Your post seems reasonable, but having just gone through incorporating and worrying about it myself, there's nothing wrong with asking non-lawyers about the experience. Most small software business owners who have looked into it would be good people to ask. Most of them *have* talked to lawyers and in my experience, everyone seems to be getting the same advice. There's also lots of people who post about these experiences online, and taking them in aggregate, there is useful info about there.
Something you have to keep in mind about lawyers: they make their money by selling you fear, just like insurance companies. If they had their way, they'd want you to spend all your startup capital on lawyers "just to be safe", but then you'd have no money or time left to actually develop your product. It's easy to get distracted by this stuff, but there are a lot more things that can go wrong in a software product launch than just a patent suit. In fact, from what I've read all over the place, it seems very unlikely.
I have talked to lawyers about this, and they generally tell you to not worry about patents at the beginning. Basically this is because they'll only sue you because either they want money or they want to shut you down. You don't have enough money to be worth sueing. You also probably aren't taking away enough of anyone's business for them to both with the cost and distraction of launching a lawsuit. What I was told was basically, if I got sued, that meant I was successful because I had enough money to be worth sueing.
However, you should always consult a good intellectual property lawyer.
Some other interesting "facts" - getting a patent generally costs about $15,000. The average return on investment of a patent is (can't quite remember, but) somewhere around $7000 or $9000. Most software companies get them for defensive rather than offensive purposes. The average patent litigation suit in the US is around $1 million. Getting one patent is kind of like being a country and getting one nuclear weapon.
That was... trippy... So I take it this is what you get when you take a computer programmer, gave him a hell of a lot of weed, some doritos, a wiki, and lock them in a room for a few days.
Actually, the last line is funny: "Identification of the ten base action constants was done by Timothy Rue in February 1988, while having lunch at Pizza Hut." Wow.
The other problem is that (in the US anyway), if they can prove you knew about the patent then that's "willful infringement" and that incurs punitive damages, which is triple the regular amount. Most lawyers would advise developers to avoid learning about software patents just because of this fact.
I agree. I just read Diamond's book - Collapse - a few months ago. His premise is exactly that. We're not "harming the Earth", just using up resources like forests, clean water, and oil at unsustainable rates. Don't get too cozy with your lifestyle because it can't continue forever.
Hi. Canadian here. Not sure where you're getting your numbers. The idea that Canadians have more firearms per-capita than Americans is something that needs a really really good citation. This article from Reuters says the US has 90 guns per 100 Americans and Canada has 30 guns per hundred Canadians. I did find a reference to your murder rate numbers.
"the US has more people who have no coverage than the entire population of Canada" - Um, I think California has more people than the entire population of Canada - yep, Wikipedia says California has 36.7 million and Canada has 31.6 million. So this is a pointless statement.
Now, there has been a lot of misinformation in the US news about Canada, and particularly the Canadian health care system. First of all, the system being proposed in the US is *not* a universal health care system like Canada has. In my opinion, as a person who has used both a US "HMO" and the Canadian system, the Canadian system only works because (a) you can't "get ahead" by scamming the health care system. Remember the Canadian system doesn't include medications, so there's no scamming pain meds or anything. You basically get doctor's visits and hospital visits paid for. Not sure about you, but I want to spend as little time in those places as possible, so there's little incentive for people to "scam more health care" from the system, and (b) EVERYONE has to use the system. This includes the hospital administrators, the politicians, their families, etc. There's a built in incentive for everyone to make the system work well, because everyone has to use it at some point in their life.
I'm a fiscal conservative, so public health care is something I look on skeptically, but I have to tell you that the Canadian system is brilliant. It needs constant supervision and tweaking, but it really is great. I've started to realize that while I'm generally pro-market, the one place I really think it makes sense to socialize is any type of insurance. Look at insurance this way: everyone is supposed to agree to share the cost of some high risk, low occurrence event, like theft, fire, accident, or health related expense. In an ideal world, the amount paid to cover expenses is equal to the amount that people have to put into the pot, perhaps adjusted by their risk level (so choosing to live in an earthquake zone or choosing to smoke might cost you more). Obviously it takes effort to administer such a program (you have to prevent fraud, keep track of the money, etc.) but this shouldn't be much more than the overhead expense of a well run charity, some of which frequently have administrative expense ratios below 5%. But then you throw insurance companies into the mix and they realize that their entire reason for existing (profit) is to maximize the amount going into the pot and minimize the amount going out. Therefore, they hire armies of lawyers, draft convoluted insurance policies, spend exorbitant sums on marketing, and ultimately none of that money and effort is being spent on bettering the world, like it would be if we spent it building infrastructure or investing in new technologies, like "good" companies do. The number I've seen is that insurance companies have administrative ratios of 30% to 50%.
If you go into my doctor's office in Canada, there is one woman behind the counter doing all the paperwork for the entire practice. Walk into a US doctor's office and there's at least 3. That's because if you're a doctor in Canada, you have one insurance company to deal with, and if you're a doctor in the US you have hundreds, and you have to narrow it down to maybe 30 or 40 that you're going to deal with. You have to be familiar with all those different forms, etc. That a huge overhead expense, and it doesn't contribute to providing the patient with better healthcare (indeed, it makes it harder to get effective
Everyone's going to have their own bit of advice, and you have to take it all in aggregate and boil it down. Here are my additions to the pot:
1. The most useful thing in all those self-help books, especially for geeks, is the chapters on communication, and specifically active listening. Not only is this useful in marriage but in the workforce too. I suggest the habit called "Seek first to understand, then to be understood" from David Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People".
2. The biggest arguments any couple has will be about money, eventually. Even though you make more money as life goes on, life will cost more, so you'll have more disposable income at the beginning. This is a recipe for an explosion a few years in when you have to reign each others' spending in. Fingers get pointed, etc. Learn to track your finances together. Also, each person should have a set amount of money per week to allocate *as they wish* and the other partner can make no comments on its use. As long as everything fits in the budget, no complaints.
3. The biggest realization for me was that if something is bothering you, then *you* have to take action to fix it, or learn to ignore it. For instance, some people complain about stupid things like their partner leaving the toothpaste cap off. You can't change the other person. That bears repeating: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE OTHER PERSON. Either invent a toothpaste tube with a cap that closes itself, or get his and hers tubes, or just forget about it. Same thing goes with cleaning the house. Typically the female is the one complaining that the male doesn't care about {dirty floors, windows, whatever} and she thinks she can change him if she just keeps nagging him. This is a myth that it's always the female though - it can go the other way. Either way, nagging doesn't work, so you just have to take action and do it. Once *both* people realize that, things go a lot smoother. My saying for this is, "expect little, appreciate much".
It's better than being stuffed in a concentration camp because you didn't toe the party line, and being force fed through a tube down your nose, and stored in a cell that isn't quite big enough in any dimension for you to stretch out fully, just so you'll eventually break down and sign the document admitting your guilt, so they can finally "legally" execute you.
As a guy in the Industrial Automation industry, who has been diligently trying to put common people out of work by replacing them with robots and other machines, I can tell you without any doubt that there is no danger of there being no jobs left for humans. All we've been able to do so far is free up people to do things that humans are better at, like making decisions.
Perhaps that's because we haven't created a machine that's actually better than a person in every way. But perform this thought experiment for a second... what if I made a robot that was exactly like you, only twice as good at everything? Let's say it will have a one time cost of about 2 years of what it costs a company to employ you, and after that, it takes about 10% of that cost per year in power, maintenance, etc. Obviously for the company it's worth replacing you with this robot. Now you're out of a job. Now what happens? When you apply for a job, you can't find one that pays what your old one did, because now you've got cheap competition. A company might hire you for about 1/10th or 1/20th of your former income. So you still could get a job, if minimum wage didn't apply.
So what do you do? You take your life's savings, plus that 1/20th of a salary and you invest all of it you can in a capital fund that owns and leases robots to companies. You live as cheaply as you can, and keep re-investing the proceeds. Essentially you realize you need to own the equipment that is replacing you.
I suggest you start now. Stop thinking about a "job" and start thinking about "wealth".
I am married to a psychologist. Here's how it works... the images were originally made randomly, but then they were shown to gads of people and there is a tremendous amount of effort that went into creating "norms", as in, when viewing this picture, 54% of respondents mention a cat, 72% mention dog, etc. That gives them a baseline for the general population. Then they go and show the cards to people who've been diagnosed with various disorders, etc., and they can measure statistically that certain disorders have a tendency to produce different results than the norm. Ultimately, you can then give someone this test, score their result, and it might say that they tend to answer questions that correlate with someone with such-and-such a disorder. You then go and give them a more detailed (and expensive) examination to determine if they actually have that disorder. Once you get enough evidence together, you can give them a "label" (in the US) or a "diagnosis" (in Canada). Either way, it gives you the evidence you need to prescribe a medical treatment plan.
It's not perfect, but it's better than talking to someone for 5 minutes, going "yeah, they're crazy" and prescribing some drug which may or may not help.
What the APA is complaining about is "test security". The profession has invested a very very large amount of effort into researching and developing statistical tests, just like the Rorschach, and within the profession it is considered unethical to allow the tests to become widely known or it would invalidate the results. The test is based on people answering the first thought that comes into their head. If the images were public and easy to get ahold of, it could become widely known that on card #1, most people see a such-and-such (imagine someone creating a website that polled people for what they say, and posted the results). Someone could then fool the test by answering all the "normal" answers. Not only does this waste the tester's time, but it screws up further statistical analysis, and it ultimately doesn't help to figure out if the person taking the test needs help, which is presumably why they're taking it in the first place.
Following that logic, people that look better just possess some quality that makes them more successful at reproducing offspring that themselves reproduce. Which is kind of a circular argument, but you get my point.
Living longer than it takes to raise your children to the point where they can raise their children would be pointless from an evolutionary standpoint.
You're not understanding. The point of a secret ballot system isn't so that nobody knows who you voted for, it's so that *you* can't prove to anyone else who you voted for. Hence, it prevents vote selling and coercing someone to vote a certain way. With Oregon's system, voters *can* prove who they voted for. That's a very serious flaw. See Secret Ballot.
I see one very very serious problem with it. It's susceptible to vote-buying. Someone could offer you money to vote a certain way, and you can actually prove that you did vote that way. Similarly, your boss could pressure you into proving to him that you voted a certain way. This type of stuff was happening a lot in the past, and that's why secret ballots were introduced.
I'm afraid those technologies don't solve the problem of Clickjacking or a myriad of other exploits that could be used. For instance, with banking you have an incentive to keep your account information secret, but with voting, people are willing to buy your votes or even compelling you into voting a certain way. Your boss could offer favors to employees who prove that they voted for his party. The current paper ballot system makes it very difficult for you to actually prove who you voted for after you leave the booth. With online voting, you can prove it. This is a very dangerous idea.
You're talking about a voter receipt, which is another horrible idea. With a receipt of what I voted for, I can then be *paid* for my vote. In fact, given an online voting system, you can always just have someone look over your shoulder while you vote and verify you're voting for the party they want. Then they can give you money for it. Or an employer can give favortism to employees who prove that they voted the way the company prefers.
Please, please do some more research about the history of voting.
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. With banking, both you and your bank keep separate records of all transactions, and you can do a balance at the end of the month if you suspect something. You can be absolutely sure at the end of the month that the bank is playing fairly with your money. With voting, the system cannot retain a link between the voter and the vote after it has been cast. Therefore, there's no way for an individual to be sure that their vote was counted. The only way to feel secure is for the system to be transparent. Nothing could be less transparent than an online voting system. There's too much crud in the technology stack to for you to be certain that what you saw on your screen is really what was recorded at the other end.
Thankfully, "sticking your head in the sand" is not considered a valid engineering method. The system needs to take this kind of stuff into account. The fact that you're naive doesn't mean we should all be naive.
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. In banking, both you and the bank keep a record of transactions, and the bank keeps a record of which account belongs to which person. Secret ballot voting is completely different. Once you've cast your vote, the system cannot store any link between your identity and your vote. Therefore, the voting system needs to be designed in such a way that fraud is detectable even though no individual can know if their vote was counted. This means voting systems need to be as transparent as possible. I can't think of a less transparent system than online voting.
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I wouldn't leave a sign that said "take me" but I might leave a sign that said "copy me" if people were walking around with car copying machines...
Your post seems reasonable, but having just gone through incorporating and worrying about it myself, there's nothing wrong with asking non-lawyers about the experience. Most small software business owners who have looked into it would be good people to ask. Most of them *have* talked to lawyers and in my experience, everyone seems to be getting the same advice. There's also lots of people who post about these experiences online, and taking them in aggregate, there is useful info about there.
Something you have to keep in mind about lawyers: they make their money by selling you fear, just like insurance companies. If they had their way, they'd want you to spend all your startup capital on lawyers "just to be safe", but then you'd have no money or time left to actually develop your product. It's easy to get distracted by this stuff, but there are a lot more things that can go wrong in a software product launch than just a patent suit. In fact, from what I've read all over the place, it seems very unlikely.
I have talked to lawyers about this, and they generally tell you to not worry about patents at the beginning. Basically this is because they'll only sue you because either they want money or they want to shut you down. You don't have enough money to be worth sueing. You also probably aren't taking away enough of anyone's business for them to both with the cost and distraction of launching a lawsuit. What I was told was basically, if I got sued, that meant I was successful because I had enough money to be worth sueing.
However, you should always consult a good intellectual property lawyer.
Some other interesting "facts" - getting a patent generally costs about $15,000. The average return on investment of a patent is (can't quite remember, but) somewhere around $7000 or $9000. Most software companies get them for defensive rather than offensive purposes. The average patent litigation suit in the US is around $1 million. Getting one patent is kind of like being a country and getting one nuclear weapon.
Also, I found this article from Paul Graham insightful.
That was... trippy... So I take it this is what you get when you take a computer programmer, gave him a hell of a lot of weed, some doritos, a wiki, and lock them in a room for a few days.
Actually, the last line is funny: "Identification of the ten base action constants was done by Timothy Rue in February 1988, while having lunch at Pizza Hut." Wow.
The other problem is that (in the US anyway), if they can prove you knew about the patent then that's "willful infringement" and that incurs punitive damages, which is triple the regular amount. Most lawyers would advise developers to avoid learning about software patents just because of this fact.
I agree. I just read Diamond's book - Collapse - a few months ago. His premise is exactly that. We're not "harming the Earth", just using up resources like forests, clean water, and oil at unsustainable rates. Don't get too cozy with your lifestyle because it can't continue forever.
Sorry, but I don't buy the guns/firearms thing. Please provide a citation from a reputable agency.
Hi. Canadian here. Not sure where you're getting your numbers. The idea that Canadians have more firearms per-capita than Americans is something that needs a really really good citation. This article from Reuters says the US has 90 guns per 100 Americans and Canada has 30 guns per hundred Canadians. I did find a reference to your murder rate numbers.
"the US has more people who have no coverage than the entire population of Canada" - Um, I think California has more people than the entire population of Canada - yep, Wikipedia says California has 36.7 million and Canada has 31.6 million. So this is a pointless statement.
Now, there has been a lot of misinformation in the US news about Canada, and particularly the Canadian health care system. First of all, the system being proposed in the US is *not* a universal health care system like Canada has. In my opinion, as a person who has used both a US "HMO" and the Canadian system, the Canadian system only works because (a) you can't "get ahead" by scamming the health care system. Remember the Canadian system doesn't include medications, so there's no scamming pain meds or anything. You basically get doctor's visits and hospital visits paid for. Not sure about you, but I want to spend as little time in those places as possible, so there's little incentive for people to "scam more health care" from the system, and (b) EVERYONE has to use the system. This includes the hospital administrators, the politicians, their families, etc. There's a built in incentive for everyone to make the system work well, because everyone has to use it at some point in their life.
I'm a fiscal conservative, so public health care is something I look on skeptically, but I have to tell you that the Canadian system is brilliant. It needs constant supervision and tweaking, but it really is great. I've started to realize that while I'm generally pro-market, the one place I really think it makes sense to socialize is any type of insurance. Look at insurance this way: everyone is supposed to agree to share the cost of some high risk, low occurrence event, like theft, fire, accident, or health related expense. In an ideal world, the amount paid to cover expenses is equal to the amount that people have to put into the pot, perhaps adjusted by their risk level (so choosing to live in an earthquake zone or choosing to smoke might cost you more). Obviously it takes effort to administer such a program (you have to prevent fraud, keep track of the money, etc.) but this shouldn't be much more than the overhead expense of a well run charity, some of which frequently have administrative expense ratios below 5%. But then you throw insurance companies into the mix and they realize that their entire reason for existing (profit) is to maximize the amount going into the pot and minimize the amount going out. Therefore, they hire armies of lawyers, draft convoluted insurance policies, spend exorbitant sums on marketing, and ultimately none of that money and effort is being spent on bettering the world, like it would be if we spent it building infrastructure or investing in new technologies, like "good" companies do. The number I've seen is that insurance companies have administrative ratios of 30% to 50%.
If you go into my doctor's office in Canada, there is one woman behind the counter doing all the paperwork for the entire practice. Walk into a US doctor's office and there's at least 3. That's because if you're a doctor in Canada, you have one insurance company to deal with, and if you're a doctor in the US you have hundreds, and you have to narrow it down to maybe 30 or 40 that you're going to deal with. You have to be familiar with all those different forms, etc. That a huge overhead expense, and it doesn't contribute to providing the patient with better healthcare (indeed, it makes it harder to get effective
Everyone's going to have their own bit of advice, and you have to take it all in aggregate and boil it down. Here are my additions to the pot:
1. The most useful thing in all those self-help books, especially for geeks, is the chapters on communication, and specifically active listening. Not only is this useful in marriage but in the workforce too. I suggest the habit called "Seek first to understand, then to be understood" from David Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People".
2. The biggest arguments any couple has will be about money, eventually. Even though you make more money as life goes on, life will cost more, so you'll have more disposable income at the beginning. This is a recipe for an explosion a few years in when you have to reign each others' spending in. Fingers get pointed, etc. Learn to track your finances together. Also, each person should have a set amount of money per week to allocate *as they wish* and the other partner can make no comments on its use. As long as everything fits in the budget, no complaints.
3. The biggest realization for me was that if something is bothering you, then *you* have to take action to fix it, or learn to ignore it. For instance, some people complain about stupid things like their partner leaving the toothpaste cap off. You can't change the other person. That bears repeating: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE OTHER PERSON. Either invent a toothpaste tube with a cap that closes itself, or get his and hers tubes, or just forget about it. Same thing goes with cleaning the house. Typically the female is the one complaining that the male doesn't care about {dirty floors, windows, whatever} and she thinks she can change him if she just keeps nagging him. This is a myth that it's always the female though - it can go the other way. Either way, nagging doesn't work, so you just have to take action and do it. Once *both* people realize that, things go a lot smoother. My saying for this is, "expect little, appreciate much".
Good luck!
You are way behind the curve, my friend. Here is your replacement. Already in use. Here's a demo video.
It's better than being stuffed in a concentration camp because you didn't toe the party line, and being force fed through a tube down your nose, and stored in a cell that isn't quite big enough in any dimension for you to stretch out fully, just so you'll eventually break down and sign the document admitting your guilt, so they can finally "legally" execute you.
Like they do in China.
As a guy in the Industrial Automation industry, who has been diligently trying to put common people out of work by replacing them with robots and other machines, I can tell you without any doubt that there is no danger of there being no jobs left for humans. All we've been able to do so far is free up people to do things that humans are better at, like making decisions.
Perhaps that's because we haven't created a machine that's actually better than a person in every way. But perform this thought experiment for a second... what if I made a robot that was exactly like you, only twice as good at everything? Let's say it will have a one time cost of about 2 years of what it costs a company to employ you, and after that, it takes about 10% of that cost per year in power, maintenance, etc. Obviously for the company it's worth replacing you with this robot. Now you're out of a job. Now what happens? When you apply for a job, you can't find one that pays what your old one did, because now you've got cheap competition. A company might hire you for about 1/10th or 1/20th of your former income. So you still could get a job, if minimum wage didn't apply.
So what do you do? You take your life's savings, plus that 1/20th of a salary and you invest all of it you can in a capital fund that owns and leases robots to companies. You live as cheaply as you can, and keep re-investing the proceeds. Essentially you realize you need to own the equipment that is replacing you.
I suggest you start now. Stop thinking about a "job" and start thinking about "wealth".
I am married to a psychologist. Here's how it works... the images were originally made randomly, but then they were shown to gads of people and there is a tremendous amount of effort that went into creating "norms", as in, when viewing this picture, 54% of respondents mention a cat, 72% mention dog, etc. That gives them a baseline for the general population. Then they go and show the cards to people who've been diagnosed with various disorders, etc., and they can measure statistically that certain disorders have a tendency to produce different results than the norm. Ultimately, you can then give someone this test, score their result, and it might say that they tend to answer questions that correlate with someone with such-and-such a disorder. You then go and give them a more detailed (and expensive) examination to determine if they actually have that disorder. Once you get enough evidence together, you can give them a "label" (in the US) or a "diagnosis" (in Canada). Either way, it gives you the evidence you need to prescribe a medical treatment plan.
It's not perfect, but it's better than talking to someone for 5 minutes, going "yeah, they're crazy" and prescribing some drug which may or may not help.
What the APA is complaining about is "test security". The profession has invested a very very large amount of effort into researching and developing statistical tests, just like the Rorschach, and within the profession it is considered unethical to allow the tests to become widely known or it would invalidate the results. The test is based on people answering the first thought that comes into their head. If the images were public and easy to get ahold of, it could become widely known that on card #1, most people see a such-and-such (imagine someone creating a website that polled people for what they say, and posted the results). Someone could then fool the test by answering all the "normal" answers. Not only does this waste the tester's time, but it screws up further statistical analysis, and it ultimately doesn't help to figure out if the person taking the test needs help, which is presumably why they're taking it in the first place.
How bad are we that when they say they mapped 99% of the Earth, we all ask what was the 1% that was missed?
It's like when the poor kid comes home with 99% on their test, and their father says, "what did you get wrong?". Talk about giving people a complex!
By the way, it's probably the poles where the orbital inclination doesn't allow the satellites to see.
Following that logic, people that look better just possess some quality that makes them more successful at reproducing offspring that themselves reproduce. Which is kind of a circular argument, but you get my point.
Living longer than it takes to raise your children to the point where they can raise their children would be pointless from an evolutionary standpoint.
You're not understanding. The point of a secret ballot system isn't so that nobody knows who you voted for, it's so that *you* can't prove to anyone else who you voted for. Hence, it prevents vote selling and coercing someone to vote a certain way. With Oregon's system, voters *can* prove who they voted for. That's a very serious flaw. See Secret Ballot.
I see one very very serious problem with it. It's susceptible to vote-buying. Someone could offer you money to vote a certain way, and you can actually prove that you did vote that way. Similarly, your boss could pressure you into proving to him that you voted a certain way. This type of stuff was happening a lot in the past, and that's why secret ballots were introduced.
I'm afraid those technologies don't solve the problem of Clickjacking or a myriad of other exploits that could be used. For instance, with banking you have an incentive to keep your account information secret, but with voting, people are willing to buy your votes or even compelling you into voting a certain way. Your boss could offer favors to employees who prove that they voted for his party. The current paper ballot system makes it very difficult for you to actually prove who you voted for after you leave the booth. With online voting, you can prove it. This is a very dangerous idea.
You're talking about a voter receipt, which is another horrible idea. With a receipt of what I voted for, I can then be *paid* for my vote. In fact, given an online voting system, you can always just have someone look over your shoulder while you vote and verify you're voting for the party they want. Then they can give you money for it. Or an employer can give favortism to employees who prove that they voted the way the company prefers.
Please, please do some more research about the history of voting.
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
It's not secure and we should do away with it.
This analogy is incorrect for the same reason that the analogy between online banking and voting is invalid. With banking, both you and your bank maintain a separate record of transactions, and you can be certain at the end of the month whether the bank has the same record of transactions as you. This is because the bank (and the tax department) actually maintain a link between you and your account. However, a voting system simply cannot maintain a link between the voter and vote cast. Therefore, there's no way for a voter to be sure that their vote was counted, unless they fundamentally trust the system as a whole. The only way for people to trust the system is for it to be transparent, and online voting is about the least transparent system I can think of. There are too many things in the technology stack between your screen and the server for you to be sure that the vote is recorded the way you think it is.
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. With banking, both you and your bank keep separate records of all transactions, and you can do a balance at the end of the month if you suspect something. You can be absolutely sure at the end of the month that the bank is playing fairly with your money. With voting, the system cannot retain a link between the voter and the vote after it has been cast. Therefore, there's no way for an individual to be sure that their vote was counted. The only way to feel secure is for the system to be transparent. Nothing could be less transparent than an online voting system. There's too much crud in the technology stack to for you to be certain that what you saw on your screen is really what was recorded at the other end.
Thankfully, "sticking your head in the sand" is not considered a valid engineering method. The system needs to take this kind of stuff into account. The fact that you're naive doesn't mean we should all be naive.
Banking and voting are fundamentally different. In banking, both you and the bank keep a record of transactions, and the bank keeps a record of which account belongs to which person. Secret ballot voting is completely different. Once you've cast your vote, the system cannot store any link between your identity and your vote. Therefore, the voting system needs to be designed in such a way that fraud is detectable even though no individual can know if their vote was counted. This means voting systems need to be as transparent as possible. I can't think of a less transparent system than online voting.