Maybe once in the past year have I managed to have someone buy my cans and bottles for basically nothing. Probably 80 percent of the people redeeming where I go are homeless, so it's no mystery to me why they're homeless.
I've been using a Blackberry Z10. I relay my Gmail to a remote Unix pay-for account, and only receive from there; I only send mail from a VM on my VPN'd home computer.
This phone does phone calls, SMS, and I use the built-in browser on private mode. There's NOTHING Google on this phone, and I sign into nothing.
I do feel like I'm not part of the game any more, but I'm not part of the game any more!
You can use a standard email client hooked to Gmail to stop Google from getting your browsing data.
You can relay your Gmail to another account with read-only access, replying from a VM with only email use (I do this on my phone). Or, only get/send your email from a VM that does nothing else.
Because it seems like there's two issues here: Google gaining intel from your email itself, and Google gaining intel from your browsing data, gained from your use of Gmail in a browser. What I've suggested addresses browsing data.
Truck traffic in LA is by far the problem, not so much the car traffic (though that is horrible, based on the population).
Ships come into Long Beach, the containers are offloaded, the trucks begin a lumbering journey to points East. Belching all the way.
I'm not making up the claim. California rules put in place over ten years ago had trucks retrofitted or whatever, and this change to TRUCKS ONLY was like removing 30 MILLION cars from California roads. There are not 30 million trucks in California, though sometimes it appears so.