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The official position is that there was no foul play, but I still can't believe in this time of super-heightened cyber-security concerns, anyone in the Democratic party would try and use a smartphone app for anything election related. The whole platform (IMHO) is compromised when you're talking nation-state level adversaries, let alone when your opponent is the Commander-in-Chief of the NSA/CIA, the ones who we all know put the back doors in place to begin with.

Occams razor though - in 2016 Bernie got gypped and lobbied for a new process. Half a case of beer says that as soon as they have a proper accountability, it comes to light that nobody really has any clue how the system is supposed to work.


Apps are fine for quick reporting as long as they're also backed by multiple "more official" records. The Iowa DNC has been very tight lipped, so it's hard to say if that's really the case.

What astounds me is that this process is not transparently published for Iowa voters to see months before the actual caucuses. Especially in light of the pressure from the Sanders campaign.


No, they really are not. Incrementlisim is a very old social manipulation tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI


Not sure I buy the slippery slope here. Should we also stop using computers in cars and planes? What about stocks and payment systems?

Election results should be backed by multiple, independent records including (but not limited to) a paper trail. Those records should be thoroughly audited for accuracy and consistency. It's perfectly fine to use computers as a quick-and-easy record as long as it's backed by more robust solutions.

Everyone talks about electronic voting vs paper as though it has to be one or the other. It should be both!

A strong password is recommended, but it's not a substitute for 2FA. In the same way, a robust, highly-auditable voting record is recommended, but it's not a substitute for redundancy.


I live in Texas, and I've seen awkward moments at dinner parties where pro-gun people say the government must not ever have a registry of owners or civilization will collapse. I bet that the next day, to let off a little steam, they bought bullets on their iPhone and had Google maps take them to the range...


Why is it awkward? Because only you recognize the extent of their privacy loss? Enlighten them.


This is not a case of consistent logic through ignorance. The same friends who will literally go out guns blazing before letting law enforcement take their AR15, believe Snowden was a traitor and the intelligence agencies would never abuse their power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


This.

Why are we allowing people to go around society being this ignorant of what's going on?

Take the opportunity to gently inform the guy of all the information the government has on him.


Are you saying they're hypocrites because you imagined it so?


I understood GP post more like "They are afraid of government registry, yet willingly give their sensitive data to corporations."


"Willingly" might be overstating things - Google is expert at misleading privacy notifications, and just like they wouldn't expect the local baker to keep logs of what they buy and when, and sell them to data collectors, maybe they have a naive idea that buying something on their phone is similar. They're just not aware how deeply hostile and backstabbing the entities they're dealing with are - like most humans, they're adapted to dealing with neighbors and people they know, not amoral international conglomerates.


Almost everyone works for a company that does marketing, so it's weird to please ignorance.


Which we now know, courtesy of Edward Snowden, that it is not much different from giving sensitive data directly to the government.


That was known long before Snowden did anything.


"The cascade of reports following the June 2013 government surveillance revelations by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have brought new attention to debates about how best to preserve Americans’ privacy in the digital age."

Pew, 2015

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/05/20/americans-at...

Unfortunately time-series data on perceptions and sentiments is difficult to find. But the very fact we're discussing this on the grounds of it being or not being an Edward Snowden-related awareness speaks to Snowden's impact. As does the the fact that the matter hasn't been considered notable enough to warrant tracking over time as part of a sentiment study.

Writing as someone who has been long aware of the issue, well before Snowden. But who has also noted that the nature and tenor of discussions with others since has changed markedly.


Indeed.... Who needs a registry when you have real-time data!


I highly recommend Mike Duncans 'revolutions' podcast for a thorough and entertaining history of Cromwell and the entire English revolution - as well as the American revolution, French (my current season) and about 6 others.


Dude they make you say the pledge of allegiance, every - damn - day. US schools are extremely culturally conditioning.


Regardless of the reasoning, if the US cant keep a site operating for even 100 years, how do we expect it to keep functioning for 10,000?

Storing nuear waste is a complete non-starter for me simply because of the timelines involved. Nobody can guarantee the safety of anything for thousands (!!) of years, when the USA itself is only ~400 years old.


Storage of spent fuel is almost entirely passive. You're literally burying it in a geologically stable site, where even if the containers completely dissolve it will take hundreds of thousands or millions of years for that waste to even potentially impact the greater environment to any significant degree.

The only conceivable risk is for some future civilization coming across the cache, not knowing what it is, and potentially suffering as a result. Which presumes that such a civilization will have declined substantially in scientific knowledge at which point it is unlikely that such access would even affect more than a small group of future peoples.

The risk is practically non existent, especially when compared to the risk of continuing to ignore nuclear now. This is pure, unsubstantiated fearmongering.


You really don't need to. The whole reason we have the waste problem now is politics. We could reprocess the waste. the 'old' rods still have 95% of their energy in them. President Carter ended that with a single executive order.


Assume non-determinism - this is just pure pragmatism because if the universe is conpletely deterministic, what is the point of even this conversation? It would be immoral for god to create us without free will. If we have free will, we must be able to act immorally, else it's not really free will. So god is in a bind - he has to imbue us with the power to go against his wishes, morally speaking. Immorality in humans is a direct consequence of a moral creator.


What Spinoza shows is that, given a set of noncontroversial axioms, free will is essentially undefined. E.g., if you take an action, it is either caused by you, someone/something else, or chance, reasonable assumption? For free will, we would say the action is caused by you. Okay, then why did you take that action? Because of the person you are at that time. Why are you that person? Something at time t-1 made you that person. Either that thing was you, something else, or chance. For the original action at time t to be caused by you, who you are at time t also has to be caused by you, meaning the action at time t-1 that made you who you are also has to be caused by you.

If we follow this recursion far backwards enough, we eventually get to the point where you were a baby, incapable of making your own decisions. This shows that any causal chain can ultimately be traced backwards to something outside "your" control. In which case, how can one sensibly assign responsibility to yourself?

Perhaps another abstract way to put it: Spinoza shows that God creating some kind of free will that made actions unpredictable to him is equivalent to the idea of God creating a rock so heavy that he himself cannot lift; it's incompatible with the idea of omnipotence. Undefined in the sense that the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is undefined.


It's more like gangsters providing "protection" to local businesses. When it comes to the US, you have no choice in the matter.


American pride won't save this country from long-term trends. Before any meaningful change can be made, the "we're the best" attitude has to go. Sometime in the next 2 decades China is gonna put a man on Mars before the US, I can't wait to see the shocked faces


Would you be disappointed if there are no shocked faces? Anti-intellectualism is a disturbing modern trend.


the Soviet Union got to space first and then what good did that do?

I’ll be shocked when the American president sends her daughter to study in China, or when the British monarchy starts exiling to China.


America got great by sending the children of the elite to Holland for college.


My 2020 prediction: k8 stacks are the new JS frameworks.


Hopefully this bullshit opens up a new market for digital obfustication services. Pay me $100, I will show you how to save $300/yr in Uber fees by changing your digital appearance.


Or we could just regulate these practices away and save the trouble. Man I would hate having to shop around for a service like that just so I can avoid being vulnerable to price gouging.


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