Love it

Yea, they might be incompetent while still fully implementing bad ideas

My theory is that Reddit is being run incompetently, without good strategy. The problem is it’s too big to fail so whatever it does seems mysterious only

I attempted to download a car once, but front wheel got stuck in my router. Was huge mess

There is a popular feeling of support in Iran right now, a rally around the flag that even many of the women who were protesting against the government are supporting.

Locking down the internet to suppress protests, or to suppress news, is not what is happening. Indeed the more damage that is shown the more patriotic Iranians become.

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I like very much the comparison you made of a rural exodus; inspiring!

0 is very overrated

I try to set it to seldom used numbers. It’s part of my fight to remain human in a conforming world.

@[email protected] draw for me Mickey Mouse stealing art

That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.

I have some fragments.

I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .

Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.

Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.

Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.

So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.

I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.

But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.

I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.

For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.

So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all

Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.

What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is

that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states

there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.

when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.

the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community

there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout

Which in itself is worrying to me; given that there are now tens of thousands of in-use libraries and millions of programmers, the chances are high that someone tried at least once more than we have heard about .

And I know there have been several attempts, but there seems to be a lack of information about them all in one easy to read place

Real programmers use production

Don’t know. But if the tariffs are as bad as many think, I believe the black market in the USA will grow faster than the speakeasies and smuggling booze did a century ago. There will be huge demand to bring in cheaper goods that are legally sold at higher rates.

It’s a new and huge untapped market to provide support, even if most of the movement of goods will be done by organized crime later. A lot of what will happen is unknown.

Certainly there will be a new cat and mouse dynamics. Very rarely does a huge layer of graft poof into existence to fast in a country. Lots of dynamics navigating this new electronic frontier!

So anyway, here I was, drifting through the lemmy pages, when I realized there was a ton of money to be made by writing software for smugglers.

I have never really known a smuggler of physical goods, but I imagine I will try now

OP please do emergency health care! I’m older and have seen people complain of this, I know you say weeks, and not days, but that does not make it better.

I also think this reflects the true number of the user base: less reports because of what you said, and also there are less people who see the material

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