From what I read and watched on this topic, not all of the canals are all gravity fed and there are sections that require pumping. This gives a great local source of power to use in all operations in processing and moving this water.
The main idea in this that scares me is trusting the State of Alabama (e.g.) to protect their private keys. Humans tend to be the weak links in all of these chains.
The problem is that these system are setup specifically to be able to be used incorrectly. Flock is getting all the rage right now but they aren't the only vendor. An acquisition and rename later and everyone will have forgotten this all. Police (others?) are setting up stingrays. Stalin's secret police had a maxim: "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime." Remember, everyone who installed a Ring doorbell camera paid to help set up these kinds of networks. (all so that a porch pirate might get caught even though Amazon will reship for free). These systems also set up a huge target for bad actors to hack outside of the law.
If these things were only ever used with the a valid search warrant, that would be a great step forward. But even that will only stop "honest" people from abusing the system.
I would argue that the change isn't really about the church as an institution. It is about a 'thing' to belong to and a place to go to every week/month. I've been reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning and it he talks a lot about having a purpose. That is the thing that we have lost. This is why so many feel so lost. We have always been a tribal species. This is what makes "othering" so powerful in today's political climate. Anyone who looks/thinks/behaves different is bad even if we would otherwise be best friends. Instead we go through each day covering up our loneliness and lost feeling with anything that will distract us.
This isn't even new but it is rapidly accelerating. Roll back to the 40s where all houses had a front porch and people sat around talking to each other. Everyone knew their neighbors and kids played freely and everyone felt more safe and actually connected. Then television came along and people rushed to the living room after dinner instead of to the front porch. Now almost no one knows their neighbors beyond superficial "How are you?"s let alone knowing and hanging out with several. It is so bad now that people in the same family sit on the same couch with the television on but all they are doing is scrolling their phone. And this isn't the last chapter, it is going to get worse when all AI and VR merge into custom hamster wheel content that fills but doesn't satisfy. The solution is for us to re-find our purpose, find a hobby, go outside for a walk, volunteer with a cause, visit people, make phone calls and write letters.
Strongly agree. Intentional community and defending what is needed to support it is the only path forward, imho. What that looks like will be based on the participants of that cultivated community.
Yeah, this is the greatest movie of all time and I don't think it is even close. No other movie covers everything it is to be human and in such a sometimes subtle way.
We should never allow digital voting ever. Machines should only be allowed to help count with the ability to hand count the paper. There are so many exploits and leverage for software/hardware in any system (even closed ones) that has to be updated every year. It becomes very very hard to create a million "passable" paper votes out of thin air. It is trivial to do with a digital system.
But then, in a country of 300 plus million people like the U.S., there is a demand for getting election results as soon as possible, because without quick results, it opens the window for bad actors to claim the election was rigged. That's part of the reason why there was a motivation for digital systems. Furthermore, the U.S. In particular does a lot more than just voting for candidates. Often the ballots have referendum questions on them. There's so much voting happening that some localities vote for some of the smallest positions. I wouldnt be surprised if dogcatcher was on a ballot somewhere. As a result, the ballot size can be multiple pages in length, which just increases the amount of effort required to tally it. With the demand for very quick results, computerization naturally emerged.
I'm not sure if you are U.S. based or not, but if not, you need to understand the context as to why that system came to be. It wasn't all just nefarious. Voting intregity activists have argued for a two way verification system. Having paper ballots to provide a record that can be audited, as well as digital input so that you can achieve the goals of quick results. Obviously, two verification steps need to occur.
After the 2016 election, a lot of activists started pushing for each state to adopt this sort of system. In my particular state, NJ there used to be only electronic recording to a memory card which obviously can be tampered with. Now they have systems where you still input the votes digitally on a giant touchpad, but as soon as you make your selections, the choices you made are printed on paper and shown to you. Once you confirm that they are the selections you made, the paper is cut and dropped into a ballot box, giving you a paper record plus the digital copy.
The thing that NJ has not fully implemented is automatic two way verification. From my understading as of now results are still digitally tallied. I think Colorado has done in interesting process of mandatory risk limiting audits of the paper ballots to ensure no anamolies are present else the results are recounted manually. The problem with not doing some sort of two way verification is that the only time NJ would look back at the paper is if there's an obvious discrepancy or if a lawsuit gets filed. I'd argue that they need to take it a step further and do automatic two-way verification. Activists have proposed statistical risk auditing be implemented everywhere, so if there's any deviation, a full recount is automatically performed.
The biggest problem that I see right now is in a lot of the southern states or swing states that matter, the governments are not taking this issue seriously. And so they are still using direct electronic recording. So my frustration is: what's the point of putting in all this work if the states that really matter are not taking this seriously?
The issue is that the people claiming things are rigged are the same ones creating this opportunity and it has nothing to do with digital voting. I live in PA and the current law is that mail-in votes can't be even started to be counted until after the polls have closed. (This law had good intent so that a potential fraudster couldn't know exactly how many votes they needed.) During Covid, Democrats tried to get this law changed and Republicans categorically refused. The only reason not to is that the mail-in (especially during Covid) leaned heavily Biden so they could pretend there was fraud.
I get that people want results very quickly but I don't think paper is a restriction to that. There can just be a law that says you count votes every hour and add them to the tally. So at poll close, you only have to count a small number of late ballots and submit your totals. Everything would be done by 9:00 pm. The thing with double verification and recounts is that for 99%+ of races, the results aren't really in doubt. I do think that deviation from historical statistical patterns for a precinct should be an auto recount as well as results that are less than 1% (X votes) different. This is also where the FEC needs to step in and saw that there are federal rules for how voting must happen as this is a constitutional right, not simply a "do whatever you want" rule. Honestly, we need a new amendment to protect voting rights and stabilize the system a bit more.
All those ideas you suggested seem great. I'm sure they'd be better than the current status quo. Now, how difficult would it be to implement any of those ideas versus going state by state and convincing the local legislator to just swap out voting machines? The money is going to the same voting machine vendors anyway who probably have sway with the government and the local legislator wont get in trouble for going outside the norms(ex. No one ever got fired for buying IBM). Fortunately, some of these companies have had to deal with the pressure from the public and update the design of their voting machines to what I've described earlier.
The U.S., it should be clear by now, is just this patchwork of random laws and people blocking radical change at various levels. And everyone who wants to move forward is forced to find some other avenue to get some half baked solution in place just so they can get around the historical blocks. We see this in everything from zoning, to deploying Internet, to even fixing this system. There's just too much inertia to not change things.
It becomes a scorecard. Success in life is strictly about making the number go up. It doesn't matter if they could spend $100K a day for life and never go broke. They must have a bigger number and be higher on the Forbes (e.g.) list. Some people are so obsessed with it they lie and make up things to claim their number is much higher than it actually is.
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