marinuso
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
marinuso
1mo ago
libertarian-except-for-anything-that-harms-others ethic
Well, as we've seen in real life, this naturally devolves into endless fighting about what should count as harm, and who should count as others.
Anything else is at least as utopian as an end to scarcity, or faster-than-light travel.
marinuso
1mo 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
2mo ago
They're still around, in recognizable form even, and there are few from Western or Middle-Eastern antiquity who can say that. (East Asia has had a lot more continuity though.)
How many Latins have you seen around lately? Even though they were the founders of Rome and nobody tried to genocide them (well, not anymore than anyone else back in the day), by the time of Augustus they were already gone and forgotten as a people and a culture, and nothing of theirs survived. The only thing that has endured in some form is their language. Rome still exists, but its people have been entirely genetically replaced several times over, just by people moving in and out.
Meanwhile the Jews have maintained their distinct culture and even genetics, even though they were in exile for give or take 2000 years.
marinuso
2mo ago
On a completely unrelated note, it still keeps surprising me how rich Americans are. People just drive around with V8 engines.
marinuso
2mo ago
Australia is not going to have a long-lasting food shortage due to our immense food production and paucity of viable nuclear targets
You may still have them once you get a fuel shortage. Growing food is one thing, trucking it to the cities is another. Planting new crops the next year will be hard without fuel for the agricultural equipment. Australia has a lot of coal, but you can't just put it in a truck. Coal can be liquified, but you'd need to have the infrastructure for that in place already, plus you'd need to modify the engines, which, modern eco-conscious computer-controlled engines aren't going to like much. You also need spare parts; this problem is, again, exacerbated by the fact that modern agricultural equipment is often locked down by the manufacturer so they can milk you for repairs, which will be a problem when their HQ in the USA gets nuked.
marinuso
2mo ago
In that case, the bugs would be in the social media apps/websites, not in the operating system's text rendering routines. That's a much better place for them to be. Websites are very restricted in what they can do, and on mobile platforms so are applications.
It also would never have gotten anywhere near this situation to begin with. In the olden days, forums displayed emoticons by doing replacements on strings like :) or :smile:. There's really not that much that can go wrong with a system like that. (Often enough these codes still work in fact, but they are now replaced with Unicode rather than an image.)
Unicode emojis have two big problems. The first and biggest is the design, they were made to be composable, as the designers foresaw that it would be extended and apparently considered that a good thing. For example, [woman] + [sunglasses] gets you a woman wearing sunglasses. I remember the reaction when the 'pregnant man' emoji came out, but really, what else should [pregnant] + [male modifier] do? That's not crazy, it isn't even trying.
You can have a cutesy couple, [man] + [heart] + [woman]. Or you can have a cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, and both are wearing sunglasses, [man] + [sunglasses] + [heart] + [pregnant] + [male modifier] + [sunglasses]. They could each additionally have a hairstyle, hair color and skin color defined. At this point it's becoming a design flaw that they didn't include the equivalent of parentheses to formally specify the order of composition (though let's not give them ideas). And we want to put this all in the operating system's text rendering routines. Define them all in fonts! As ligatures! Madness, I tell you.
The only limit is that unofficial combinations don't need to be supported (though you are certainly welcome to try), as long as you can display the component parts in order. For example, an old enough system is going to render [pregnant] + [male modifier] as a pregnant woman and an Ares symbol.
Which brings me to the second problem, the Unicode Consortium. There's a single body that decides this, and it can be lobbied, and is it ever. Everybody wants their pet issue represented, and they've really got no reason to deny anyone, because the design already allows it. In the olden days this wasn't a thing. You try convincing phpBB to add your thing, and MSN, and AOL, and whatever else there used to be.
This is why I liked this decision, because it means sanity won at least once. Consider the alternative, that you could say "cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, one is black with curly hair and one is white with short red hair, with a bald Asian boy and a white girl with long, straight dark hair". This kind of composition is already allowed, but could've been made mandatory to support, in the dark mirror universe.
marinuso
2mo ago
I don't see how it leaves the ones who don't any worse off.
The way emojis are encoded is very complex, to allow for all the variations without encoding each possible variation as its own character. This leads to bugs and even security issues in everything that needs to display Unicode text.
marinuso
2mo 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
2mo ago
Probably not.
In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.
Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.
That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.
marinuso
2mo ago
Banning child porn is something different from banning a bunch of other things under the pretext of banning child porn.
If you're going to actively try to ruin the lives of 17-year-olds taking pictures of each other, or going after people witnessing a rape rather than the rapist, you are acting in bad faith, and the same holds if you're trying to set up a censorship regime under the pretext of tackling child porn. That doesn't mean you can't ban child porn without doing these things. Changing the law so that intent does matter is trivial and obvious. Yes, that means you might occasionally let someone off, but that tradeoff is worth it, exactly the same as for any other law. As far as this is not the case for child porn, that is the result of politicians acting in bad faith.
Censorship or encryption bans also don't follow from a child porn ban. We don't after all open letters to see if there's child porn in there. People may be getting away with mailing child porn, but the secrecy of letters is such an old established right that nobody would think of trying to violate it. That same attitude should've been carried over to modern forms of communication, but this never happened, and so now bad people can get away with doing bad things under the guise of "think of the children". That's the problem.
marinuso
2mo ago
90% of everything is shit, that doesn't mean nothing good is produced.
To add to that, we see everything that is vomited onto our market, but we don't see the Chinese market (or other East Asian markets). There's a big cultural and linguistic gap, the only things from over there that make it over here despite that are almost by definition the good things. We're not showered with crappy Chinese phone games or CCP propaganda or what have you. We do get showered with our own crap.
marinuso
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
road locomotives
That's what they called steam cars and steam tractors when they were just invented, which makes sense given that rail locomotives were first.
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
3mo ago
There's been EU elections recently, so the Commission gets to appoint new people, and they are all jockeying. Thierry Breton wants to keep his post and is acting all tough. He wants to position himself as someone who isn't afraid of the Americans.
marinuso
3mo 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
3mo ago
Every time I bring my car in for service I have to sign a form allowing them to read out my car's computers and send the data to the EU. EU laws say they can't use my data without my affirmative consent, but EU laws also say they're obligated to send all my data to the EU when they work on my car. So every time they give me a form and every time I sign it. I could withhold consent, but then it would be illegal for them to work on my car. That's EU regulation for you. But luckily my privacy is safe.
Big companies will do what they want anyway and the fines are just taxes by another name.
If you really want federalism, the federal government should be made to raise less taxes. Ideally the federal government shouldn't be able to tax citizens directly and should tax only the states. States would raise their own money to e.g. build roads.
Of course that's not really feasible either, not even if everybody really wanted it, because the federal government can print money or get loans from abroad, whereas the states cannot.
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