Yes.
In any election in which a federal candidate is on the ballot, federal law prohibits any
individual or entity, including 501(c)(3) nonprofits, social welfare organizations, and unions,
from knowingly and willfully paying, offering to pay, or accepting payment either for
registering to vote or voting
> pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both
It's not hard to figure out who people would vote for (on average). Pick a town that leans in your direction but has low voter turnout and I'm convinced you can affect the outcome.
> It's not hard to figure out who people would vote for (on average). Pick a town that leans in your direction but has low voter turnout and I'm convinced you can affect the outcome.
And you've just described pretty much every voter registration and voter turnout effort ever.
And that's why the US is such a terrible place right now; more than 150 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election, a stark decline from the days of 1776 when the entire country had about 2.5 million people in total, many of whom were ineligible to vote, as God intended.
If I want the public to tune out of climate issues in disgust, I can't think of a more effective way than throwing soup on Van Gogh while crying "Climate!"
The cynic in me wonders if somebody is funding these protestors. If I were an oil baron I would feel deeply indebted to them.
Also a surprisingly large number of them are libertarians, whose view is that government can never do anything right and if anybody claims a government intervention (or a concerted society-level effort) is necessary then they are lying.
Climate change is, almost by definition, something that cannot be solved at individual level. It must be tackled at the society level. Which makes it a lie in their worldview.
Don't ask me, I could never understand the libertarian position.
Much of the mainstream right-libertarian rhetoric seems to trace most directly to Murray Rothbard and to a lesser degree Robert Nozick (though he distanced himself from that somewhat later in life), with strong supporting roles from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, von Mises, and others. The institutional support is strongly tied to the Kochs, the Cato Institute, and a large group of aligned propaganda mills through the Atlas Network, comprised of 500+ partners in 100+ countries, to quote the network itself. The greatest number are in the US (181) and Europe (157), with a disproportionate number in the English-language speaking Canada (11) and Australia (10):
Somewhat interestingly, few of the RLs I've encountered seem even aware of this legacy, with many appearing to think that they'd reached an identical set of conclusions (and rhetoric) through their own self-directed free thinking...
The Atlas Network itself is strongly tied to the Mont Pelerin Society. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe edited an excellent history of that movement, The Raod from Mont Pelerin (2015):
I could get past their survival (if they didn't there would be no more story!) but the level of technological development really strained my imagination. I mean, are we supposed to witness a space-faring civilization that can hoist a fucking city block on carbon fibers (or whatever) and move it up to space and then back down on Earth, while simultaneously:
- It has no Cold War era level technology to build a dozen spy satellites to survey every square meter of the earth, with which most of the Part 3 plot would simply not happen;
- It cannot build a simple propeller plane, so the pilot has to instead strip naked (I think - it's been a while since I read it) and wear some kind of scifi haptic feedback suit that will tell you how the wind is blowing so that you can steer your unpowered glider in the correct direction.
Honestly the second point reads like the author's sexual fantasy leaking into the story.
Even that doesn't agree with reality. Some tyrants prefer to say they're doing things for your freedom, your money, or your rights. (In fact, you know what, it's silly to expect tyrants to stay consistent.)
Linux didn't support per-monitor fractional scaling until fairly recently. I only got it after I changed to Wayland about a year ago (not sure if X supports it these days), and then it turns out Wayland doesn't support color profile (or at least that's what I learned from random Reddit posts).
So I guess I could either go back to X and have uncomfortably large letters or stick with Wayland and tolerate slightly off colors. Yay.
The IME shows Korean characters in slightly wrong size whenever I type and gvim keeps throwing UI error messages in the console. At least it allows the input to go through, so I guess it's fine?
Hibernation used to work, and then stopped working for about two years, and then started working again after the latest upgrade. No idea why, I'm not gonna question the system when it works.
(BTW, I think the last time I had to worry about IME or hibernation in Windows or Mac was about twenty years ago.)
not a fan of linux font/text rendering either. doesn't look too bad on my 4k but the 1080p monitor is unusable for me. fonts also look so airy and thin, and white on black looks weird as well.
For some reason, South Korea became a country of young incels and young male Koreans have taken a hard turn into sexist conservatism. There's probably an element of them "getting back" at those evil feminist girls who wouldn't sleep with them.
The difference is nobody sees firefighters saving a homeless man and thinks "Eww gross I'd rather not have them saving lives next to me."
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
The fare has to be low enough that poor people can afford it because they have to be able to use mass transit to get to work. Even the homeless need to be able to use it so they can e.g. get to a job interview. And a fare is not going to be a deterrent to juvenile delinquents because they're the ones jumping the turnstiles.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
(Off-topic?) Not talking about the pheasant, but I once read that the Japanese used to eat cranes (presumably the same kind shown in JAL logo), and even offered them as delicacy to a group of Korean ambassadors, who were horrified, because cranes were considered a symbol of Confucian virtue in Korea and nobody ate them.
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