Spiritus Ranae

I just sent a version of this email to the two people running for the Democrat nomination for the Illinois General Assembly 1st District. My district, the 1st includes a stretch of Archer Avenue in Chicago under state jurisidiction which has proven so far very difficult to improve for bicycle and pedestrian safety.

Greetings,

I am a voter in the 1st District and am trying to decide how to vote in the upcoming primary. After reviewing your web site, I still have a few questions about transportation and street safety, and I’d be grateful for your responses:

What is your position on protected bike lanes and other street safety projects in the 1st District, especially when there is neighborhood controversy about parking or traffic?

How would you balance the needs of drivers, pedestrians, transit riders, and people who bike when the city proposes street redesigns in our area?

Do you support expanding low‑stress options for people to walk and bike on the Southwest Side and, if so, what role do you think the state should play?

Thank you for your time and for your service to our community.

Sincerely,

ACTUAL NAME HERE

and the robots have to give all their wages, initially to the unemployed and underemployed and then eventually, when all the non-automated jobs are gone, to everyone.

Put another way: robots are paid a wage somewhat comparable to the wage that would have been paid to a human worker. Those wages are taxed at 100%. That tax income is then used to fund unemployment payments, and over time, gradually shifted over to pay for a universal basic income.

I just added a tiny, privacy‑friendly “pageview counter” to this blog that runs for free, doesn’t use Google Analytics, and avoids collecting personal data. ​

What problem this solves

Most analytics tools track a lot more than many small sites need: they set cookies, profile visitors, and phone home to big platforms just to answer basic questions like “Which pages are people reading?” and “Is anyone visiting this thing?” The goal here was different: count visits and see which pages get attention, without building dossiers on readers or depending on gross ad‑tech companies. ​

What I built instead

A tiny web service (hosted on Deno Deploy) that receives a simple “someone/something viewed this page” message whenever a page on the site loads. ​

The service is a very small snippet of JavaScript added to the blog’s template that sends just three pieces of information:

1. Which page was viewed (the URL path)

2. The page title

3. Where the visitor came from on the site (the referrer)

The service does not store IP addresses, cookies, or unique identifiers—only high‑level information that’s useful for understanding traffic, not tracking people. ​

How it works behind the scenes

When someone opens a page on the site, their browser quietly makes a background request to the analytics service saying “Page /blog/archive/ was viewed.” The service checks that the request comes from a web page, updates an in‑memory counter for that page, and writes a brief log line (timestamp, path, title, referrer, and browser type). ​

What makes it privacy‑respecting

No cookies and no fingerprinting. The system doesn’t try to recognize or follow a person across visits; it only counts pageviews. ​

Minimal data

It records just enough to answer “what is being read?” rather than “who is reading it?”. ​

Why this is a good fit for a personal blog

For a small site or personal blog with no commericial interests whatsoever, the interesting questions are about content, not people: which posts resonate, which pages nobody sees, and whether the site is still alive in the eyes of readers. This setup answers those questions with a tiny, understandable, and host‑agnostic piece of plumbing - no dashboards, no trackers, and no dependence on ad‑network analytics. ​