• 0 Posts
  • 383 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • But they choose to not. One of those cake and eat it too scenarios.

    A territory like them is eligible for Federal money from various programs, while not having to pay Federal income tax. If they became a state, they’d then have to pay income tax, lose benefit of the free program money, but be allowed to vote.

    If you don’t want to fully commit to the whole package and are milking the advantages of being a territory, should you really get a right to choose how the package that is being taxed and giving you free money is steered?

    (Oversimplification, of course.)

    If I were a member of a territory, I don’t really know where my thoughts would land.

    However, as one that is taxed, it seems that allowing the untaxed to choose our taxed destiny would be disingenuous.






  • They will likely revamp the process. The problem is, once the ballot is counted, the vote is separated from the voter, so there’s no link to who the person was and who they voted for.

    It’s a process meant for privacy. That someone was able to accurately forge signatures enough to pass verification (which is handled by trained humans) is a bit on the “this was creepy/planned” side, which is likely how the outlier event happened.

    America isn’t there yet, but cryptographic hashes anonymizing but connecting a vote to a voter, so the vote could be anonymously recalled for an attack like this would likely be the best privacy-preserving process.








  • We need another flavor of the 1980s telecom antitrust. All phones should be sold 100% unlocked. All carriers should not be allowed to sell phones with custom software configurations (Verizon is the worst for this) or neutered basic band support that makes the phone difficult if not impossible to use on competing carriers. All phones should be as interchangeable as they are currently capable of. Predatory carrier financing deals should be heavily regulated. No more trapping people in multi-year financing pyramid schemes. Basic communications methods for voice, image, video, text, video call, data should be forcibly standardized on all brands.

    These companies were given a long leash, and they just abused it.





  • It started with requiring larger antennas, then larger batteries. LTE was super inefficient, and low frequency bands need large antennas.

    Then the industry tried to push tablets and smartphones to sell more devices. Most people settled on a single device, the large smartphone that already exists and forego the tablet. In a lot of cases forego the computer as well.

    Somewhere in the middle, the industry self-proclaimed that people obviously prefer large smartphones, when there were no small ones available anymore.

    …and here we are.