You can have central storage with boxes labeled by the precinct they came from. Since they've been pre-counted by machine, any serious attempt to change the vote later will raise suspicion.
This doesn't necessarily apply to really close elections, like Franken-Coleman in Minnesota 2008, but if the vote's that close it doesn't really matter for fairness which candidate is eventually selected.
You don't need incorruptible neutral parties. You need people who are willing to do the job while being watched by observers from the parties. If a counter tries to cheat in favor of the Democrats, the Republican observer shuts it down, and vice versa.
Boxes are labeled with the precinct identifier in my state. A box of ballots would either have no precinct on it, which means it's phony, or a duplicate precinct on it, which means something bad's going wrong.
The neat thing about manual vote-counting is that people know what it is and trust it. If we have human counters supervised by representatives from all concerned parties, we have guaranteed reliability. We don't have that while running paper ballots through a machine.
Usually it's enough to spot-check the machines, selecting maybe 1% or 0.1% of precincts randomly after the election and comparing the manual count to the machine count.
Sure. However, the big, big problem with solar and wind is that they're not all that reliable. Once we have the big battery packs in place, reliability of power doesn't matter, only whether we overall make enough of it. That means we can use solar and wind, and they're cheaper than nuclear.
There are people who are convinced, for one reason or another, that anthropogenic global warming is not happening, and are willing to believe anything else rather than admit that it might be. We call those "deniers". There are skeptics who haven't seriously looked at the evidence. Typically, when a skeptic does get around to looking at the evidence, they conclude that AGW is real and serious.
Since climate science is showing us that AGW is happening, deniers have to malign an entire field of science. One technique is to pretend there's a large political conspiracy among scientists to impose some sort of government control over people. The conspiracy is typically US-centric, despite the fact that AGW is studied all over the world with pretty much the same results.
This leads to libel, in which a denier will accuse scientists of being dishonest and corrupt, when the only evidence is that the scientists came to a conclusion the denier found utterly unacceptable. Deniers nitpick things, apparently in the belief that finding a tiny flaw in a large body of evidence invalidates all the evidence. They often lie, for example claiming that it's legally dangerous to not believe in AGW, citing lawsuits that claimed that companies were perfectly aware of AGW and planned around it while denying it for commercial gain, a process normally termed "fraud".
However, civilization has developed over a few thousand years of reasonably stable climate. We have no experience with what's happening now.
Global warming won't destroy the planet, and it won't wipe humanity out. That doesn't mean it can't be really, really disruptive and expensive to deal with, or that spending money on mitigation doesn't help.
The market optimizes for direct costs that a vendor incurs. It doesn't optimize for what's good for people. The basic concept is "externality", a cost not borne by the person making the decision to impose the cost.
The market will push energy producers to the ways to produce energy that are cheapest for them, regardless of what they do to anybody else. If nobody pays extra for producing carbon dioxide, then the power companies will not care how much carbon dioxide they emit (except as a PR measure).
We've seen the results of what happens when industries are allowed to pollute as they please. It's not at all pretty. Government regulation is necessary in cases like these.
The market doesn't always do what the band wants, though. They want lots of their fans there, people who really want to be there. The market sucks at allotting stuff to the people who want it most, because people don't all have the same disposable income. I could casually spend a sum that would strain the budgets of lots of teenagers, for example.
So you like your phone. Great. I like mine. So far, so good.
There are reasons why iPhones have batteries that are difficult to replace. An easily replaceable battery takes up more volume for the battery than a glued-in battery that can easily conform to available space. Assuming the battery doesn't need to be changed often, the extra battery capacity is better for many people than being able to change it easily. It can be a design feature you don't like, and it may make tradeoffs you don't want, but it isn't necessarily boneheaded.
You';re mixing fixed and variable costs together. There's no point, for example, in including R&D costs, since they are amortized over however many phones are sold. Except in retrospect, they're an unknown part of each phone. Judging markup by cost minus the cost to make each phone is reasonably objective and informative.
I'm not putting something forth, I'm disagreeing with your argument. A lack of a defining border is irrelevant. It's possible to classify things as "large enough", "small enough", and "somewhere in the middle", bearing in mind that those borders are fuzzy. You were using a slippery slope argument.
"Gender" is a social construct. "Sex" is biological. There's sometimes a disconnect here. The people who I've seen most strongly defending the idea that women are inherently different tend to be right-wing. If men's brains and women's brains are different, what's to stop rare occasions where a man's brain is in a woman's body or vice versa?
On the left, we tend to just accept people. It's the right that generally worries about whether someone had a penis or vagina at birth (and doesn't seem to worry that it isn't always that clear-cut). A leftist sees a woman going into the ladies' room. It's only right-wingers who want to know what she's got in her underwear.
There are indeed biological differences between races. One medical test I have gotten has different normal parameters for blacks and non-blacks. That doesn't explain the social behavior differences between how people are treated. The most significant part of race, by far, is the social ramifications, and those are based on relatively superficial characteristics that aren't always biologically significant.
I didn't mention gender, and I'm being premodern if anything. If you look for "racial characteristics" in stuff written before, say 1950, you'll find a lot of writing on the characteristics of the French race and the German race and the Italian race and so on. The idea of black, white, and yellow being the races (Negroid, Caucasian, and Mongoloid) is relatively new as a general agreement, and "Japanese" works as a racial designation as well as cultural and language.
And weak men who are threatened by strong women make crap up (including pseudo-science) to justify their anger. Feminism is the idea that women are actually human, just as men are.
So you think your idea of who is what gender overrides everybody else's. Figures.
The original accusation is that the left considers you subhuman if your genitals are intact. That's incredibly obtuse. Gender reassignment surgery is for transsexuals, nobody else. Leftists will normally welcome people regardless of what's in their pants, while right-wingers insist on knowing whether what's in the pants matches what was in the diaper.
Because you let your employer do this to you. Either stand up for yourself or move to a country with decent labor laws. Alternately, unionize and/or work for better labor protection laws.
If you're willing to take whatever crap somebody is willing to give you, don't complain that somebody else gets less crap.
I would not consider not being alive as a loophole, but rather as a valid distinction. There are plenty of experiments involving human tissue. Do you object to all of them, or just some of them?
Surely, you must see that there is not a defining border or limit to it.
So? There's not a defining border or limit to lots of things. What's a big pile of sand? How many sand grains or kilograms or whatever do you want for a lower limit? Now, I put one sand grain onto three others: is that a big pile of sand? Are you willing to say it's not, even without a clear defining border?
Borders tend to be stretchy and vague, but in many cases there's cases that are clearly on one side or another.
You can't be a pragmatist without some sort of ideology.
Being pragmatic means that you favor measures that work well towards a goal without too may ill effects. However, you have to have some idea what the goal is and what effects are ill. If you have no idea of what you want to have happen, you can't be pragmatic about it.
If you criticize a policy for not being effective at reducing the crime rate, you're saying that reducing the crime rate is important to you. If you further criticize it for imprisoning people who aren't really harming society, you're saying that such people shouldn't be seriously punished for, say, smoking a joint.
I suppose you could imagine an axis with "means" on on end and "ends" on the other. The "means" people are what you'd think of as ideological, who think that right conduct must bring good ends. The "ends" people would be more like you or me, being very willing to try new means, and considering that right conduct is that which brings good ends.
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You can have central storage with boxes labeled by the precinct they came from. Since they've been pre-counted by machine, any serious attempt to change the vote later will raise suspicion.
This doesn't necessarily apply to really close elections, like Franken-Coleman in Minnesota 2008, but if the vote's that close it doesn't really matter for fairness which candidate is eventually selected.
You don't need incorruptible neutral parties. You need people who are willing to do the job while being watched by observers from the parties. If a counter tries to cheat in favor of the Democrats, the Republican observer shuts it down, and vice versa.
In which case we don't have fair elections no matter what we do. If there's nobody willing and able to act on complaints of dishonesty, anything goes.
Boxes are labeled with the precinct identifier in my state. A box of ballots would either have no precinct on it, which means it's phony, or a duplicate precinct on it, which means something bad's going wrong.
The neat thing about manual vote-counting is that people know what it is and trust it. If we have human counters supervised by representatives from all concerned parties, we have guaranteed reliability. We don't have that while running paper ballots through a machine.
Usually it's enough to spot-check the machines, selecting maybe 1% or 0.1% of precincts randomly after the election and comparing the manual count to the machine count.
Sure. However, the big, big problem with solar and wind is that they're not all that reliable. Once we have the big battery packs in place, reliability of power doesn't matter, only whether we overall make enough of it. That means we can use solar and wind, and they're cheaper than nuclear.
There are people who are convinced, for one reason or another, that anthropogenic global warming is not happening, and are willing to believe anything else rather than admit that it might be. We call those "deniers". There are skeptics who haven't seriously looked at the evidence. Typically, when a skeptic does get around to looking at the evidence, they conclude that AGW is real and serious.
Since climate science is showing us that AGW is happening, deniers have to malign an entire field of science. One technique is to pretend there's a large political conspiracy among scientists to impose some sort of government control over people. The conspiracy is typically US-centric, despite the fact that AGW is studied all over the world with pretty much the same results.
This leads to libel, in which a denier will accuse scientists of being dishonest and corrupt, when the only evidence is that the scientists came to a conclusion the denier found utterly unacceptable. Deniers nitpick things, apparently in the belief that finding a tiny flaw in a large body of evidence invalidates all the evidence. They often lie, for example claiming that it's legally dangerous to not believe in AGW, citing lawsuits that claimed that companies were perfectly aware of AGW and planned around it while denying it for commercial gain, a process normally termed "fraud".
However, civilization has developed over a few thousand years of reasonably stable climate. We have no experience with what's happening now.
Global warming won't destroy the planet, and it won't wipe humanity out. That doesn't mean it can't be really, really disruptive and expensive to deal with, or that spending money on mitigation doesn't help.
It's been a LONG time since we had a complete extinction event on Earth. Another one is extremely unlikely to occur in the next few centuries.
The market optimizes for direct costs that a vendor incurs. It doesn't optimize for what's good for people. The basic concept is "externality", a cost not borne by the person making the decision to impose the cost.
The market will push energy producers to the ways to produce energy that are cheapest for them, regardless of what they do to anybody else. If nobody pays extra for producing carbon dioxide, then the power companies will not care how much carbon dioxide they emit (except as a PR measure).
We've seen the results of what happens when industries are allowed to pollute as they please. It's not at all pretty. Government regulation is necessary in cases like these.
The market doesn't always do what the band wants, though. They want lots of their fans there, people who really want to be there. The market sucks at allotting stuff to the people who want it most, because people don't all have the same disposable income. I could casually spend a sum that would strain the budgets of lots of teenagers, for example.
So you like your phone. Great. I like mine. So far, so good.
There are reasons why iPhones have batteries that are difficult to replace. An easily replaceable battery takes up more volume for the battery than a glued-in battery that can easily conform to available space. Assuming the battery doesn't need to be changed often, the extra battery capacity is better for many people than being able to change it easily. It can be a design feature you don't like, and it may make tradeoffs you don't want, but it isn't necessarily boneheaded.
You';re mixing fixed and variable costs together. There's no point, for example, in including R&D costs, since they are amortized over however many phones are sold. Except in retrospect, they're an unknown part of each phone. Judging markup by cost minus the cost to make each phone is reasonably objective and informative.
I'm not putting something forth, I'm disagreeing with your argument. A lack of a defining border is irrelevant. It's possible to classify things as "large enough", "small enough", and "somewhere in the middle", bearing in mind that those borders are fuzzy. You were using a slippery slope argument.
"Gender" is a social construct. "Sex" is biological. There's sometimes a disconnect here. The people who I've seen most strongly defending the idea that women are inherently different tend to be right-wing. If men's brains and women's brains are different, what's to stop rare occasions where a man's brain is in a woman's body or vice versa?
On the left, we tend to just accept people. It's the right that generally worries about whether someone had a penis or vagina at birth (and doesn't seem to worry that it isn't always that clear-cut). A leftist sees a woman going into the ladies' room. It's only right-wingers who want to know what she's got in her underwear.
There are indeed biological differences between races. One medical test I have gotten has different normal parameters for blacks and non-blacks. That doesn't explain the social behavior differences between how people are treated. The most significant part of race, by far, is the social ramifications, and those are based on relatively superficial characteristics that aren't always biologically significant.
I didn't mention gender, and I'm being premodern if anything. If you look for "racial characteristics" in stuff written before, say 1950, you'll find a lot of writing on the characteristics of the French race and the German race and the Italian race and so on. The idea of black, white, and yellow being the races (Negroid, Caucasian, and Mongoloid) is relatively new as a general agreement, and "Japanese" works as a racial designation as well as cultural and language.
And weak men who are threatened by strong women make crap up (including pseudo-science) to justify their anger. Feminism is the idea that women are actually human, just as men are.
Race is a social construct, not biological, so a race is whatever enough people define it to be, idiot.
So you think your idea of who is what gender overrides everybody else's. Figures.
The original accusation is that the left considers you subhuman if your genitals are intact. That's incredibly obtuse. Gender reassignment surgery is for transsexuals, nobody else. Leftists will normally welcome people regardless of what's in their pants, while right-wingers insist on knowing whether what's in the pants matches what was in the diaper.
Because you let your employer do this to you. Either stand up for yourself or move to a country with decent labor laws. Alternately, unionize and/or work for better labor protection laws.
If you're willing to take whatever crap somebody is willing to give you, don't complain that somebody else gets less crap.
Of course. And that's why the drivers are legally employed by Uber rather than being independent contractors.
I think so,Brain, but how do we get the Attorney General into the wetsuit?
I would not consider not being alive as a loophole, but rather as a valid distinction. There are plenty of experiments involving human tissue. Do you object to all of them, or just some of them?
So? There's not a defining border or limit to lots of things. What's a big pile of sand? How many sand grains or kilograms or whatever do you want for a lower limit? Now, I put one sand grain onto three others: is that a big pile of sand? Are you willing to say it's not, even without a clear defining border?
Borders tend to be stretchy and vague, but in many cases there's cases that are clearly on one side or another.
You can't be a pragmatist without some sort of ideology.
Being pragmatic means that you favor measures that work well towards a goal without too may ill effects. However, you have to have some idea what the goal is and what effects are ill. If you have no idea of what you want to have happen, you can't be pragmatic about it.
If you criticize a policy for not being effective at reducing the crime rate, you're saying that reducing the crime rate is important to you. If you further criticize it for imprisoning people who aren't really harming society, you're saying that such people shouldn't be seriously punished for, say, smoking a joint.
I suppose you could imagine an axis with "means" on on end and "ends" on the other. The "means" people are what you'd think of as ideological, who think that right conduct must bring good ends. The "ends" people would be more like you or me, being very willing to try new means, and considering that right conduct is that which brings good ends.