No. Most people are good and decent towards those they have a personal attachment to. Their friends, their family, their pets, their community. Sometimes the community can be a whole nation, or an ideological movement, but it always has a border.
And anyone who is outside of that boarder? Doesn't even register as a person.
The nature of humans is their ability to grieve for their dead cat while feeling nothing for the deaths of millions elsewhere in the world.
Since America only has two parties worthy of the descriptor, you could also say that 'Only ONE party is calling for stricter voter ID.'
I notice 'United Kingdom' is on that list. Odd. I live in the UK, and have voted a number of times in both plain elections and in one major referendum, never needed to present ID. I just had to bring the voting card that had been mailed to me beforehand, which was notably lacking in any kind of photo.
I don't think voter ID in the US is intended to discourage racial minorities from voting. I think it's to discourage low-income people from voting. It just happens that, for historical reasons,there's a strong correlation between these groups.
Expect to see more of this in the coming days. A heavily Republican-leaning 'watchdog' organisation, Project Veritas, did a lot of undercover filming during the election. I wouldn't trust any of it because they have a long history of selectively editing videos - looks like they were manipulating polling booth staff into saying they are happy to let illegal immigrants vote, or editing videos in a way that implies that is what was said. I'm sure it'll be all over right-leaning media soon as the smoking gun that proves Democrats stole the election with illegal voters.
It doesn't always work like that. You can't know who someone will vote for, so voter surpression has to go on statistics. You target demographics that are going to vote one way. There are a few dirty tricks that have been used in the past.
- Misinformation - spread fake government announcements to your target to inform them of a last-minute change to voting location or time, so they miss the vote. Or in a more recent version, inform them they can now vote through their phones by texting a specific number. - Intimidation - have some scary-looking thugs stand near the polling building, looking for people of the other side and scaring them off with glares and threatening gestures. This is why many places ban wearing any sort of political attire when voting - having a candidate logo on your shirt makes it very easy to identify who you will vote for. You can also do this with voting officials by having them be extra-vigilant when checking credentials (Sorry, there's a scratch on this photo, I can't take this). - Uneven allocation of resources. Give plenty of polling booths to districts you expect to support your party, and under-allocate resources to districts that will oppose, so voters there have to drive further and queue for hours. This discourages them from voting. - Selective de-registration - this is one of the accusations against Georgia. They deleted a lot of voters from the rolls at the last minute, and blocked registration for a lot more based on very minor discrepencies with other government records - things like names spelled slightly differently, which disproportionately affect immigrants and children of immigrants, who are more likely to vote Dem.
In a very close election, convincing even just one percent of the other team's voters to give up can make the difference.
On a wider scale, Republicans have been pushing for tighter voter ID requirements for years - claiming that it's about vote fraud, and repeating a claim that millions of illegal immigrants are voting every election, though they've never been able to catch any of them in the act. Voter ID laws can be used to target by income: It's very difficult to get any sort of ID without a fixed address, so instantly excludes the homeless from voting. It also excludes a lot of people who live on reservations, as they generally use post-office boxes rather than addresses. So it's a way to selectively discourage these Democrat-loving demographics from voting.
Depends on the plane. You're thinking of the big jets that carry hundreds. This is for the tiny passenger aircraft that serve small airports, isolated communities and island ferry service.
Microwaves don't really operate at 2.45GHz. They operate at 2.45GHertzish. Their tuning varies between 'crap' and 'god-awful' - the magnetron is a means of generating microwave energy at very high power levels, not at precise frequency, and magnetrons intended for microwave ovens are not manufactured to the high tolerances expected in communications.
I work in education. Our toilets use 'passive supervision' - the stalls are enclosed,but the sink areas are open directly to the corridor, no doorway, so anyone passing by can't help but look in. We designed them that way because the toilets are otherwise a common place for bullying, dealing drugs, or just hiding out to skip lessons - they are the one place in the school where students can know they won't be caught.
And yet... we still have separate boys and girls toilets. Identical rooms in every way - no urinals. Just perfectly matched apart from the signs. Really weird when you think about it, but we also know that if we took the signs down there would be absolute outrage from some of the parents. So we maintain segregation.
Personally I think we'd have been better off removing one set of toilets, making the other unisex, and using the space thus freed up to give each faculty a proper storage cupboard. A consequence of a failed dream of going paperless - a critical lack of storage space for the mountains of books and paperwork that a school invariably needs.
The obvious solution would be unisex rooms, but a lot of people react to the suggestion with horror. Such a massive violation of taboo just feels sickening - but that really is not a sound basis for public policy. If we refused every change that makes people feel sickened, America would probably still have racial segregation.
Half-true. The stalls take up more space, but that's more than countered by needing fewer of them. Rather than needing one male stall, a urinal wall and three female stalls, you can just have four co-ed stalls. The overall space works out around the same or slightly smaller.
Here in the UK you also need the giant disabled toilet, which takes up a lot of space due to all the extra handles and fittings. I am sure the retail sector is disgusted by this accommodation wasting precious space they could use to display goods for sale, but there's not a lot you can do about that. Maybe throw a few million quid towards prosthetic limb research and wait another decade or two.
It does depend a bit on state. Some have employment and service protections.
A surprisingly important one is restroom and changing room access. It doesn't sound like much, but it really does matter - some transgender people look more like their 'target' gender than their birth gender - even without hormone treatment, makeup and clothing can get that. Without protection, they really have two options if they need the toilet: - Enter the restroom of their birth sex. Meet five year old girl who screams "There's a man watching me!" Get punched by scared parent, escorted out by security, and have to explain to the police that it was just a misunderstanding. - Enter the restroom of their apparent sex. Hope no-one notices they look a bit odd. If someone does... get punched by scared parent, escorted out by security, and have to explain to the police that it was just a misunderstanding.
The phrase 'bathroom bill' is sometimes used either dismissively or as a way to scare people with the prospect of creepy men in dresses who want to molest their children, but behind that there is a serious issue at stake.
Not quite. The field of sociology makes a distinction between sex and gender. Sex is the simple biological part to which you refer: Male or female, and in a very small percentage of cases intersex. Gender is the social expression and recognition of sex, and it's a lot more complicated and flexible - gender is what determines how you should dress, which jobs you are expected to go into or to avoid, which restroom you can enter, and if you are socially allowed to carry a handbag. Usually sex and gender are in clear alignment, and everyone is happy - people know their place and how to behave. When they do not align, unpleasantness happens.
It is very helpful of Newsmax to actually link directly to their source for the '31 genders' claim. I wish all publications would be so forthright. There is one small problem: If you actually look at the source, you see that it does not say anything remotely like what Newsmax says. Their '31 genders list' is just a bit of filler-text on the back of a leaflet, and has no legal importance at all.
Politics aside, this would actually have some practical benefits. It consumes less floor space and costs less to maintain, which is good from a business perspective. It also, counterintuitively, improves safety - twice the foot traffic means twice the 'passive supervision,' people just wandering by who can intervene if they hear any cries for help or see something suspicious. It's especially good in schools, as having no urinals and individual stalls means any teacher can walk in if they have reason to investigate - the reason the school toilets are a traditional place for bullying and drugs deals is that they are usually the one place where teachers fear to tread.
The only real downside is that for people who are used to sex-segregated toilets the idea feels... well, wrong. Creepily, uncomfortably, wrong. Not the way things Ought To Be. But creepy is no basis for policy.
Trump personally does not need to do very much at all. With Republicans in control of both house and senate, all Trump needs to do is sign the bills that come out and occasionally appoint a social conservative to various key positions. Both of which he has done.
It's hyperbole, but it's not completely ungrounded. The internet, as we all know, has a *lot* of porn on it. There are also a lot of people who would like to see porn banned. It gets a lot easier for them to get their way when the government is involved in operating an internet service, for much the same reason that the FCC is able to regulate indecency transmitted on government-allocated radio frequencies. The argument that "we don't want our tax money to pay for other people to watch smut" is going to be a pretty powerful one, and anti-porn activists generally do not consider themselves as violating the first amendment because they do not recognize pornography as a form of speech. Similar concerns can be raised about government being pressured to block copyright infringement.
But bizarrely, the federal government is currently dominated by a faction which supports banning the porn! There's a weird double standard going on here that shows the writer of this speech does not care at all about everything outlined in the above paragraph. The strongest argument that could be made in relation to the point raised is the possibility of anti-pornography efforts, but the FCC can't even acknowledge that possibility because they are allied to the people who are pushing it. Instead he is using the current bogeyman of liberal censorship of 'threatening' behavior - which every conservative is supposed to fear right now, though any attempt by a municipal provider to do that would likely be smacked down in the courts. It's quite the fear on the right though - you need only skim a few suitably skewed news sites to find them full of stories about how prominent right-wing activists have been 'censored' on social media and punished for their political views. Strangely though, very few of these stories actually repeat the contents of the banned posts, and the victims invariably turn out to be raging homophobes or conspiracy theorists. Usually both.
I can't even interpret this at near-midnight. It's too deep in political dog-whistles and codephrases. None of it makes any sense, and I don't think it's supposed to. It works because most of the country loves the first amendment in the abstract sense, but is also very eager to disregard it when they have an agenda to advance - usually while accusing everyone else of doing the same.
If the FCC really cared about preserving freedom of speech on the internet, they'd be doing everything they can to promote the use of universal encryption at every level. But they aren't doing to do that. It would get in the way of things like keeping television free of dirty words and making sure the government can issue warrants worth the effort.
This posts is bleh and rambling... I shouldn't write these while barely awake. Screw it, too tired to care. Night.
Not necessarily true. There are plenty of historical examples of currencies of no inherent worth. Gold has been a valued currency for thousands of years even though its practical application was limited to looking shiny, because it was rare and difficult to manufacture. That's all you need for a currency, really: It has to have some means of enforced scarcity, either natural or artificial (ie, one organisation has authority to issue it, and counterfeiters are punished harshly), and people need to believe it has value. A major government backing it up by requiring it in taxes and paying it in wages is certainly an aid in maintaining a currency, but it isn't essential.
Bitcoin is still a poor choice for a currency though. It's doomed to deflation for a start, any any economist will tell you that is a terrible idea. A healthy economy needs to experience just a small amount of inflation - too much leads to collapse, but no inflation at all makes it very difficult to secure credit needed for businesses to function and growth to occur. And deflation, well... good luck getting a loan in a bitcoin world.
Bitcoin cannot be adopted at rates similar to credit cards, because the network is incapable of maintaining reasonable performance under such a load. It's struggling already.
Bitcoin, from a technical perspective, actually rather sucks. It's one of the first blockchain currencies, and as such it does not incorporate the performance-boosting refinements that later currencies introduced. It's just like a lot of other technical standards: Once good-enough is established, it's very hard for even a superior technology to replace it. That's why we're still using MP3 and JPEG.
Gas is less polluting than coal, but it's still not clean. It could be regarded as the less of two evils, just a stopgap until truly sustainable and non-polluting technologies are more viable.
Thermal storage is practical for home heating. It's very common in electrically heated homes. The heaters run at night when electricity is cheaper, and heat up a big chunk of brickwork. Then in the day, air is circulated through the bricks. Only good for heating purposes though, and on a currency-per-Joule basis natural gas is usually a cheaper means for home heating, so you only see electric heating where gas is not available.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Most people are good and decent towards those they have a personal attachment to. Their friends, their family, their pets, their community. Sometimes the community can be a whole nation, or an ideological movement, but it always has a border.
And anyone who is outside of that boarder? Doesn't even register as a person.
The nature of humans is their ability to grieve for their dead cat while feeling nothing for the deaths of millions elsewhere in the world.
Large dies also mean a much lower yield rate. No point in having huge dies if most of your chips fail testing.
Since America only has two parties worthy of the descriptor, you could also say that 'Only ONE party is calling for stricter voter ID.'
I notice 'United Kingdom' is on that list. Odd. I live in the UK, and have voted a number of times in both plain elections and in one major referendum, never needed to present ID. I just had to bring the voting card that had been mailed to me beforehand, which was notably lacking in any kind of photo.
I don't think voter ID in the US is intended to discourage racial minorities from voting. I think it's to discourage low-income people from voting. It just happens that, for historical reasons,there's a strong correlation between these groups.
Expect to see more of this in the coming days. A heavily Republican-leaning 'watchdog' organisation, Project Veritas, did a lot of undercover filming during the election. I wouldn't trust any of it because they have a long history of selectively editing videos - looks like they were manipulating polling booth staff into saying they are happy to let illegal immigrants vote, or editing videos in a way that implies that is what was said. I'm sure it'll be all over right-leaning media soon as the smoking gun that proves Democrats stole the election with illegal voters.
It doesn't always work like that. You can't know who someone will vote for, so voter surpression has to go on statistics. You target demographics that are going to vote one way. There are a few dirty tricks that have been used in the past.
- Misinformation - spread fake government announcements to your target to inform them of a last-minute change to voting location or time, so they miss the vote. Or in a more recent version, inform them they can now vote through their phones by texting a specific number.
- Intimidation - have some scary-looking thugs stand near the polling building, looking for people of the other side and scaring them off with glares and threatening gestures. This is why many places ban wearing any sort of political attire when voting - having a candidate logo on your shirt makes it very easy to identify who you will vote for. You can also do this with voting officials by having them be extra-vigilant when checking credentials (Sorry, there's a scratch on this photo, I can't take this).
- Uneven allocation of resources. Give plenty of polling booths to districts you expect to support your party, and under-allocate resources to districts that will oppose, so voters there have to drive further and queue for hours. This discourages them from voting.
- Selective de-registration - this is one of the accusations against Georgia. They deleted a lot of voters from the rolls at the last minute, and blocked registration for a lot more based on very minor discrepencies with other government records - things like names spelled slightly differently, which disproportionately affect immigrants and children of immigrants, who are more likely to vote Dem.
In a very close election, convincing even just one percent of the other team's voters to give up can make the difference.
On a wider scale, Republicans have been pushing for tighter voter ID requirements for years - claiming that it's about vote fraud, and repeating a claim that millions of illegal immigrants are voting every election, though they've never been able to catch any of them in the act. Voter ID laws can be used to target by income: It's very difficult to get any sort of ID without a fixed address, so instantly excludes the homeless from voting. It also excludes a lot of people who live on reservations, as they generally use post-office boxes rather than addresses. So it's a way to selectively discourage these Democrat-loving demographics from voting.
Depends on the plane. You're thinking of the big jets that carry hundreds. This is for the tiny passenger aircraft that serve small airports, isolated communities and island ferry service.
Just measure fuel efficiency in square meters. Simplest way to do it.
If this is some sort of scam, or if he is an overly idealistic true believer.
Milton Keynes isn't *that* bad. My grandparents live there.
Microwaves don't really operate at 2.45GHz. They operate at 2.45GHertzish. Their tuning varies between 'crap' and 'god-awful' - the magnetron is a means of generating microwave energy at very high power levels, not at precise frequency, and magnetrons intended for microwave ovens are not manufactured to the high tolerances expected in communications.
I work in education. Our toilets use 'passive supervision' - the stalls are enclosed,but the sink areas are open directly to the corridor, no doorway, so anyone passing by can't help but look in. We designed them that way because the toilets are otherwise a common place for bullying, dealing drugs, or just hiding out to skip lessons - they are the one place in the school where students can know they won't be caught.
And yet... we still have separate boys and girls toilets. Identical rooms in every way - no urinals. Just perfectly matched apart from the signs. Really weird when you think about it, but we also know that if we took the signs down there would be absolute outrage from some of the parents. So we maintain segregation.
Personally I think we'd have been better off removing one set of toilets, making the other unisex, and using the space thus freed up to give each faculty a proper storage cupboard. A consequence of a failed dream of going paperless - a critical lack of storage space for the mountains of books and paperwork that a school invariably needs.
The obvious solution would be unisex rooms, but a lot of people react to the suggestion with horror. Such a massive violation of taboo just feels sickening - but that really is not a sound basis for public policy. If we refused every change that makes people feel sickened, America would probably still have racial segregation.
Do you automatically assume all muscular tattooed guys are rapists until proven otherwise?
Half-true. The stalls take up more space, but that's more than countered by needing fewer of them. Rather than needing one male stall, a urinal wall and three female stalls, you can just have four co-ed stalls. The overall space works out around the same or slightly smaller.
Here in the UK you also need the giant disabled toilet, which takes up a lot of space due to all the extra handles and fittings. I am sure the retail sector is disgusted by this accommodation wasting precious space they could use to display goods for sale, but there's not a lot you can do about that. Maybe throw a few million quid towards prosthetic limb research and wait another decade or two.
It'd probably avoid a lot of complication to just take that box off the form entirely.
It does depend a bit on state. Some have employment and service protections.
A surprisingly important one is restroom and changing room access. It doesn't sound like much, but it really does matter - some transgender people look more like their 'target' gender than their birth gender - even without hormone treatment, makeup and clothing can get that. Without protection, they really have two options if they need the toilet:
- Enter the restroom of their birth sex. Meet five year old girl who screams "There's a man watching me!" Get punched by scared parent, escorted out by security, and have to explain to the police that it was just a misunderstanding.
- Enter the restroom of their apparent sex. Hope no-one notices they look a bit odd. If someone does... get punched by scared parent, escorted out by security, and have to explain to the police that it was just a misunderstanding.
The phrase 'bathroom bill' is sometimes used either dismissively or as a way to scare people with the prospect of creepy men in dresses who want to molest their children, but behind that there is a serious issue at stake.
Not quite. The field of sociology makes a distinction between sex and gender. Sex is the simple biological part to which you refer: Male or female, and in a very small percentage of cases intersex. Gender is the social expression and recognition of sex, and it's a lot more complicated and flexible - gender is what determines how you should dress, which jobs you are expected to go into or to avoid, which restroom you can enter, and if you are socially allowed to carry a handbag. Usually sex and gender are in clear alignment, and everyone is happy - people know their place and how to behave. When they do not align, unpleasantness happens.
It is very helpful of Newsmax to actually link directly to their source for the '31 genders' claim. I wish all publications would be so forthright. There is one small problem: If you actually look at the source, you see that it does not say anything remotely like what Newsmax says. Their '31 genders list' is just a bit of filler-text on the back of a leaflet, and has no legal importance at all.
Politics aside, this would actually have some practical benefits. It consumes less floor space and costs less to maintain, which is good from a business perspective. It also, counterintuitively, improves safety - twice the foot traffic means twice the 'passive supervision,' people just wandering by who can intervene if they hear any cries for help or see something suspicious. It's especially good in schools, as having no urinals and individual stalls means any teacher can walk in if they have reason to investigate - the reason the school toilets are a traditional place for bullying and drugs deals is that they are usually the one place where teachers fear to tread.
The only real downside is that for people who are used to sex-segregated toilets the idea feels... well, wrong. Creepily, uncomfortably, wrong. Not the way things Ought To Be. But creepy is no basis for policy.
Trump personally does not need to do very much at all. With Republicans in control of both house and senate, all Trump needs to do is sign the bills that come out and occasionally appoint a social conservative to various key positions. Both of which he has done.
It's hyperbole, but it's not completely ungrounded. The internet, as we all know, has a *lot* of porn on it. There are also a lot of people who would like to see porn banned. It gets a lot easier for them to get their way when the government is involved in operating an internet service, for much the same reason that the FCC is able to regulate indecency transmitted on government-allocated radio frequencies. The argument that "we don't want our tax money to pay for other people to watch smut" is going to be a pretty powerful one, and anti-porn activists generally do not consider themselves as violating the first amendment because they do not recognize pornography as a form of speech. Similar concerns can be raised about government being pressured to block copyright infringement.
But bizarrely, the federal government is currently dominated by a faction which supports banning the porn! There's a weird double standard going on here that shows the writer of this speech does not care at all about everything outlined in the above paragraph. The strongest argument that could be made in relation to the point raised is the possibility of anti-pornography efforts, but the FCC can't even acknowledge that possibility because they are allied to the people who are pushing it. Instead he is using the current bogeyman of liberal censorship of 'threatening' behavior - which every conservative is supposed to fear right now, though any attempt by a municipal provider to do that would likely be smacked down in the courts. It's quite the fear on the right though - you need only skim a few suitably skewed news sites to find them full of stories about how prominent right-wing activists have been 'censored' on social media and punished for their political views. Strangely though, very few of these stories actually repeat the contents of the banned posts, and the victims invariably turn out to be raging homophobes or conspiracy theorists. Usually both.
I can't even interpret this at near-midnight. It's too deep in political dog-whistles and codephrases. None of it makes any sense, and I don't think it's supposed to. It works because most of the country loves the first amendment in the abstract sense, but is also very eager to disregard it when they have an agenda to advance - usually while accusing everyone else of doing the same.
If the FCC really cared about preserving freedom of speech on the internet, they'd be doing everything they can to promote the use of universal encryption at every level. But they aren't doing to do that. It would get in the way of things like keeping television free of dirty words and making sure the government can issue warrants worth the effort.
This posts is bleh and rambling... I shouldn't write these while barely awake. Screw it, too tired to care. Night.
Not necessarily true. There are plenty of historical examples of currencies of no inherent worth. Gold has been a valued currency for thousands of years even though its practical application was limited to looking shiny, because it was rare and difficult to manufacture. That's all you need for a currency, really: It has to have some means of enforced scarcity, either natural or artificial (ie, one organisation has authority to issue it, and counterfeiters are punished harshly), and people need to believe it has value. A major government backing it up by requiring it in taxes and paying it in wages is certainly an aid in maintaining a currency, but it isn't essential.
Bitcoin is still a poor choice for a currency though. It's doomed to deflation for a start, any any economist will tell you that is a terrible idea. A healthy economy needs to experience just a small amount of inflation - too much leads to collapse, but no inflation at all makes it very difficult to secure credit needed for businesses to function and growth to occur. And deflation, well... good luck getting a loan in a bitcoin world.
Bitcoin cannot be adopted at rates similar to credit cards, because the network is incapable of maintaining reasonable performance under such a load. It's struggling already.
Bitcoin, from a technical perspective, actually rather sucks. It's one of the first blockchain currencies, and as such it does not incorporate the performance-boosting refinements that later currencies introduced. It's just like a lot of other technical standards: Once good-enough is established, it's very hard for even a superior technology to replace it. That's why we're still using MP3 and JPEG.
Gas is less polluting than coal, but it's still not clean. It could be regarded as the less of two evils, just a stopgap until truly sustainable and non-polluting technologies are more viable.
Thermal storage is practical for home heating. It's very common in electrically heated homes. The heaters run at night when electricity is cheaper, and heat up a big chunk of brickwork. Then in the day, air is circulated through the bricks. Only good for heating purposes though, and on a currency-per-Joule basis natural gas is usually a cheaper means for home heating, so you only see electric heating where gas is not available.