Mostly_Gristle
@Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 2 weeks ago:
The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.
- Comment on How does US "early voting" works logistically speaking ? 4 weeks ago:
In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.
Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers
The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.
There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.
There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.
- Comment on Help me understand littering 3 months ago:
Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.
- Comment on Hotel sued over claim they ignored Black man’s resume until he used a white name 4 months ago:
I was really expecting a much more ethnic sounding name than Dwight Jackson.
- Comment on How do you search for honest product recommendations? 5 months ago:
Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.
Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 6 months ago:
The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.
- Comment on California law would give employees the 'right to disconnect' during nonworking hours 7 months ago:
I’m pretty sure that’s the exact reason why we don’t have those things. Harder to exploit people when they’re not scared and desperate.
- Comment on Easter 2007: B.J. Novak Proves Cadbury Eggs Are Getting Smaller 7 months ago:
Way before that, actually. When I was a kid in the 80s they were about the same size as grade A large chicken eggs. They were already noticably smaller by 2007. Don’t even get me started on Doritos.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Yup.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
YouTube for fascists, basically.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
The last time I went to McDonald’s I got two regular hamburgers and a medium fry, no drink. It was almost $10 after tax, the fries were cold and I had to pull out of the drive-through and wait for it.
I didn’t eat McDonald’s a lot to begin with, but it’s just not worth it to eat there anymore. It was always crap food, but it was at least fast and cheap. Now that it’s crap, slow, and expensive, there’s absolutely no reason to go there. The entire time I was sitting in my car eating my sad little mostly-bun burgers and cold fries, I was looking at the Costco across the street thinking about how, for the same $10, I could have gotten a huge slice of pizza, a soda, two churros, and an entire rotisserie chicken.
- Comment on Do the people in Reniassance festivals pccurring in Brotain also speak with faked British accents, or do they ise faked French/Iralian accents? 1 year ago:
That is Larkspur. I’m from Denver, and recognized it immediately (also I image searched Larkspur ren faire to double check I wasn’t misremembering what it looks like). I’m sure other ren-faires have similar things, but that castle facade has been there since at least the 1980s, and I kind of doubt that was something you could get pre-fabricated back then.
- Comment on Are there any prince movies for kids? 1 year ago:
There’s also Under the Cherry Moon, and Graffiti Bridge.
- Comment on Is "Burn Notice" worth watching? 1 year ago:
His ex-girlfriend is an IRA bomber
An IRA bomber who couldn’t do a convincing Irish accent if her life depended on it. Seriously, it’s so bad.
- Comment on I have an apartment where the dumpster is a car's drive away, and taking trash down involves 4 staircases. What is the best way to ameliorate this situation? 1 year ago:
I’m guessing they live in a large sprawling suburban apartment complex whose trash facilities were designed to be out of the way and unobtrusive rather than functional and convenient.
My last apartment was in a place kind of like that. It sat on a lot that was probably about eight city blocks. For the entire complex they had eight dumpsters in four trash enclosures around the perimeter, two of which were toward the front of the complex, and the other two toward the middle. If you lived at the back of the complex you’d have to carry your trash for at least a block and a half to dispose of it. It wasn’t uncommon to see people driving to the trash enclosure with bags of trash balanced on their car’s trunk lid.
- Comment on Word meaning health-related? 1 year ago:
I would say, “These products are found to have health risks,” or, “These products may negatively affect your health.”
- Comment on Dunkey: The best pizza from every state 1 year ago:
The Colorado one isn’t accurate either. There’s one small pizza chain called Beau Jo’s that makes “mountain pies” like they show in the video, but they’re super litigious about anyone even slightly imitating them. They’ve actually trademarked the term “Colorado-style pizza,” thus preventing Colorado from having an actual Colorado-style pizza. Which is a shame because it’s far from the best pizza, and it would benefit a lot from some outside innovation.
If Colorado has a Colorado-style pizza thing it’s probably putting honey on the crust. Which actually may have started at Beau Jo’s, but they pretty much have to do it because, for there being so much of it, their crust really kind of sucks and nobody would eat it otherwise.
- Comment on Too many cooks 1 year ago:
Smarf!