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Comment Re:Yes to Brexit (Score 1) 396

I can completely understand the rest of Europes desire to see the UK leave the EU. As a British citizen who finds life in the UK dull, drab, overcrowded and the only respite from the dullness and drabness is the violence and crime caused by the deep social problems confronting the UK, I'm really really glad that its so easy for me to live and work anywhere else in the EU. I can't understand why so many people want to come to the UK, they must be very misguided and misinformed.

Sadly, people like me are almost the only people who actually benefit from the UK being a member of the EU. Oh, me and most of the business leaders in the UK.

The Media

Death In the Browser Tab 96

theodp writes: "There you are watching another death on video," writes the NY Times' Teju Cole. "In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else's crisis, someone else's horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it." Cole continues, "For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions of death, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space." Disturbing as they may be (Cole notes he couldn't bear to watch the ISIS beheading videos), such images may ultimately change things for the better. Is it better to publish them than sweep them under the carpet?

Comment Re:Transparency (Score 3, Funny) 103

If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.

I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?

Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).

Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.

Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.

The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.

I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Comment Re:So, that's how it works? (Score 1) 10

As I've said before, when I get to vote, I have to choose between a candidate who doesn't really fit my beliefs and one who wants to destroy my ability to make a living. Voting for a nonviable candidate in a close race is effectively giving a vote to the candidate who wants me unemployed.

But I've told you that before. So go ahead, tell me how it means something completely different from what I have told you it to mean.

Comment Re:Overblown (Score 4, Insightful) 396

exactly. I bet they also had all sorts of contingency plans, and meetings if Scotland voted to leave the UK too.

The USA has military plans to invade Canada, and the UK. and they keep them updated. it is war game scenarios just in case and it makes for easy test cases for new people to think about.

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