Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1973/05/08/how-the-chicago-tribune-exposed-city-vote-fraud-in-1972-and-won-a-pulitzer-prize/

Nobody can prove that there’s less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it’s more honest.

Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.

Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.

And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.

First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.

Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.

The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.

Yes, and again, it’s all based on trust.

The scary thing about elections is that, by design, nobody can ever “prove” they won.

Votes are designed to be anonymous. They have to be. If they’re not, they’re very vulnerable to manipulation. If someone can prove how they voted, then they can either be bribed to vote a certain way, or threatened to vote a certain way. If you can check that your vote was counted successfully for the candidate you chose, then someone else can check that you voted for the candidate they chose.

That means that, by design, the only security that elections can have is in the process. In a small election, like 1000ish votes or fewer, someone could supervise the whole thing. They could cast their vote, then stand there and watch. They could watch as other people voted, making sure that nobody voted twice, or dropped more than one sheet into the box. They could watch as the box was emptied. Then, they could watch as each vote was tallied. Barring some sleight-of-hand, in a small election like that, you could theoretically supervise the entire process, and convince yourself that the vote was fair.

But, that is impossible to scale. Even for 1000 votes, not every voter could supervise the entire process, and for more than 1000 votes, or votes involving more than one voting location, it’s just not possible for one person to watch the entire thing. So, at some point you need to trust other people. If you’re talking say 10,000 votes, maybe you have 10 people you trust beyond a shadow of a doubt, and each one of you could supervise one process. But, the bigger the election, the more impossible it is to have actual people you know and trust supervising everything.

In a huge country-wide election, there’s simply no alternative to trust. You have to trust poll workers you’ve never met, and/or election monitors you’ve never met. And, since you’re not likely to hear directly from poll workers or election monitors, you have to instead trust the news source you’re using that reports on the election. In a big, complex election, a statistician may be able to spot fraud based on all the information available. But, if you’re not that statistician, you have to trust them, and even if you are that statistician, you have to trust that your model is correct and that the data you’re feeding it is correct.

Society is built on trust, and voting is no different. Unfortunately, in the US, trust is breaking down, and without trust, it’s just a matter of which narrative seems the most “truthy” to you.

Almost everything in any religion is a “telephone game” retelling of things. These days they’re the same to most people which is what really matters.

Luce means light in Italian. Lucifer means “light bringer” and the mythos is about trying to steal the light (luce) of god. It doesn’t mean “luce” is bad.

I guess the Catholic church overestimated the education of its followers.

“Luz” is an incredibly common name in Spanish speaking countries. It means light. “Luce” means light in Italian, but seems to be less common as a name. Lucifer means “Light-bringer”, and the myth of the light-bringer is much, much older than Christianity.

Old religions thought things in the sky were gods. Venus orbits closer to the sun than the Earth, which means light reflecting from it is extremely bright, but that light is only visible near sunrise and sunset. During the rest of the day the brightness of the sun overwhelms the reflected light from Venus, and during the rest of the night it’s not visible because it’s near the sun, so it’s behind the earth. So, old religions talked about the brightest “god” in the sky, who disappeared when it got too bright or too dark. That led to the myth of the god who tried to be the brightest light and was cast down. That, of course, led to Satan, A.K.A. Lucifer.

I guess the Catholic church was giving its followers too much credit in their understanding of words.

It’s pretty interesting how “concentration camp” used to just mean “a camp where people were grouped together”. It wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but in many cases it was effectively a relatively nice prison. Then, it became a euphemism for an extermination camp. The Nazis pretended they were just grouping people together in a camp, when in reality the aim was to kill everyone there. That euphemism tainted the original meaning, so now when people hear “concentration camp” they think of the Nazi extermination camps.

Technically, Guantanamo Bay probably qualifies as a concentration camp, but I bet they are very careful not to ever use that term.

“B” has never even been considered. That’s a bogeyman that the Republicans are trying to invent.

The US is constantly enforcing immigration laws. That’s not going to change. The issue is that laws that used to work, like asylum, no longer do.

And even if there were, First Past The Post means a vote for anybody but D or R means you’re taking a vote away from your preferred D or R candidate. A smart “I” voter would only vote for an “I” party (if one existed) in cases where the more preferred D or R candidate was already basically guaranteed to win, so their third-party vote wouldn’t affect the D or R result.

Not really. For immigration, someone might think that only the best of the best should be allowed to immigrate. They think that includes them, but doesn’t include a lot of the people who do it illegally. And, to a certain extent, they’re probably right. It’s pretty hard to immigrate legally to the US as a menial labourer, but that’s what a lot of illegal immigrants do. They work in restaurants, slaughterhouses, on farms, etc. doing extremely hard work, but work that doesn’t require any education. Meanwhile a lot of legal immigration slots are only available to people with “extraordinary ability”.

The kinds of jobs that illegal immigrants do are the ones that US citizens would only do if they were really desperate. Meanwhile, the kinds of jobs that legal immigrants do are often the ones that very few US citizens can do, so that the companies need to hire from outside the country to fill the position.

Being against student loan forgiveness is also a pretty reasonable position, whether or not you paid yours off, or you never went to university.

It’s not just one generation receiving an education vs. another one that didn’t. It’s that the platforms the generations used are fundamentally different.

Gen X / Millennials grew up with Macs and PCs, computers that were fundamentally not locked down. You could install any software you wanted. You could modify the OS in many ways. DRM wasn’t really a thing in general, and there were almost always easy ways around it.

Gen Z / Gen Alpha grew up mostly with cell phones. The phones they had are much more powerful than the PCs from 20-30 years ago, but they’re incredibly locked down. The only applications you’re allowed to use are the ones that Apple / Google allow on their app stores, unless you root your phone which is a major risk. It’s very hard to even load up your own audio files, movies or images let alone “dodgy” ones. DRM is everywhere, and the DMCA means you risk serious prison time if you bypass access controls.

Gen X / Millennials grew up at a time when there were still more than 5 tech companies in the world, and the companies out there competed with each-other. There were plenty of real standards, and lots of other de-facto standards that allowed programs to interoperate. Now you’re lucky if you can even use an app via its website vs. using a required app.

It’s not just a difference in education. It’s that companies have gained a lot more power, and the lack of antitrust enforcement has made for plenty of walled gardens and “look but don’t touch” experiences.

Unless it’s ruled and a precedent is set, the statement is false.

They believe that the users agreed to a contract that specifies that in any dealings with Disney they’ve agreed to binding arbitration.

What’s the “false statement” there?

It could be changed at any time, it might not resolve properly, the page could be hijacked, an ad blocker could decide it’s an ad and show something else instead…

That was something Disney Lawyers claimed, but was never actually agreed/enforced.

Disney backed down. They still believe they have that right, and no court has ever said they didn’t, but the bad publicity was too much for them in this case. They’ll wait until there’s a case that doesn’t get that kind of publicity before they try to establish that precedent.

You aren’t internet.

The EULA isn’t null and void, but it’s pretty meaningless. Not because you can’t reasonably be expected to copy that link into a browser to read it, but because there’s no indication that you should or even must do that.

The EULA contains no terms, it doesn’t contain any wording saying what you can or can’t do. It doesn’t say what your rights are. It just contains something that looks like a URL. So, you’re still bound by the terms of the EULA (as much as you’re bound by any EULA) but the EULA doesn’t permit or forbid anything. It’s effectively the same as if it were blank.

They’re bound to the EULA, but the EULA is meaningless because it’s just a URL. They’re definitely not bound by whatever’s at that URL.

This would be like having someone sign a contract when the contract was just a shopping list. Sure, they’re bound by the “contract”, but the contract doesn’t specify anything they can or can’t do.