It's $165 per 10 years if you don't lose it or $65 if you just need in place of national ID (i.e. no international travel). I think anyone can save up that much in 10 years, renewals a bit cheaper btw.
> Local state ID cards don't prove citizenship.
No, but to get a Real ID in any state you have to prove you're in the country legally, and in some states to get any form of ID you have to prove that.
No party in the US seem to fight for a secure (end-to-end auditable) voting process. I've yet to hear any politician talk about anything like that, a process where no voter has to trust the system and can be still confident (assuming they understand the underlying math) their vote was counted and counted correctly.
It is true that every scheme out there (that I've read about) has some flaws. But I'd rather have NSA spending their budgets and talent working on this kind of stuff, than spying on citizens or whatever they do.
The current discourse is all about identification during registration vs when voting. Which is meaningful but feels like avoiding the actual issue, as it is still not really secure either way.
What Democratic policies are geared towards disenfranchising Republican voters? I don't believe there are any. Unlike Republican-enacted policies, which have been found in court to have discriminatory intent.
Allowing “potentially illegal votes” is a hypothetical. Actual disenfranchisement is not hypothetical, it is measurable.
To date, every audit, recount, signature review, and court case has found illegal voting rates so low they have no statistical impact. Meanwhile, multiple Republican-backed laws have been struck down by federal courts for intentionally or disproportionately disenfranchising specific groups of eligible voters.
So one side is dealing with documented, court-verified disenfranchisement. The other is raising a theoretical scenario that has no evidence behind it. Hypotheticals do not outweigh the real, observed effects of restrictive voting laws on lawful voters.
Leftists fight as hard as they can for an insecure and unverifiable voting system, so it's not surprising that audits, cases, etc. find little fraud. That's the entire idea, to make it difficult if not impossible to find!
This is the MAGA playbook: make an allegation, produce no evidence, then claim the lack of evidence proves the cover-up. It’s two fallacies at once.
1. Unfalsifiable claim.
2. Reversed burden of proof.
If fraud is real at meaningful scale, you show it. You don’t assume it, declare the system rigged, and treat every failed audit or court case as part of the conspiracy. That’s not analysis. It’s a closed loop designed to protect the claim from scrutiny.
Each of those claims is not only incorrect but reveals a deep lack of knowledge about all of the measures taken to improve election security in the current century, not to mention the apparent unawareness of the lack of a leftist political party in power.
We already have an electoral system which people who aren’t actively mislead trust. The problem is the same as in other areas where something established far beyond reasonable doubt, such as the reality of climate change or vaccine efficacy and safety, is questioned not because facts are lacking but because a multi-billion dollar propaganda network pushed false claims for political purposes.
Sure, but that's the point of an end-to-end auditable system so you don't have to trust whoever implements it. The whole idea is that no crooks can make math work any differently than it does.
In the United States, getting an ID is expensive and time-consuming and is often inaccessible to many people, particularly those who don’t speak English, are poor, or work service jobs. These people are the same people who are historically marginalized and oppressed. This is why voter ID laws in the United States are fundamentally anti-democratic and disenfranchising.
If IDs were free and incredibly easy to get, I wouldn’t care about a voter ID law.
> In the United States, getting an ID is expensive and time-consuming and is often inaccessible to many people, particularly those who don’t speak English, are poor, or work service jobs.
No to all of that? Passport book (which you don't need unless you travel internationally) cost 165 USD per 10 years.
Time-consuming...it's a one short trip to local-ish post office (not every post office has passport services). Sure, it's appointment only and only M-F, but you need to do it once every 10 years.
Non-English speakers... You have to pass a basic English test for naturalization, and if you're born here, you probably should speak at least basic English. It's one form as you have to fill out online.
Objectively, it's easier for a service worker to get shit done during the workweek than for 9-5 salaried.
Anyway, California got it right: applied for Real ID? Want to register to vote or update your registration while you're at it? And it cost like $40 (depending on state)
IDs are cheap and easy to get, and I wouldn't want a person who can't figure something that simple to have any voice on the federal level.
Yes to all of that. Your experience is not universally shared, and the people who are affected disproportionately belong to specific groups which have been discriminated against in the past (e.g. Native Americans on a reservation are more likely not to have a short trip to a local post office).
Here’s a summary from 2012 by people who study this professionally:
I would also note that in theory, this is a fixable problem and no election security expert I’ve heard of opposes doing it in the right order (make ID universally available before disenfranchising anyone), they’re just quick to note that there’s absolutely no evidence that it would make a difference in outcomes despite the high cost.
> No to all of that? Passport book (which you don't need unless you travel internationally) cost 165 USD per 10 years.
This won't work for people who don't have a government issued photo ID because you need a government issued photo ID to get a passport. If you can get a passport then you've already got what you need to vote in the states with voter ID laws.
I'm aware. I'm saying getting a passport (or any state id...) in the US is not some epic battle against the system: it's a few bucks and reading comprehension to understand which documents to bring or someone to tell you what to bring.
Not only that, but I went from having zero photo IDs that aren't expired as a foreigner in the US to Real ID really quick without even making a DMV appointment.
40% of Americans never do, and many of the people who do don’t buy it themselves. For example, elderly people are one of the groups which disproportionately lack current photo ID but would also be more likely to have relatives helping with their shopping or simply not being carded either because they’re visibly far past the limit or have been buying at the same place for ages.
I look young for my age (well over 21) and I almost never get carded for alcohol purchases. Even on my 21st birthday when I went to make my first legal purchase I wasn't carded.
I hear this a lot, can you give me any examples of how these IDs are inaccessible? Can you please give concrete examples of what is asked for that feels onerous, or any specific cases where people aren't able to get IDs?
For example, I know that Maryland DMV will even offer a translator to help you with your driving test. I'm not sure why, because all signs are in English.
I have seen exactly the opposite, that at least in Maryland and bigger states, they go out of their way to make things convenient.
Very very few people actually fundamentally disagree with the core idea of identification to vote.
The problem is the act of getting the ID itself. In most (all?) states getting an ID is not free, takes time, and if you lost everything will require jumping through a lot of hoops.
If getting an ID was actually simple, free, and not time consuming than we could have a genuine discussion about ID requirements. But until that point it is very thinly veiled classism and racism.
Also the numbers just simply don't back up this being a serious issue to begin with.
TLDR: Fix the fundamental issues with having identification in the first place and we can talk.
> leftists fight as hard as they can for an insecure and unverified voting process
that is false
what they fight for is a voting process that provides equal access to voting by all citizens
for those from Europe who wonder why this is even an issue when voting is the most basic of rights in a democracy, the US has a terrible history of voter suppression, especially of African Americans, where local systems were intentionally designed to make it as difficult for them to vote; this still happens today
the fact that voting takes place on a weekday, and you don't get a day off from work to do it, and polling stations in poorer areas are removed or have restricted hours, is one example of how the right to vote is stacked against poorer working class people
this is why some states allow you to vote by mail, which Trump is desperately trying to outlaw
if you're worried about insecure voting processes, lets take a look at the companies who own the electronic voting machines
If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers" do these days
If a gram scale and a grinder that has one knob and one button is too much to deal with then I guess you do need K-cups after all.
300g of water over 17g of freshly ground beans will pretty much always beat the K-cup on quality, is cheaper and produces less waste. You don't even need fancy beans, my go-to is the store brand bean from the supermarket.
It can wear on you a bit if you make lots of coffee but I went years with a Hario skerton hand grinder until my partner got sick of it and got us a reasonably priced election burr
Truly you could be making great coffee at home with <$75 of equipment. Gram scale, eBay secondhand conical hand grinder, department store kettle, pourover funnel, filters.
Not a 1-1 comparison. For my daily double shot espresso, actual gourmet locally roasted coffee costs me just over $2. My coffee equipment cost enough that factoring in some kind of depreciation for it seems necessary, which would put my costs somewhere in the ballpark of $3 all in with a 5 year full depreciation. Paying someone else $4 for a them to make a coffee doesn't actually sounds that crazy if it's good coffee.
I would still make fun of you for hoarding physical media. Mine now lives on my NAS, a black box of spinning HHDs sitting in my living room, to which i have saved copies of everything i care about. My music exists as files which i coppy to my phone's music folder, my movies as files that i can stream to my tablet without any mention of clouds. With recent improvements in storage tech, short of a raging fire, "my" media is safer there on my personal server than it is with apple.
My nas has moved to a new house now three times. Even before i have internet setup in my new place, if i want to rewatch some old movie i dont check to see whether Apple or google still has it, i just open up VLC and find it right where i saved it on my nas a decade ago.
I did the same: tended to use Apple services then when I hit poverty I was able to use my NAS copies of music and videos after cancelling subscriptions. Had a "so why was I paying for years?" moment especially with all the enshitification issues
You are indeed correct. I'm the type of person who watches movies once and rarely goes back to re-watch them. But there are just a few things I truly wish to support and will go back and enjoy years later.
I went from a 0 movie collection to buying a higher end Blu-Ray player and purchasing UHD movies. Which is deeply ironic because I'm losing the ability to purchase movies locally with stores like BestBuy discarding them to Wal-Mart only having a few and none I wish to own.
Nothing I hate more than "where can I watch X" and the response is "you can't".
I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally.
That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventually rot and become unplayable.
For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is only a couple of decades depending on the type of media [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are somewhere around 10-20 years.
Outside of manufacturing defects you can expect HTL blu-rays to last for more than a hundred years when stored properly. Some estimates are as high as 300 years. Don't buy the cheap ones or store them outdoors and you'll be fine.
Some archival grade disc's are estimated to last 700 years or more and dont cost THAT much more.
DVD's and CDR'S used organic dies that broke down quickly. Blu-rays mostly use inorganic dies that last forever. Cheap LTH disc's being the exception.
MOST manufacturers like Verbatimm do not even produce the organic die LTH disc's anymore as people stopped buying them. There are still some floating around for sale, so avoid them.
Not necessarily as even the factory produced optical discs have had issues with de-lamination, oxidation etc. Of course a lot of that had to do with companies cheaping out on manufacturing in order to make that last tenth of a cent of profit as they tend to do.
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now.
Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).
It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.
We need another commercial desktop OS to compete with Microsoft. The problem is Apple is shooting itself in the foot with their greed on hardware pricing.
This is the reasons many heavy/high-duty software never makes it to the Mac, it's just too expensive to outfit everyone with performant enough Mac computers.
It's pretty sad because they don't even need the money, and clearly they have shown in the past 10 years that they are completely unable to do anything better with the surplus money.
It's just self-defeating greed, they could eat a lot of Microsoft market share where it matters but instead they try to push an even more locked-down approach with the iPadOS.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
What nonsense. A decision about workplace should be a combination of factors -- workplace culture, products you can work on, compensation, skill fit, alignment with your interests, etc.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race.
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!
> What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?
Women generally have different interests than men, and different cultures generally have different interests and expectations than others. This is extremely well documented, as is the fact that people have a harder time being comfortable and fitting in around others who are unlike them or don't share their interests.
> wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture
If Valve mostly hires white males, then either you're expecting the employees to not socialize at all (leading to no culture), which is sociopathic, or yes, that's exactly what you would expect.
You're objecting to reality and truth because it offends you, for some reason? There's literally nothing objectionable with any of the above. Being uncomfortable implies zero moral wrongdoing. You should do some reflection and/or research.
It's kinda wild how part of the modern zeitgeist is entitlement to be comfortable, and how irrationally people will defend that entitlement, including to the point of being literally racist and sexist.
You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements:
1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture.
2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
Why would anyone want to use a complex kludge like QUIC and be at the mercy of broken TLS libraries, when Wireguard implementations are ~ 5k LOC and easily auditable?
Have all the bugs in OpenSSL over the years taught us nothing?
FWIW QUIC enforces TLS 1.3 and modern crypto. A lot smaller surface area and far fewer foot-guns. Combined with memory safe TLS implementations in Go and Rust I think it's fair to say things have changed since the heartbleed days.
> I think it's fair to say things have changed since the heartbleed days.
The Linux Foundation is still funding OpenSSL development after scathing review of the codebase[1], so I think it's fair to say things haven't changed a bit.
QUIC allows identities to be signing keys, which are used to build public key infrastructure. You need to be able to sign things to do web-of-trust, or make arbitrary attestations.
Wireguard has a concept of identity as long term key pairs, but since the algorithm is based on Diffie-Hellman, and arriving at a shared secret ephemeral key, it's only useful for establishing active connections. The post-quantum version of Wireguard would use KEMs, which also don't work for general purpose PKI.
What we really need is a signature based handshake and simple VPN solution (like what Wireguard does for the Noise Protocol Framework), that a stream multiplexing protocol can be layered on top of. QUIC gets the layers right, in the right order (first encrypt, then deal with transport features), but annoyingly none of the QUIC implementations make it easy to take one layer without the other.
An open source developer (the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy Linux) made a political comment someone didn't like. Now there is a concerted effort by a small group of terminally online histrionics to ruin his life and get all his projects cancelled. The comment was apparently made on his personal blog and not in any official capacity.
It should be noted that this specific framing ("it's just a disagreement," "someone didn't like it," "it's nothing big") is used by the people that, instead, like the "comment." It's an extremely common pattern. So is one of the words he uses later, "histrionics."
The comment in question is an ethnonationalist blog post. Not a comment somewhere, but an actual goddamn essay. But you don't have to take my word on it, you can read it yourself:
You should also click through his archive for more, because this isn't really new for him, it's just taking it to a new low.
> by a small group of terminally online histrionics
Again, witness the minimization of the actual thing he said and the redirection to the critics. Why? It's the argument pattern they've adopted.
The term that the parent post would be looking for it actually "social shaming." You see, shame used to be an effective tool against bigotry. Not wanting to associate with bigots isn't histrionics. On the contrary, being OK with bigotry is bad, and wrong!
I'm one of the immigrant groups people don't seem to like very much these days, but even I recognize some degree of ethnonationalism or desire to restrict immigration is NOT bigotry. I can empathize how jarring it must be to begin to feel like a minority in your own country - even if they aren't minorities nationally, they may be in local urban pockets. Unfettered immigration IS causing problems in many places, is often supported by businesses looking for cheap labor and it's absolutely reasonable to be opposed to it.
Moreover, the false equivalence you're drawing between opposition to immigration and bigotry is part of what let the problem fester in the first place. I think people should be allowed to oppose immigration without being called racist, its not the same thing. The open bigotry and racism by the right in many countries is partly a reaction to this false equivalence. They saw immigration in some cases as causing social disorder, as a tool to suppress wages, as causing increased crime etc. and they were forcefed a message of "all immigration is good and any opposition is racist" to reasonable objections. No one is obligated to accept every person who wants to come in.
That's all well and good except he didn't say he wanted stricter immigration controls, he endorsed openly bigoted and unapologetically violent white supremacist Tommy Robinson
I don't see him endorsing the guy somewhere else and all i see in this post is:
> So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country. That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson's march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, ...
This is false. I do not, in fact, have an opinion one way or the other about his blog post. I don't care at all what the man has to say about politics. But I still disapprove of people trying to drag his politics into the thread, and start flame wars, every time the man comes up.
>It is easy to buy local. Support your community. Go to the local store. Don’t go back to the big corporations who have sold out America.
Is it easy? How many people live walking distance from a record store? Or know of one within 10 or even 30 minutes drive? One that isn't a big corporation (i.e. Walmart, Target, Best Buy*, B&N). Who still owns a CD player?
I do, but not in my car. The 'infotainment' is sophisticated enough to call in an airstrike, but can't play CDs. Okay, so I've got the CD in hand, can't play it yet, just need to rip it and transfer to USB. Grab the MacBook, and... no optical drive.
It's not as easy as the old man purports. I'm reminded of the scene in Austin Powers where he puts a CD on the turntable.
*Best Buy stopped selling DVDs and Blu-Rays, not sure about music.
I’ve got a cd player and burner, record player may be more niche. But I’m all for it, and I’ve been working on gathering my music locally again. I’ve had other songs disappear from my cloud playlists for reasons I can’t find answers to. I’d rather be able to buy it digitally, honestly. but to support artists I like I’ll do what I can, and most of them still make cds or records of their new albums. EDM and other electronic music has been harder, especially since many of these djs release more singles than they do full albums.
It is harder than it was 20 years ago for sure. But not totally gone yet! And I do feel like it’s making a slow come back in some ways.
I used to buy movies before I ripped them too. But now physical copies of those are becoming harder to get.
To be clear, I'm a big proponent of physical media.
But places to buy them brick & mortar simply do not exist anymore. The few that do exist are mostly owned by 'big corporations'. And the physical media sections in stores are some of the saddest places I've walked through: they look abandoned, media is disorganized and difficult to find. They tend to focus on stocking greatest hits compilations. The days of treasure hunting in a record store is a relic of the past I'm afraid.
If you live in a city that still has a record store within driving distance, great! But that's, what, maybe 10% of the population at most? You're likely making a special trip, not dropping in on your way to do something else.
I buy books from bookshop.org, which donates a portion of sales to a local bookstore I can elect. The same can be done for music. I want as much of my creative dollars spent to go to the creative folks and local distributors, even if less convenient. I will avoid Amazon and Spotify as much as possible. Maybe that’s physical media (I buy lots of vinyl now, which I didn’t previously, which gets shipped to me via usps or fedex from the artist’s distributor), and it’s easy to play digital music I buy via Bandcamp through my car via my phone (Jellyfin and Plex apps).
Is it easy? It’s not hard. Making it easier is a market opportunity.
