GET THE ROUNDIE!

I’m perplexed: How do you go from someone saying “gender is a social construct” to them being trasphobic? I got the “spot the vegan” vibes that they were trying to suddenly make this about trans rights…

Well I guess that still has the same effect of removing anonymity, but if it gets more people voting it’s still a net positive. To my knowledge the US has a concerningly low turnout rate for elections, so anything that helps…

I guess what I’m most concerned about is a situation where people are forced to vote for a specific candidate, and it doesn’t really seem to me like there’s any mechanism in place to prevent that (?)

I wasn’t implying anything here, no need to be a dick about it. Like I said: I’m my country we don’t have this system.

The kind of possibilities I was thinking about were more along the lines of an abusive spouse forcing their partner to sign a ballot, someone stealing a neighbours ballot out of their mailbox and forging their signature, or some family member doing the same to other family members.

Signatures can be forged quite easily if you have access to other signatures from that person, so I was honestly wondering what kind of system they have in place to ensure the kind of things mentioned above don’t happen.

Also, I guess I was kind of assuming ballots weren’t signed, in order to protect the anonymity of the voters, and that there was some more sophisticated system in place.

Honest question: With this kind of system, how do you verify who filled in the ballot? In my country we have “mail in” voting, which consists of going to a polling station in some other district than the one your from, filling in a ballot in the normal way, and then they send it for you.

Also: I’ve seen people talking about how you have to vote in person on election day, don’t the polling stations open before that? I usually vote a couple days before election day, the polling stations open like two weeks before…

The US supreme court judges are appointed by politicians: They are political appointees. In a lot of other countries supreme court judges are selected by a non-political committee, like every other non-political appointee.

The way I understand this, the issue is that without reading it they cannot verify that it doesn’t contain sensitive information, so they can’t give it out. That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

The issue with online voting, no matter what you do, is that someone can force you under threat of violence to vote for a specific candidate, and watch to make sure you do it. Complete privacy in the voting booth is paramount to ensuring that everyone can vote freely.

I’ll be completely honest: I was on board the hype train. I thought it was awesome that someone was investing in EV’s and pushing them into the market. Hell, I was even fooled by the whole hyperloop thing…

I’m glad it’s not too late to admit that I was terribly wrong about the guy.

At the same time, I don’t blame those that were fooled back then, and I most definitely don’t blame anyone for having bought a Tesla and keeping it even though the guy turned out to be who he is. Some years ago he honestly looked like he was trying to do a lot of good, at least for those of us that didn’t look very closely.

Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.

I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…

Lol, this is actually top-level trolling, you really know what buttons to push to keep people going.

I should have listened to you… I took the bait, but got out now :P

You’re making arguments to attack positions I’m not trying to defend, and you seem completely unaware that you’re missing the mark.

I’ve repeatedly tried to clarify this for you, but the way you’re blatantly ignoring my actual position, and instead making up proxy opinions that you ascribe to me and find it easier to argue against makes me think you’re either a troll or a pigeon. Either way arguing with you is rather pointless when you’d rather make up what you think my opinion is, and argue against that, than try to assess a position I’m actually willing to defend.

Nah, you’re still just making up opinions you want me to have so that you can think I’m an ass. Then you’re twisting my words in order to convince yourself I’m saying something I’m not.

It’s honestly kind of impressive that you’re able to go from “I respect people who are willing to risk their own well being in order to protect others, without care for personal gain.” to what you just wrote. Like… that requires some pretty heavy handed misinterpretation.

Now you’re just coming off as disingenuous. So that I won’t need to repeat myself, just read my comments and try to figure out for yourself where you can find backing for what your accusing me of instead of putting words in my mouth and purposefully misinterpreting my comments or taking individual phrases out of context.

Take your time, I won’t be waiting up.

Ok, I’ll try to make this simple for you: I can hold respect for a combatant that puts their life on the line in an effort to do something they believe is making the world a better place, rather than for personal gain.

The KKK is immediately excluded, because there was/is little to no sacrifice being made by those lynching others. The same goes for SS soldiers running a concentration camp. I was quite clear in pointing out that what demands respect is the act of putting your life on the line to protect or help others.

As for who put those regimes in place: That is completely irrelevant as to whether you can have respect for an individual who sees the atrocities committed by the regime, and believes they are doing good by fighting it. I have a hard time thinking that a soldier in Afghanistan is thinking a lot about who put the Taliban in power, or what they personally stand to gain from the fight when they decide to go there.

“All the troops, both sides” is half my point when pointing out that enemy combatants historically have often held respect for each other.

Yes, I respect a combatant fighting for something they believe in that’s bigger than themselves, people not fighting for personal gain, but because they want to give someone else a better life. That’s regardless of what side they’re on- even if they’re on the side I’m actively trying to kill.

This take just baffles me… you can disapprove of a war, and still respect people willing to put their life on the line for something they believe is right. Even in war, opposing sides have a long history of showing their enemy a certain amount of personal respect, even though they clearly disagree about something to the point of killing each other over it.

Your take is just condescending and unempathetic. You can respect someone for sacrificing themselves without agreeing with them about what they’re sacrificing themselves for. Regardless, it shouldn’t be hard to see how someone fighting to depose an infamously brutal dictator (Iraq) or a fundamentalist regime that stones women for wanting a divorce (Afghanistan) can believe that they are doing something good.

You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.