What happens when neither candidate is your ideal candidate? In my country, it has been decades that people have had to choose between bad and worse. All handpicked by the "system" and not a single one being an ideal candidate for the "people".
I live I the US (so I'll speak to that situation), where it certainly is difficult to influence who is on the ballot for the major parties, but we do pretty much have open ballot access, where anyone that follows the process can stand for an election, and write in votes are at least very widely accepted.
the likelihood of a write-in candidate are small. i could not find any actual statistics but this article which points out that write-in candidates do win occasionaly:
but the article also shows that some write-in wins are based on a technicality, like when there are more seats than nominated candidates.
in other words, this is not a level playing field. write-in candidates are not on equal footing with candidates nominated by established parties. even alternative parties usually have little chance.
in a truly democratic system write-in candidates would have an equal chance to get elected compared to those nominated by major parties. i don't know what the solution here is. in the current systems, those with more funds can do more campaigning. so do we need to eliminate campaigning entirely?
likeability and eg integrity of character are much better indicators of a good candidate than the amount of money they can spend to get their name promoted.
equal chance refers to the awareness and knowledge about each candidate among the voting population. that can be achieved by promoting all candidates equally.
for other qualities, we need to get a better understanding what makes good candidates, and educate voters to choose candidates based on that.
You don't pay VAT in the USA? I don't remember specific examples but usually prices of phones or such were just 1:1 even if the exchange rate was like .95
I never recall 1:1 pricing here in europe... everything was much more expensive. Whenever I could, I would ask relatives/friends from the US bring in things that I wanted.
I'm an Iranian living in Italy and have an Italian phone/WhatsApp number. Couldn't call anyone or receive WhatsApp calls to/from Iranian and non-Iranian numbers yesterday afternoon when the internet blocking started in Iran. It was like all numbers somehow in touch with Iranian contacts were blocked from completing calls. As soon as either side of the call would answer, the call would end with a message like you are connected via a network that has blocked WhatsApp or something similar.
How is it possible for two non-Iranians (in a geographic/telecom sense, not ethnic sense) to lose the connection on WhatsApp due to Iranian government? Surely the blocklist isn't implemented inside Facebook, it must be based on cellphone carrier.
Normally the government (in this case Iran) contacts the service provider (in this case FB/Whatsapp)and lets them know that unless they self-block their service, the government will do blocking at the network level and might issue fines.
Normally, that makes the service provider implement blocks on their end, because then at least they can present the user with a sensible error message, and other services that the government isn't trying to block are not impacted (eg. services hosted on the same servers - for example Whatsapp voice calls might be banned, but text chat not banned).
> The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI,
Can the blocking be adequately distinguished from packet loss? If not it seems like it would be embarrassing for the app to declare Government blockage when it's not really the case.
Sure, but if Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp would react to such an order from _Iran_ they'd be in very big trouble _very_ quickly. That's violating US sanctions level stuff.
Ignoring the Iranian government might make them loose some users. Trying to ignore the US government will make some people go to prison. If that's what happens.. someone made a _very_ bad decision
There is zero chance that FB/Meta is complicit in this. The occam's razor answer is that the Iranian government has figured out an attack, and a bunch of FB employees are frantically trying to mitigate it instead of reading HN.
I doubt Iran needs to go to the extent of hacking Meta to block a few random users in Italy? They've achieved their main aim of quelling protests by simply blocking at the network level. I'm skeptical about the original bug report.
To my knowledge, Iranian government doesn't have power to dictate FB's actions outside Iran. So FB could block by the IPs, but blocking everywhere by the nationality makes no sense (at least by the standards of a normal person).
Github once managed to ban accounts of Iranians, even students in the US. Afaik shortly after that GH went to the US government and convinced them that sanctioning every Iranian even outside Iran was technically and politically dubious, which resulted in the sanctions being relaxed in some way.
I noticed this issue last night while trying to call WhatsApp numbers in India from the UK (no Iranian numbers involved). I got the same error message: "Couldn't place call because your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network that prevents WhatsApp calls. Connect to a different network or turn Wi-Fi off." I wonder if that was collateral damage from the Iranian block.
I have friends here in the US who use WhatsApp and they are originally from Iran. I wonder, if it's been many years since they lived in Iran if they're still considered "Iranian" for the purposes of this blockage?
Similar scenario for me... countless accounts throughout various services, newsletter subscriptions, paid services/subscriptions, tickets, loan requests and confirmations, house deeds & ...
I have tried finding the numerous people throughout the world with the same name and surname as me and notifying them and asking them kindly to update their contacts or to stop using mine (name.surname@gmail scenario), some work, some don't.
At some point I even started canceling their appointments/subscriptions/closing their accounts, hoping they'd stop but apparently no use. Not a month passes without a few of these emails popping up in my inbox. The most annoying are when I am stuck in a group email with multiple recipients that are replying all.
I have a statistically very uncommon name (there’s like 3 other people with my name who have showed up on the internet) and I’ve still run into this because I use first name.surname@gmail.com.
I can’t imagine what it’s like for whoever uses the same naming convention for a super common name.
I receive emails almost every day for various people with my same name in other parts of the US, the UK, and Australia. For ones that matter, like job interviews, I try to let people know they have the wrong email address.
As they did last year... There was quite some adapting for the drivers then and still confusing for drivers not familiar with these streets. Newly painted lanes with width that would vary every 50-100 meters (or less), random taxi/bus stops and parking being interchanged with the bike lane... Not easy for the riders nor the drivers...
While I might agree with the part that you said they act against other Italians as well, I can not agree with your 1st statement after 11 years of living here in Italy as a foreigner of non EU origin.
Persian native here. Every now and then I tell myself it's time to start translating some of the books that interest me and that haven't been translated already, but then I find myself reading some related books (translated to Persian/Farsi) and after seeing some of the ridiculous terms used for the translations, I just give-up and postpone the entire idea for some uncertain future.
I personally have to guess some of the meanings and for some other words/terms I need a Persian/English dictionary (not even sure if it exists or that I can find anything up-to-date) to figure out what the translator meant.
We have an "Academy of Persian Language and Literature" which comes up with "Persian" terms/words for most things but a lot of them will almost hardly ever be used even on public television which is (almost) entirely operated by the government itself.
I remember 11 years ago when I attempted to register a company there which the name had to be made-up of a minimum of 3 words and that I had chosen "digital" as one. They rejected the my request and asked me to use the equivalent term which wasn't even Persian and came from Arabic and that no-one even uses today. At the same time I remember there was a national competition about "digital" media with ads running on every tv channel using the exact word "digital" in them... Sent an email to the president of that academy which comes up with these translations and rules (also chairman of the parliament at that time) expressing my feeling, obviously never got a response nor anything changed. I never registered their proposed version as it would've just been a laughing stock had I gone with it.
