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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.



  • Tails is only partly correct. The state is open about it’s monopoly on violence , and it’s a key argument in the philosophy of government. The state will use that violence against anyone who threatens it.

    The state exists to protect the power that enables the state. Protestors object to some organization of the state, and so they’re de facto threats.
    Minorities are disproportionately targeted because they inevitably don’t have the power that enables the state.

    It’s not the state being pro peace and making exceptions, it’s the state being pro-state, and being structured around that principle. The violence is inherent and exceptions are made if you provide value or benefit from value being defined to include you.







  • I thought the universal part was the tone and cadence people use when talking to small children, and not the actual words or grammar changes.

    It’s why you can listen to a recording of a language you don’t know and tell if they’re talking to a baby, but there are also cultures that essentially don’t talk to them at all until they have language.



  • I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

    If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

    You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

    You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.


  • The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
    You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

    Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

    The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

    You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
    Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
    When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

    It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.





  • Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
    Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.


  • All of our best data on the impact says that it really wouldn’t matter. Sometimes a species is a linchpin for the ecosystem, and sometimes it isn’t.

    Sucks for mosquitoes, but there’s a very real chance that we’ll smallpox them, and the biggest concern will be our confidence that the virus we use doesn’t impact other species unintentionally.


  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.



  • “In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”

    That’s a very fancy way of saying “we’ll comply with a court order”, which is what any business would do.
    This is marketing fluff. DRM free is good enough reason to like them without framing them as fixing literally every problem with steam.