marinuso
1mo ago
They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?
marinuso
1mo ago
Raising children is valuable to society. We're already seeing, in various ways, what bad effects we get when people don't want to do it anymore. And someone has to do the household work. Also, someone has to bring in money.
I would not call it grift. That's the same kind of take that radical feminists have when they say family life is nothing but oppression to women, just the other way around.
For all the political debates about who should do what, what cannot change is that it is ultimately a team effort, and what also cannot change (except through technological progress) is the list of things that need doing.
marinuso
8mo ago
You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible.
There's usually no voter ID. The electoral rolls can easily be screwed around with (by both parties in different ways, even). Voting machines seem opaque even when they're not, and break down during voting, necessitating workarounds that don't inspire confidence. Mail-in votes are common and there's barely even a pretense of a chain of custody. And then there are outright shenanigans, such as kicking out the poll watchers.
I've said it before, you need to be able to convince the loser that he lost a fair game.
Consider how it works in the Netherlands:
- Everyone who is legally in the country is registered with his municipality. The same registry is also used for taxes, so you bet the government makes sure it's kept in order.
- When there is an election, everyone who is eligible to vote is mailed a voter card, which looks like this. It is personal to you and has your name on it. You should receive it at least two weeks before the election. If you don't get it for some reason you still have two weeks to get it sorted.
- When you go to vote, you bring the voter card and your ID (such as a driver's license, government ID card, or passport). They take your voter card and put it in a sealed box. Then they give you a ballot (all voting is on paper). This prevents anyone from voting more than once, and also prevents ballot box stuffing: there need to be at least as many voter cards as ballots at the end.
- Polling stations are generally in schools, churches, or other public buildings. There is approximately one per 1000-1500 voters depending on the election. A wait time of an hour is considered a scandal.
- By law your employer has to give you time to vote. Normally this doesn't matter, as the polls are open from 7AM to 9PM, well beyond normal working hours.
- If you really can't make it, you can appoint a proxy by writing their name on the back of the voter card, signing it, and giving it to your proxy. One person can only cast two proxy votes, to prevent ballot harvesting.
- Each polling station counts its own votes, by hand. Each polling station submits an official report containing their votes, which is nowadays also published online. Anyone is allowed to attend the count, and anyone is allowed to speak up, and the comments will be written in the report. (You can get yourself kicked out if you really try, but that's also written in the report.) They add up all the results by computer, but if you really don't trust it, you can download the reports and check the work.
Media outlets will download the reports and make fancy visualisations such as this one from the last election. I encourage you to click that link, you can see every single vote that was cast. Each dot on the map is a polling station, and if you click them you can see how many votes were cast for each party.
We do sometimes still have sore losers who yell fraud, but we don't have anyone taking them seriously, not even their own supporters.
marinuso
5mo ago
Consider, for a minute, the perspective of a person who is willing to wait an hour in traffic, but is not willing to wait 15 minutes plus pay $9. In a world of rational actors, this person should not exist.
Why shouldn't he exist? $9 per commute is $18 a day, is $396 a month assuming 22 working days in a month. Would you like to be out an extra $396 a month? I mean, I wouldn't, and I work as a software developer (albeit not in the US). And if you're still commuting to work 5 days a week you're probably not a software developer. And I'm not even counting other trips, though in a big city you can probably do your groceries on foot.
Yeah, but your time is worth $X an hour, where X>9! Not evenly, it isn't. My hours at work are worth ˜$25 after taxes but my hours outside of work are worth $0. Averaged over the day, an hour of my life is worth ˜$1, slightly more, which you will note is less than 9. If I had an extra 1.5 hour a day I wouldn't know how to use them to consistently make $18 after taxes to earn back the congestion charge. And you don't even get that, you get two blocks of 45 minutes.
Now, I wouldn't die if I were out $396 a month. It would just suck. But again, these people who are still physically coming into work 5 days a week probably aren't programmers.
Probably, lots of these people are just taking the subway now, which the Internet tells me costs $132 for a month, which is at least less than $396 albeit some crazy person might set you on fire. Notably, people would rather spend two hours a day in New York traffic than ride the subway if given the choice, which has to mean something. Others will have switched jobs, but again, that would be a job so much worse than their previous one that they'd rather spend two hours in New York traffic each day, when given the choice.
marinuso
6mo ago
The EU financed and even gave weapons to the revolutionaries that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014, installing an EU-friendly government instead of the previous government, which was oriented towards Russia. That kicked off the current Ukraine situation.
There isn't even a veneer of fair play and there hasn't been in a long while. To be fair, I would not expect fair play from Putin. But the EU as an institution is converging towards the same kind of thing, in the name of "defending democracy" to boot. I don't like either, but I have to live in the EU and Putin is far away, so one of them I hate theoretically but the other one I by now hate viscerally.
marinuso
6mo ago
The American tech sector has a big advantage though.
The jobs aren't moving to London because you don't want to even try in Europe (including the UK, since the attitudes aren't that different even though it's not in the EU anymore). You will be regulated to death immediately. Europe follows a mostly corporate (in the old sense) economic model. There's little room for entrepreneurship, and that's by design, even though few politicians would openly admit that.
marinuso
9mo ago
In order to have a functioning democracy, you need to be able to convince the losing party that they lost a fair game. Therefore, any problems or irregularities with the elections delegitimize the elections to some extent. It doesn't even matter all that much if it's deliberate tampering or honest mistakes, or if nothing at all happened and it just kind of looks like something might've. The loser has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. Really nothing should even look like it's going wrong.
cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
This comes very close to what was actually done in the UK. Common sense eventually prevailed, (edit:) but it set back automobile development in the UK by probably half a century.
marinuso
10mo ago
For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan.
The problem with that is that people will take the money, spend it, and then we'll see a parade of sad little kids on CNN whose parents can't afford medical treatment, and then the government will have to either pay for the medical treatment anyway (encouraging people to take advantage and raising the costs), or they'll have to go on CNN and publicly declare "fuck the kids", which they won't.
marinuso
9mo ago
This is a much, much less idiotic option than trying to support full customisation of the family. They should've done this ages ago across the board rather than introduce skin colors at all.
Honestly, I would say emojis do not belong in Unicode to begin with. It was a mess from the start, and allowing skin color and gender modifiers made it much much more of a mess. This is by far the sanest decision to make.
marinuso
8mo ago
The kind of military Canada would need in that situation is such a difference from the kind it would have any use for in the current situation that it's impractical to prepare for that or view the current military as preparation for it.
It can be done, you could be like the Swiss, who not only draft everyone, but have rigged their bridges and tunnels with explosives, and issue every man a weapon they have to take home just in case, and still build bomb shelters under new buildings, even though Switzerland is surrounded by the EU and has been for a while, just in case. But if the Canadians were like that, they'd already be doing it.
We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them. They try to avoid it, scheduling them apart from each other, but when they are combined you just get e.g. three separate voter cards, three separate ballots, etc. This is a bitch to count which is why they rather not do it.
Eligibility may vary: someone from another EU country can vote in the EU parliament elections, can vote in a municipal or district committee election if they have lived there for at least 5 years, and can't vote in any other elections. There may be multiple elections going on at once, and you can only vote in one of them, so you just get only the one voting card and your neighbour may get all of them.
We don't get to vote for judges or school boards, sadly, so maybe it does not scale to the level of democracy in the US. On the other hand you could of course just spread them out and just have a couple of elections every year. We run our elections mostly using volunteers already, so it doesn't need to be that expensive (and democracy is worth something, right?).
counties run elections, here
The municipalities run the elections here, but there are set standards for doing so. They have to print the voter cards and the ballots and set up the polling booths (the picture of the voter card I linked has the coat of arms of the municipality of Sliedrecht on it, for example), but they have to follow the same process everywhere.
You can't assume everyone has an address!
Ah, but you can. If you really are homeless, you are supposed to register at a shelter in the municipality where you last lived before you became homeless. Then you'll get your mail there. I guess if you're truly vagrant you'll have trouble, but that surely can't be too different anywhere else.
(Edit: though this actually can be a bit of a problem. People may live in (ahem) informally rented housing, so they can't register. Especially students and other young people. This is technically illegal, but tolerated. They leave their registration at their parents' house. They can vote, but would have to travel back "home" to do so (or ask one of their parents to be their proxy). They also can't vote for local elections in the place where they actually live, since on paper they don't live there.)
Nor that they check their mail.
That's on them.
marinuso
1yr ago
is to require political tests which can always be faked.
Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.
In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.
Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.
For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.
marinuso
5mo ago
Would you pay $396 per month if you were in return given two separate 45-minute blocks of extra time each day in which to read a book or go for a walk?
I mean, maybe if you're a high-powered lawyer who makes half a million a year but works 90-hour weeks, you might. Presumably that's the kind of person still driving and paying the congestion charge. Someone to whom money is nothing and time is very short, i.e. someone whose time is actually worth a lot.
In fact not many people are taking the deal. You can tell by how the roads are empty. Presumably they're on the subway now, which I can't imagine is going to save time, what with the delays and transfers. It still costs $132, and then there's the getting set on fire bit which I also can't imagine is giving them joy instead of rage. If the subway were a more pleasant experience than sitting in traffic, people would've been choosing that in the first place.
Even in Europe nobody takes public transport if they can avoid it. This is despite every American urbanist YouTuber squeeing with glee upon seeing it, and despite many people not being able to afford a car at all.
You're talking as if it's about sitting in traffic vs not sitting in traffic. That's not true. It's sitting in traffic, vs standing in a dingy subway station with a bunch of hobos wondering if the train's still coming, vs taking a worse job outside of the area, vs paying $396 per month.
marinuso
1yr ago
Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu.
This is where Mac OS already is. If you find the setting and turn it off, it will automatically turn back on after 30 days. So every month you have to go in and put it back. That wasn't even the government, just plain old fashioned greed. Gotta pay Apple for a developer's license to get a key to sign your executables. And if you're paying for the license anyway, you may as well put it on the App Store too, which means Apple gets 30% of the sales.
The impact on random users has been zero, because they just get their apps from the App Store, so nobody cares.
And iPhones have famously been entirely locked down since the beginning, they started putting it in the desktop OS too when they figured out people would put up with it.
marinuso
10mo ago
This is how you get anarcho-tyranny. People just end up ignoring the permits and regulations out of necessity, and then the government only goes after easy targets to fine and/or after people they dislike for some other reason.
marinuso
9mo ago
If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better.
I don't think that holds when you're the one imposing them in the first place.
marinuso
10mo ago
(i.e. electric cars charge as fast as normal cars do, on the same schedule normal cars require it)
It isn't possible.
Consider that the biggest battery you can get on a Tesla Model 3 has a capacity of 100 kWh. They claim it'll do 362 miles on a full charge. Which is indeed nearly as far as small European hatchbacks will generally make it on their 9-gallon tanks, except of course that in the case of the hatchbacks that's the real-world figure and in Tesla's case it's the marketing figure.
If you wanted to charge that battery in six minutes (for easy math), you would need to supply a megawatt of power continuously for those six minutes (in reality even more than that, accounting for losses). Even assuming you could find battery tech that could withstand that, where are you going to get that power? A big, modern, new American house will generally have a 44kW connection (200A at 220v). Charging the one Tesla in 6 minutes works out to the equivalent of the maximum allowed power draw of about 23 houses.
An electric charging station with 10 chargers would need a 10MW grid connection, as much as 227 houses, that is to say as much as a whole neighbourhood. And again, even more, as residential power networks are generally quite a bit undersized on the (for now correct) assumption that not everyone will be drawing the maximum amount all at once.
If you wanted to charge it in three minutes (at which point it would actually approach the time it takes to fill up) you can go and double all of that again.
marinuso
10mo ago
The better parts of Eastern Europe are shaping up to be this counterfactual. For what it's worth, places like Poland and the Czech Republic have little crime and no ethnic tensions, and maintain their culture.
marinuso
11mo ago
I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."?
They shouldn't, really. Riots don't follow deaths, but media coverage. Media coverage doesn't follow deaths, but political expediency.
US police killed 245 black people in 2023, near enough to one per workday, at least according to the Washington Post's data. The vast majority, we never hear anything about. The media does not need 4-5 such stories a week. A couple a year is more than enough.
Now, cops are always going to be people, so no matter how good the hiring and training are, some of them will fuck up every once in a while. Even if, by magic, we would lower police violence by 9/10ths without screwing up anything else in the process — at which point the US would have by far the nicest police in the world — still two black people would be killed per month. And the media does not need two stories a month. There aren't two a month now. If this 9/10ths reduction were achieved somehow, nothing would change.
This is not the fault of the woman who got shot, and it isn't really the fault of the cop either. Though the individual cop is at best as dangerously incompetent as the Secret Service, and should be tried for manslaughter, you can't blame him, let alone cops in general, for the fallout. That is, dare I say it, systemic.
The problem isn't South Korea not letting North Koreans in, it's North Korea not letting them out. North Koreans aren't allowed to travel at all. They can't even travel around their own country without a permit, which is not given without a reason (or a bribe). They certainly can't travel abroad. An amount of smuggling into and out of China is generally tolerated to keep the economy going, but that's it.
North Koreans who manage to make it to South Korea somehow are considered traitors and their family is punished in their stead, so if you're going to do that you better take your whole family at once.
Both China and Russia will deport North Korean 'illegal immigrants' back to North Korea, so basically the only way to get out is to travel the length and breadth of China and then sneak into Mongolia or one of the SEA countries from where they'll be 'deported' to South Korea instead.
South Korea already considers them citizens (SK claims the whole peninsula, so does NK.) When they arrive, they're even given some money and an acculturation course. They couldn't really be much more welcoming.
marinuso
1yr ago
Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.
Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.
If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.
You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.
We have this in the Netherlands too. When you first get a license you have to fill out a form asking about your health, and if you check 'yes' on any of the questions you have to go for a review process which, given bureaucracy and staff shortages, can easily take more than a year to resolve. It's no wonder that even official examinators will outright tell you to lie on the form. But there are cases of people having their driver's license revoked upon seeking help for a mental illness that has nothing to do with driving, even if they've been driving for 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. I've known people to avoid getting even normal healthcare for fear of their license.
In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.
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