Telling OEMs that if they wanted to sell ANY Microsoft products on their system they had to sell Microsoft products on ALL of their systems is much different than Google promoting their own stuff on their own website.
Are you unhappy that the microsoft.com website doesn't sell RedHat subscriptions? Then why should you care that Google websites promote Google stuff?
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power.
Google customers will not abandon Google because Google is doing exactly what Google customers want: promoting Google things and things the customers have paid them to promote.
The USERS may or may not change search engines, but if they are like me they will base their decision on which search engine to use on how good the results are. As it stands, Google is still better for some things, others for other. Google has no way to coerce me into using it for any search, and proof of that is how easy it is to change search engines.
Oh, you thought YOU were the customer when you did a search? When you send a check to Google for their data you can be a customer. Until then, you are a product. Your click-throughs are what the customers pay for.
There are many 60kHz time signals, including WWVB in the US and others in other countries.
The easiest time source nowadays is the almost ubiquitous cell phone system. You don't even need a paid data service to get the time from the local cellsite.
So, we're going back to coding in assembly and calculating the execution time of opcodes, right?
No, we're admitting that non-realtime OSs cannot guarantee when a program will be executed or that it won't be interrupted in the middle for some other task. It is a Bad Thing if the program that is in charge of determining whether your autonomous vehicle is about to hit a small person or a wind-blown plastic bag is currently swapped out because the mp3 player is processing your touch-screen input, or even if it is waiting for disk I/O to complete.
Coding in assembly will not solve that problem.
I would also not be surprised to find that the "bag/child" program was not running at the moment because the car's computer had just downloaded a critical update from Microsoft and was rebooting to install it.
Really? You know damn well advertisers want to know where you have been, what you were doing there, how long you stayed, what you bought, who you met with...
I was at the airport, going through customs, about twenty minutes, didn't buy anything because they had nothing for sale but did dump a half-eaten apple into the bio-hazard agri-trash, and I met two uniformed customs agent and one dog. That's what my fingerprint on a scanner at customs will tell the advertiser.
As for a picture: the one time I went through one of those the sun was behind me and the picture of me was completely black. I don't recall any special processing that took place as a result, it seemed like the agents didn't worry too much about it.
If instead there was a website where you could put in issues you find important (checkboxes) and get a record of voting on these issues by people in office, you could see if your incumbent did what you find important.
It would tell you nothing about any opponents. It is typically a bad idea to vote based on "anyone but..." considerations. You may find that the person you elected is even worse than the one you had, and all you'll have to evaluate him on is the sound bytes he's uttered in those scripted ads.
It is a major downside to the political process that people are quick to "vote against" instead of "vote for". It drives negative campaigning, since the entire purpose of negative campaigns is to get people to vote against the target. I would be perfectly happy with an amendment to the existing political speech laws that make it illegal for politicians to talk about anyone but themselves in their ads. Never again should we have to experience the kind of thing like the Wyden "Smith killed a kid" ads.
It'd require some hard workers to simplify complex obfuscated legislation into an easy to understand format,
And it would be rife with the same kind of biased evaluations that are rampant on the web already. Every issue-oriented site figures out ways to score down those politicians they don't like and score up those they do. One trivial way to do that is to rate a politician as "voting against issue X", when the vote was actually on an omnibus bill that contained something about "issue X" but also had a lot of other stuff that was the actual reason he voted against it. You've never heard of the problem of the party in control attaching riders about "kissing babies and feeding the homeless" to a bill authorizing something they know the opponents will not vote for, and then announcing that their opponents oppose kissing babies and feeding the homeless?
Except that it only works because where you have no compulsory voting they have no reason to record "who voted"
What? Of course they record who voted, every time. It doesn't take a mandatory voting law to force that, it only takes a reasonable law that removes people who haven't voted for a set amount of time from the voter registration lists. They are supposed to do this on a regular basis to weed out people who move or die.
Now, in most places it is not perfect (where I am from we don't even have to give id of any kind just your name) and so the attempt at a fraudulent vote will almost certainly get past an initial hurdle of getting the ballot paper into the box.
And since there is no hurdle following that, you've just admitted that simple vote fraud by using someone else's name "will almost certainly" work. That the ballot in the box has had all identifying information removed so it can no longer be tracked by name. All the checks for voters have to take place before that happens.
In those places where provisional voting takes place, contested ballots are not put in the box until their authenticity is checked. They aren't put in the main ballot box because removing them when the provisional voter is shown to be bogus cannot happen if they are.
Such as, total number of ballots cannot be greater than the number of registered voters,
Given the normal low turnout for elections, this is hardly a danger in all but the most flagrant fraud. Even if it does happen, whose ballots do you throw out to get the number down below the "correct" value?
Hi, I'm an electoral roll. Polling station staff check names off of me when people turn up to cast an anonymous vote. In this way, it quickly becomes apparent if a person claiming a particular name has voted multiple times, at multiple polling stations.
And nobody would be smart enough to think that maybe they should use the name of a dead person, or some name other than their own, when they cast their second, third, etc ballot?
Yes, you will catch people who are honest enough to use their own name every time they try to vote, but then, they aren't the ones that need to be caught.
It turns out the rate of this happening is so low as to be nearly non-existent.
Well, yes, I can believe that your strawman is truly a strawman. But how many times do people using multiple names vote? You're not looking for that, and you aren't stopping that.
I know it's hard to grasp, but other people have different experiences than you . In Florida and Ohio, the lines to vote can be up to 7 hours long.
So we solve a local technical issue by a national mandatory paid holiday? Yes, having sufficient equipment and supplies to run a polling place is a technical issue with technical solutions.
A national solution to such a problem is ridiculously wasteful and just patently absurd. Mandating a paid holiday for people in Oregon, for example, means that employers get no productive work for a full day's pay for every employee, who get basically a vacation day with nothing special to do. It means every employee in the service industries get an unpaid day off, or at best they get the minimum wage they would have gotten but none of the tips they rely on. And anyone who works more than 8 hours a day normally loses money because they will only get the 8 hours for holiday time.
No, mandatory holidays for voting is not a reasonable solution. It's certainly not a good solution to a problem that has already been solved. If you can't vote on election day, there are other options.
Yet another paid holiday helping to improve a slowly recovering economy.
Another paid holiday, at 8 hours, costing someone who is so poor they have to work 12 hour days four hours of wages, and if they are working that many hours it may be 6 hours -- at time and a half.
You can't just create a mandatory paid holiday without costing a lot of people a lot of money, and stretching the edges of the federal span of control even more. That makes it rather hard to do, and to justify.
Why not just vote absentee if you can't make it to the polls on voting day? It means you have to plan ahead, that's all. You really want to cost everyone who doesn't get holiday pay the wages they lose by not working, just so the few who can't figure out how to pull an hour out of their really busy schedule can vote?
One day every year you have to arrange to be someplace sometime during a twelve hour period. Very difficult. It certainly merits shutting down the US economy by mandating all businesses close their doors for the entire day, costing wage slaves a day's wages, just so a few people don't have to use the existing absentee system to vote on a different day. It certainly justifies an unconstitutional extension of federal powers for there to be a mandated shutdown of every for-profit business in the country. Think of the Children!
And those people you are trying to help -- the ones who work a twelve hour day on Tuesday? Losing that twelve hours may cut them back to being straight time for the other days they work, costing them a bundle of money. Even if it doesn't cost them overtime altogether, those four hours they lose (by being on a paid holiday of 8 hours instead of a workday of 12) may be a lot of money, all at time and a half.
Exactly how much should it cost someone to be able to vote? Four hours of wages? And all the money other people lose by being idle for a day? And this is a good thing? Does your largesse extend to paying them all back for lost time?
And that doesn't even begin to cover the hit to the economy and incomes in states where a national holiday isn't necessary because they vote by mail. I'd just love to be told that I have to take a day off on election day because my company has to shut down, just so someone in New Jersey doesn't have to vote absentee. I get to sit around all day doing nothing -- can't go to the store, movies, or anyplace that is a for-profit business -- for nothing.
Registering to vote is not an honor system, but actually voting, in many places, is. I never had to show any ID when I went to a polling place, all I did was say my name and address, and then I'd point to my name on the list. Good enough. If I had wanted to I could go to another polling place, say someone elses name and address, point to their name on the list, and I could vote again.
It isn't rocket science to understand how to vote more than once. To deny that it is happening despite how easy it is is just ridiculous.
US citizens need to register to vote. It is not an "honor" system.
Yep. And it would be impossible for anyone to pretend to be one of those registered voters, yes sirree! Only those people who actually registered to vote would ever show up at a polling place to try to vote, no sirree Bob! And every registered citizen does his civic duty by notifying the election board to remove his registration when he dies, absolutely.
There is no reason why these "honor system" citizens should not be required to provide ID when they vote. The only reason not to require ID is so that non-honorable people can slip in.
State-issued ID cards are a thinly-veiled partisan attempt to disenfranchise certain voter-groups by placing additional obstacles in their way.
Right on, Man! And requiring people to actually REGISTER to vote is a thinly-veiled partisan attempt to disenfranchise certain voter-groups by placing an obstacle in their way!
I don't know, how about this? When you REGISTER to vote you get an ID to prove it and you show that ID when you go vote? No, that's too hard I guess. Even when it's a motor-voter state and you're already getting a driver's license with your photo on it...
That's election fraud. Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times or tries to vote as someone they are not.
Voter fraud is many times how they pull off election fraud. Busing people around to various polls so they can vote multiple times is the standard operating practice in some areas, like Chicago. The old saying was that the cemeteries are empty in Chicago neighborhoods on election day. So many dead people are voting...
So no, it's not a lie, voter fraud is incredibly ineffective as a means of influencing an election because it has to be done more publicly and more frequently
But it is harder to detect than a missing ballot box. To rig a precinct election all you need is to bus a lot of people in; to lose ballot boxes you have to buy off ALL the election workers involved -- even the ones from the opposing party.
Having elections on a regular work day is a huge disincentive for hourly workers to vote. It literally costs them money,
If you're working a twelve hour day, you're pretty lucky. Otherwise, go to the polls during one of the hours you're normally not working. The relatively few people it is an issue for can work around it by voting absentee.
Forcing businesses to close when THEY could be making money and paying their employees is ludicrous. It would be a vast overstepping of the federal powers. What do people in the service industries (waitresses, etc) do when they cannot work a day and thus wind up losing an entire day's wages (and tips) just so a few people who can't manage to take an hour out of their busy day can vote?
To balance out the work calender, they can get rid of MLK day.
Exactly which businesses are forced to close by the federal government on MLK Day? How does "allowing" them to stay open on a day they can already stay open balance a forced closure?
There are, however, plenty of voters who are informed but find voting to be so difficult -
s/are informed/care enough to do it/i;
It should take both a level of informed decision making and concern about the output. Lacking either one is a good reason not to vote. Changing the system so more people who are uninformed/don't care can vote is a bad thing.
If your local municipality has issues with providing sufficient facilities so that those who are informed and care can vote, fix that problem. Trying to solve a local problem at the national level is wrong.
One thing that should be seriously considered is making election day a national holiday to guarantee that everyone has time to vote.
"Oh, goody, it's National Voting Day again. I can sleep late, and then we can go to the lake and drink a few brewskies..." Good for the brewers, but not so good for the rest of the economy.
however it does do a very good job of capturing what the whole country thinks on election day.
Unless there's an option on the ballot for "leave me the hell alone, I don't care, I just want another beer", I don't think you're accurately capturing the feelings of the voters.
Also why does the US insist on having an election on a Tuesday when everyone is at work, that's just fucking bizarre,
So you vote on Monday or whenever your absentee ballot shows up. Very difficult, not.
it's like you don't want societies grunts to turn up.
"Societies grunts" don't have jobs so they have no excuse for not voting. It's more like a useful way of weeding out the people who don't really care enough about voting to spend half an hour doing it. For the ones who truly care and cannot make it on Tuesday there are ways around that.
I live in a place where we have mail-in ballots, and I can't say that our decision making based on that is any different or better than it was when we had polling places. We do get a lot more political ads than we used to, though. Three weeks solid.
You mean why would advertising play a bigger role in a mandatory election than in voluntary? I think it's obvious.
Right now, we have 37% turnout. Of those, less than half are probably well informed voters, the rest are voting because of, well, any number of reasons. First black President, first woman, not a Mormon, etc. Let's use 15% as a round number for the interested, informed group. That leaves 22%.
Now imagine that mandatory voting is implemented. You get 95% turnout. Where do the extra voters come from? From the one who aren't interested, of course. If they were interested, they'd have voted without it being mandatory. So you now have 15% of the turnout as informed voters, and 80% are now emotion-based or simply uninterested.
If an advertiser of a commercial product went from an audience of 22% to 80%, they'd be orgasmic. Imagine political advertisers all trying to reach that new 58% of the voters who aren't already committed to any candidate but want a way to make a decision. The $1 that could sway only 22% of the population yesterday now blossoms into $100 to try to reach all 80% of the targets.
Claiming that mandatory voting will get money out of politics is one of the stupidest things anyone has said. Since we know that Mr. Obama isn't that stupid, he must have another reason to suggest it. If the reason can't be openly stated, then there must be a problem with it.
In any case, mandatory voting is a bad idea no matter how many other countries do it. It is someone's right not to vote just as much as it is to vote, and encouraging people who otherwise have no interest in the process to vote is a mistake. Voting for voting's sake is a travesty of the process.
Ultimately I think one solution would be to require the manufacturer to take back and arrange for recycling or proper disposal. That would add to the upfront cost but eliminate a lot of back end problems. Of course, manufacturers will whine about the cost but I think bottle deposit laws are a good example of what may happen.
Yep. Bottled drinks cost a nickel more each, and the effort to return them is hardly offset by the cost, so I wind up throwing them away in the trash. A good solution to a recycling problem, I think.
It tells the local police to send out more officers on patrol,
They already have all the available officers doing what they are supposed to be doing. It takes time to call out more. And calling out more officers does NOTHING to help people who need to call 911 know they need to call the non-emergency number.
patrolling officers can be instructed to keep an eye out.
Patrolling officers are already supposed to "keep an eye out". Would you suggest that they increase their "keep an eye out" by peering in citizen's windows just in case someone is having a heart attack and can't call 911 on their cell phone?
Calls direct to the station will be taken more seriously.
If calls "direct to the station" aren't taken seriously, the problem is not with Verizon, it is with the people who answer the non-emergency numbers. I don't know any of them who would dismiss such a call just because it came over a non-emergency line, but they MAY not answer it as quickly if they are already busy with an emergency call. That's why it is the "non-emergency line".
I'm sure the local emergency services have a contingency plan for then PSAP goes down.
This wasn't a case of the PSAP going down, it was a failure in a switch used by a few cellular carriers. The plan I am familiar with for the local PSAP includes routing incoming calls to neighboring PSAPs. How do you route calls that aren't going anywhere to a neighboring PSAP?
...as well as implicitly refers to Tesla in that the bill is tailored such that it will only ever apply to Tesla.
This is called a "bill of attainder" and is explicitly prohibited by the US Constitution. (A bill of attainder is defined as a law that makes someone a criminal without due process in a court of law, but by allowing only X number of dealerships they have, defacto, criminalized the act of having X+1 for this one specifically named "defendant".)
Reporting the issue immediately would have given the affected emergency services a chance to get the message out via television, radio, Facebook/Twitter/etc. and use the opportunity to remind the public of the non-emergency numbers.
The problems started just before midnight Pacific Time on April 9...
The number of people listening to the radio or watching news programs at that time of night is very low.
Reading a list of communities and the appropriate local non-emergency numbers would take a long time in some places. And confuse a lot of people, especially sleepy ones.
How many people follow their local cops on Twitter or Facebook? How many of them follow the PSAP, if the PSAP even has a Twitter or Facebook presence?
And, in the long run, the people who need to call 911 probably aren't going to remember any news flashes telling them not to call 911, and a large number of them are going to call because they think there's something important that they missed.
We've had the latter happen twice. The wonderful "call everyone in the city" notification system has been tested twice. Both times people got home from work, saw they got a call from the cops, either didn't listen to the message saying "this is a test" or didn't have voicemail, and they called back to see what was going on. Instant, ongoing PSAP overload.
Or worse, you'll get people who think ahead and program the non-emergency number into their phones. Then they have an emergency and they remember that 911 might not work so they call the non-emergency number. Guess which lines get low priority when there is a crush of calls?
Do people call the non-emergency numbers when they have an emergency? Certainly. Our local law enforcement has a stock outgoing message for all non-emergency lines: "So and so isn't available right now. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911." Yes, you have to tell people in an emergency that not only do they need to dial 911, but that they must first HANG UP from their call to the non-emergency numbers.
Not a lot of work to save a few million and possibly save some lives.
How does telling the PSAP (public safety answering point) that cellular 911 service is out save lives? How does the PSAP tell people who can't call in that they can't call in?
By the time it got to the newspapers, or the radio, it would be over.
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Are you unhappy that the microsoft.com website doesn't sell RedHat subscriptions? Then why should you care that Google websites promote Google stuff?
That Google is able to employ such tactics with the implicit understanding that its customers will not abandon it for a competitor argues that it has coercive monopoly power.
Google customers will not abandon Google because Google is doing exactly what Google customers want: promoting Google things and things the customers have paid them to promote.
The USERS may or may not change search engines, but if they are like me they will base their decision on which search engine to use on how good the results are. As it stands, Google is still better for some things, others for other. Google has no way to coerce me into using it for any search, and proof of that is how easy it is to change search engines.
Oh, you thought YOU were the customer when you did a search? When you send a check to Google for their data you can be a customer. Until then, you are a product. Your click-throughs are what the customers pay for.
The easiest time source nowadays is the almost ubiquitous cell phone system. You don't even need a paid data service to get the time from the local cellsite.
So, we're going back to coding in assembly and calculating the execution time of opcodes, right?
No, we're admitting that non-realtime OSs cannot guarantee when a program will be executed or that it won't be interrupted in the middle for some other task. It is a Bad Thing if the program that is in charge of determining whether your autonomous vehicle is about to hit a small person or a wind-blown plastic bag is currently swapped out because the mp3 player is processing your touch-screen input, or even if it is waiting for disk I/O to complete.
Coding in assembly will not solve that problem.
I would also not be surprised to find that the "bag/child" program was not running at the moment because the car's computer had just downloaded a critical update from Microsoft and was rebooting to install it.
Really? You know damn well advertisers want to know where you have been, what you were doing there, how long you stayed, what you bought, who you met with ...
I was at the airport, going through customs, about twenty minutes, didn't buy anything because they had nothing for sale but did dump a half-eaten apple into the bio-hazard agri-trash, and I met two uniformed customs agent and one dog. That's what my fingerprint on a scanner at customs will tell the advertiser.
As for a picture: the one time I went through one of those the sun was behind me and the picture of me was completely black. I don't recall any special processing that took place as a result, it seemed like the agents didn't worry too much about it.
If instead there was a website where you could put in issues you find important (checkboxes) and get a record of voting on these issues by people in office, you could see if your incumbent did what you find important.
It would tell you nothing about any opponents. It is typically a bad idea to vote based on "anyone but ..." considerations. You may find that the person you elected is even worse than the one you had, and all you'll have to evaluate him on is the sound bytes he's uttered in those scripted ads.
It is a major downside to the political process that people are quick to "vote against" instead of "vote for". It drives negative campaigning, since the entire purpose of negative campaigns is to get people to vote against the target. I would be perfectly happy with an amendment to the existing political speech laws that make it illegal for politicians to talk about anyone but themselves in their ads. Never again should we have to experience the kind of thing like the Wyden "Smith killed a kid" ads.
It'd require some hard workers to simplify complex obfuscated legislation into an easy to understand format,
And it would be rife with the same kind of biased evaluations that are rampant on the web already. Every issue-oriented site figures out ways to score down those politicians they don't like and score up those they do. One trivial way to do that is to rate a politician as "voting against issue X", when the vote was actually on an omnibus bill that contained something about "issue X" but also had a lot of other stuff that was the actual reason he voted against it. You've never heard of the problem of the party in control attaching riders about "kissing babies and feeding the homeless" to a bill authorizing something they know the opponents will not vote for, and then announcing that their opponents oppose kissing babies and feeding the homeless?
Except that it only works because where you have no compulsory voting they have no reason to record "who voted"
What? Of course they record who voted, every time. It doesn't take a mandatory voting law to force that, it only takes a reasonable law that removes people who haven't voted for a set amount of time from the voter registration lists. They are supposed to do this on a regular basis to weed out people who move or die.
Now, in most places it is not perfect (where I am from we don't even have to give id of any kind just your name) and so the attempt at a fraudulent vote will almost certainly get past an initial hurdle of getting the ballot paper into the box.
And since there is no hurdle following that, you've just admitted that simple vote fraud by using someone else's name "will almost certainly" work. That the ballot in the box has had all identifying information removed so it can no longer be tracked by name. All the checks for voters have to take place before that happens.
In those places where provisional voting takes place, contested ballots are not put in the box until their authenticity is checked. They aren't put in the main ballot box because removing them when the provisional voter is shown to be bogus cannot happen if they are.
Such as, total number of ballots cannot be greater than the number of registered voters,
Given the normal low turnout for elections, this is hardly a danger in all but the most flagrant fraud. Even if it does happen, whose ballots do you throw out to get the number down below the "correct" value?
Hi, I'm an electoral roll. Polling station staff check names off of me when people turn up to cast an anonymous vote. In this way, it quickly becomes apparent if a person claiming a particular name has voted multiple times, at multiple polling stations.
And nobody would be smart enough to think that maybe they should use the name of a dead person, or some name other than their own, when they cast their second, third, etc ballot?
Yes, you will catch people who are honest enough to use their own name every time they try to vote, but then, they aren't the ones that need to be caught.
It turns out the rate of this happening is so low as to be nearly non-existent.
Well, yes, I can believe that your strawman is truly a strawman. But how many times do people using multiple names vote? You're not looking for that, and you aren't stopping that.
I know it's hard to grasp, but other people have different experiences than you . In Florida and Ohio, the lines to vote can be up to 7 hours long.
So we solve a local technical issue by a national mandatory paid holiday? Yes, having sufficient equipment and supplies to run a polling place is a technical issue with technical solutions.
A national solution to such a problem is ridiculously wasteful and just patently absurd. Mandating a paid holiday for people in Oregon, for example, means that employers get no productive work for a full day's pay for every employee, who get basically a vacation day with nothing special to do. It means every employee in the service industries get an unpaid day off, or at best they get the minimum wage they would have gotten but none of the tips they rely on. And anyone who works more than 8 hours a day normally loses money because they will only get the 8 hours for holiday time.
No, mandatory holidays for voting is not a reasonable solution. It's certainly not a good solution to a problem that has already been solved. If you can't vote on election day, there are other options.
Another paid holiday, at 8 hours, costing someone who is so poor they have to work 12 hour days four hours of wages, and if they are working that many hours it may be 6 hours -- at time and a half.
You can't just create a mandatory paid holiday without costing a lot of people a lot of money, and stretching the edges of the federal span of control even more. That makes it rather hard to do, and to justify.
Why not just vote absentee if you can't make it to the polls on voting day? It means you have to plan ahead, that's all. You really want to cost everyone who doesn't get holiday pay the wages they lose by not working, just so the few who can't figure out how to pull an hour out of their really busy schedule can vote?
Is a Christmas holiday unconstitutional as well?
When did the US Congress pass a law forcing businesses to shut their doors on Christmas? Were there one, yes, it would be unconstitutional.
because for them taking half a day off work to go vote
They don't have to take a half day off work to vote.
And those people you are trying to help -- the ones who work a twelve hour day on Tuesday? Losing that twelve hours may cut them back to being straight time for the other days they work, costing them a bundle of money. Even if it doesn't cost them overtime altogether, those four hours they lose (by being on a paid holiday of 8 hours instead of a workday of 12) may be a lot of money, all at time and a half.
Exactly how much should it cost someone to be able to vote? Four hours of wages? And all the money other people lose by being idle for a day? And this is a good thing? Does your largesse extend to paying them all back for lost time?
And that doesn't even begin to cover the hit to the economy and incomes in states where a national holiday isn't necessary because they vote by mail. I'd just love to be told that I have to take a day off on election day because my company has to shut down, just so someone in New Jersey doesn't have to vote absentee. I get to sit around all day doing nothing -- can't go to the store, movies, or anyplace that is a for-profit business -- for nothing.
It is not an "honor" system.
Registering to vote is not an honor system, but actually voting, in many places, is. I never had to show any ID when I went to a polling place, all I did was say my name and address, and then I'd point to my name on the list. Good enough. If I had wanted to I could go to another polling place, say someone elses name and address, point to their name on the list, and I could vote again.
It isn't rocket science to understand how to vote more than once. To deny that it is happening despite how easy it is is just ridiculous.
US citizens need to register to vote. It is not an "honor" system.
Yep. And it would be impossible for anyone to pretend to be one of those registered voters, yes sirree! Only those people who actually registered to vote would ever show up at a polling place to try to vote, no sirree Bob! And every registered citizen does his civic duty by notifying the election board to remove his registration when he dies, absolutely.
There is no reason why these "honor system" citizens should not be required to provide ID when they vote. The only reason not to require ID is so that non-honorable people can slip in.
State-issued ID cards are a thinly-veiled partisan attempt to disenfranchise certain voter-groups by placing additional obstacles in their way.
Right on, Man! And requiring people to actually REGISTER to vote is a thinly-veiled partisan attempt to disenfranchise certain voter-groups by placing an obstacle in their way!
I don't know, how about this? When you REGISTER to vote you get an ID to prove it and you show that ID when you go vote? No, that's too hard I guess. Even when it's a motor-voter state and you're already getting a driver's license with your photo on it...
That's election fraud. Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times or tries to vote as someone they are not.
Voter fraud is many times how they pull off election fraud. Busing people around to various polls so they can vote multiple times is the standard operating practice in some areas, like Chicago. The old saying was that the cemeteries are empty in Chicago neighborhoods on election day. So many dead people are voting ...
So no, it's not a lie, voter fraud is incredibly ineffective as a means of influencing an election because it has to be done more publicly and more frequently
But it is harder to detect than a missing ballot box. To rig a precinct election all you need is to bus a lot of people in; to lose ballot boxes you have to buy off ALL the election workers involved -- even the ones from the opposing party.
To claim that either one doesn't happen is a lie.
Having elections on a regular work day is a huge disincentive for hourly workers to vote. It literally costs them money,
If you're working a twelve hour day, you're pretty lucky. Otherwise, go to the polls during one of the hours you're normally not working. The relatively few people it is an issue for can work around it by voting absentee.
Forcing businesses to close when THEY could be making money and paying their employees is ludicrous. It would be a vast overstepping of the federal powers. What do people in the service industries (waitresses, etc) do when they cannot work a day and thus wind up losing an entire day's wages (and tips) just so a few people who can't manage to take an hour out of their busy day can vote?
To balance out the work calender, they can get rid of MLK day.
Exactly which businesses are forced to close by the federal government on MLK Day? How does "allowing" them to stay open on a day they can already stay open balance a forced closure?
There are, however, plenty of voters who are informed but find voting to be so difficult -
s/are informed/care enough to do it/i;
It should take both a level of informed decision making and concern about the output. Lacking either one is a good reason not to vote. Changing the system so more people who are uninformed/don't care can vote is a bad thing.
If your local municipality has issues with providing sufficient facilities so that those who are informed and care can vote, fix that problem. Trying to solve a local problem at the national level is wrong.
One thing that should be seriously considered is making election day a national holiday to guarantee that everyone has time to vote.
"Oh, goody, it's National Voting Day again. I can sleep late, and then we can go to the lake and drink a few brewskies..." Good for the brewers, but not so good for the rest of the economy.
however it does do a very good job of capturing what the whole country thinks on election day.
Unless there's an option on the ballot for "leave me the hell alone, I don't care, I just want another beer", I don't think you're accurately capturing the feelings of the voters.
Also why does the US insist on having an election on a Tuesday when everyone is at work, that's just fucking bizarre,
So you vote on Monday or whenever your absentee ballot shows up. Very difficult, not.
it's like you don't want societies grunts to turn up.
"Societies grunts" don't have jobs so they have no excuse for not voting. It's more like a useful way of weeding out the people who don't really care enough about voting to spend half an hour doing it. For the ones who truly care and cannot make it on Tuesday there are ways around that.
I live in a place where we have mail-in ballots, and I can't say that our decision making based on that is any different or better than it was when we had polling places. We do get a lot more political ads than we used to, though. Three weeks solid.
Right now, we have 37% turnout. Of those, less than half are probably well informed voters, the rest are voting because of, well, any number of reasons. First black President, first woman, not a Mormon, etc. Let's use 15% as a round number for the interested, informed group. That leaves 22%.
Now imagine that mandatory voting is implemented. You get 95% turnout. Where do the extra voters come from? From the one who aren't interested, of course. If they were interested, they'd have voted without it being mandatory. So you now have 15% of the turnout as informed voters, and 80% are now emotion-based or simply uninterested.
If an advertiser of a commercial product went from an audience of 22% to 80%, they'd be orgasmic. Imagine political advertisers all trying to reach that new 58% of the voters who aren't already committed to any candidate but want a way to make a decision. The $1 that could sway only 22% of the population yesterday now blossoms into $100 to try to reach all 80% of the targets.
Claiming that mandatory voting will get money out of politics is one of the stupidest things anyone has said. Since we know that Mr. Obama isn't that stupid, he must have another reason to suggest it. If the reason can't be openly stated, then there must be a problem with it.
In any case, mandatory voting is a bad idea no matter how many other countries do it. It is someone's right not to vote just as much as it is to vote, and encouraging people who otherwise have no interest in the process to vote is a mistake. Voting for voting's sake is a travesty of the process.
Ultimately I think one solution would be to require the manufacturer to take back and arrange for recycling or proper disposal. That would add to the upfront cost but eliminate a lot of back end problems. Of course, manufacturers will whine about the cost but I think bottle deposit laws are a good example of what may happen.
Yep. Bottled drinks cost a nickel more each, and the effort to return them is hardly offset by the cost, so I wind up throwing them away in the trash. A good solution to a recycling problem, I think.
It tells the local police to send out more officers on patrol,
They already have all the available officers doing what they are supposed to be doing. It takes time to call out more. And calling out more officers does NOTHING to help people who need to call 911 know they need to call the non-emergency number.
patrolling officers can be instructed to keep an eye out.
Patrolling officers are already supposed to "keep an eye out". Would you suggest that they increase their "keep an eye out" by peering in citizen's windows just in case someone is having a heart attack and can't call 911 on their cell phone?
Calls direct to the station will be taken more seriously.
If calls "direct to the station" aren't taken seriously, the problem is not with Verizon, it is with the people who answer the non-emergency numbers. I don't know any of them who would dismiss such a call just because it came over a non-emergency line, but they MAY not answer it as quickly if they are already busy with an emergency call. That's why it is the "non-emergency line".
I'm sure the local emergency services have a contingency plan for then PSAP goes down.
This wasn't a case of the PSAP going down, it was a failure in a switch used by a few cellular carriers. The plan I am familiar with for the local PSAP includes routing incoming calls to neighboring PSAPs. How do you route calls that aren't going anywhere to a neighboring PSAP?
...as well as implicitly refers to Tesla in that the bill is tailored such that it will only ever apply to Tesla.
This is called a "bill of attainder" and is explicitly prohibited by the US Constitution. (A bill of attainder is defined as a law that makes someone a criminal without due process in a court of law, but by allowing only X number of dealerships they have, defacto, criminalized the act of having X+1 for this one specifically named "defendant".)
Reporting the issue immediately would have given the affected emergency services a chance to get the message out via television, radio, Facebook/Twitter/etc. and use the opportunity to remind the public of the non-emergency numbers.
The number of people listening to the radio or watching news programs at that time of night is very low.
Reading a list of communities and the appropriate local non-emergency numbers would take a long time in some places. And confuse a lot of people, especially sleepy ones.
How many people follow their local cops on Twitter or Facebook? How many of them follow the PSAP, if the PSAP even has a Twitter or Facebook presence?
And, in the long run, the people who need to call 911 probably aren't going to remember any news flashes telling them not to call 911, and a large number of them are going to call because they think there's something important that they missed. We've had the latter happen twice. The wonderful "call everyone in the city" notification system has been tested twice. Both times people got home from work, saw they got a call from the cops, either didn't listen to the message saying "this is a test" or didn't have voicemail, and they called back to see what was going on. Instant, ongoing PSAP overload.
Or worse, you'll get people who think ahead and program the non-emergency number into their phones. Then they have an emergency and they remember that 911 might not work so they call the non-emergency number. Guess which lines get low priority when there is a crush of calls?
Do people call the non-emergency numbers when they have an emergency? Certainly. Our local law enforcement has a stock outgoing message for all non-emergency lines: "So and so isn't available right now. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911." Yes, you have to tell people in an emergency that not only do they need to dial 911, but that they must first HANG UP from their call to the non-emergency numbers.
Not a lot of work to save a few million and possibly save some lives.
How does telling the PSAP (public safety answering point) that cellular 911 service is out save lives? How does the PSAP tell people who can't call in that they can't call in?
By the time it got to the newspapers, or the radio, it would be over.