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.

I mean, Bezos doesn’t run that either. Might as well just stop using every stock in his portfolio by that logic.

Get Amazon employees to unionize and take back the ship is the answer there. Amazon is annoyingly too big to be affected by even a large grassroots protest.

Sorry, that’s not how it works with people stuck in a loop. It’s a very American problem, if you aren’t American. Not sure if it was the leaded gas, or what, but some people are just broken. The person you want to change needs to want to, and be able to change for your idealism to work. Otherwise you’re just building a delusion around a fixed point to fit your viewpoint while that person remains unchanged.

It’s terribly sad, really.

One can feel how one feels, however, the boomer generation’s brains are locked in a time loop. They can’t be changed. It’s like visiting someone with alzheimers. It’s quite sad and frustrating.

Oddly, the silent generation peeps are more adaptable.

It is always projection. There have been previous Republican voters fraud cases in the last election(s).

At least it’s an easy alert for what problems to look for. If they’re declaring “the other guys” are doing something, they’re already doing it themselves.

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.

The time of reckless software really has to end. They will bemoan that it “stifles” innovation, but so much damage has resulted from irresponsible software just in the last couple of decades.

We humans used to be technologically limited by how fast we could innovate. Not enough RAM or CPU or a sensor didnt exist. There is no technological throttle anymore, we need to govern one.

The way these food audit and recall processes work, it could very well be the JDS beef processing facility in Greely that mistreats it’s workers for all we will ever know.

There is always such a lack of transparency in the public information surrounding these food poisoning events, so as to not harm our precious corporations. They just paint a narrative that looks real enough, round the recall number to something arbitrary, and call it good.

Yeah, it always seemed like a lazy republicapitalist move. Why ever sell out so much security to a vague third party. They have smart people, mad respect to their engineers. No question. But national security being sold to a third party seems like nation-state safety 101.

To add on to what others have already said, Israel also supplies the US with a lot of advanced technology and biotechnology. All the cellbrite scanners used to hack into phones come from them, medical equipment like sleep study equipment, drugs, and other things.

Although it seems an area that would be good to just bring in house for national defense in the event a partner nation goes rogue.

China’s always dicking around in space, really wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a “test” gone “wrong”. Doubt we’ll know the truth anytime soon.

Less than half. Roughly 1/3 voted for the orange plump ball in the last election. There will be less now, as many factions are seeing through his lies finally, even evangelicals.

The evil isn’t as big as it looks, it’s just loud.

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.

The same group that will vote for pro-rich-person legislations because they think that some day they’ll be rich too.

Not so sure, more and more people fed up with greedy price gouging seem to be cutting back on tipping. You see it in business rags trying to sell it as “are consumers getting more stingy?”

Tips go away, tipped workers go away, tip-model businesses then have to adapt or die. (While whining that nobody wants to work, I’m sure.)

America’s entire Capitalist model is based on 3-month cycles of amnesia. It is designed to forget. Business could be run successful, profitable, and non-asshole, but the hunt for the next quarterly positive shareholder report by design blinds them permanently from comprehending history.

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.

Wouldn’t that be nifty. So many less things would have to exist as well.

Huh, tell that to all the laid off engineers that corpo thinks will be replaced with AI. There have been constant layoffs over the last couple of years in all sorts of industries.

Reducing the seats at the table to then claim the table is full, and thusly successful, is not honest, nor accurate.

Sometimes the future is really, really, really really…dumb.