The Department of State switching to a less accessible font is not a nothing burger to all the people who now have more difficulty reading the documents. It reinforces the tone of international relations being put forward by the administration to the detriment of everyone in the country.
If it's legible, the terms of a lease are way more important than the typeface. Anyone wasting time on the typeface of the contract would worry me more than comfort me with regard to knowing what's important.
that's moving the goalposts of the comment I replied.
"people who might not otherwise be able to win" would mean that without this rule change, the current admin would not have been able to win. that's clearly not true. all this does, as you suggest, makes it harder for their opposition to use a valid means of voting.
not sure what the point is. this is possible, clearly as that's what has happened. i'm only asking why with the known situation that something left in your personal box not getting postmarked as expected for whatever reasons would you allow something of this import to be handled that way? you only file taxes once a year, and most people only vote every four years. making arrangements for that infrequent to have a piece of mind something was postmarked as expected doesn't seem too outlandish to me. i even stipulated potential for victim blaming suggesting if you read the context that i was in no way suggesting whatever you want to think is a gotcha
I don't know, are your opinions about life and reality made up or you're just so credulous you are repeating whatever you see on social media?
Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?
And 88 million people signaled they were fine with either candidate, by not voting. 165 million people out of 264 millions eligible voters supported this.
as someone who has never voted, i am absolutely okay with this characterization. i often hold my tongue when it comes to complaining about political stuff because i dont really feel like i have the right to. i mean, of course i HAVE the right, but the hypocrisy isn’t. to be clear: this is not the same thing as being animated about general gov. malfeasance, which is something that everyone is in the right to complain about, as the operation of the government isn’t a politics-specific issue in a lot of cases.
> don't think one can blame them, not voting can be a legit option for many reasons,
With the exception of people who have religious beliefs prohibiting voting, it’s saying that you don’t feel strongly enough about the differences between the two candidates to pick one. There are some people who can plead various hardships, but most people don’t have that excuse: it really did come down to thinking their life would be fine either way.
No, in the US electoral formula, not every vote for President will make a difference. Seven out of 50 states are close, so in 43 states it’s only a protest vote.
It still matters for the popular vote and all of the downstream candidates. People who stay home inevitably complain about local changes which also were on the ballot.
I strongly support national electoral vote reform but it’s important to remember that every election really does matter.
In a healthy democracy there are more ways than just voting to influence the countrys political affairs. Democracy has a price, voting every four years is not enough.
> We don’t elect Presidents based on getting a majority of votes of all US citizens, even if they can’t vote.
We don't even elect Presidents based on getting a majority (or even plurality) of all voters who actually vote, though the method actually used usually (but not always) also happens to elect the person who does that.
Nope. Sorry. From outside the US, there is just the US. We dont understand your "us vs them" tribalism nor the political divide. Every US citizen at this point is responsible for what's going on. Regardless of who you voted for. All of this is due to decades of complacency by the citizenry, it's not some sudden surprising coup.
I'm not saying the rest of the world is in the clear though. I think many countries are headed in a similar direction. Hopefully this is the wakeup call we all need to step up and arrest this slide into authoritarianism that's happening everywhere.
The recent elections in the U.S. went mostly anti-Trump. Is that the type of action you are calling for? Or did you want something more than running for office and voting?
Sorry, I don't know what elections you are talking about. The only one that I'm aware of was last year's election, which was very much the opposite of anti-trump.
And still Trump reigns without a care. But I am sure the next flipped seat in some mayor-election will bring him to his knees. Just one more lawsuit and we have him, just one more impeachment, pretty please.
You might be safe as long as the ad is on a website but stupid laws that shouldn't exist like the DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
> DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
Your issue there is with the government. No disagreement from me in this regard :)
The problem of course isn't the fact that government and laws exist. Most of us are happy that we have government and laws. The alternative is very ugly and doesn't lend itself to progress or prosperity.
The problem is that our government was allowed to be bribed/corrupted by corporate interests to pass bad laws designed to protect their profits and enforce control by taking freedom from consumers. The true villain here isn't government, government was just the tool they leveraged against us.
It's supposed to be our job to insist that our government work for the interests of "we the people" and we failed. The solution now is to get rid of corrupt politicians and the bad laws they passed and replace them with good ones that preserve our freedoms and don't put corporate interest ahead of the people's.
Sadly, our entire political system has been carefully refined over centuries to make it harder and harder to keep our government accountable to the people but hopefully it's not too late to change that situation within the democratic framework we've created.
The founding fathers knew that the system wasn't perfect and would need to be modified as things changed and flaws were discovered. Making it work by "doing it right this time" was the point. That's not a sign of a bad system, it's a good thing!
Of course, nothing about government itself prevents adults from engaging in consensual transactions, and only a tiny percentage of laws do. Sometimes those laws are stupid and sometimes they are good to have. The original plan (and I still think it was a good one) was that we would have the ability to remove the bad laws and add good ones as needed. That process mostly even works, but with corruption and bribery in our government going unchecked it usually just works for a small few and the rest of us get shafted as a result.
There were a lot of people trying to do the best they can and doing great things until Trump started fucking that up by firing them. Now there are 10s of thousands of people getting paid not to do what used to be their jobs. and many more not getting paid at all. Trump's attacks on competency are going to be felt for the rest of our lives.
I know. Someone people are so distrustful of the government that when they take it over they MAKE it untrustworthy to retrospectively prove that they were "right."
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