Exactly - they are equivalent except for the ease-of-use. And voting in Norway is already pretty easy (source: I am a citizen) - you have voting booths at basically every primary school during election day with quite short queues, and you can pre-vote a lot of places (which was my preference a couple of times - go to the booth in the corner of the university canteen). They also come around to hospitals, retirement homes etc. so that even if you're stuck in bed, they bring the ballot box to you.

Where is mail-in voting the default?

You can probably still vote blank.

I think we don't have as much problems with corrupt politicians as the US. There are also many more parties to choose from, and governements are typically coalitions of 2-3 parties.

You're wrong.

In Norway, the standard system is that you get into a private voting booth, which is stocked with ballots for different parties. You may if you wish rearrange this ballot (cross out candidates etc. using a normal pen), before you put the ballot in a closed envelope. You take this envelope, together with an ID, to the ballot box, show the ID and get crossed off the list, and put the envelope in the ballot box.

It is also possible to cast the vote a few weeks earlier at some locations (local government offices, universities, embassies/consulates etc.), basically using the same system except that the protocol (the list which you are crossed off from) is electronic.

Finally it is possible to mail in a ballot (you need not use the official forms, it is acceptable to write the name of your favourite party on a sheet of paper) if you are living abroad, but the process is somewhat complicated. This probably corresponds closest to the electronic system.

I think the strongest argument against home-PC-voting is that secrecy of the vote is not protected, as someone (husband/wife/boss/religious leader/...) could force you to vote against your own conviction.

In Kuwait it's subsidized - and since you want to bring up subsidies: In Venezuela, it's subsidized by Chavez's governement to 0.015$/liter...

> Pollution from cars--hmm, not much lately since the advent of catalytic converters.

Eh, these don't reduce CO2, which is also pollution.

Luckilly most of that is done in the trigger of the experiment, where dedicated hardware solutions filter out a lot. These boards typically sits physically close to the experiment, monitoring a few key subdetectors. When one of a list of pre-programmed conditions occur, they read out all the data from that event, and pass it on to higher levels of sorting. This has to happen very quickly, as there is a new collission every 25 ns, and each of the subdetectors can only hold the data for a few events before it "rolls off the pipeline".

It's kind of a very very fast spamfilter...

... not just an article talking about it.
https://zenodo.org/record/8765...

I was answering to your comment, which seemed to imply that they are never point-to-point, when the system as a whole often are. And for the on-demand thing: If it leaves every 10 minutes or so, that's close enough.

But shure, if you live out on the contryside, it gets harder, especially during the night. However it's funny that you mention airports, as they are often quite well served by public transport. I have myself several times taken the airport express train or bus to catch an early flight.

You might have to switch to a subway / bus / tram and (ghasp!) maybe walk a few 100 meters.

Actually, to me it always made more sense that the indoors temperature should to a certain degree follow the outdoor temp - during the winter I have more clothes on, so I preffer a bit colder. During the summer I work in a t-shirt and shorts, so make it warmer please!

In the end, we end up only running the AC a few months in the middle of the summer + running the heat (waterborne radiator under the desk, perfect to rest my feet on when they're cold :) ) through the winter. We do have AC in this corridor (top floor facing the sun), but it's not really standard here. Luckilly it's each and every office has it's own thermostat, the only common control is whether it's set to cooling or heating (useless...) - and all the people in the office agree on what is a comfortable temperature.

Oh, and no reason to excuse yourself for using sane units :)

The point I'm trying to make, is that violent crime is not directly a lever - you can't legislate less violent crime, only measures to lower it. Thus the statistic "violent crime" in itself is always better if it's lower - but of course the measures taken may also influence other things. That doesn't make violent crime into something you want in a society.

I also question your assertion that "the European situation is not a desireable one" - here people may have differing opinions, I would say that the US situation is not a desireable one.

It absolutely does make sense to talk about single factors in isolation - it is obvious that lowered rate of violent crime is a good thing.

It is also likely that trying to change society in order to lower this statistic will affect other aspects of society, and not all of these changes are wanted - I think we agree on that. Thus it becomes an optimization problem, where you try to maximise some set of values - typically safety from violence (no matter wether it comes from private persons or governement, against your person or your property), freedom (what we typically call "liberal values" i.e. the freedom from someone else telling you what you can and can't do), predictability (i.e. making it unlikely that the economy crashes tomorrow, or Putin invades, or tax law rapidly changes, etc.), economic growth (you can afford more stuff next year) and many more.

These values have to be weighted against each other, and it is by no means certain that the current setup is the ideal one or even the only good one. Given that the boundary conditions are always changing, what worked yesterday may be less optimal today, so we must continiously reevaluate both our goal function and how we try to maximize it. As an example, there are many places which are further from being a "police state" than the US, while still having relatively strict gun laws - this is only a insignificantly tiny part of the huge patchwork which is society.

I did mean Switzerland. And very few Swiss are carrying a handgun either (which is usually not what is issued by the military), as you need a permit which is quite hard to get in order to carry a loaded weapon in public. The point I was making is that you can't really take the number of guns in Switzerland use that to "prove" that guns and gun culture in the US is unproblematic problem, as the situations are not comparable. As the grandparent points out, the cultures are different - people here don't feel like they need to carry a handgun for self protection. I think they are right about that - and honestly I've never felt like I needed it while visiting the US either.

And to be honest - the people saying they would move if they couldn't carry a gun of whatever specification everywhere have a point, except I would leave if I saw that I needed to carry one to feel safe. I don't want to live in a warzone.