There's an excellent documentary by Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) where he tries to work with a group of homeless people in Las Vegas to get them papers and the process is extremely difficult. Like bordering on impossible.
>where he tries to work with a group of homeless people in Las Vegas to get them papers and the process is extremely difficult. Like bordering on impossible.
That seems like the worst case scenario though? I don't think homeless people should be disenfranchised, but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
"But these marginalized group of people isn't something we need to worry about right?"
But even setting aside homeless, US states have a very documented, very public history of disenfranchising African American voters.
* 1890-1960 you've got "literacy tests" that would routinely fail black voters but allow white voters through
* 1800-1960 you've got poll taxes which was used strategically in places to harm black & sometimes even poor white voters, mostly to suppress black voters. This by the way is where a lot of the sensitivity comes up around driver's licenses and ID cards - it's frequently referred to as a modern day poll tax.
* "Grandfather" clauses where if you grandfather could vote before the Civil War then you could bypass literacy tests & poll taxes.
Let's fast forward lest you think this is an "old" problem.
* In the 1960s you've got racial gerrymandering which starts to become popular as previous mechanisms are disallowed (this by the way still happens today & the GOP will frequently try to whitewash it as a political move and it just so happens that the Democratic party is predominantly black & the current SCOTUS has allowed that kind of fig leaf).
* Voter roll purges frequently seem to target black communities.
* Felon disenfranchisement laws seem "equal access" until you realize that African Americans are jailed in a 2:1 ratio to white people.
* North Carolina in 2013 cut early voting and same-day registration specifically targeting Black voters (as ruled on by the 4th circuit). Alabama in 2015 closed DMVs and polling places making it hard to get an ID AND to vote (closures centered in majority-Black counties). Wisconsin in 2016 had DMV clerks caught on tape intentionally giving incorrect information to deter voters from getting ID. Georgia in 2018 closed a huge amount of polling places centered in black majority districts. Texas as well (these counties had been protected by the VRA).
Sure, the most impacted tend to be poor people, but regardless of income, it's almost always got a racial bent by most of these power centers. Pretending like racism is a solved problem in America is being willfully blind.
> but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
"Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it typical in your socioeconomic class? No probably not. Is it typical in terms of many millions of people experience this problem every election cycle? Yes.
> when I specifically acknowledged that homeless not being able to get id is a real issue.
In one breadth you acknowledge it and then say "but is it really that big a deal?" in the next. That's minimization.
>"Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it typical in your socioeconomic class? No probably not. Is it typical in terms of many millions of people experience this problem every election cycle? Yes.
Do you honestly think the median person who can't vote because of voter ID laws is experiencing the same level of difficulty as a homeless person trying to get an ID? If not, then maybe you shouldn't accuse other people of ""Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here".
You're somehow creating this weird dichotomy where if someone is struggling more then another person can't be experiencing difficulty either. It's possible for both problems to exist and you're playing some weird competition of "well if someone has it worse then your issue isn't as bad". No, both problems are bad and trying to stack rank between them is weird - is disenfranchising black people because of racism worse than disenfranchising the homeless? It's still disenfranchisement at the end of the day.
Pretending like voter ID laws are about the median voter is being willfully blind. If it was, they'd be pared with "free ID" legislation and making sure there's polling places commensurate with the size of population centers. But it's not - it's always purely about disenfranchising people. I'm all for voter ID laws if and only if they're pared with making voting easier. As standalone measures intended to harm specific groups I'm not in favor of them.
It can be incredibly difficult and time consuming to get a birth certificate if you have lost yours. If you work full time, you'd have to take off for an unknown time period (typically multiple hours) to stand in line at a court or other facility that provides them. In some cases, people just don't have the option to take that time off and/or lack vehicle access to get there. Then there's a fee to get a copy, lots of forms you and your relatives have to sign & get notarized. Finally, if you're successful, then you get the opportunity to make an appointment to wait at line at a DMV location. In Texas, they have severely limited hours since COVID.
I think it's become significantly worse since COVID & REAL ID requirements, but it's always been a Kafkaesque nightmare to try & get the proof of who you legally are. And, not to mention, it's a paper form that you can't just pull up digitally, so if you don't take precautions, it's easy to misplace.
Oh man the birth certificate thing is ridiculous. I had to get a new Id from scratch recently and it was the most painful process
The state I was born in decided to outsource the handling of birth certificates to some shit tier consulting firm.
In order to get my birth certificate shipped to me, I would have to wait over six months simply to process my request (ostensibly due to Covid, but this was 2023). It would have been quicker for me to walk hundreds of miles and get it in person. Thankfully I lucked out and found an old one.
Just a reminder that this is the shit politicians mean when they talk about privatizing government services.
For non-US contrast, when I needed a birth certificate recently, I filled an online form and the next day I received a digitally signed pdf by email. It was free.
Not just a slow turn-around time, but as I recall, it also cost me $90 to get my copy. That's not much for most of us, but to someone living paycheck to paycheck, it may be insurmountable or nearly so.
Having each section of our government and it's services privatized it's a whole other issue as well. We're watching the same thing that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and all the Warsaw pact states) happen here in the U.S. right now: the organs of the state being shut down & sold to the highest bidder to create a loyal oligarch class.
Slowly but sure, the USPS, the NWS, and public broadcasting is being destroyed so private entities can scoop up the leftovers or take over in their stead.
Honestly sounds extremely dystopian. Thankfully I dropped social media a long time ago, but imagining some company creating a digital version of me and my friends so they can create hyper-focused advertisements to manipulate me into engaging with something is beyond gross.
Very sorry that it came across that way for you! We built Societies in the hope that the better people can understand each other, the better we can innovate solutions that meet people’s wants and needs - much of bad policymaking and bad product designs came from not being able to foresee the unintended consequences, and we hope that one day we can help flag those risks in an artificial society first, before taking the bet that could impact real people in real life :)
Every website you visit, every purchase you make online, every time you open safari on mobile, chrome on android, you’re being tracked. You don’t have to have social media anymore for a persona to be built for you.
yes, that is even more dystopian. If America was run by non blood sucking vampires (both parties) we would start heavily taxing and incentivizing outcomes now before society completely collapses.
That ship has sailed already… the only thing we can do now is start engineering Internet alternatives or better security. Crypto is broken when you have data centers full of H100s, quantum chips, and all Internet traffic routing through northern virginia.
He wasn't exactly doing it out the goodness of his heart. From the same article:
"Ford was also motivated by a desire to squeeze out his minority shareholders, especially the Dodge brothers, whom he suspected (correctly) of using their Ford dividends to build a rival car company. By cutting off their dividends, Ford hoped to starve the Dodges of capital to fuel their growth."
They were using the word 'critical' in a different way. They're saying students, authors, and philosophers were critical (pivotal, important) in many regime changes in the past. Even if you can't vote, you can organize people and that is the most powerful skill of all.
I had him as a lecturer in undergrad, and I still remember the weightlessness of his intellect. It was one thing to realize that we were the same age, but his ability to flit around different concepts was remarkable.
There were a lot of people around who felt like high performance athletes of the mind, while he was just this sort of effortless butterfly going from flower to flower.
Prophet is great and we use it for multiple models in production at work. Our industry has tons of weird holidays and seasonality and prophet handles that extremely well.
We also used it at my previous job. Yes it does handle that well, but it was also simply not as correct as we would have liked (often over adjusting based on seasonality) even with tuning. Prophet was probably the right choice initially though just on how easy it is to set up to get decent results.
Reminds me of the proof that all natural numbers are interesting. If there is some set of uninteresting natural numbers, there must be a minimal element of that set. It being the smallest uninteresting number is interesting which is a contradiction.
Of course, it sort of a joke, and so having an element of surprise helps it. But really, the properties that make a number “interesting” should probably be defined from the outset. By including “the smallest member of any set is interesting,” at the start, the joke is kind of blown because the result becomes obvious, right?
Serious response? In that case the set still has a smallest member which can then be removed, if we keep going eventually there will be no uninteresting numbers remaining.
It reminds me about the logic puzzle of the criminal sentenced to death, where the judge says "you will be executed on or before Sunday, and you won't know what day it will be until we come for you."
The criminal knows it can't be Sunday, because he would wake up on Sunday and know he was going to be executed that day. But if Sunday isn't possible, on Saturday he would know he was being executed that day; so Saturday wasn't possible either. The same reasoning can be repeatedly applied to every day between now and Sunday.
It's obviously flawed reasoning (Surprise! they execute you on Thursday), but the flaw is difficult to articulate.
When you get to the point in a proof of the irrationality of root two where you've demonstrated that if it is expressible as a fraction p/q, then both p and q have to be even, you don't then need to proceed to prove that if they're both even, then they both have to be divisible by four, and then if they're both divisible by four, that means they're both divisible by eight...
I mean, you can, but you don't have to.
You can just say 'if it's a rational number then it has a reduced form where p and q have gcf of 1, so if p and q would both have to be even, that is a contradiction'.
Same with the 'set of uninteresting numbers'. If 'being uninteresting' is a property numbers can have, then the 'set of uninteresting numbers' exists, and it has a least member. Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers is interesting.
You don't have to infinitely regress from here and get tied up in knots saying that surely there is some 'first truly uninteresting number' to prove that the set is actually empty - you can just see that you must have gone wrong somewhere. Either:
1) Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers isn't as interesting as we assume.
or
2) 'Being uninteresting' is not a property numbers can have
I think actually of the two, 1) is more likely the case.
But that doesn't defy mathematical logic. It is a consequence of mathematical logic.
There's a third option. The definition of uninteresting we're using may be flawed. Here's a quick stab at a more rigorous approach:
We could start by defining a set of "all numbers that are uninteresting other than by membership or position in this set".
That describes the set the proof naively called "interesting numbers" without the contradiction.
Then we could create a second set with all members of the first set except those that are interesting because of where they are in that set (smallest, whatever). This is a new version of "interesting numbers" that approaches the version in the original proof but is, in human terms, less interesting. As you said, "Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers isn't as interesting as we assume."
We could repeat that, making a sequence of sets that approach the definition of interesting in the original proof, but the definition of each set is progressively less interesting in human terms.
Then if we really want to be rigorous, we could talk about "first degree interesting" (what most people mean), "nth degree interesting", or "asymptotically interesting", but the last one is an empty set.
If someone tasks me to create a set of even/prime/blue/rectangular/crunchy/uninteresting numbers I have two options:
1) I list each and every number that is part of the set. It is OK if the set is countably infinite, we can wait.
2a) I grab my special black box that receives a number and lights up a red or a green LED depending on whether the input is a member of my conjured up set or not;
2b) I grab the other special black box, this one has a single LED (to indicate it is switched on) and a push button which prints out the next member of the set on infinite 7-segment displays. The box is a bit wider than the 2a) unit.
These are mostly traversable, e.g. my 2b) generator could be built from a counter and a 2a) tester, or my 2a) tester could use a table lookup backed by a 1) list for all I know.
What they can/should not do is retroactively change their mind on the membership of a particular number:
- It is either in the 1) list or not, no erasers, no backsies;
- 2a) should always respond with the same LED for a given number, no moon phase lookups, no RNG, no checking of previous LED responses;
- 2b) can not even be rewound so it is impossible to tell if it would produce or skip the number, should we coerce it somehow to start again (we can't).
So using any of the two and a half mechanisms lead us to a set where the minimal element should have the same property as any other element: it is exactly as even/prime/blue/rectangular/crunchy or uninteresting as the rest of the set.
Except prison has some very key differences from living freely in another state or country. You cannot leave and so don't have a choice about where you work. Even if cost of living is low in prison, you often still have to pay for being there and wages are far less than the cost. A prisoner will be released one day and their cost of living will skyrocket overnight. Do we want motivated hard working people leaving prison with nothing so they end up back in the same environment that got them there in the first place?
As usual, we need laws preventing gross (in every sense) invasions of privacy. Building new apps that aren't evil still allows the evil ones to exist. Targeted advertising as a whole should be eradicated.
Because you "technically" agreed to it in the 5000 words long terms and conditions, you also agreed to the clause that says they can change at anytime.
Maybe limit the contract that a person (who is not a professional in the subject of the contract) can sign to 200 words. Anything past the 200th word doesn't exist even if you sign it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRGrKJofDaw
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