The privatization of public spaces is a serious ongoing concern in all Canadian urban centers. In its more insidious manifestations it gives corporations power over homeless individuals' rights, by the removal of places of rest, drinking fountains and the coercive removal of the homeless.
For a start, I don’t have anything at all on the desktop. The download folder is always clean, because I either delete files or just move them to folders in documents. I am a perfectionist, and so I am calmer.
My top level directories are like: Accounts, Clients, Projects, Apps. Then sub-directories etc. I use symlinks e.g. when a client project is reused as an App or vice-versa.
Everything initially gets downloaded into ~/Downloads and then moved as appropriate. Having two Finder windows open makes this very easy. One stays on ~/Downloads and the other changed to suit the destination.
I am a heavy Terminal user, with multiple active windows, so most of my current work-in-progress is a "cd ...".
I replicate the above to a Linux desktop with rsync based scripts. So I basically perform the same activities on both platforms, e.g. LibreOffice, etc. Hardly use any Apple software anymore, notable exception being iTunes for the various iPads and iPods around the house and car.
It might be nice if the US became the privacy state in contrast to the proliferation of the surveillance states. It is a naïve speculation but, by coining a phrase, maybe we can get a few politicians to try to nudge the government toward a greater respect of personal freedoms and a sense of protected privacies with respect to this particular issue.
It would be nice but I'd reckon the US will be the last to do so. The US, being the center of Capitalism and home of Big Tech, the lobbying pressure on politicians will be far too great for them to resist. Even Europe, despite the GDPR, is pretty wishy-washy about this kind of privacy regulation.
For the time being, I reckon this is strictly a DIY exercise.
"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!
I imagine the emissions are a tiny rounding error compared to the emissions of those pigs. Livestock and the fields to feed them are one of the largest contributors to climate change. If those servers improve efficiency at all that will easily offset their emissions
