In my precinct, they print the voting results out on paper, the voter can look at it, verify that it is correct (or discard it and try again) then the paper result gets stored by machine. That gives you a full paper trail if you want to go back and verify.
Better yet you should be able to watch it drop into a transparent box under the voting machine. That way you know your paper result is being stored and that extra votes aren't being added.
Really, this isn't a hard problem to solve. The first requirement for any electronic voting machine should be that it is difficult to compromise the results even if you let the attacker write the damn source code.
Every political group has this play in their playbook and it is hardly unique to this administration. If it seems that way it is because unlike other politicians who keep tight lipped about such things when possible, Trump likes to blurt out his opinion on Twitter ever chance he gets which draws more attention. Since everyone knows that Trump will throw them under the bus, they have no particular loyalty to remain silent themselves if blame can be deflected.
So it wasn't super clear to me from the article just how much the CIO deserved blame for crying wolf and how much Pai was going all-in on a preliminary finding.
But the thing that gets me is the childishness of Pai's statement:
I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I’m also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn’t feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office.
What ever happened to the guy at the top taking responsibility? Pai didn't just throw the guy under the bus, he tied him up, hopped into the driver's seat, and drove over him a few times to make sure.
"No longer cool?" I've been on Slashdot and it sure seems to me that most people I've talked to here never read past the second sentence of the summary, much less the article.
Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's fun when we have this exchange:
MD Solar: Fucking Trump screwing everything up again.
Me: The first sentence of the summary is "In 2015, the TSA stripped searched 4,800 people". Can you read the first two words? I didn't know Trump was running the TSA in 2015.
Second sentence of the summary?
I barely even finished the second word of the title!
The problem is that the water is chilled... but it's chilled by running it through colder water, usually pulled from a lake or a stream. Usually this isn't a problem, because the waste heat doesn't disrupt the ecosystem too much.
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem. Instead, the reactors are shut down to minimize the amount of heat they have to dissipate.
If true that's a pretty critical point.
It implies the Nuclear plants could be run in these temperatures if it were really critical, they're just shutting them down because there are other power sources with fewer side effects.
Hacking aside. The biggest issue I see, is it takes the privacy out of voting. We should be able to vote without our pastor looking over our solders judging us, or a Union Rep who may decide that your department may be OK for a layoff so they can bring in other workers. A Boss who may just fire you on the spot...
Voting our conscious without direct personal repercussion is one of our basic rights. And one of our few powers that we have to actually change those who lead us.
So the question will be on voting day, how many Church Congregations, Union Meetings, will there be to show people how to use the app.
This.
Forget all the BS about voter impersonation, it's about as serious a problem as Big Foot.
The real voter fraud is from absentee voting, I don't think the examples you mention happen much in practise, but certainly there's a lot of spouses who "help" each other fill out their absentee ballot.
you have to take care of their basic needs first. In America 80% of us live paycheck to paycheck. When you're living hand to mouth you don't really care about 20 years from now.
Some of that is poverty, but most of that is personal finance. For whatever reason a lot of people can't save money, give them a raise and you'll raise their standard of living, but they'll still be living paycheck to paycheck.
You can't wait until you've fixed every other problem on the planet until you start addressing global warming, you need to start fixing it now.
Dunno about you, but my corporate gym doesn't have a sauna. Nor do the public schools, the storefront gyms or other facilities the proles commonly use. Are you sure these findings aren't just looking at wealthy white guys somewhat interested in health vs. the great unwashed cheetoh-eating masses?
It's a review paper, so in some cases yes, in other cases probably not.
But I think the hypothesis makes sense, a sauna stresses the system and is essentially a kind of exercise, a style of exercise you're going to have trouble finding elsewhere.
Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.
Alternately, the tax would significantly reduce the cost of the program, allowing you to give more help to the people who can't work full time. And the disincentive of the 50% tax might not be as significant as you think, they're still making more money by working, just not as much as they would have otherwise.
One of the beauties of a pilot project is you actually get some real data to test your assumptions. Everyone has talked about this pure form of the basic income until now but it's all just theory, maybe this design is the one that works better in practise.
Actually my argument was that even with a UBI we'd still have a lot of people in distress and would probably need to deal with that.
There will always be addicts, irresponsible people, the mentally ill, and other folks who end up homeless regardless of financial policy. So what? Your defense amounts to saying "things will never be perfect, so why try?".
It's unreasonable to compare a given policy's impact to perfection. Instead we should compare it to existing policies, or other proposed policies. UBI gets rid of a couple major problems: 1. People being homeless through no fault of their own. 2. Large and complicated welfare allocation rules, and large bureaucracies to ensure compliance to those rules. 3. The disincentive for people on welfare to work.
There will still be homeless people, but frugal, responsible, mentally healthy folks will have a significant safety net to prevent that from happening. A huge amount of convoluted bureaucracy will be removed. Many people who are currently "stuck" on welfare because working a job would cause them to have less money will be freed up to rejoin the workforce. So while UBI doesn't instantly create a utopian society, it's still a massive policy improvement compared to the existing system.
To be clear I still think UBI is a really good idea, I just worry the benefits are being oversold.
For instance, I don't think it will help with homelessness nearly as much as you think. Giving everybody $1k / month means everyone has a bit more to spend on housing, which means housing is suddenly a lot more expensive. Same with food and other goods, giving more money to bottom earners will increase inflation and the cost of living in general.
The original poster said the UBI would replace everything. But that only work if it eliminates homelessness and people who end up in a situation where they can't afford to heat their homes or feed their families. But those people will still exist, there will probably be fewer, but you'll still need programs to deal with them.
How is this a "right-wing" voting issue? Which party has always been against voter ID laws and removing the deceased from voter rolls?
This about election hacking, both potential hacking of the actual apparatus used to conduct elections (voting machines, state governments, election vendors, etc) but also hacking of political actors in order to influence political outcomes.
Whining about non-existent voter fraud that is really just a transparent pretext for voter suppression efforts is a different discussion.
This problem can be addressed at the state level with it being major talking point at federal level for the elections. Great opportunity to find where lawmakers stand, and yes some Democrats are dirtbags on the issue too, despite what comes out of their mouths.
Slips of paper and human counters are pretty damn hard to hack - Since we cant seem to get open source hardware and software platforms for voting, the only option is slips of paper and manual counting.
Open source has nothing to do with having secure electronic voting machines.
Security is done by design and the licensing of the IP doesn't affect design.
You need a hard copy of the vote cast that the voter can see and verify. Any software-only solution is insecure.
The Xperia Compact phones are the only decent size phones with decent specs. Larger phones are a colossal pain since dealing with the extra weight and size is not worth it when I don't use the phone to consume media, browse the web much (maybe when I am not right near a computer, but that is it), or spend the day on social media apps. In decreasing order of importance, I need a phone that: makes phone calls, lets me text, acts as a hotspot, has GPS/maps for navigation, and a browser for the occasional quick search on the go. I don't need a Galaxy whatever or a phone with a ~6.5 inch display for that.
The Xperia Compact phones are a bit overpriced for what you get, but they are otherwise very high quality and nice to use. Every other phone I have seen with a ~4.5 inch display is rubbish (assuming you can even find a current year model, as that is getting to be more difficult), and every other decent phone nowadays is ~5.5 or larger.
I really hope they manage to stick around since they are servicing a part of the market nobody else seems to be interested in servicing.
My Xperia has been losing touch sensitivity near the edge of the screen, but one-off anecdotes are hardly a basis on which to judge hardware quality.
But I do agree the compact smartphone market is sorely under served.
If I wanted a tablet I'd buy a tablet, I don't need a giant screen to read webpages or look at a map. I get why the giant phones exist, but I don't see why no one is interested in making compact smartphones.
The "gun manufacturing lobby" is such a tired line of BS. I don't even know what it means
The lobbyists and advocacy groups representing gun manufacturers. In general they want rules that encourage people to buy lots of guns. Restricting 3d printed guns would qualify though I don't know if they had anything to do with Trump's tweet or if it's just Trump doing something random.
nobody is being forced to buy a gun and you can't have gun rights without guns which means gun manufacturing. Gun manufacturing and gun ownership have a lot of interests aligned, it's entirely sensible that the NRA supports gun owners and gun makers.
Some, but not all. For instance, the gun manufacturing lobby would probably like more restrictions on private gun sales, though they're very leery of pissing off their customers.
I don't understand the hype about 3D printed guns. Real guns are easier to get and actually work. You still need ammo. Plus improvised guns have been around for a long time -- zip guns -- the only thing novel about this is the "3D" part.
Plus isn't 3D printing still not quite ready for prime time unless you're a pretty serious hobbyist? Not unaffordable, but putzy and technically challenging to produce good output.
I'm more worried about pipe bombs than 3d guns.
Not ready yet, but as the previous poster said give it 10-20 years and it will change. In won't take long before 3d printing metal goes mainstream, and eventually consumer-grade printers will be able to turn out a fairly decent gun. How it eats into gun sales really depends on how mainstream the printers get.
The ammo is another question, but if you can make gunpowder I don't see why you couldn't print bullet casings too.
Your argument essentially is an argument for taking away individual freedom.
Actually my argument was that even with a UBI we'd still have a lot of people in distress and would probably need to deal with that. I suspect that continuing government programs would be the overwhelmingly likely solution.
Taking away their individual freedom would be restricting what people could do with their UBI so they couldn't get into financial dires.
I mean, consider the statistic that only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now. By your implication, this suggests that 61% of all Americans lack the sufficient wherewithal to be making their own financial decisions.
Many of them, though there's a lot who are legitimately poor because of employment options, and a few others who were financially responsible but answered the survey in a different way (the "I'll cut back on other spending options").
But however you want to deal with it the fact remains, a huge proportion of people don't save money well enough to handle a big expense, and a UBI isn't going to change that.
And if they can't make their own decisions for themselves, who make it for them? The State?
Ultimately I find arguments like your an aesthetic one, because often, when you explore the boundaries you find arguments like "he shouldn't eat at McDonalds because those are empty calories" or "she shouldn't spend her time out partying because she isn't spending enough time making home-cooked meals."
And down that rabbit hole is authoritarianism--one where only 39% of Americans are trusted with their own money.
Uhhhh, I suggested we'd still need government assistance, like we have now. You're the one who started the walk towards not letting them eat at McDonalds.
If you don't want the authoritarian solution to the problem then don't use the authoritarian solution to the problem! But don't offer up an authoritarian solution and act like it's the only solution because you're in denial of the fact we'll still need a social safety net even with a UBI.
You still haven't addressed what's going to happen to those people who are still in distress under UBI.
The funny of it is, if you add up how much we pay administering the current welfare system--the thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who administer things like Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, who determine what items you are allowed to buy, who determine if you qualify, who police the system--we could provide a reasonably generous UBI to everyone with nearly no administrative overhead.
Remember: a proper UBI replaces EVERYTHING, including tax deductions normally enjoyed by higher-income individuals, such as tax deductions for children (as children also receive a UBI), mortgage tax deductions, tax deductions for retirement savings, tax credits for paying for college. The idea is to eliminate the unfairness that is intrinsically tied into all of these separate programs, each which have their own target audiences, administrative bureaucracies and qualifications.
I don't think it will be that easy.
To me the big unsolved problem with UBI is still going to be people at the margins. There's always going to be a portion of people who are really bad at managing their money, only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now, presumably most of the remaining 61% are employed, meaning that even with a UBI they'd still be $1k away from financial trouble.
Think about what will actually happen with a UBI. Some people will spend it on a big mortgage, or they'll find a way to borrow against it by building up credit card debt, or they'll have a substance abuse problem and spend everything on feeding their habit. Or they'll just have zero savings like most people do now and a major expense will come up and cause ruin.
So even with a UBI we still have homelessness, we still have kids going hungry, we still have families with their heat and power shut off, and we're still going to need programs to deal with those people.
But who will evaluate the housing/care/food provided?
If everyone has a guaranteed room, you can be sure that the government will be quite happy to pay 10$ a month to Hovel Towers to provide them, although a much better room could be rended for 11$. The same will be true for medical care and food - the cheapest provider will be picked. And the people relying on these services won't have the ability to work a few hours a month to afford something better - if they want an upgrade they have to the entire expense on their own.
For food and housing government provided really is the cheapest acceptable option since the people who use it are the poorest who lack political capital to demand more.
But for most nations with public health care all but the rich use that public option, so there's quite a substantial political constituency demanding that it be of high quality.
You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.
You think most of the media coverage was positive.
I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...
They could have focused.
I do think the media was a lot harder on Clinton, though I don't think it was by design.
The way scandals work is you either need a good answer or need to wait until a new story comes up.
For Clinton there was basically just one scandal, the emails, notably her choice to exempt herself from the rules and then the admin's choice to purge the server after the subpoena came in.
She didn't have a great answer for either of those but it probably should have only been a moderate sized scandal where she had to wait until a new Clinton story took the narrative. Unfortunately all the new stories that came up involved the words "email" and "Clinton", so that one moderate sized scandal dominated coverage and the public got freaked out by this thing that she continually couldn't answer for.
Trump by contrast had too many scandals, no tax returns, fraudulent TrumpU, fraudulent charity, groping women, walking into change rooms with underaged girls, dealings with the mafia, stiffing contractors, shifting dealings with Russia, shifty dealings with money launderers, connections with white supremacists, connections with conspiracy theorists, unrealistic proposals, etc, etc, etc.
Because there were so many scandals they just became this big laundry list, one would come up but before Trump was really backed into a corner another one would come up and take over the coverage. The only two that had any real impact were TrumpU and the sexual assaults, but even then they didn't take long to get displaced by other scandals.
I'm sure they already know this, but the algorithm isn't designed to trip up GOP politicians. It says a lot more about how they choose to phrase their message and talk about issues, than any agenda seeking to silence them on Twitter.
When what you post is designed to be inflammatory and lower discourse and a system designed to combat that properly flags it, maybe its working as intended and you should look inwards? No matter where you stand, there are good and bad ways to engage in discourse. On all topics, with all points of view.
I suspect the problem is that prominentracists try to avoid saying things that are obviously racist, so there's a lot of subtext and "draw the obvious conclusion" posts that are so hard for an algorithm to reliably flag as racist that you might as well not bother.
So how do you find those prominent racists to shadow ban? Well the trick is that there's a bunch of other racists who are so guarded in their language and are really easy for an algorithm to flag as racist.
So you steal a page from PageRank and realize that if a whole bunch of obvious racists are constantly retweeting someone in a positive context then you've probably found a prominent racist.
The problem that happened here is that White Supremacists really like Trump and the job of the GOP Chairwoman is to promote and defend Trump.
So all of her pro-Trump tweets are now getting retweeted by obvious White Supremacists and indicating to Twitter that she's some prominent White Supremacist, hence the shadow-ban.
conservation status is "least concern" and they're in europe and asia besides the USA.
great grouse, threatened or near threaten, okay lets watch out for that one.
but the burying beetle? world can live without it, we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter (and we're not going to lose it anyway, even with drilling, the land area its on is huge)
Maybe, but you're looking at the most corrupt (and lobbyist riddled) department in one of the most corrupt administrations in US history, and a congress that has been at best enabling, and at worst (healthcare, tax cut) encouraging.
Are they really the ones you're counting on to make wise decisions about endangered species?
I live in Rome. It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
Yeah, ideally the archaeologists would get some additional funding so they could help compensate for the increased construction costs though that doesn't really work politically.
Which reminds me, I was originally gonna write "priceless artifacts" in my original post but then I thought better of it, turns out with good reason.
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
It's an opportunity more than a problem.
Most time when you build a tunnel for a subway all you get out of it is a big hole.
Rome is getting a bunch of ancient artifacts out of the deal, and all it costs them is a longer schedule and the associated costs.
Rape is action of perpetrator forcing themselves on the victim. Using physical coercion or threat of violence. So after that victim runs away crying unless restrained. Something that is not the case here. Instead the "victim" carried on as if it was usual night. "consent" is merely a legal criterion to disambiguate certain acts between actual rape and BDSM roleplay and not essential part of definition of "rape".
Rape INCLUDES a forcible physical rape. But it is not limited to such. Rape also includes sex when the victim did not consent and is incapable of consenting, and when the victim is intimidated into consenting (including though implied violence).
In this case (at least according to the report) the victim had clearly laid out the parameters under which she consented. He then waited till she was asleep in order to initiate intercourse that violated those parameters, that's rape.
That she didn't "run away crying" is only indicative of the fact she had just woken up mid-assault and was probably a little disoriented and unsure how to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
In my precinct, they print the voting results out on paper, the voter can look at it, verify that it is correct (or discard it and try again) then the paper result gets stored by machine. That gives you a full paper trail if you want to go back and verify.
Better yet you should be able to watch it drop into a transparent box under the voting machine. That way you know your paper result is being stored and that extra votes aren't being added.
Really, this isn't a hard problem to solve. The first requirement for any electronic voting machine should be that it is difficult to compromise the results even if you let the attacker write the damn source code.
Every political group has this play in their playbook and it is hardly unique to this administration. If it seems that way it is because unlike other politicians who keep tight lipped about such things when possible, Trump likes to blurt out his opinion on Twitter ever chance he gets which draws more attention. Since everyone knows that Trump will throw them under the bus, they have no particular loyalty to remain silent themselves if blame can be deflected.
So it wasn't super clear to me from the article just how much the CIO deserved blame for crying wolf and how much Pai was going all-in on a preliminary finding.
But the thing that gets me is the childishness of Pai's statement:
I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I’m also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn’t feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office.
What ever happened to the guy at the top taking responsibility? Pai didn't just throw the guy under the bus, he tied him up, hopped into the driver's seat, and drove over him a few times to make sure.
"No longer cool?" I've been on Slashdot and it sure seems to me that most people I've talked to here never read past the second sentence of the summary, much less the article.
Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's fun when we have this exchange:
MD Solar: Fucking Trump screwing everything up again.
Me: The first sentence of the summary is "In 2015, the TSA stripped searched 4,800 people". Can you read the first two words? I didn't know Trump was running the TSA in 2015.
Second sentence of the summary?
I barely even finished the second word of the title!
It's a terrible summary.
The problem is that the water is chilled... but it's chilled by running it through colder water, usually pulled from a lake or a stream. Usually this isn't a problem, because the waste heat doesn't disrupt the ecosystem too much.
Right now, however, the environment is so warm that adding the waste heat would push temperatures above acceptable levels, killing the local ecosystem. Instead, the reactors are shut down to minimize the amount of heat they have to dissipate.
If true that's a pretty critical point.
It implies the Nuclear plants could be run in these temperatures if it were really critical, they're just shutting them down because there are other power sources with fewer side effects.
Thereby violating the third law of thermodynamics. You should of learned in high school physics perpetual energy machines dont work, Silly child.
It's not a perpetual energy machine, the input energy comes from the radioactive decay of Uranium, not from the water.
Hacking aside.
The biggest issue I see, is it takes the privacy out of voting.
We should be able to vote without our pastor looking over our solders judging us, or a Union Rep who may decide that your department may be OK for a layoff so they can bring in other workers. A Boss who may just fire you on the spot...
Voting our conscious without direct personal repercussion is one of our basic rights. And one of our few powers that we have to actually change those who lead us.
So the question will be on voting day, how many Church Congregations, Union Meetings, will there be to show people how to use the app.
This.
Forget all the BS about voter impersonation, it's about as serious a problem as Big Foot.
The real voter fraud is from absentee voting, I don't think the examples you mention happen much in practise, but certainly there's a lot of spouses who "help" each other fill out their absentee ballot.
you have to take care of their basic needs first. In America 80% of us live paycheck to paycheck. When you're living hand to mouth you don't really care about 20 years from now.
Some of that is poverty, but most of that is personal finance. For whatever reason a lot of people can't save money, give them a raise and you'll raise their standard of living, but they'll still be living paycheck to paycheck.
You can't wait until you've fixed every other problem on the planet until you start addressing global warming, you need to start fixing it now.
Dunno about you, but my corporate gym doesn't have a sauna. Nor do the public schools, the storefront gyms or other facilities the proles commonly use. Are you sure these findings aren't just looking at wealthy white guys somewhat interested in health vs. the great unwashed cheetoh-eating masses?
It's a review paper, so in some cases yes, in other cases probably not.
But I think the hypothesis makes sense, a sauna stresses the system and is essentially a kind of exercise, a style of exercise you're going to have trouble finding elsewhere.
In general, exercise is good for your health.
Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.
Alternately, the tax would significantly reduce the cost of the program, allowing you to give more help to the people who can't work full time. And the disincentive of the 50% tax might not be as significant as you think, they're still making more money by working, just not as much as they would have otherwise.
One of the beauties of a pilot project is you actually get some real data to test your assumptions. Everyone has talked about this pure form of the basic income until now but it's all just theory, maybe this design is the one that works better in practise.
Actually my argument was that even with a UBI we'd still have a lot of people in distress and would probably need to deal with that.
There will always be addicts, irresponsible people, the mentally ill, and other folks who end up homeless regardless of financial policy. So what? Your defense amounts to saying "things will never be perfect, so why try?".
It's unreasonable to compare a given policy's impact to perfection. Instead we should compare it to existing policies, or other proposed policies. UBI gets rid of a couple major problems: 1. People being homeless through no fault of their own. 2. Large and complicated welfare allocation rules, and large bureaucracies to ensure compliance to those rules. 3. The disincentive for people on welfare to work.
There will still be homeless people, but frugal, responsible, mentally healthy folks will have a significant safety net to prevent that from happening. A huge amount of convoluted bureaucracy will be removed. Many people who are currently "stuck" on welfare because working a job would cause them to have less money will be freed up to rejoin the workforce. So while UBI doesn't instantly create a utopian society, it's still a massive policy improvement compared to the existing system.
To be clear I still think UBI is a really good idea, I just worry the benefits are being oversold.
For instance, I don't think it will help with homelessness nearly as much as you think. Giving everybody $1k / month means everyone has a bit more to spend on housing, which means housing is suddenly a lot more expensive. Same with food and other goods, giving more money to bottom earners will increase inflation and the cost of living in general.
The original poster said the UBI would replace everything. But that only work if it eliminates homelessness and people who end up in a situation where they can't afford to heat their homes or feed their families. But those people will still exist, there will probably be fewer, but you'll still need programs to deal with them.
We ran out of other people's money.
Translation:
Ontario just elected a dumber version of Trump, cancelling the project signals nothing more than it seemed like a "lefty liberal" idea.
How is this a "right-wing" voting issue? Which party has always been against voter ID laws and removing the deceased from voter rolls?
This about election hacking, both potential hacking of the actual apparatus used to conduct elections (voting machines, state governments, election vendors, etc) but also hacking of political actors in order to influence political outcomes.
Whining about non-existent voter fraud that is really just a transparent pretext for voter suppression efforts is a different discussion.
This problem can be addressed at the state level with it being major talking point at federal level for the elections. Great opportunity to find where lawmakers stand, and yes some Democrats are dirtbags on the issue too, despite what comes out of their mouths.
The states are hardly the ones to trust with ensuring fair elections.
Slips of paper and human counters are pretty damn hard to hack - Since we cant seem to get open source hardware and software platforms for voting, the only option is slips of paper and manual counting.
Open source has nothing to do with having secure electronic voting machines.
Security is done by design and the licensing of the IP doesn't affect design.
You need a hard copy of the vote cast that the voter can see and verify. Any software-only solution is insecure.
The Xperia Compact phones are the only decent size phones with decent specs. Larger phones are a colossal pain since dealing with the extra weight and size is not worth it when I don't use the phone to consume media, browse the web much (maybe when I am not right near a computer, but that is it), or spend the day on social media apps. In decreasing order of importance, I need a phone that: makes phone calls, lets me text, acts as a hotspot, has GPS/maps for navigation, and a browser for the occasional quick search on the go. I don't need a Galaxy whatever or a phone with a ~6.5 inch display for that.
The Xperia Compact phones are a bit overpriced for what you get, but they are otherwise very high quality and nice to use. Every other phone I have seen with a ~4.5 inch display is rubbish (assuming you can even find a current year model, as that is getting to be more difficult), and every other decent phone nowadays is ~5.5 or larger.
I really hope they manage to stick around since they are servicing a part of the market nobody else seems to be interested in servicing.
My Xperia has been losing touch sensitivity near the edge of the screen, but one-off anecdotes are hardly a basis on which to judge hardware quality.
But I do agree the compact smartphone market is sorely under served.
If I wanted a tablet I'd buy a tablet, I don't need a giant screen to read webpages or look at a map. I get why the giant phones exist, but I don't see why no one is interested in making compact smartphones.
The "gun manufacturing lobby" is such a tired line of BS. I don't even know what it means
The lobbyists and advocacy groups representing gun manufacturers. In general they want rules that encourage people to buy lots of guns. Restricting 3d printed guns would qualify though I don't know if they had anything to do with Trump's tweet or if it's just Trump doing something random.
nobody is being forced to buy a gun and you can't have gun rights without guns which means gun manufacturing. Gun manufacturing and gun ownership have a lot of interests aligned, it's entirely sensible that the NRA supports gun owners and gun makers.
Some, but not all. For instance, the gun manufacturing lobby would probably like more restrictions on private gun sales, though they're very leery of pissing off their customers.
I don't understand the hype about 3D printed guns. Real guns are easier to get and actually work. You still need ammo. Plus improvised guns have been around for a long time -- zip guns -- the only thing novel about this is the "3D" part.
Plus isn't 3D printing still not quite ready for prime time unless you're a pretty serious hobbyist? Not unaffordable, but putzy and technically challenging to produce good output.
I'm more worried about pipe bombs than 3d guns.
Not ready yet, but as the previous poster said give it 10-20 years and it will change. In won't take long before 3d printing metal goes mainstream, and eventually consumer-grade printers will be able to turn out a fairly decent gun. How it eats into gun sales really depends on how mainstream the printers get.
The ammo is another question, but if you can make gunpowder I don't see why you couldn't print bullet casings too.
Your argument essentially is an argument for taking away individual freedom.
Actually my argument was that even with a UBI we'd still have a lot of people in distress and would probably need to deal with that. I suspect that continuing government programs would be the overwhelmingly likely solution.
Taking away their individual freedom would be restricting what people could do with their UBI so they couldn't get into financial dires.
I mean, consider the statistic that only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now. By your implication, this suggests that 61% of all Americans lack the sufficient wherewithal to be making their own financial decisions.
Many of them, though there's a lot who are legitimately poor because of employment options, and a few others who were financially responsible but answered the survey in a different way (the "I'll cut back on other spending options").
But however you want to deal with it the fact remains, a huge proportion of people don't save money well enough to handle a big expense, and a UBI isn't going to change that.
And if they can't make their own decisions for themselves, who make it for them? The State?
Ultimately I find arguments like your an aesthetic one, because often, when you explore the boundaries you find arguments like "he shouldn't eat at McDonalds because those are empty calories" or "she shouldn't spend her time out partying because she isn't spending enough time making home-cooked meals."
And down that rabbit hole is authoritarianism--one where only 39% of Americans are trusted with their own money.
Uhhhh, I suggested we'd still need government assistance, like we have now. You're the one who started the walk towards not letting them eat at McDonalds.
If you don't want the authoritarian solution to the problem then don't use the authoritarian solution to the problem! But don't offer up an authoritarian solution and act like it's the only solution because you're in denial of the fact we'll still need a social safety net even with a UBI.
You still haven't addressed what's going to happen to those people who are still in distress under UBI.
The funny of it is, if you add up how much we pay administering the current welfare system--the thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who administer things like Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, who determine what items you are allowed to buy, who determine if you qualify, who police the system--we could provide a reasonably generous UBI to everyone with nearly no administrative overhead.
Remember: a proper UBI replaces EVERYTHING, including tax deductions normally enjoyed by higher-income individuals, such as tax deductions for children (as children also receive a UBI), mortgage tax deductions, tax deductions for retirement savings, tax credits for paying for college. The idea is to eliminate the unfairness that is intrinsically tied into all of these separate programs, each which have their own target audiences, administrative bureaucracies and qualifications.
I don't think it will be that easy.
To me the big unsolved problem with UBI is still going to be people at the margins. There's always going to be a portion of people who are really bad at managing their money, only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now, presumably most of the remaining 61% are employed, meaning that even with a UBI they'd still be $1k away from financial trouble.
Think about what will actually happen with a UBI. Some people will spend it on a big mortgage, or they'll find a way to borrow against it by building up credit card debt, or they'll have a substance abuse problem and spend everything on feeding their habit. Or they'll just have zero savings like most people do now and a major expense will come up and cause ruin.
So even with a UBI we still have homelessness, we still have kids going hungry, we still have families with their heat and power shut off, and we're still going to need programs to deal with those people.
But who will evaluate the housing/care/food provided?
If everyone has a guaranteed room, you can be sure that the government will be quite happy to pay 10$ a month to Hovel Towers to provide them, although a much better room could be rended for 11$.
The same will be true for medical care and food - the cheapest provider will be picked. And the people relying on these services won't have the ability to work a few hours a month to afford something better - if they want an upgrade they have to the entire expense on their own.
For food and housing government provided really is the cheapest acceptable option since the people who use it are the poorest who lack political capital to demand more.
But for most nations with public health care all but the rich use that public option, so there's quite a substantial political constituency demanding that it be of high quality.
Okay, just so I'm clear here.
You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.
You think most of the media coverage was positive.
I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...
They could have focused.
I do think the media was a lot harder on Clinton, though I don't think it was by design.
The way scandals work is you either need a good answer or need to wait until a new story comes up.
For Clinton there was basically just one scandal, the emails, notably her choice to exempt herself from the rules and then the admin's choice to purge the server after the subpoena came in.
She didn't have a great answer for either of those but it probably should have only been a moderate sized scandal where she had to wait until a new Clinton story took the narrative. Unfortunately all the new stories that came up involved the words "email" and "Clinton", so that one moderate sized scandal dominated coverage and the public got freaked out by this thing that she continually couldn't answer for.
Trump by contrast had too many scandals, no tax returns, fraudulent TrumpU, fraudulent charity, groping women, walking into change rooms with underaged girls, dealings with the mafia, stiffing contractors, shifting dealings with Russia, shifty dealings with money launderers, connections with white supremacists, connections with conspiracy theorists, unrealistic proposals, etc, etc, etc.
Because there were so many scandals they just became this big laundry list, one would come up but before Trump was really backed into a corner another one would come up and take over the coverage. The only two that had any real impact were TrumpU and the sexual assaults, but even then they didn't take long to get displaced by other scandals.
I'm sure they already know this, but the algorithm isn't designed to trip up GOP politicians. It says a lot more about how they choose to phrase their message and talk about issues, than any agenda seeking to silence them on Twitter.
When what you post is designed to be inflammatory and lower discourse and a system designed to combat that properly flags it, maybe its working as intended and you should look inwards? No matter where you stand, there are good and bad ways to engage in discourse. On all topics, with all points of view.
That was my first thought but her account didn't really seem that bad.
I suspect the problem is that prominent racists try to avoid saying things that are obviously racist, so there's a lot of subtext and "draw the obvious conclusion" posts that are so hard for an algorithm to reliably flag as racist that you might as well not bother.
So how do you find those prominent racists to shadow ban? Well the trick is that there's a bunch of other racists who are so guarded in their language and are really easy for an algorithm to flag as racist.
So you steal a page from PageRank and realize that if a whole bunch of obvious racists are constantly retweeting someone in a positive context then you've probably found a prominent racist.
The problem that happened here is that White Supremacists really like Trump and the job of the GOP Chairwoman is to promote and defend Trump.
So all of her pro-Trump tweets are now getting retweeted by obvious White Supremacists and indicating to Twitter that she's some prominent White Supremacist, hence the shadow-ban.
conservation status is "least concern" and they're in europe and asia besides the USA.
great grouse, threatened or near threaten, okay lets watch out for that one.
but the burying beetle? world can live without it, we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter (and we're not going to lose it anyway, even with drilling, the land area its on is huge)
Maybe, but you're looking at the most corrupt (and lobbyist riddled) department in one of the most corrupt administrations in US history, and a congress that has been at best enabling, and at worst (healthcare, tax cut) encouraging.
Are they really the ones you're counting on to make wise decisions about endangered species?
I live in Rome.
It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
Yeah, ideally the archaeologists would get some additional funding so they could help compensate for the increased construction costs though that doesn't really work politically.
Which reminds me, I was originally gonna write "priceless artifacts" in my original post but then I thought better of it, turns out with good reason.
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
It's an opportunity more than a problem.
Most time when you build a tunnel for a subway all you get out of it is a big hole.
Rome is getting a bunch of ancient artifacts out of the deal, and all it costs them is a longer schedule and the associated costs.
Rape is action of perpetrator forcing themselves on the victim. Using physical coercion or threat of violence. So after that victim runs away crying unless restrained. Something that is not the case here. Instead the "victim" carried on as if it was usual night. "consent" is merely a legal criterion to disambiguate certain acts between actual rape and BDSM roleplay and not essential part of definition of "rape".
Rape INCLUDES a forcible physical rape. But it is not limited to such. Rape also includes sex when the victim did not consent and is incapable of consenting, and when the victim is intimidated into consenting (including though implied violence).
In this case (at least according to the report) the victim had clearly laid out the parameters under which she consented. He then waited till she was asleep in order to initiate intercourse that violated those parameters, that's rape.
That she didn't "run away crying" is only indicative of the fact she had just woken up mid-assault and was probably a little disoriented and unsure how to deal with it.