital’s Plaça de Catalunya is in full voice. The gathered are protesting what they say is clearly going to be a jump in electricity prices coming from a new peak and off-peak billing system.  A media source says: “The increase could be 8.5% for some households but as high as 27.3% for others depending on the supplier.”

The Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) is arguing that small households and businesses are likely to suffer the most. Those who work at home during the day (including this journalist) are also at risk of increased energy costs. Social media jokes about ironing after midnight don’t seem especially funny to me.

But a promise has been made. There will be “savings for 19 million consumers already on a plan without hourly rates.” To me, this is about as believable as their other promise. The 9 million customers who had hourly based pricing will supposedly now have their bills rise by only around €2 a month. 

What seems more probable to me is that with the Covid 19 pandemic starting to show signs of fading, the three big energy companies are using this time as a good excuse to create a so-called “new normal.” Apparently, normal service (ie. poor quality service) is to be resumed as soon as possible, except at higher prices for millions of consumers who are unable to afford it. 

There is of course a simple solution to the above. It’s called nationalisation. A government, elected by a majority of voters, runs an infrastructure system on behalf of all the population, for the populations’ sole benefit, not for investor profit. It would guarantee lower prices. 

Radical? I don’t think so. It’s been done plenty of times before.

 

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2021.]

Someone please tell me why...?

The Spanish region of Valencia will be the world capital of Hyperloop, "the transport of the future." 

From July 19 to 25, Valencia will host the European Hyperloop Week, a transport system that will allow passengers and goods to be carried at more than 1200kph.

[Source via news service: Business Over Tapas.]

Video: "Paul McCartney - Córdoba - Spain (1966 ) ( The Beatles en España)" -- A home video:

"Until now, there had ben no evidence that McCartney had been a tourist in Córdoba. Here are the images of some emblematic places of the Andalusian capital, such as the Plaza de la Corredera, exteriors of the Alcazar de los Reyes Católicos, Patio de los Naranjos, Cathedral Mosque.

The recording also includes children and local people in their daily lives.

Paul McCartney visits  the Spanish city of Córdoba together with The Beatles' roadmanager Mal Evans. 

In November 1966, McCartney traveled through Spain towards Almería with the intention of visiting John Lennon, who was there working on the movie "How I Won the War " by Richard Lester but filming had already finished and John was no longer in Almería.

Apparently, McCartney and Evans traveled from Bordeaux (France) to the Almeria coast.. Evans and McCartney traveled to Seville, where on November 12 they took a plane to Madrid, and from there they traveled to Nairobi. 

According to Diario de los Beatles and the journalist and writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra, McCartney returned to London on November 19, 1966."

Aymerich’s “The tourist factory” [New release, 2021]

"Ramon Aymerich, La fábrica de turistes. El país que va canviar la indústria pel turisme [The tourist factory: the country that traded industry for tourism], 2021, 149 p.

publisher’s summary:

Catalonia is no longer a country of industry, but one of tourists.

The day that Barcelona was left without tourists [2020, Covid-19] felt strange to the locals, they were so used to them. 

During the last 60 years, tourism has changed the country’s appearance. 

It has urbanized half of the country, has damaged natural ressources, has transformed the economy and has created a lot of jobs… temporary jobs. Part of Catalonia’s identity was made up of industry, and now it is a country that fabricates tourists. During the pandemic we have discovered the cost of this bet, now full of uncertainties.

La fàbrica de turistes covers the creation of the myth of the Costa Brava, the birth of Port Aventura [amusement park], and the appearance of Barcelona as a big international tourist destination… and it stresses the urgency of finding a plan B for its economy."

Above text from Literary Rambles here.

My latest editorial work now published: "10 Hikes near Malmo + Copenhagen"

I'm very happy to have been the editor for the English language version of this superb guide by Rikard Anderson. 

Available here.

"Living the reality" -- My latest book review for Catalonia Today magazine

[Writer Carrie Frais: Pic by Poppy Maidment]
Who are these people? “Immigrants temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than the one[s] in which they were raised.”

 

This to me is a much better explanation than the word expat (or expatriate) which I dislike and so does Carrie Frais the editor of a new book titled “#LivingTheDream: Expat life stripped bare.” 

Her preferred definition of herself and the other ten women who contributed a chapter each is stated in her introduction, inside a publication with a cover photo of broken sunglasses. (It reminded me of Yoko Ono’s album cover for “Season of Glass” showing John Lennon’s bloodied specs after his murder in New York in 1980.)

 

The book explores “grief, loneliness, Brexit, motherhood, identity, belonging, single parenthood, rootlessness and integration” but these are just some of the issues that are ranged over. The nebulous concept of “home” is also touched on in various distinct ways.

 

As an author, Frais focuses especially on the emotional baggage of her relocation. Her timeline of the last decade and a half jumps between London and Cabrils (not Cambrils) in Catalonia and moves between themes of parental illness and death, the power of memory and ultimately the Covid 19 pandemic. Wisely, she both recognises and reconciles her status as an outsider: an adventurous one, open to challenges.

 

Deborah Gray, Managing Director of Canela Public Relations in Barcelona has some specific advice. She finishes her chapter with a title taken from a century old quote from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, saying “exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is: many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

 

Her own life experiences include managing a private life (including children) and running offices in Madrid and Lisbon as well as the Catalan capital. She has been navigating the rough seas of European business conditions since 2006. Gray states, “Don’t define yourself by what you do for a living because it can all disappear overnight through no fault of your own.” Millions across Catalonia and the rest of Europe could relate to that.

 

Mother of three, teacher, writer, designer and Associate Director of MumAbroad.com Jane Mitchell, lives in El Masnou on the Maresme coast just north of Barcelona. Her part of the book is called “Becoming Me (Again)” and talks about how she made happiness a priority ahead of her career. She believes her previous years in Cairo taught her about acceptance and adaptability but didn’t fully prepare her for a new role as a mother in Catalonia.  

 

Sue Wilson of the Bremain in Spain organisation is another highlight, writing about the legacy of Brexit for her, living in Valencia.

 

A great strength of this book is that it avoids most of the cliches that surround those who relocate. In several places it confronts them face on to dispel fanciful dreams and watery eyed romantic projections of Europe as a land of sunny, easy plenty. I, too, think this needs to be done.

[This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine here.]

"G7 Central Banks printed $9000 billion on behalf of Big Finance but skimped on $39 billion that would have vaccinated Humanity"

 

DiEM25's Yanis Varoufakis speaks on "vaccine internationalism" as an alternative...

La Florida: Density and Drill [in outer, outer Barcelona]

 

"The most densely populated square kilometre in Europe is a region in Barcelona called La Florida (50,000 per km2) according to La Vanguardia here.

It follows with maps and plans of the heaviest densities and smallest populations across Spain.

It also (oddly) equates density with musical talent, at least the drill popular in the poorest barrios of Paris and Barcelona.

(YouTube for drill with Nickzzy here)."

Above found via BoT.