• 2 Posts
  • 108 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As someone who comes from a country where we do require photo ID for voting, not requiring one feels absurd, so I asked the same question. Apparently in the US, there is a part of the population that doesn’t normally get photo ID and that part is mostly poor people and minorities and photo ID laws are used as means of disenfranchisement, similar to having the voting days during business days (when many people can’t come to vote) or having voting stations far away in an area with limited public transport options.

    Where I live in Finland, the police will actually grant you a temporary photo ID only for voting if you don’t have one, although most people have passports. There are early voting stations in basically every post office for a week and the main voting day is always on a Sunday. No excuse to miss voting.

    I’ve only missed one voting during my life, at a time when I was living in another country and there was no consulate in the part of the country I was in. Nowadays there’s also the option of mail-in voting when outside the country, I don’t know if it wasn’t a thing back then or I just didn’t know.

    That’s not to say I didn’t want some improvements in our system: I’d like to see ranked choice voting or something similar here, there are some smaller parties I’ve been voting and it seems they seldom have a chance.







  • I can actually imagine my grandpa doing this. I wouldn’t call him a computer wizard by any means, but he has surprised me before. He will just go to the library, and have the librarians find printed computer magazines which would deal with various connectors, learn about HDMI and composite. Then proceed to find another magazine which has reviews of adapters and take a bus to the big electronics shop to ask about adapters and have them place the order for one.

    He actually did this when he needed to digitize some tapes. Granted, he ended up with a firewire-connected external sound card and a tape deck from a hi-fi store connected to Audacity, when all he needed was my old walkman, a 3.5mm cable and Windows Recorder, but hey, it got the job done.

    He used to be a researcher and he somehow sees these things just as requiring time to find the right source of information… And time he has.

    I could imagine someone’s grandma being the same.




  • I feel like there are some missed opportunities

    • Sensors that don’t work because a proprietary driver is missing
    • Having to add repositories to get wifi working
    • Voice assistant that only works if you know terminal command parameters by heart
    • More tool windows
    • More xorg.conf to get displays working
    • A flame war about the relative benefits of obscure infrastructure componemts
    • 7 package managers, 3 if which are needed to install 90% of needed software. The remaining 10% somehow still needs to be installed via shell scripts
    • Completely new UI in each version, still looks like it was designed by german ocelots in the 90s