Slashdot Mirror

Seven States Still Force Prohibition-era Bans on Election Day Alcohol Sales

I remember going to a bar after the first time I voted and was shocked to find I could NOT buy a drink to celebrate. Bars could only even open on election day if they made at least 30% of their revenue from non-alcohol sales.

Unfortunately, corruption still exists and this happened less than a decade ago:

Hudson Hallum further told Carter that $20 to $40 was too much to pay for one vote, but that this amount was acceptable to pay for the votes of multiple members of a household. On that same date, Hudson Hallum also told Carter, “We need to use that black limo and buy a couple of cases of some cheap vodka and whiskey to get people to vote.” Two days later, Carter and Kent Hallum spoke with an individual in Memphis, Tennessee about getting a discounted price for the purchase of 100 half pints of vodka for the campaign.

We have mail-in ballots where I live. I like it because I can fill it out at my leisure while I carefully study the candidates and issues and then I drop it off in person. The drawback of course is that the USPS is not infallible and a rogue postal carrier could collect ballots only from those who don't vote or perhaps only vote in Presidential elections and if anyone complains about not getting a ballot? It must have gotten lost in the mail.

I don't know if that has happened, but it's a possibility.

The single greatest determinant of a child's success, is parental involvement. That's how we fix public schools, unfortunately, it can't happen when children live in poverty or get shunted around due to evictions and homelessness. The public schools that are hurting are the ones that deal with these issues.
The vast majority of public schools are excellent, but some are so bad they drive down the average significantly.

How do you get that data about the bad potatoes, how any sacks of shitty potatoes have to be eaten? You do realize that each of those "sacks" represents at least a couple hundred kids who are wasting a year of their lives and in the best case trying to catch up at a better school.

In reality, most kids will stay at the shitty private school because it's convenient, or their friends go there, or their parents are too busy to notice, or their parents have to metric to compare.

Where your guess is off is in assuming the existence of journalists.

The business model of "news," is to attract eyeballs.

Those eyeballs belong to you and me.

We're way more interested in a pregnant woman's parody of a pregnant giraffe.

All eyes continue to be on April the giraffe. Everyone is waiting for her to give birth. Video of the giraffe, who is at the Animal Adventure Park in New York, went viral last week as millions of people stayed glued to her story.

Actual journalism doesn't sell.

if only people had realized how stupid drug testing is...
http://www.wthr.com/story/2133...

http://www.wthr.com/story/17861738/will-lawmakers-act-to-close-tax-loophole-for-illegal-immigrants

Illegal workers collect what's called an additional child tax credit. The credit – up to $1,000 per child – can be claimed even by families who pay nothing in taxes, in many cases resulting in a cash payment from the IRS. It is intended for working families with children who live in the same home.

Many illegal immigrants are claiming the tax credit for children who've never lived in this country.

Hell why don't we just go all the way and print the purchasers name on the damned ticket and if you don't show up at the event with positive ID sorry out of luck.

Some artists (such as Miley Cyrus) are insisting on "ticketless" ticketing, where you just show your credit card and ID at the venue.

There is a tension between artists who want to seem like anyone can buy a cheap ticket, the venues who dislike the variability of ticket sales, ticketing companies that make money by mitigating the risk to the venue, and brokers who mitigate the risk to the ticketers. A "sure sell-out" artist like Miley Cyrus can do "no-scalping" ticketless ticketing, but most artists who may or may not sell out a venue could not get the venue to agree to ticketless ticketing without reselling.

http://www.wthr.com/global/story.asp?s=9299280

LOL, they should get used to it. Maybe their wealth got "spread around."

It has nothing to do with what the search engines do or provide per se. Search engines aren't always needed to a certain extent any more, particularly when it comes to popular sites, specific uris, etc. The reason (IMO)?

Word of "mouth". Actually, email messages[1] are sending names of services or specific uris for a particular site (e.g., something particularly funny on youtube) and people are pointing their browser in that direction, then exploring what else is there. If there are uris to other locations on the web, people follow those. One of the local affiliates in Indy played a considerably portion of this last night and made sure everyone knew there was a link on their web site. Lots of people likely pointed their browsers and youtube had a lot of extra traffic[2]. On the youtube page is Explore other videos. Lots of information conveyed, but no search engine activity in the process.
The web has enough toys^w services which people regularly visit (e.g., blogs, youtube) they don't necessarily need search engines unless somethings isn't found via the normal means. And normal now includes the various discussion forums where people provide the advice from the voice of context. IMDb.com has a professional side (reasonably priced paid service) where people who are in the biz can post things they're looking for or are available for. A couple of nights ago, someone was asking about the best software for scriptwriting on a small budget. ca. eight people chimed in with what they knew about different packages, including a couple of free ones, a commercial one for $25, a template which can be downloaded for MS Word, and some of the pros & cons about the ones they'd used. Where will you find ad hoc information in that context on demand in a search engine?
__________________________________

[1] Unless you're in the media and use "emails" as a noun.

[2] Several years ago, I had a client who helped small to medium newspapers get online. Someone build a web site for them (taking six months, #include files nested six deep, every call to the server required 20'000 lines of code to be processed, regardless of the function involved. Once more than twenty people hit a site, the server showed you its impression of the La Brea tar pits. One site for a reasonably small city, perhaps a handful of a thousand people had a sheriff's deputy arrested for pedophilia, a ten-car pileup on the nearby interstate, and the largest employer (a substantial percentage of the citizenry) was going to be dismissed. All of this hit CNN with a reference to their newspaper's web site. That's about the time Chrnobyl and Three Mile Island happened at the same time. Fortunately smarter people are starting to anticipate resource issues a little better than they used to.

When the responding officers don't do anything, get their names and badge numbers (but, as we learned earlier, don't videotape them unless you want to be a martyr)

Really.

Last summer, one of the local affiliates aired a story which involved a private investigator who was practically tailgating a state trooper (no siren or emergency lights) on I-65 as it heads out of Indy on its way to Chicago. The PI was doing it as much out of fun as anything. After all, we see the cops go 10+ mph over the rest of traffic, knowing no one is going to do anything about it. His video showed his speed via local dash and the trooper's cruiser just up & over his steering wheel with the license plate in view for proper identification. This apparently went on for quite some time. The thing the reporter mentioned was that this guy was driving like the trooper's wing man and he never really seemed to notice and|or care. There was no followup as to what happened to the trooper.

Totally unrelated - galaxies away, but part of recent investigations (from the same affiliate): Basically Dumpster Diving Behind Rx. Extending Social Engineering beyond what we're used to (passwords & whatnot). What was wild was seeing some of the pill bottles which contained partial bottles of oxy* (the wildcard fits - there's a ton of joy pills fitting into the "oxy" mold). Someone actually had the cajones to use the 'script info, greet a woman at her front door, and ask for the remainder of her pills because they were a bad batch or they'd be exchanged, or something like that. The best part was when the stores were shown. One lady said they had no business digging in their trash, others still had a problem on follow-up visits.

unf%ck'nbelievable.

There are a few times when it's nice to see someone representing the executive branch get nailed. The affiliates got a lot of airplay about this until the punishment was doled out. What the PI did was film the cop's car over his dashboard so the speed could be seen real-time. The cop must have been one of the finest available. He didn't notice someone sitting on his immediate right bumper for a lengthy distance.

Unfortunately, that's an extreme. There's nothing like driving one of our interstates at the speed limit (70mph) and see someone with a couple of [unlit] strobes and silent sirens cruising along at 80+.

Here in Indy, 465 is like a public race track betwixt races. With three lanes, there's the occasional opportunity to have a cop trapped behind you in the leftmost lane doing 55mph (the speed limit) and the other two lanes aren't going to give them room, either. I'll frequently keep going instead of worrying about my exit just to pace and know it's got to be killing them to do 55. If they want to kick the lights & siren on, there'll likely be a check (by moi) as to whether they really had an emergency.

This: $25M estate is for sale. The guy who owned it was receiving $100M+ in compensation from the company he founded. ($ + stock) (he sold encyclopedia door-to-door as his last job before he founded the insurance company). He and another dozen+ suits were taking huge loans out of the company to load up on shares of stock. They bought a company which insured trailers (as in mobile home trailers - tornado magnets) and the company financially bounced pretty hard and most of them were tossed. They are now being pursued for repayment but are claiming they have no way to pay and will not declare bankruptcy.

The funny thing is, they would have kept the money had the stock paid off but they don't believe they owe anything because the stock didn't pay off. The best part is Hilbert (said estate above) claims he's spent all of his money and has nothing more than a handful of millions left - as an aside: a substantial number of donations were made before the financial issues - hospital wings, orchestra, athletic facilities, etc. Mysteriously, his wife seems to have two substantial estates across the street from each other in Florida, etc. The Hilbert family attorney claims she's permitted to have her own financial status and it's no one else's business. read that: they've stashed the money in her name.

Who is she? The second Mrs. Hilbert. She was the stripper at Mr. Hilbert's son's bachelor party. I'm not kidding. The only thing she shouldn't have taken off during her routine is the bag she had on her head. Have you heard the phrase, "Uglier than a mud fence?"

Oh, they've had two auctions to unload everything they left behind because it wouldn't fit when they moved into the biggest house they could afford around here - 9'000 ft^2 - $5M. Auction #2 The real estate sign advertises "55'000 ft^2 under roof!" The basketball court mentioned in the cited story is a to-scale replica of Indiana University's, down to the championship banners, scoreboards, ...everything.