The electronic ID is a great idea for everything except for voting.
I can easily go to someone's place, make sure he votes for my candidate and give him 10$. A lot of people with low interest in politics would sell their vote, I suppose.
Polling booths are still safer than all other options (mail voting, electronic voting, etc...)
And then after taking your money I can vote again as many times as I want for someone I actually like. Only the last vote counts. And I think that next elections it will be possible to override your electronic vote on paper at the polling stations.
1. the vote buyer can lock the eID in the vault until the end of the elections
2. the vote seller can be paid only after the end of the elections, given s/he didn't voted on paper (it it all possible to authenticate wuthout eID on the voting station).
In person voting at the voting booth is without any doubt more secure. For something so important like voting I would only use the most secure option.
I live in a country with only voting at the voting booth and I am perfectly happy with it!
In addition to this, the fact that you are not aware of voting fraud does not mean it does not happen. That's why it's important to care about potential voting fraud.
Unfortunately, voting fraud occurs even with in-person voting at the voting booths. Here election observer committees are made up of representatives of the various parties, and there are reports of the deals that split the votes of people who did not show up at the voting booth.
There was a proposal to install cameras on the voting booths, but it was rejected by the high court.
Surprisingly e-voting can solve these low-tech corruption problems, but it introduces a much larger attack surface.
There are a couple of services I would love to use, but I have a strict no-subscription policy. It just gives me bad vibes, I would rather pay 24 months upfront and have the full application/service.
Of course this does not matter, because the MBAs in charge showed in a PowerPoint presentation that the subscription model will squeeze 11.1% more money for customers, mostly from people who forget to unsubscribe.
> The new plan has some limitations. While Germany’s 9-euro ($9) passes cover all public transit except faster train services, Spain will restrict itself to regional and suburban rail services, which are not as extensive as they are in Germany. While it might be technically possible to travel across Spain using only regional trains, it would not necessarily be easy because the slower network is quite patchy.
To be honest the German situation is not so different from the Spanish one.
Going from Munich to Berlin with the 9-euro ticket requires from 3 to 6 changes, and from 10 to 15 hours.
I think it is expected to be somewhat complex, considering you're using regional trains only. These trains serve a different purpose compared to national lines.
I would be incapable of finding an easy regional journey between major cities in the countries I can think of.
The vast majority of human activities have a carbon footprint.
I would rather give up Facebook and all other social (which in my opinion add no value to society) rather than cryptocurrencies (which are instrumental to the right of privately transacting online, which I deem very important).
This obsession over the carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is ideological and, ultimately, wrong.
Not immediately, no, but there's no forward secrecy, so unless users take extensive steps to obfuscate their activities, as soon as they make one transaction with a counterparty who knows who they are (such as an exchange with KYC) they are at risk of de-anonymisation.
The obsession over the carbon footprint is that it is pure waste (like sticking a gigantic space heater in the middle of nowhere and running it 24/7)
It has an efficiency of approx 0%.
And as it gets more successful it gets less efficient and wastes more energy.
And there is no incentive to reduce that energy usage (Facebook would save money if they could make their algorithms more green, for example so they may pay people to look into that).
Bitcoin has to pollute, for the security of the network.
Also there is the manufacture of disposable single purpose hardware for the mining of bitcoin and it’s environmental impact.
Must be the most tone deaf article I read in a while. Lots of people were starving in Russia in the ‘90s, for sure malnourished or dead people emit less carbon.
Still very rough years for Russia. Still as tone deaf as observing that since grandma has suddenly died the ecological footprint of the family greatly improved.
> Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown.
"Excuses"? If you know that your company shuts down one year from now, why would you be ordering spare parts for five years into the future? Especially if you've known that date for twenty years like Germans did?
Sure, sure, but I find difficult to believe that an industrial superpower such as Germany can't find a solution in a couple of months.
The the usual politicians' way of speaking. If there was the political will of having the nuclear power plants works, they would go and find the spare parts in a second. There's no political will (thank you Greens!) so they make up excuses.
Germany is an industrial superpower without military industrial complex and command vertical, meaning that the government is not set up to do such things quickly (in fact, I don’t think even China would be able to move that fast).
To be honest I am pretty fine with it. For a few reasons:
1) Abortion (in my opinion) should not be a constitutional right. I can't name a country that has abortion as a constitutional right. More generally: the constitution should care about super-general, universally-agreed values, let's leave everything else to the legislative branch!
2) Roe v. Wade was a bad decision. Before you downvote me, read the 14th Amendment: how the judges could infer from it at the time a right to abortion is beyond me! I can squint my eyes a lot, but the right is simply not there!
Edit: downvoters, go read the 14th Amendment, and tell me if you can honestly read a right to abortion in there.
Indeed, even though I generally support guns rights, I think they should be regulated by state law.
However, notice the difference: the 2nd Amendment is extremely clear in granting the right to bear arms, whereas the 14th Amendment needs to be twisted in an almost comical way to get out of it a right to abortion.
> What I witnessed was no less than a 45 minute diatribe on the dangers of abortion, casting various aspersions (ad hominem) on any political leader not on board with new political agenda of the Catholic Church.
A typical Catholic Mass lasts less than one hour. Most of the Mass follows a fixed, prescribed set of prayers and readings, that have nothing to do with politics. In the middle there's a sermon, that usually lasts about 15 minutes, that might include references to news or to politics.
Either you ended up at a very atypical mass, and by very atypical I'd say borderline heretic, or you don't remember well.
> with new political agenda of the Catholic Church.
New? Like it or not, the position of the Catholic Church on abortion has been extraordinarily consistent through the centuries.
Yeah, I'm not Catholic, but I go to services in all three major branches (Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic) and I am a Christian. Granted, I've only been to one service in the USA in recent years, but even still, Canada is not so different and I've not even heard abortion mentioned once nor long diatribes on any specific political issue other than vague warnings against government manipulated media.
But this isn't what gets mentioned in Hacker News comments. And it certainly isn't what is upvoted. The internet boosts grievances and fourth sigma event reporting.
> New? Like it or not, the position of the Catholic Church on abortion has been extraordinarily consistent through the centuries.
That's not even remotely true!
For the vast majority of the history of the Catholic Church early term abortion was acceptable. It was only the 1588 that it was outlawed, and that didn't last long, only a few years. Another ban was instituted in 1869.
At the timescale of the Catholic Church, the current extremist position on abortions is extremely recent. Far less established as precedent than say Roe was.
150 years out of 2000 is not consistent. If you value consistency, then ignore the current ruling as its relatively fresh and just carry on with abortion.
Not sure why you’re downvoted, my wife is catholic and you’re right on every point. I would even go further and say deviating from the standard ritual of catholic mass is probably a big no-no in the church and could land a priest in hot water.
As I read it, yes. The risk of being killed by an intruder is practically nil, while the more considerable risk of being shot by someone else in the household just requires the presence of a gun in the house.
> Those numbers suggest the risk rises 50%, but Studdert said it was actually higher: in a separate calculation designed to better account for where people live and other factors, the researchers estimated the risk was more than twice as high.
