And that is far inferior to that person being able to fill out their own ballot.
It is far superior to not being able to vote at all, and it is by far not the only thing that a blind person needs assistance with. It is a minor event in the life of a blind person and there aren't enough blind people (and not concentrated enough in one place) to swing an election.
Omg, that's so right. You would think that someone thought of that problem and solved it. Oh wait... they did and they have.
Depending on your disability, you have wheelchair accessible voting places, you can vote by letter (e.g. you can't leave your home) or with a disability you have an exception and can bring someone with you into the booth to help you make your cross.
This. There is just everything wrong with the entire idea of digital voting. It's a bad idea and no amount of technology or cryptography will ever save it.
The real issue with electronic voting isn't even the hackability of the system. Or the fact that an exploit scales to an entire country. The real problem is that there's no assurance anymore. A very simple process turns into something opaque.
For you americans who don't understand how voting is done properly in the rest of the world, it goes like this:
You put an X in the circle or box of your choice (sometimes several X in several boxes, but nothing too complicated). Then you seal that paper in an envelope or you simply fold it. Then you drop it into a box. That box is watched over by volunteers from all the major parties and basically everyone who cares to spend his time checking that the election is done properly. These same people at the end of the day open the box and count the votes.
At no point is anything not accounted for. At no point is there an attack vector. The whole thing is so simple that an idiot can understand it and that's the point - because it means that every idiot or non-idiot can check it and verify that all is well. Think the box has been tampered with? Go and check the box. Think the paper is special? Go and check the paper. Think some votes were thrown into the box at the beginning of the session? Check the box at the beginning, then seal it, and at the end count the number of paper slips against your very simple tally sheet of people who voted.
There are ways to fuck with the system, of course, there always are. But the low-tech approach also means they are low-tech and can be spotted. Tell me how you'll find the kernel-level backdoor in the voting system that knows which bits to flip in-memory without leaving any traces on the disk. And the number of people capable of validating a system at such a level are low enough to be pressured or bribed.
A highly distributed low-tech system is exactly what we want for something like elections.
Yes, it does. It integrates well with all operating systems I'm running plus has a web interface. It doesn't try to be more than a cloud file storage, and that's wonderful. It does its job and does it well, but I guess we are again regressing backwards in development and the Unix philosophy of actually doing your fucking job instead of trying to be a kitchen sink isn't trendy anymore.
I'll be setting up my own cloud service now, because using Dropbox was just the most convenient way, but damn it was convenient.
The end of cash has been announced for decades, basically every time some cashless payment system becomes popular. Credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, you name it.
Won't happen. Cash is still the easiest, most convenient payment for both small everyday transactions and private-to-private exchanges. It already has disappeared from most large purchases - people buying a house or a car on cash have become so rare that they're newsworthy. But in all other areas, change is much more slow than all the news articles claim.
Change will continue to happen, but cash won't disappear anytime soon.
so much of the info about Fukushima is clearly tainted by the preferences of those writing.
I've now read, within 2 days, articles about the current cleanup efforts that
a) claim they mostly don't work, the area is still dangerous and it will take decades to complete everything. b) claim they are a demonstration of 1st world technology keeping things under control, people returning to the area, much of the radiation being cleaned up and the Japanese making impressive progress with robots in the reactor cores as well as completing a total overhaul of all their nuclear reactors to incorporate the lessons learnt from Fukushima.
So what is true? Probably some of both. But which?
I've worked closely with legal and HR for years and call center topics appeared regularily.
The real reason has nothing to do with the customers. Those 1st line call center agents are the lowest rank of the corporate ladder, many of them are temp workers, lots of them are badly educated and need absolutely everything spelled out for them. No surprises there, it's not exactly the kind of job someone eager for a career and personal development would choose.
From the company perspective, they simply don't want to give these people who barely care which company they work for too many options to hand out freebies. Many of these people just want to get the call over with, because they are rated by number of calls handled and such KPIs. So if you give them a shortcut such as giving a customer a refund and be done with it, they will routinely take it, even when they shouldn't. That's why they have low limits of what they can hand out, and the more pricey decisions go to a 2nd level where you have more qualified, better trained and more interested about the company (e.g. not temp workers) people.
He's right, except for a small detail: That's not how the world works.
In the same sense that it would be great if we could resurrect murder victims, or question them about who killed them. True, it would really be good. It's just not how the world works.
Encryption either is strong, or it is useless. There's no middle ground. If law enforcement has a way in, so has everyone else. It's in the nature of the thing.
That was true 20 years ago. Then suddenly everyone had a home office and they added so many rules and restrictions about it that nowadays it is really difficult to get it approved even if you genuinely do have a home office.
I can't deduct my rent. Maybe in your country you can. Over here, deductions are only possible for things directly related to your job, and a very small number of extras.
Can't speak about your country, but mine is very, very, very far away from allowing actual cost of living to be deductible. The deductions include those expenses made in direct relation to the job, i.e. commuting costs, application costs for a new job and a small number of additionals.
Nowhere can I deduct my mortgage payment, my electricity bill or my food.
Comparing standard deductions with the profit-margin-only taxation of corporations is not a thing here. If you can deduct your mortgage, let me know, I might want to move where you are living.
Contrary to anything else that gives them an excuse to raise prices, this price raise at least will cycle around to the society. Also, a company that decides to absorb this tax without raising the prices - for example by not paying lawyers lots of money to come up with tax evasion schemes - will have a competitive advantage.
The whole point is that this is a tax that stays within the country where the business is made. Name one other way to ensure this.
Will Government chip in to cover costs when there is a loss on the books? No? Then why does it get to claim a piece of revenue when that loss happens?
Like I said: Income tax works that way. My income is taxed based on revenue. And no, if I can't make it and end the month spending more than I made, the government doesn't chip in.
Also: Yes, the government does regularily step in to prop up companies. It saved most of the banks during the financial crisis, it hands out subsidies to industries that are critical to society but not very profitable, it has a multitude of sponsorship and financial support programs running and many more ways in which money flows to companies.
Anything in your argument I forgot to wipe the floor with?
As to Nuclear, Fucku(p)shima made the "but in the West" argument obsolete, because it does not get any more technologically advanced than Japan.
Though the argument has been made that Fukushima proves that a western-built reactor won't blow up and spray radioactive clouds over an entire continent.
Anyways, it has been a while since somebody on/. gave me a good discussion, thanks!
Same to you. It has become rare in the last few years.
Funny how taxes are always huge, massive, unbearable no matter the actual number. 3% now. The same was said when someone proposed a 0.001% tax on stock exchange trades. Yes, that's a thousandth of one percent.
If you want a country with really high taxes, look to Switzerland. Last I checked (was there in summer last year), they were doing quite well for themselves. I seems - shocking, I know - that the fate of a country doesn't depend much on how it structures it taxes, but on how well it is run in total. Taxes are a small part of the equation.
Basically, in simple words: You are complaining about the price of food, without checking how much and what quality you get for it. Sure, this restaurant is more expensive than McDonalds, but you get actual meat in a size that doesn't leave you wondering if you already ate that burger or just imagine you did.
The key word is not "3%" nor is it "Internet giants" - the key word is revenue.
This is what should've happened a decade ago. Taxing revenue instead of profits puts a clean shot right between the eyes of the majority of tax evasion schemes. It's a step long overdue.
And before the typical neo-conservative trolls shout it down: Remember that everyone BUT corporations is taxed by revenue, not profits. My income tax is based on my income, not on what's left at the end of the month. And so is yours. If we can survive that type of taxation, so can multinational corporations.
Actually, no. First, any real scientist does understand the scientific process and what it can and cannot deliver.
Absolutely. If you are a scientist or knowledgeable in the scientific process, you can easily spot obvious bad studies and judge if the approach of a study is sound even if you don't know the specific field. But you are still far from being able to decide the truth value of a hypothesis. You have to rely on the peer review process.
(on ethics)
I see that our definitions of the word differ. For me, ethics is more personal while you consider things that I would see in the field of politics or sociology into it.
I want to add one more point: Ethics often follows practicability. Slavery was abolished around the time when it simply became impractical to have slaves. Neither the ancient romans nor the authors of the bible found any moral dilemma in slavery. Our own ethics are likewise subjective and a thousand years from now people will look in horror upon things that we don't even think require a discussion.
But thanks for the book hint, that sounds very interesting and relevant for today with politics shifting right-wing again everywhere.
For your the GM foods example, it is more that the people do not trust the researchers than the research.
There certainly is a good part of that, yes. But in other fields we don't have that. Nuclear power, for example, was an area where many of the opponents to it understand the science very well, and trust the scientists. They just disagree with the final verdict and the judgement that the risk is manageable - and Tschernobyl proved them right. (and it doesn't matter that we can say "but in the west..." because if you have the tech then other countries will want it, too).
It goes beyond the distrust. The fundamental question is who gets to decide which new things to discover and which technology to use. Scientists? Ethics commissions? The people?
In theory, yes. However, even scientists are only experts in their own narrow field and have to trust the other scientists for everything else. And science and its results touch you literally everywhere. From air pollution to the food you eat to the tech you use and increasingly (sociology, psychology) the politics, society, culture and personal interactions of your life.
We already see people abusing pseudo-scientific arguments in political ways (not just in politics, also in pushing agendas outside of parties, parliaments and elections).
We also see the political abuse of properly conducted science, i.e. hand-picking the studies you like, lying about what the consensus is or postulating a consensus that isn't yet established.
I make it a point to always include ethical aspects.
Ironically, ethics is not scientific.:-)
That's not to say I don't support it. I'm a firm believer in striving to be better than those around me as a personal goal and to consider ethical factors. I think we need more of that and way stronger punishments on the unethical fucks that have come to dominate politics and economics.
But there's no scientific base for ethics. It's funny really, that this simple core value teaches us that desipite the outstanding success of science as a model to understand and control our world, the world still is larger than just science (there's also arts, of course).
If the general public can trust Science and scientists and does listen to them, then democracy can work.
There are conflicts we will have with us for a long time. GM foods are a good example. Scientists would love to do research on them and the public (at least here in Europe) largely says "nope". Same on human cloning. And while some of the reservations are simply based on not understanding the science, many of them do understand the science and still object.
The other part of the equation is scientists accepting democracy, even when it impacts their pet research project.
But I agree with you that the opposite, the fake and pseudo science and the anti-science mindset of too many is at this time the far larger problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have even one friend whom you trust enough for this, then casting your vote is the least problem in your life.
And that is far inferior to that person being able to fill out their own ballot.
It is far superior to not being able to vote at all, and it is by far not the only thing that a blind person needs assistance with. It is a minor event in the life of a blind person and there aren't enough blind people (and not concentrated enough in one place) to swing an election.
what do disabled people do?
Omg, that's so right. You would think that someone thought of that problem and solved it. Oh wait... they did and they have.
Depending on your disability, you have wheelchair accessible voting places, you can vote by letter (e.g. you can't leave your home) or with a disability you have an exception and can bring someone with you into the booth to help you make your cross.
There's no need for fancy tech stuff.
This. There is just everything wrong with the entire idea of digital voting. It's a bad idea and no amount of technology or cryptography will ever save it.
The real issue with electronic voting isn't even the hackability of the system. Or the fact that an exploit scales to an entire country. The real problem is that there's no assurance anymore. A very simple process turns into something opaque.
For you americans who don't understand how voting is done properly in the rest of the world, it goes like this:
You put an X in the circle or box of your choice (sometimes several X in several boxes, but nothing too complicated). Then you seal that paper in an envelope or you simply fold it. Then you drop it into a box. That box is watched over by volunteers from all the major parties and basically everyone who cares to spend his time checking that the election is done properly. These same people at the end of the day open the box and count the votes.
At no point is anything not accounted for. At no point is there an attack vector. The whole thing is so simple that an idiot can understand it and that's the point - because it means that every idiot or non-idiot can check it and verify that all is well. Think the box has been tampered with? Go and check the box. Think the paper is special? Go and check the paper. Think some votes were thrown into the box at the beginning of the session? Check the box at the beginning, then seal it, and at the end count the number of paper slips against your very simple tally sheet of people who voted.
There are ways to fuck with the system, of course, there always are. But the low-tech approach also means they are low-tech and can be spotted. Tell me how you'll find the kernel-level backdoor in the voting system that knows which bits to flip in-memory without leaving any traces on the disk. And the number of people capable of validating a system at such a level are low enough to be pressured or bribed.
A highly distributed low-tech system is exactly what we want for something like elections.
My first thought as well.
Then my second thought was that that's the whole point. They don't want us freebooters on their services anymore.
Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything,
Yes, it does. It integrates well with all operating systems I'm running plus has a web interface. It doesn't try to be more than a cloud file storage, and that's wonderful. It does its job and does it well, but I guess we are again regressing backwards in development and the Unix philosophy of actually doing your fucking job instead of trying to be a kitchen sink isn't trendy anymore.
I'll be setting up my own cloud service now, because using Dropbox was just the most convenient way, but damn it was convenient.
The end of cash has been announced for decades, basically every time some cashless payment system becomes popular. Credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, you name it.
Won't happen. Cash is still the easiest, most convenient payment for both small everyday transactions and private-to-private exchanges. It already has disappeared from most large purchases - people buying a house or a car on cash have become so rare that they're newsworthy. But in all other areas, change is much more slow than all the news articles claim.
Change will continue to happen, but cash won't disappear anytime soon.
so much of the info about Fukushima is clearly tainted by the preferences of those writing.
I've now read, within 2 days, articles about the current cleanup efforts that
a) claim they mostly don't work, the area is still dangerous and it will take decades to complete everything.
b) claim they are a demonstration of 1st world technology keeping things under control, people returning to the area, much of the radiation being cleaned up and the Japanese making impressive progress with robots in the reactor cores as well as completing a total overhaul of all their nuclear reactors to incorporate the lessons learnt from Fukushima.
So what is true? Probably some of both. But which?
I've worked closely with legal and HR for years and call center topics appeared regularily.
The real reason has nothing to do with the customers. Those 1st line call center agents are the lowest rank of the corporate ladder, many of them are temp workers, lots of them are badly educated and need absolutely everything spelled out for them. No surprises there, it's not exactly the kind of job someone eager for a career and personal development would choose.
From the company perspective, they simply don't want to give these people who barely care which company they work for too many options to hand out freebies. Many of these people just want to get the call over with, because they are rated by number of calls handled and such KPIs. So if you give them a shortcut such as giving a customer a refund and be done with it, they will routinely take it, even when they shouldn't. That's why they have low limits of what they can hand out, and the more pricey decisions go to a 2nd level where you have more qualified, better trained and more interested about the company (e.g. not temp workers) people.
He's right, except for a small detail: That's not how the world works.
In the same sense that it would be great if we could resurrect murder victims, or question them about who killed them. True, it would really be good. It's just not how the world works.
Encryption either is strong, or it is useless. There's no middle ground. If law enforcement has a way in, so has everyone else. It's in the nature of the thing.
...taxing profits is unfair... of course. typo.
Apple paid 0.005% of taxes in Europe, give or take a zero. If you think that is fair, we have nothing to discuss.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight, because all businesses make the same margins and thus taxing revenue is fair.
If you need proof that taxing profits is fair, you have been living under a rock the past 20 years.
There is no way those policies have unintended consequences like driving manufacturing out of France...wait...they already did that 50 years ago.
Rumours to the contrary, France still exists.
favor of businesses that employee much smaller numbers of people (higher margin businesses like marketing).
There is a proposal on the table to counter this. Very simple: Make social security payments deductable. Suddenly, employing people is a benefit.
You're a new startup, you have $250,000 in expenses, you made $200,000 in revenue, meaning a gross loss of $50,000
That is why you have a cash reserve when you start a business. Obviously you won't be profitable immediately.
So what would this change? Take non-viable companies out of the economy a little bit faster. Cry me a river.
You have deductions, don't you? If
I've answered this already. Deductions are incomparable, much more narrow and limited.
That was true 20 years ago. Then suddenly everyone had a home office and they added so many rules and restrictions about it that nowadays it is really difficult to get it approved even if you genuinely do have a home office.
I can't deduct my rent. Maybe in your country you can. Over here, deductions are only possible for things directly related to your job, and a very small number of extras.
Can't speak about your country, but mine is very, very, very far away from allowing actual cost of living to be deductible. The deductions include those expenses made in direct relation to the job, i.e. commuting costs, application costs for a new job and a small number of additionals.
Nowhere can I deduct my mortgage payment, my electricity bill or my food.
Comparing standard deductions with the profit-margin-only taxation of corporations is not a thing here. If you can deduct your mortgage, let me know, I might want to move where you are living.
Yeah, they'll raise prices 3%
Contrary to anything else that gives them an excuse to raise prices, this price raise at least will cycle around to the society. Also, a company that decides to absorb this tax without raising the prices - for example by not paying lawyers lots of money to come up with tax evasion schemes - will have a competitive advantage.
The whole point is that this is a tax that stays within the country where the business is made. Name one other way to ensure this.
It's the surest way to kill companies.
[citation required]
Will Government chip in to cover costs when there is a loss on the books? No? Then why does it get to claim a piece of revenue when that loss happens?
Like I said: Income tax works that way. My income is taxed based on revenue. And no, if I can't make it and end the month spending more than I made, the government doesn't chip in.
Also: Yes, the government does regularily step in to prop up companies. It saved most of the banks during the financial crisis, it hands out subsidies to industries that are critical to society but not very profitable, it has a multitude of sponsorship and financial support programs running and many more ways in which money flows to companies.
Anything in your argument I forgot to wipe the floor with?
I happen to live in one of those neighbouring countries. Our taxes are lower.
As to Nuclear, Fucku(p)shima made the "but in the West" argument obsolete, because it does not get any more technologically advanced than Japan.
Though the argument has been made that Fukushima proves that a western-built reactor won't blow up and spray radioactive clouds over an entire continent.
Anyways, it has been a while since somebody on /. gave me a good discussion, thanks!
Same to you. It has become rare in the last few years.
France defaults to extra big taxation.
Funny how taxes are always huge, massive, unbearable no matter the actual number. 3% now. The same was said when someone proposed a 0.001% tax on stock exchange trades. Yes, that's a thousandth of one percent.
If you want a country with really high taxes, look to Switzerland. Last I checked (was there in summer last year), they were doing quite well for themselves. I seems - shocking, I know - that the fate of a country doesn't depend much on how it structures it taxes, but on how well it is run in total. Taxes are a small part of the equation.
Basically, in simple words: You are complaining about the price of food, without checking how much and what quality you get for it. Sure, this restaurant is more expensive than McDonalds, but you get actual meat in a size that doesn't leave you wondering if you already ate that burger or just imagine you did.
The key word is not "3%" nor is it "Internet giants" - the key word is revenue.
This is what should've happened a decade ago. Taxing revenue instead of profits puts a clean shot right between the eyes of the majority of tax evasion schemes. It's a step long overdue.
And before the typical neo-conservative trolls shout it down: Remember that everyone BUT corporations is taxed by revenue, not profits. My income tax is based on my income, not on what's left at the end of the month. And so is yours. If we can survive that type of taxation, so can multinational corporations.
Actually, no. First, any real scientist does understand the scientific process and what it can and cannot deliver.
Absolutely. If you are a scientist or knowledgeable in the scientific process, you can easily spot obvious bad studies and judge if the approach of a study is sound even if you don't know the specific field. But you are still far from being able to decide the truth value of a hypothesis. You have to rely on the peer review process.
(on ethics)
I see that our definitions of the word differ. For me, ethics is more personal while you consider things that I would see in the field of politics or sociology into it.
I want to add one more point: Ethics often follows practicability. Slavery was abolished around the time when it simply became impractical to have slaves. Neither the ancient romans nor the authors of the bible found any moral dilemma in slavery. Our own ethics are likewise subjective and a thousand years from now people will look in horror upon things that we don't even think require a discussion.
But thanks for the book hint, that sounds very interesting and relevant for today with politics shifting right-wing again everywhere.
For your the GM foods example, it is more that the people do not trust the researchers than the research.
There certainly is a good part of that, yes. But in other fields we don't have that. Nuclear power, for example, was an area where many of the opponents to it understand the science very well, and trust the scientists. They just disagree with the final verdict and the judgement that the risk is manageable - and Tschernobyl proved them right. (and it doesn't matter that we can say "but in the west..." because if you have the tech then other countries will want it, too).
It goes beyond the distrust. The fundamental question is who gets to decide which new things to discover and which technology to use. Scientists? Ethics commissions? The people?
But it is that Science is not egalitarian.
In theory, yes. However, even scientists are only experts in their own narrow field and have to trust the other scientists for everything else. And science and its results touch you literally everywhere. From air pollution to the food you eat to the tech you use and increasingly (sociology, psychology) the politics, society, culture and personal interactions of your life.
We already see people abusing pseudo-scientific arguments in political ways (not just in politics, also in pushing agendas outside of parties, parliaments and elections).
We also see the political abuse of properly conducted science, i.e. hand-picking the studies you like, lying about what the consensus is or postulating a consensus that isn't yet established.
I make it a point to always include ethical aspects.
Ironically, ethics is not scientific. :-)
That's not to say I don't support it. I'm a firm believer in striving to be better than those around me as a personal goal and to consider ethical factors. I think we need more of that and way stronger punishments on the unethical fucks that have come to dominate politics and economics.
But there's no scientific base for ethics. It's funny really, that this simple core value teaches us that desipite the outstanding success of science as a model to understand and control our world, the world still is larger than just science (there's also arts, of course).
If the general public can trust Science and scientists and does listen to them, then democracy can work.
There are conflicts we will have with us for a long time. GM foods are a good example. Scientists would love to do research on them and the public (at least here in Europe) largely says "nope". Same on human cloning. And while some of the reservations are simply based on not understanding the science, many of them do understand the science and still object.
The other part of the equation is scientists accepting democracy, even when it impacts their pet research project.
But I agree with you that the opposite, the fake and pseudo science and the anti-science mindset of too many is at this time the far larger problem.