Since when has anyone who is not an Obama critic been concerned with a Constitutional crisis?
For crying out loud, our current President negotiated a treaty with a hostile foreign power with no consent from the Senate! He just created it out of thin air, and worse, the Senate just rolled over and let him do it!
If a President negotiates a treaty with a foreign power, that is not a Constitutional crisis. Quite the contrary: under the constitution, that's his job. And it's the job of the Senate to ratify such a treaty with a supermajority. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the Senate is not in the picture.
Actually, the Senate doesn't ratify most treaties with a supermajority. We rarely use that process. Normally what we do is to enact the terms of the treaty as ordinary federal law, with simple majorities in both houses and a signature from the president. This process produces what's called a "congressional executive treaty".
It should also be pointed out that the president can and does sign many treaties without the participation of either house. He does this when the terms of the treaty can be enacted entirely on his own authority, for example as Commander in Chief. The most common example of this sort of treaty (called a "sole executive treaty") are the Status of Forces Agreements (SoFA) that are signed with the various countries who host US military bases. These agreements specify how the US forces will interact with the host country and because the Commander in Chief has the power to tell the US military what to do, the president can simply sign them.
Of course, the president can sign anything he likes, but if the treaty obligations exceed his authority, then he needs Congress to weigh in, either a simply majority of both houses or a 2/3 majority of the Senate.
Keep in mind that the US Constitution with its protections of rights held above ordinary law was written because of the bad things the British were known to do.
That's rather one-sided. The Constitution's model was based on key British documents that blazed the trail of removing the power to restrict certain rights from the King. It went further in many areas, but it was as much following the British path as it was a rejection of British actions (it was both!).
Maybe. It depends mostly on whether or not Americans as a whole decide they'd prefer a popular vote for president. If they do, a constitutional amendment would be possible, but the compact would be a lot easier.
Personally, as a resident of a small state, I'd prefer that we just fix the EC so that it does what it was originally intended to do. The EC was part of a compromise between large and small states to boost the voting power of the small states a bit. But those who designed it didn't understand the effect of bloc voting. Mathematicians didn't figure out how to quantify it until the 60s, but by the early 1800s states had figured out that they could boost their influence if they instructed their electors to vote as a group. If instead (and this *would* require a constitutional amendment, which the big states would refuse to sign onto -- though it may be possible to ratify without them), each state were required to allocate its electoral votes proportionally then small states would actually get the small boost in influence that was originally intended.
It wasn't that tight, Hilary got 2 million more votes than Trump. That's why he is making the claims about millions of illegal votes on Twitter now, he is worried that the closer people look and the more they demand electoral college reform the less legitimate his administration will look.
The national popular vote was tight (Hillary's win margin was just over 1%), but that's irrelevant because that's not how the president is elected. Some key state races, however, were very close. In Wisconsin Trump's margin was 0.9%. In Michigan it appears that he won by less than 0.3%. Further, there were some irregularities in Wisconsin's results that argue for closer scrutiny. The recounting is unlikely to change the results, but it may reveal problems in the voting systems that can be fixed. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, we should recount all close results as a matter of course, and randomly select other locations to recount as well, as a sort of hygiene for our democracy.
Actually, what we should *really* do is use verifiable voting processes. When the discussion of voting machines began 20+ years ago, the election integrity problem caught the attention of cryptographers and other security researchers, and their work since then has produced some dramatically better systems by applying ideas from modern cryptography and information theory. They make election integrity mathematically provable (within certain fairly rigorous assumptions; the way cryptographers always work). Early designs were ridiculously impractical, but they improved and the best systems are extremely practical. See Chaum's Scantegrity system, for example.
But the country insists on ignoring these systems. Oddly enough, every time this topic comes up on/., a nominally nerd-oriented side where I'd expect people to be fascinated by them, I post about them... and nearly always get ignored.
If you're confident of that (as I am, actually), then you have nothing to fear from a recount, right? There's nothing wrong with double-checking all tight races and not a select few.
Fixed that for you. Unless you fear the outcome.
All tight races should be recounted, plus a random sample of the rest. This should be standard procedure. Plus we should also have independent re-checking of the voter registration rolls and processes. Basically, we should apply academic rigor to the election process. It's too expensive to do that universally, sure, but it could be done randomly in the normal case, and it's probably worth expending a little more effort and money on tight races.
It's not the public's money. That's why those asking for the recount had to raise the money to pay for it. As for your other comment... changing the outcome of the election isn't the only goal. We're also interested to find out if the election procedures are counting the votes accurately. If they are, great. If not, it means that we've got some work to do. Personally, I think we should do random recounts as a matter of course, no matter what the outcome.
It will never happen because the Constitution specifies that the president is to be elected by the states. The only way to change that is to change the Constitution, which would require 38 states to decide they should have no say on who is President
Actually all it would require is states holding another 105 electoral votes to join the states that have already signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The compact goes into effect as soon as enough states have signed on that they collectively have at least 270 electoral votes. At that point, all of the states in the compact will direct their electors to cast their electoral college ballots for whichever candidate received the plurality of the national popular vote. Assuming no faithless electors from those states, that will give the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.
Since the constitution has no requirements on how states appoint electors or how the electors must vote, it's hard to see how there could be any constitutional challenge to the compact. The states in the compact are simply exercising their constitutionally-granted power to appoint electors in whatever manner they see fit. No amendment is needed because the constitution already provides the states with all the power and freedom needed to carry it out.
The government isn't going to let fully automated trucks run around with nobody to watch them any time soon
Not true. The DoT is already drafting new regulations to cover driverless vehicles. They will require significant testing and evaluation, but the self-driving systems will quickly prove themselves safer than human drivers and will be approved quickly. Especially for highway-only driving.
If you're confident of that (as I am, actually), then you have nothing to fear from a recount, right? There's nothing wrong with double-checking tight races.
Yeah, it appears to do more. Looks like it touches anything that you could log in using google OAuth, so depending on how you've got accounts configured it could remind you of stuff you're signed up for and forgot about.
You can shut all that down from the Google side. The other sites will still be holding OAuth tokens, but Google's OAuth servers will refuse to validate them.
I started to type a lengthy response, but there's no point. We're not going to agree on much. Well, I'm fine with legal abortion and pot, but the both Republicans and Democrats are way too into regulation and redistribution for my taste. Since both want to increase government interference, I prefer gridlock.
I'm afraid we will be stuck with electric cars that need many hours to charge.
Well, many minutes, anyway. Tesla's superchargers deliver up to 145kW. At that rate you could charge a Bolt from empty to full in 20 minutes (assuming no battery heating issues).
In reality home chargers don't need to be anywhere near that fast. As long as the car can recharge overnight so it's always full in the morning, that's good enough. Faster charging is really only needed on long road trips.
A quick search tells me a phone battery typically has a capacity of something like 1500 mAh, so "charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week" sounds like something on the order of adding 5000 mAh in 30 seconds.
That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency. For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.
All this means is that the battery pack won't be the bottleneck when charging. The bottleneck will be the thickness of the wires between the voltage step-down transformer and the battery pack. I imagine we'd want to make those wires as short as possible (they'd probably end up looking a lot more like "plates" than "wires"). We'd probably also want to consider higher battery voltages.
With Li-ion batteries we usually use 3.7V or 4.2V batteries, because that works well from a Lithium ion chemistry perspective. A 3.7V, 1500 mAh battery pack stores 5.55Wh. If you have a 12V supercapacitor pack of the same capacity, it has only 460 mAh. Assuming 100% efficiency, that's 55A at 12V for 30 seconds. That's high, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. If it is, we could always reduce it a bit and take 60 seconds to charge, for example.
Regarding getting that power from your home wiring. 15A at 115V is 1725W, so your outlet can provide 5.55Wh in 11.6 seconds. But if we're charging over 30 seconds, we only need to draw 5.7A to do it.
These warnings are being sent by Google since 2012
This form of grammatical error is common among people whose native language is not English, in particular I see it a lot from Germans.
Odds are that the author writes their native language far better than you do.
Please learn to write or don't call yourself a writer.
Where does it say that the anonymous poster called himself a writer? You were clearly able to understand the intent, so your post is just snobbery.
Now, had you pointed out that a competent English-speaking editor could and should have corrected the error before posting it, well, then you'd have had a point. But this is slashdot, which has always been noted for incompetent editing.
If you want to be safe, then you need a simple, reusable password for low-risk sites (forum accounts like/.)
Fine, and exactly what I do.
a secure and long password for critical sites that you access through special services (like your email account)
No, you need a unique secure and long password for each critical site. Otherwise if any one of those sites gets compromised, they all are.
Your email account, the one that is the password-reset confirmation method for all of your other sites, is the crown jewel, the master key to all of your online accounts needs even better security. You need a secure password and a second authentication factor. If your email service doesn't support 2FA, get a better one that does and change the reset email address on all of your other accounts. For extra paranoia, get multiple such accounts, each with its own strong password and 2FA method, and use different ones for the contact email for different critical online sites. Not necessarily one to one, but spread the risk. I don't bother with that, myself.
and possibly a third medium security password for sensitive sites (like online gaming where your credit card is involved)
Fine, and exactly what I do. The legal protections on abuse of your credit card are such that you really don't need to worry tremendously about it. A compromised credit card is an inconvenience, not a serious problem.
Better yet, since you only have three passwords to keep track of, you can make them a bit tougher.
No, you still need a lot more than three passwords. Which basically means that you cannot rely on your memory. You need some sort of password storage system, whether it's a piece of paper in your wallet (if you do that, keep a backup somewhere safe and ideally try not to identify which site each password corresponds to in any obvious way), or a password wallet in your phone (encrypted under a single password and backed up somewhere), or the password storage in your web browser... as long as your browser encrypts the passwords.
Personally I rely mostly on Chrome as my password store. I have a very strong "sync" password set, which is used to encrypt all of the others, and this allows the password database to be backed up in Google's cloud (securely, since it's encrypted) and also seamlessly replicated to Chrome on all of my other devices with browsers. From a security perspective there are some weaknesses to this approach, but since I have aggressive lock screens and good passwords on all my devices, it's not too bad. I also have a paper backup stored in my gun safe (fire resistant) in my home. That's mostly in case I die, though, so my wife will be able to get into everything.
Note that however you store your passwords, good security also requires that all of the devices that store your passwords, or that you type your passwords into, be secure. That's another challenge.
Right. You would have risked an extremely massive fine and jail time for something that could have been readily proven fraudulent, in order to cast a single vote?
I'd have risked a vanishingly small probability of a massive fine and jail time. I expect that it happens quite a bit. But as I said, it shouldn't have significant systematic effects. The bigger risk with mail-in ballots is coercion.
Heh. I had another opportunity for an extra vote this year. My disabled brother-in-law moved to my house a couple of months ago when his dad passed away. When we all got our ballots he came to me and said "So, how are we voting this year?". Apparently my dad in law had always just told him how to vote. My wife and I told him he was on his own to figure it out this year. His disability is due to a head injury and he has some specific mental deficits associates with the regions of his brain that were damaged, but outside of those specific deficits he's quite intelligent. He's perfectly capable of making his own decisions on who and what to vote for, but hasn't had to until this year. I could probably have convinced my 23 year-old son to let me fill out his ballot, too.
All compensation, whether in the form of stock, use of company vehicles, company-provided housing, etc., is considered income by the IRS.
Yes, but capital gains are taxed at a lower rate.
Stock and option grants are taxed as income, not capital gains. Change in value between vesting and sale is capital gains... which may be less than the income tax rate or may be the same, depending on how long the stock was held. All of the other things I mentioned are income, not capital gains.
It's been self-evident to every generation ever that the younger generation was lazy, stupid and useless. And they've all been wrong. Why are you different?
Best of all worlds is an E-voting machine that prints out a human readable summary of a ballot, then the ballot is physically dropped into a box.
No, best of all worlds is a human-readable paper ballot (however produced) that is machine-countable and accompanied by a receipt that allows the voter to verify that his or her vote was counted correctly, but doesn't allow proving how he or she voted to any third party, and a system that allows the count to be proven correct by anyone.
Cryptographers have designed more secure -- but still eminently practical -- voting methods, like Chaum's Scantegrity, but the world doesn't seem to be interested in really good election systems.
the tax code gets rewritten such that personal compensation (not income) is taxed. No one works for free, including CEOs, even if they have a $1 salary. They get compensated in some fashion and that compensation has a fair market value at time of distribution.
This is already the case. All compensation, whether in the form of stock, use of company vehicles, company-provided housing, etc., is considered income by the IRS.
Even most of the extremely-reported cases of "dead people voting" in recent history have turned out to be clerical errors (e.g. wrong date on the death certificate).
I'm sure a lot of dead people vote every year. I could easily have cast my father-in-law's ballot this year. His mail-in ballot arrived at his house a month after he passed and I really doubt anyone would have noticed if I'd filled it in, scrawled a signature and dropped it in the mail. If I'd been a little bit careful about it I could have made sure no one could prove I'd done it even if they had noticed. Instead, I shredded it.
However, those sorts of fraud opportunities are pretty randomly distributed, so they shouldn't produce a significant systematic effect unless there's a strong generational difference.
If the electronic vote was systematically manipulated no conclusions whatsoever can be drawn from the "apparent" outcome by anyone who values the integrity of the future process.
My point was that the electorate is so close to evenly divided that all sorts of things can push it one way or the other. Weather, for example. Or FBI announcements. It's not as though one side was clearly and strongly selected by the voters and manipulation gave it to the other side. So democracy is not seriously harmed by the decision, whichever way it goes... what may seriously harm democracy is if the people believe the results are invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when has anyone who is not an Obama critic been concerned with a Constitutional crisis?
For crying out loud, our current President negotiated a treaty with a hostile foreign power with no consent from the Senate! He just created it out of thin air, and worse, the Senate just rolled over and let him do it!
If a President negotiates a treaty with a foreign power, that is not a Constitutional crisis. Quite the contrary: under the constitution, that's his job. And it's the job of the Senate to ratify such a treaty with a supermajority. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the Senate is not in the picture.
Actually, the Senate doesn't ratify most treaties with a supermajority. We rarely use that process. Normally what we do is to enact the terms of the treaty as ordinary federal law, with simple majorities in both houses and a signature from the president. This process produces what's called a "congressional executive treaty".
It should also be pointed out that the president can and does sign many treaties without the participation of either house. He does this when the terms of the treaty can be enacted entirely on his own authority, for example as Commander in Chief. The most common example of this sort of treaty (called a "sole executive treaty") are the Status of Forces Agreements (SoFA) that are signed with the various countries who host US military bases. These agreements specify how the US forces will interact with the host country and because the Commander in Chief has the power to tell the US military what to do, the president can simply sign them.
Of course, the president can sign anything he likes, but if the treaty obligations exceed his authority, then he needs Congress to weigh in, either a simply majority of both houses or a 2/3 majority of the Senate.
Keep in mind that the US Constitution with its protections of rights held above ordinary law was written because of the bad things the British were known to do.
That's rather one-sided. The Constitution's model was based on key British documents that blazed the trail of removing the power to restrict certain rights from the King. It went further in many areas, but it was as much following the British path as it was a rejection of British actions (it was both!).
Maybe. It depends mostly on whether or not Americans as a whole decide they'd prefer a popular vote for president. If they do, a constitutional amendment would be possible, but the compact would be a lot easier.
Personally, as a resident of a small state, I'd prefer that we just fix the EC so that it does what it was originally intended to do. The EC was part of a compromise between large and small states to boost the voting power of the small states a bit. But those who designed it didn't understand the effect of bloc voting. Mathematicians didn't figure out how to quantify it until the 60s, but by the early 1800s states had figured out that they could boost their influence if they instructed their electors to vote as a group. If instead (and this *would* require a constitutional amendment, which the big states would refuse to sign onto -- though it may be possible to ratify without them), each state were required to allocate its electoral votes proportionally then small states would actually get the small boost in influence that was originally intended.
It wasn't that tight, Hilary got 2 million more votes than Trump. That's why he is making the claims about millions of illegal votes on Twitter now, he is worried that the closer people look and the more they demand electoral college reform the less legitimate his administration will look.
The national popular vote was tight (Hillary's win margin was just over 1%), but that's irrelevant because that's not how the president is elected. Some key state races, however, were very close. In Wisconsin Trump's margin was 0.9%. In Michigan it appears that he won by less than 0.3%. Further, there were some irregularities in Wisconsin's results that argue for closer scrutiny. The recounting is unlikely to change the results, but it may reveal problems in the voting systems that can be fixed. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, we should recount all close results as a matter of course, and randomly select other locations to recount as well, as a sort of hygiene for our democracy.
Actually, what we should *really* do is use verifiable voting processes. When the discussion of voting machines began 20+ years ago, the election integrity problem caught the attention of cryptographers and other security researchers, and their work since then has produced some dramatically better systems by applying ideas from modern cryptography and information theory. They make election integrity mathematically provable (within certain fairly rigorous assumptions; the way cryptographers always work). Early designs were ridiculously impractical, but they improved and the best systems are extremely practical. See Chaum's Scantegrity system, for example.
But the country insists on ignoring these systems. Oddly enough, every time this topic comes up on /., a nominally nerd-oriented side where I'd expect people to be fascinated by them, I post about them... and nearly always get ignored.
If you're confident of that (as I am, actually), then you have nothing to fear from a recount, right? There's nothing wrong with double-checking all tight races and not a select few.
Fixed that for you. Unless you fear the outcome.
All tight races should be recounted, plus a random sample of the rest. This should be standard procedure. Plus we should also have independent re-checking of the voter registration rolls and processes. Basically, we should apply academic rigor to the election process. It's too expensive to do that universally, sure, but it could be done randomly in the normal case, and it's probably worth expending a little more effort and money on tight races.
It's not the public's money. That's why those asking for the recount had to raise the money to pay for it. As for your other comment... changing the outcome of the election isn't the only goal. We're also interested to find out if the election procedures are counting the votes accurately. If they are, great. If not, it means that we've got some work to do. Personally, I think we should do random recounts as a matter of course, no matter what the outcome.
It will never happen because the Constitution specifies that the president is to be elected by the states. The only way to change that is to change the Constitution, which would require 38 states to decide they should have no say on who is President
Actually all it would require is states holding another 105 electoral votes to join the states that have already signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The compact goes into effect as soon as enough states have signed on that they collectively have at least 270 electoral votes. At that point, all of the states in the compact will direct their electors to cast their electoral college ballots for whichever candidate received the plurality of the national popular vote. Assuming no faithless electors from those states, that will give the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.
Since the constitution has no requirements on how states appoint electors or how the electors must vote, it's hard to see how there could be any constitutional challenge to the compact. The states in the compact are simply exercising their constitutionally-granted power to appoint electors in whatever manner they see fit. No amendment is needed because the constitution already provides the states with all the power and freedom needed to carry it out.
The government isn't going to let fully automated trucks run around with nobody to watch them any time soon
Not true. The DoT is already drafting new regulations to cover driverless vehicles. They will require significant testing and evaluation, but the self-driving systems will quickly prove themselves safer than human drivers and will be approved quickly. Especially for highway-only driving.
Hillary lost. Get over it.
If you're confident of that (as I am, actually), then you have nothing to fear from a recount, right? There's nothing wrong with double-checking tight races.
Yeah, it appears to do more. Looks like it touches anything that you could log in using google OAuth, so depending on how you've got accounts configured it could remind you of stuff you're signed up for and forgot about.
You can shut all that down from the Google side. The other sites will still be holding OAuth tokens, but Google's OAuth servers will refuse to validate them.
I started to type a lengthy response, but there's no point. We're not going to agree on much. Well, I'm fine with legal abortion and pot, but the both Republicans and Democrats are way too into regulation and redistribution for my taste. Since both want to increase government interference, I prefer gridlock.
If you want the damage undone then you'll need to give the Dems a super majority in the senate and probably some state legislatures.
But then what kind of damage would *they* do?
I'd rather neither party ever had complete control.
I'm afraid we will be stuck with electric cars that need many hours to charge.
Well, many minutes, anyway. Tesla's superchargers deliver up to 145kW. At that rate you could charge a Bolt from empty to full in 20 minutes (assuming no battery heating issues).
In reality home chargers don't need to be anywhere near that fast. As long as the car can recharge overnight so it's always full in the morning, that's good enough. Faster charging is really only needed on long road trips.
A quick search tells me a phone battery typically has a capacity of something like 1500 mAh, so "charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week" sounds like something on the order of adding 5000 mAh in 30 seconds.
That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency. For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.
All this means is that the battery pack won't be the bottleneck when charging. The bottleneck will be the thickness of the wires between the voltage step-down transformer and the battery pack. I imagine we'd want to make those wires as short as possible (they'd probably end up looking a lot more like "plates" than "wires"). We'd probably also want to consider higher battery voltages.
With Li-ion batteries we usually use 3.7V or 4.2V batteries, because that works well from a Lithium ion chemistry perspective. A 3.7V, 1500 mAh battery pack stores 5.55Wh. If you have a 12V supercapacitor pack of the same capacity, it has only 460 mAh. Assuming 100% efficiency, that's 55A at 12V for 30 seconds. That's high, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. If it is, we could always reduce it a bit and take 60 seconds to charge, for example.
Regarding getting that power from your home wiring. 15A at 115V is 1725W, so your outlet can provide 5.55Wh in 11.6 seconds. But if we're charging over 30 seconds, we only need to draw 5.7A to do it.
Yay math, indeed!
These warnings are being sent by Google since 2012
This form of grammatical error is common among people whose native language is not English, in particular I see it a lot from Germans.
Odds are that the author writes their native language far better than you do.
Please learn to write or don't call yourself a writer.
Where does it say that the anonymous poster called himself a writer? You were clearly able to understand the intent, so your post is just snobbery.
Now, had you pointed out that a competent English-speaking editor could and should have corrected the error before posting it, well, then you'd have had a point. But this is slashdot, which has always been noted for incompetent editing.
If you want to be safe, then you need a simple, reusable password for low-risk sites (forum accounts like /.)
Fine, and exactly what I do.
a secure and long password for critical sites that you access through special services (like your email account)
No, you need a unique secure and long password for each critical site. Otherwise if any one of those sites gets compromised, they all are.
Your email account, the one that is the password-reset confirmation method for all of your other sites, is the crown jewel, the master key to all of your online accounts needs even better security. You need a secure password and a second authentication factor. If your email service doesn't support 2FA, get a better one that does and change the reset email address on all of your other accounts. For extra paranoia, get multiple such accounts, each with its own strong password and 2FA method, and use different ones for the contact email for different critical online sites. Not necessarily one to one, but spread the risk. I don't bother with that, myself.
and possibly a third medium security password for sensitive sites (like online gaming where your credit card is involved)
Fine, and exactly what I do. The legal protections on abuse of your credit card are such that you really don't need to worry tremendously about it. A compromised credit card is an inconvenience, not a serious problem.
Better yet, since you only have three passwords to keep track of, you can make them a bit tougher.
No, you still need a lot more than three passwords. Which basically means that you cannot rely on your memory. You need some sort of password storage system, whether it's a piece of paper in your wallet (if you do that, keep a backup somewhere safe and ideally try not to identify which site each password corresponds to in any obvious way), or a password wallet in your phone (encrypted under a single password and backed up somewhere), or the password storage in your web browser... as long as your browser encrypts the passwords.
Personally I rely mostly on Chrome as my password store. I have a very strong "sync" password set, which is used to encrypt all of the others, and this allows the password database to be backed up in Google's cloud (securely, since it's encrypted) and also seamlessly replicated to Chrome on all of my other devices with browsers. From a security perspective there are some weaknesses to this approach, but since I have aggressive lock screens and good passwords on all my devices, it's not too bad. I also have a paper backup stored in my gun safe (fire resistant) in my home. That's mostly in case I die, though, so my wife will be able to get into everything.
Note that however you store your passwords, good security also requires that all of the devices that store your passwords, or that you type your passwords into, be secure. That's another challenge.
Right. You would have risked an extremely massive fine and jail time for something that could have been readily proven fraudulent, in order to cast a single vote?
I'd have risked a vanishingly small probability of a massive fine and jail time. I expect that it happens quite a bit. But as I said, it shouldn't have significant systematic effects. The bigger risk with mail-in ballots is coercion.
Heh. I had another opportunity for an extra vote this year. My disabled brother-in-law moved to my house a couple of months ago when his dad passed away. When we all got our ballots he came to me and said "So, how are we voting this year?". Apparently my dad in law had always just told him how to vote. My wife and I told him he was on his own to figure it out this year. His disability is due to a head injury and he has some specific mental deficits associates with the regions of his brain that were damaged, but outside of those specific deficits he's quite intelligent. He's perfectly capable of making his own decisions on who and what to vote for, but hasn't had to until this year. I could probably have convinced my 23 year-old son to let me fill out his ballot, too.
I could have had four votes!
All compensation, whether in the form of stock, use of company vehicles, company-provided housing, etc., is considered income by the IRS.
Yes, but capital gains are taxed at a lower rate.
Stock and option grants are taxed as income, not capital gains. Change in value between vesting and sale is capital gains... which may be less than the income tax rate or may be the same, depending on how long the stock was held. All of the other things I mentioned are income, not capital gains.
It's been self-evident to every generation ever that the younger generation was lazy, stupid and useless. And they've all been wrong. Why are you different?
Best of all worlds is an E-voting machine that prints out a human readable summary of a ballot, then the ballot is physically dropped into a box.
No, best of all worlds is a human-readable paper ballot (however produced) that is machine-countable and accompanied by a receipt that allows the voter to verify that his or her vote was counted correctly, but doesn't allow proving how he or she voted to any third party, and a system that allows the count to be proven correct by anyone.
Cryptographers have designed more secure -- but still eminently practical -- voting methods, like Chaum's Scantegrity, but the world doesn't seem to be interested in really good election systems.
Because we're incapable of building our own production lines and fab shops?
Certainly not. But if all of those parts are manufactured in the US, they'll cost more than $224.
the tax code gets rewritten such that personal compensation (not income) is taxed. No one works for free, including CEOs, even if they have a $1 salary. They get compensated in some fashion and that compensation has a fair market value at time of distribution.
This is already the case. All compensation, whether in the form of stock, use of company vehicles, company-provided housing, etc., is considered income by the IRS.
Even most of the extremely-reported cases of "dead people voting" in recent history have turned out to be clerical errors (e.g. wrong date on the death certificate).
I'm sure a lot of dead people vote every year. I could easily have cast my father-in-law's ballot this year. His mail-in ballot arrived at his house a month after he passed and I really doubt anyone would have noticed if I'd filled it in, scrawled a signature and dropped it in the mail. If I'd been a little bit careful about it I could have made sure no one could prove I'd done it even if they had noticed. Instead, I shredded it.
However, those sorts of fraud opportunities are pretty randomly distributed, so they shouldn't produce a significant systematic effect unless there's a strong generational difference.
If the electronic vote was systematically manipulated no conclusions whatsoever can be drawn from the "apparent" outcome by anyone who values the integrity of the future process.
My point was that the electorate is so close to evenly divided that all sorts of things can push it one way or the other. Weather, for example. Or FBI announcements. It's not as though one side was clearly and strongly selected by the voters and manipulation gave it to the other side. So democracy is not seriously harmed by the decision, whichever way it goes... what may seriously harm democracy is if the people believe the results are invalid.
Actually, the best option is for them to have good voice controls.