It's a fair amount but no not all government spending is automatically "socialist" or even socialistic. Government and socialism are two different things.
>How would you know if it didn’t? The very nature of the problem means that it’s hidden!
Even if it's at a polling place on the day of, it's still a secret ballot. As such, of course it's hidden. It's a secret ballot. What are you going on about?
Not sure what you mean - every implementation of mail-in ballots I've seen has a doubly sealed pair of envelopes. It's no less secret than pushing a button in a booth. The ballot is physically checked (but not counted) upon receipt and an email/text/etc is sent to confirm delivery with no issues.
I'm talking about the "abusive spouse" attack, which can take many forms. So the time between receiving the ballot and mailing it back is when privacy is easily violated.
> More than one in five polling places have closed over the last decade, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Stations analysis of data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, the Center for New Data and the Center for Public Integrity.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/protecting-vote-1-5-election-day-p...
This is after Shelby County v. Holder, and now states are shutting down polling stations to suppress the vote --- well you can no longer accuse them that in the courts, but it is clearly what they are doing.
There's no "sanctity of the voting booth" - shutting down polling stations and DMVs and then requiring people to visit the DMV and the polling station and making it intentionally more difficult for some people, this is all very very obvious and you can't hide it from me by waving a flag in front of my face.
Here's the actual plan:
Require in person voting, "protect" the polling places with armed masked goons working for ICE to "keep illegals from voting" and then call it freedom.
Give me a break. Do you really think we're that dumb?
Yes that’s right, the sanctity of the voting booth. The ability, and indeed the requirement, to vote in private so as to avoid all influence is an important value. Of course, one may prepare beforehand.
Polling places aren't open during a plurality of hours in which people who work irregular hours can vote -- the Alabama example above affected me personally but generally is true in most of the southeastern United States. We don't get the day off, there isn't a means of transport unless you already live in a city that provides "rides to the polls," and lines are often long and slow to move.
I'm not saying that to deride your instinct here that a polling place being a private booth is kind of Cool™, just that providing accessibility (or, if I had my druthers, making voting _mandatory_ and giving everyone the day off to do it) sometimes requires we open the idea book and consider how we can make sure everyone who has the right to vote can do it.
Do you also oppose a federal election holiday? because pretty much everyone who opposes flexible voting options does so because they want less people voting.
repurposing one, fine as long as its not one of the "bank holidays" where retail goes into overdrive. Lower income people are more likely to be working on weekends, so no on that one. I believe that you'd need a constitutional amendment to change the day too.
I have to pay for trash removal in my town and I have a variety of choices. And while I pay the town for water, many people have wells. And I have my own septic system. So, while electricity is mostly regulated, many other utilities are on a house by house basis.
Humans and absolutes tend to be a pretty bad combo.
It is my experience that no system is good for all things. While some systems trend better than others, they are only good until they are not - and there will always be a 'not'.
Similarly, every 'not' is different. When we get there we're wise to consider it with experience + evidence and a willingness to do what those indicate.
I would prefer an knowledgeable, effective and non-corrupted PSC regulate the utility in a manner that keeps the utility viable, so it can serve customers first and shareholders last.
I thought we were supposed to be replacing natural gas appliances with electric ones, but it's become ruinously expensive to do so. Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates, the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
> Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates,
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA. This is especially true for appliances like heat pumps due to their >100% "efficiency", and if you are somewhere with cheap clean electricity (Pacific Northwest) they are a no-brainer.
> the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
With smart splitters and some planning, panel upgrades can often be avoided:
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA.
Nope. I'm in PG&E territory. Electricity is too expensive and natural gas is too cheap. Even compared to my not-high-efficiency gas powered furnace a heat pump is more expensive to run. At best electricity is about $0.40/kWh and natural gas is $2.45/therm.
> Nope. I'm in PG&E territory. Electricity is too expensive and natural gas is too cheap.
Yes, the electricity rates in the IOU territories (PGE, SCE, SDGE) are horribly high.
But in publicly owned LADWP or SMUD, the average rate is around $.22/kWh, depending on usage patterns. Not Pacific Northwest cheap, but definitely better than PGE.
Yes, muni power is significantly cheaper. Unfortunately it's in the minority. PG&E is the dominant player in most of California. In the Bay Area only Alameda and Santa Clara (cities) have muni power. PG&E's astroturfed (hi Greg Dewar!) and lobbied hard against it each time it comes up.
To be very clear, redlining didn't happen just because a bunch of individual bankers happened to be racist. It was a consequence of federal policy -- the FHA would insure loans in white neighborhoods but not in minority neighborhoods, so even for a rational banker uninterested in race, it made sense to issue the loans for white home buyers, and not minority home buyers, even if they were financially qualified. The "redline" choices were not where a bunch of separate banks had independently decided that some "bad risk" threshold was crossed -- they were picked by HOLC/FHA. The FHA also subsidized construction of white housing developments, but not minority ones.
When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.
Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.
Do you mean today or in 1950? In 1950 I'll go with racists for the majority of banks. Today race is not a factor, but credit risks are still important.
Or it means oil and automobiles are lucrative industries with huge amount of influence.
The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.
The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.
Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.
Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?
Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.
That's my point. Automobiles are much better than any other alternative.
We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.
Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost. For many people transit because it can avoid congestion and go faster than cars (even on an uncontested highway) transit should be better. However transit is lacking the network needed to make it that good.
Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.
I would just propose that the transit advocates concentrate on that goal ("Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost") in one small area, because in most areas in the United States, it is currently extraordinarily far from reality.
Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.
> Also, they should do this without crippling cars,
Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.
So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.
99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.
I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.
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