Of course you shouldn't have to pay to vote, but I don't see a single problem with needing to identify yourself as someone who is eligible to vote in the first place. That this happens to cost money is no more of an infringement upon their rights than the fact that food also costs money, which they need to eat just in order to stay alive in this society.
Or do you think that the right to vote is actually more important than the right to simply continue breathing, and the fact that money is required to do the latter should have no bearing on the former?
Whether or not it is non-existent is entirely irrelevant to the government state doing what is actually entirely reasonable to prevent it.
And again, we are talking about $35 dollars for something that is good for five years and a person will have many months or sometimes even years to plan for needing it. For the relatively few people that it actually would be an issue for, you are then talking about homeless people.... who would reasonably need to prove their citizenship anyways or else you could easily end up with people voting who are not eligible to vote in the first place, and would be unfair to the citizens that vote legitimately.
However there have been documented cases of legitimate people being denied the right to vote because they could not get an ID. IDs cost money....
$35, good for 5 years. That works out to less than 60 cents per month. Seniors can get ID for less than half of that.
Honestly, not having the money to get ID when you will have *LOTS* of warning that you are going to need it is not an excuse, IMO.... it's not like election days just happen without much warning. If they did, you might have a case for allegedly unjustly denying people their right to vote.... I would suggest that they have voluntarily surrendered that right by not fulfilling criteria that there is absolutely no excuse not to know about long before the date of the election.
Perhaps it has escaped your attention that whether or not there is a need for it is irrelevant. Humans are greedy, and will charge accordingly for products that they control the supply of, regardless of how much or how little it costs them. If that means that only the rich will be able to afford them, then so be it... if the nonworking poor cannot afford their products, that's not the capitalist's problem.
My point is that it doesn't matter if the labour cost is zero, the person who controls the supply is still going to try and charge as much money as he possibly can for the product, and if there is nobody willing or able to pay the price that he wants, he may simply decide to not produce the product in the first place.
The ideal that savings are somehow always passed on down to the consumer is a myth in any industry where the supplies can be easily controlled, which is almost everything these days.
With or without human labour, the cost price is whatever the person who controls the supply can get people to pay for the end product.
If there are enough people that can pay the price the the supplier wants, then it's probably not going to matter to them how many other people might do without it, because presumably reducing the price to appeal to a larger market wouldn't necessarily increase their own bottom line.
Yes, they could still do that, of course. But at that point they are arresting a person because they want to, and could not even try to make the argument that they were arresting the person because they posed any threat to public safety or security unless they had other evidence to go on.
Possible, though they could likely give you something to help get you in the right state of mind.
If they gave you something to artificially try and induce a cooperative state, then the tech should be able to discern that you were not in a normal frame of mind, and could still refuse access.
The principle behind using such mechanisms would be that if a would-be snoop knows in advance that such mechanism are in place, then they would not try to coerce someone to give them access in the first place because they know ahead of time that any effort they might undertake will fail.
Although we might not yet have the tech to do this, I can easily imagine a password system in the not too distant future that is tied with a wetware mechanism that analyzes the state of mind of the person entering the password to determine who is entering the password and their emotional state while they are entering it. If the person is under any duress while they are entering the password, then it will not unlock.
Thus, it would be provable that you have no ability to unlock it for them.... what would they do about that, exactly?
The price of milk certainly would go up 20% or even more if the USA didn't susbisidize its dairy to create a surplus (it would probably nearly double in price, in fact.... there's a reason why USA dairy is so inexpensive compared to most other countries)..
If minimum wage workers are already being fairly paid, then increasing the minimum wage puts their pay above their actual productivity.
As mininum wage has not actually kept pace with either inflation or worker productivity for at least the past 40 years, minimum wage workers are more often not getting fairly paid than are.
Actually, the prices don't need to really go up that much to compensate for increased wages because the lowest paid workers don't actually control a significant percentage of the economy in the first place. With increased minimum wage, people are able to spend more money, creating a healthier economy that actually *helps* business.
Obviously, there's a limit to how far this can be taken, but as I said, in practice it works for minimum wage and low wage earners because such a small percentage of the overall economy is actually controlled by those earners, even though they represent a majority of the population (I think it's called the Pareto Principle). As long as low wage earners control such a tiny percentage of the economy, this characteristic will endure.
The increase in prices that objectors often allege needs to occur to compensate for increased wages is not anywhere close to the amount by which the low wages are actually increased... it's more than an order of magnitude in difference.
If the claim had been based on factual data, it would have been headline news within days. I'd love for this to be true, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My money's on never hearing another word about this again.
Awful lot is an understatement.... try over 10 tons of it for every human on the planet..... and that's just to get us to a point of being carbon neutral, let alone doing anything to actually undo the damage we have done.
Strawman... I said free elections, not fixed ones.
The fact that some socialist countries practice what they are calling fair elections that are actually fixed has no bearing on whether democracy and socialism can actually coexist.
For an example of how they can, just look at the country north of the USA. And if you don't think that Canada is a socialist country, I don't think you understand what socialism is.
This includes "Democratic Socialism" which is an oxymoron in itself as it tries to put lipstick on that same old, tired, Marxist pig
Democratic socialism exists when the governing party is socialist, and is democratically elected. There is nothing about socialism, inherently, that disallows free elections... including the ability to elect a party in the next election that does not have a socialist agenda (at which point the term 'socialist' cannot apply).
Sorry for being dense, I just think that essentially making absolutely any communication that happens to be undecipherable illegal, even if it is otherwise entirely innocuous, to be quite serious. This could easily be the case with artificially constructed languages, where the number of parties that even know of the language's existence, let alone how to translate it, can be extremely tiny, and certainly impossible for any existing automated translation system to decipher
You don't need to create a way to detect it... the idea is that you have to know a-priori that the information is there in the first place. That would require intercepting a communication that may have very well occurred in person several months prior.
Obviously, this technique is very low bandwidth, but its as fucking undetectable as shit.
So every private person who might have a broadcast antenna has to let the government install a MitM device on it? Interesting.... and not particularly tenable, considering how easy they are to make or jury-rig. Or are you suggesting that they employ 24/7 surveilance of every tall enough structure that might make a viable broadcast point, anywhere, to see if the owners are installing any kind of antenna, even if only temporarily?
One very simple steganographic technique that comes to mind that I do not think would be feasible for computers, or anyone, to detect would be hiding the data in the rightmost few decimal places of each x and y coordinate, each extending some number of digits past the decimal point so that alterations are not visually distinguishable. The hidden data, in turn, can be encrypted using whatever unbreakable encryption is desired. Unless you knew in advance that a particular svg image was using this technique, you'd never even know that it was there... and even then, the hidden data itself could be superficially indistinguishable from some arbitrary binary data stream, perhaps itself being simply encoded via a one-time pad that may be communicated out-of-band. Some artistic skill might be required to have an inexhaustible supply of svg images, but one could also privately employ an artist to create custom images that they would have permission to modify or broadcast as desired. The coordinates in the a given svg would be massaged appropriately by a computer program to conceal the data within.
Now pray-tell, how would a computer or for that matter anyone be able to tell that somebody was using this method of transmitting data unless they already knew in advance exactly which images contained such data?
MitM attacks only work on wired communications. Not all communication is over wires... radio is immune to MitM attacks unless the MitM can acquire complete control of the broadcasting antenna or receiver.
You realize that this means that speaking in a language that they don't know (or have a convenient translator for) would be illegal under this law... since they don't have any backdoor way to know what is being said.
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Of course you shouldn't have to pay to vote, but I don't see a single problem with needing to identify yourself as someone who is eligible to vote in the first place. That this happens to cost money is no more of an infringement upon their rights than the fact that food also costs money, which they need to eat just in order to stay alive in this society.
Or do you think that the right to vote is actually more important than the right to simply continue breathing, and the fact that money is required to do the latter should have no bearing on the former?
Whether or not it is non-existent is entirely irrelevant to the government state doing what is actually entirely reasonable to prevent it.
And again, we are talking about $35 dollars for something that is good for five years and a person will have many months or sometimes even years to plan for needing it. For the relatively few people that it actually would be an issue for, you are then talking about homeless people.... who would reasonably need to prove their citizenship anyways or else you could easily end up with people voting who are not eligible to vote in the first place, and would be unfair to the citizens that vote legitimately.
$35, good for 5 years. That works out to less than 60 cents per month. Seniors can get ID for less than half of that.
Honestly, not having the money to get ID when you will have *LOTS* of warning that you are going to need it is not an excuse, IMO.... it's not like election days just happen without much warning. If they did, you might have a case for allegedly unjustly denying people their right to vote.... I would suggest that they have voluntarily surrendered that right by not fulfilling criteria that there is absolutely no excuse not to know about long before the date of the election.
Perhaps it has escaped your attention that whether or not there is a need for it is irrelevant. Humans are greedy, and will charge accordingly for products that they control the supply of, regardless of how much or how little it costs them. If that means that only the rich will be able to afford them, then so be it... if the nonworking poor cannot afford their products, that's not the capitalist's problem.
My point is that it doesn't matter if the labour cost is zero, the person who controls the supply is still going to try and charge as much money as he possibly can for the product, and if there is nobody willing or able to pay the price that he wants, he may simply decide to not produce the product in the first place.
The ideal that savings are somehow always passed on down to the consumer is a myth in any industry where the supplies can be easily controlled, which is almost everything these days.
With or without human labour, the cost price is whatever the person who controls the supply can get people to pay for the end product.
If there are enough people that can pay the price the the supplier wants, then it's probably not going to matter to them how many other people might do without it, because presumably reducing the price to appeal to a larger market wouldn't necessarily increase their own bottom line.
Oh, and one more point... if you need to call emergency, then you don't need to unlock the phone in the first place. Same as it is right now.
Yes, they could still do that, of course. But at that point they are arresting a person because they want to, and could not even try to make the argument that they were arresting the person because they posed any threat to public safety or security unless they had other evidence to go on.
If they gave you something to artificially try and induce a cooperative state, then the tech should be able to discern that you were not in a normal frame of mind, and could still refuse access.
The principle behind using such mechanisms would be that if a would-be snoop knows in advance that such mechanism are in place, then they would not try to coerce someone to give them access in the first place because they know ahead of time that any effort they might undertake will fail.
Although we might not yet have the tech to do this, I can easily imagine a password system in the not too distant future that is tied with a wetware mechanism that analyzes the state of mind of the person entering the password to determine who is entering the password and their emotional state while they are entering it. If the person is under any duress while they are entering the password, then it will not unlock.
Thus, it would be provable that you have no ability to unlock it for them.... what would they do about that, exactly?
The price of milk certainly would go up 20% or even more if the USA didn't susbisidize its dairy to create a surplus (it would probably nearly double in price, in fact.... there's a reason why USA dairy is so inexpensive compared to most other countries)..
As mininum wage has not actually kept pace with either inflation or worker productivity for at least the past 40 years, minimum wage workers are more often not getting fairly paid than are.
Actually, the prices don't need to really go up that much to compensate for increased wages because the lowest paid workers don't actually control a significant percentage of the economy in the first place. With increased minimum wage, people are able to spend more money, creating a healthier economy that actually *helps* business.
Obviously, there's a limit to how far this can be taken, but as I said, in practice it works for minimum wage and low wage earners because such a small percentage of the overall economy is actually controlled by those earners, even though they represent a majority of the population (I think it's called the Pareto Principle). As long as low wage earners control such a tiny percentage of the economy, this characteristic will endure.
The increase in prices that objectors often allege needs to occur to compensate for increased wages is not anywhere close to the amount by which the low wages are actually increased... it's more than an order of magnitude in difference.
If the claim had been based on factual data, it would have been headline news within days. I'd love for this to be true, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My money's on never hearing another word about this again.
Canada's not considered western?
Or were you unaware that Canada is largely socialist?
Awful lot is an understatement.... try over 10 tons of it for every human on the planet..... and that's just to get us to a point of being carbon neutral, let alone doing anything to actually undo the damage we have done.
Strawman... I said free elections, not fixed ones.
The fact that some socialist countries practice what they are calling fair elections that are actually fixed has no bearing on whether democracy and socialism can actually coexist.
For an example of how they can, just look at the country north of the USA. And if you don't think that Canada is a socialist country, I don't think you understand what socialism is.
Democratic socialism exists when the governing party is socialist, and is democratically elected. There is nothing about socialism, inherently, that disallows free elections... including the ability to elect a party in the next election that does not have a socialist agenda (at which point the term 'socialist' cannot apply).
Sorry for being dense, I just think that essentially making absolutely any communication that happens to be undecipherable illegal, even if it is otherwise entirely innocuous, to be quite serious. This could easily be the case with artificially constructed languages, where the number of parties that even know of the language's existence, let alone how to translate it, can be extremely tiny, and certainly impossible for any existing automated translation system to decipher
Obviously, this technique is very low bandwidth, but its as fucking undetectable as shit.
Not specifically, no... I meant any language that they didn't know. This would also make any privately created conlangs illegal too.
So every private person who might have a broadcast antenna has to let the government install a MitM device on it? Interesting.... and not particularly tenable, considering how easy they are to make or jury-rig. Or are you suggesting that they employ 24/7 surveilance of every tall enough structure that might make a viable broadcast point, anywhere, to see if the owners are installing any kind of antenna, even if only temporarily?
One very simple steganographic technique that comes to mind that I do not think would be feasible for computers, or anyone, to detect would be hiding the data in the rightmost few decimal places of each x and y coordinate, each extending some number of digits past the decimal point so that alterations are not visually distinguishable. The hidden data, in turn, can be encrypted using whatever unbreakable encryption is desired. Unless you knew in advance that a particular svg image was using this technique, you'd never even know that it was there... and even then, the hidden data itself could be superficially indistinguishable from some arbitrary binary data stream, perhaps itself being simply encoded via a one-time pad that may be communicated out-of-band. Some artistic skill might be required to have an inexhaustible supply of svg images, but one could also privately employ an artist to create custom images that they would have permission to modify or broadcast as desired. The coordinates in the a given svg would be massaged appropriately by a computer program to conceal the data within.
Now pray-tell, how would a computer or for that matter anyone be able to tell that somebody was using this method of transmitting data unless they already knew in advance exactly which images contained such data?
MitM attacks only work on wired communications. Not all communication is over wires... radio is immune to MitM attacks unless the MitM can acquire complete control of the broadcasting antenna or receiver.
You realize that this means that speaking in a language that they don't know (or have a convenient translator for) would be illegal under this law... since they don't have any backdoor way to know what is being said.