Most of those 62 lawsuits were thrown out on procedural grounds, such as lack of standing (which I think was a bad reason: if the losing candidate doesn't have standing to challenge an allegedly fraudulent voting system, then who does?). But that means they never reached the fact-finding stage, so citing those cases as meaning "there was no fraud" is not supported by the evidence. The cases thrown out on procedural grounds only mean "no conclusion was reached on whether the facts alleged in the complaint were true".
They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year".
If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project.
> They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year".
> If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome
See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1].
How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no?
Unless there are others that reached the fact-finding stage, that's 10 out of 62, meaning 52 were not decided on the merits. So "most" being decided on procedural grounds is still correct, IMHO. But thanks for the link, that's useful info.
As for your "How do you reconcile ..." question, I'll assume that the summaries of those ten cases are correct (I don't have time to read all ten of them for myself), and look through them one by one:
First one, Trump v. Biden (Wis. Dec. 14, 2020): three out of four claims tossed for not being filed in a timely manner. Fourth claim, "that voters wrongfully declared themselves indefinitely confined", ruled against Trump because "Trump challenged the status of all voters who claimed an indefinitely confined status, rather than individual voters". Not expert enough on relevant law to know what that means, but it looks to me like this one was "your claim is overbroad and you can't prove it" rather than "your claim is false", and I don't understand how that case relates to vote fraud. (Perhaps someone more informed about relevant law can explain this one to me).
Second one, Trump v. Wis. Elecs. Comm’n (E.D. Wis. Dec. 12, 2020): Trump claimed that "Wisconsin officials violated his rights under the Electors Clause because said officials allegedly issued guidance on state election statutes that deviated significantly from the requirements of Wisconsin’s election statutes." Court ruled that "interpretations of election administration rules do not fall under the meaning of “Manner” in the Electors Clause" and even if they did, the officials had "acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature". Again, I don't understand how this one specifically relates to vote fraud, it looks like an argument about whether laws were followed. Perhaps the laws being followed were highly relevant to vote fraud, but someone will have to explain that one to me as well.
Third, King v. Whitmer (E.D. Mich. Dec. 7, 2020): First part was a decision about whether the law was followed. "Second, the district court found the plaintiffs’ Equal Protection claim to be too speculative, finding no evidence that physical ballots were altered." This one is a case where the court said "you haven't presented evidence of fraud".
Fourth, Ward v. Jackson (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cnty. Dec. 4, 2020): This was a decision that the plaintiff showed insufficient evidence of fraud.
Fifth, Law v. Whitmer (Nev. Dist. Ct., Carson City Dec. 4, 2020): Plaintiffs failed to prove "that there had been either a voting device malfunction or the counting of illegal/improper votes in a manner sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the election’s outcome." Actual decision on the merits saying "not enough evidence of fraud".
Sixth, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar (M.D. Pa. Nov. 21, 2020): Court found that Trump lacked standing, but decided on the merits of his case. "The district court held that different counties implementing different types of notice-and-cure policies (many implementing none) did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because the clause does not require complete equality in all situations—“a classification resulting in ‘some inequality’ will be upheld unless it is based on an inherently suspect characteristic or ‘jeopardizes the exercise of a fundamental right.’”" Again, unless I'm misunderstanding the case, not a decision about "you didn't show evidence of fruad", but rather about whether election law was followed correctly. (If I understand right, "notice-and-cure" policies means a voter says "Hey, something's fishy here" and the election board has been put on notice and must "cure", resolve, the alleged problem. Which is relevant to fraud, but does not mean this was a decision where the judge said "you didn't provide enough evidence".)
Seventh, Wood v. Raffensperger (N.D. Ga. Nov. 20, 2020): first claim dismissed because "there was no disparate treatment among Georgia voters". Second claim dismissed because "Secretary Brad Raffensperger had not overridden or rewritten any state law". Third claim dismissed because "there is no individual constitutional right to observe the electoral process (i.e., monitor an audit or vote recount)". Again, maybe there's something I'm missing, but this doesn't look like a decision on whether there was evidence, or lack thereof, of fraud.
Eighth, Bower v. Ducey (D. Ariz. Dec. 9, 2020): Did address claims of fraud, saying plaintiffs had not presented evidence, merely speculation that fraud "could" have occurred or was statistically likely, which the court did not find to meet evidentiary standards. So this one was indeed a decision on the evidence.
Ninth, Costantino v. City of Detroit (3d Jud. Ct. Wayne Cnty. Nov. 13, 2020): Dismissed at preliminary injunction stage; "the court found that the plaintiffs’ claims of fraud would unlikely prevail on the merits" because "many plaintiffs failed to include crucial information in their allegations, such as locations of alleged misconduct, frequency of alleged misconduct, names of those involved in alleged misconduct, and so on." So in a rushed case filed a week or so after the election, plaintiffs didn't put together enough evidence, and the judge said "We don't need to proceed to fact-finding, I can tell your case is weak before I even look at the details".
Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cty.): "The court noted that the relief plaintiff sought—an additional hand count of ballots—was not legally available due to the suit’s numerous procedural defects. The court found that plaintiff did not adequately assess the validity of their claims before filing the suit, and thus failed to prove that the county had inappropriately applied the statute in question." Decided on procedural grounds, not actually evidentiary grounds.
So of the ten cases in that list, five (cases 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10) were not actually cases where the judge ruled on evidence of fraud, as far as I can tell. (Again, corrections on specifics welcome if I misunderstood one of these). The other five were decided on "you don't show convincing evidence of fraud", though I question whether #9 should count in that list because it was a preliminary injunction rather than reaching the fact-finding stage.
So that's five, or possibly four if you discount number nine but let's count it for the sake of argument, cases out of the 62 where the court went as far as ruling on the evidence.
And I have no trouble reconciling the idea of widespread fraud with five court cases where plaintiffs couldn't prove it. Because in many cases, the kind of fraud people are claiming happened (note that I have not actually investigated those claims) are things that would be extremely hard to prove afterwards, such as people walking up to an unguarded ballot dropoff location and stuffing 50 ballots into it. We know that happened in some places, because a few times the person was caught on video. But how do you prove, to a court's satisfaction, that that was someone committing fraud, as opposed to someone helpfully collecting ballots for friends and family so they didn't have to drive downtown?
No, if fraud is happening then the way to prevent it is by putting rules in place to make it hard, rather than court cases afterwards. It's very very hard to prove certain kinds of election fraud (such as alleged ballot-stuffing) were fraudulent. But it's a lot easier (not easy, mind you) to put rules in place, like requiring some form of official photo ID for verification, that make fraud harder to commit.
I'd argue that `new Date()` returning the current time is a design mistake, and it should at least have been something like `DateTime.now()`. (Especially because it's called a date but it actually returns a timestamp: the footgun potential is large). C#'s date API isn't the best design (otherwise [NodaTime](https://www.nodatime.org/) wouldn't have been necessary) but it at least got some things right: you don't get the current time by doing `new DateTime()`, you get it by referencing `DateTime.UtcNow` for UTC (almost always what you want), or `DateTime.Now` for local time (which is sometimes what you want, but you should always stop and think about whether you really want UTC).
And even with C#'s date API, I've seen errors. For example, a library that formatted datetime strings by merely writing them out and adding a "Z" to the end, assuming that they would always be receiving UTC datetimes — and elsewhere in the code, someone passing `DateTime.Now` to that library. (I'm guessing the dev who wrote that was in the UK and wrote it during winter time, otherwise he would have noticed that the timestamps were coming out wrong. If he was in the US they'd be 4-7 or 5-8 hours wrong depending on whether DST was in effect. But in the UK during winter, local time equals UTC and you might not notice that mistake).
This is another reason why Temporal's API making clear distinctions between the different types, and requiring you to call conversion functions to switch between them, is a good idea. That C# mistake would have been harder (not impossible, people can always misunderstand an API, but harder) if the library had been using Nodatime. And Temporal is based on the same design principles (not identical APIs, just simmilar principles) as Nodatime.
Converting between solar-based and lunar-based calendars is fraught with potential for ambiguity. The Buddhist calendar is a solar calendar, while the Hebrew calendar is lunar-based. So converting between dates in the Buddhist calendar and the international-standard (ISO 8601) calendar is typically easy (give or take some subtleties I won't go into for reasons of length). But converting between the Hebrew calendar and the ISO 8601 calendar, or the Buddhist calendar, involves figuring out when the new moon will be — and since the lunar cycle is 29 or 30 days, 12 lunar months add up to 354 days. So the lunar calendars, including the Hebrew calendar, typically add a "leap month" every two or three years in order to track the sidereal year.
All of which means there are many potential ambiguities in converting between calendars, and the combinatorial explosion possible means they probably only want you to convert between non-ISO8601 calendars and ISO8601. It would be too easy to get corner cases wrong otherwise and not notice, I'm sure. So to convert a date from Buddhist calender to Hebrew calender, you'd probably have to do Buddhist -> ISO8601, then ISO8601 -> Hebrew. (I haven't had time to test that for myself yet, I'll post a correction if that turns out to be wrong).
Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused.
The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.
While we're at it, let's think the rest of the way through, and consider the marginal effect that additional transportation cost has on price and therefore both the supply and demand side, shall we?
To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.
In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]
If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.
And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.
Nice, but maybe you need to travel more! The USA and Canada is not representative of the wider world. Also, demand elasticity in USA/Canada suburbs is again not representative.
So we're not proving or disproving anything by focusing on that narrow view. I can understand, if you are in it it seems universal, but as I like to reflect, You Are Not The Only User.
Also, I think demand elasticity is more relevant in the short term, I think the costs shake out eventually. Especially when you are talking about pipeline or major infrastructure level changes in capacity, that can have major regional pricing ramifications, shall we say extreme. I think I need not elaborate, given current events in the Persian Gulf.
You may not have learned much about them, or thought through the potential costs of a pipeline being built through your property. Some of those 'eco-warrior types' are not protesting a pipeline, they are protesting the potential irreversable damages to their communities if a neglected or mismanaged pipeline springs a leak (and many, many have), or catches fire, or explodes. Many of them have already seen more than one result of cavalier energy company facilities that have ruined community water and food supplies. What will happen to their community if the pipeline doesn't go in? NOTHING.
The problem that the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were protesting was not the pipelines in and of themselves, it was the running them through their reservation, and that many pipelines have had leaks, 23 from the Keystone pipeline alone.
They didn't want an ecological disaster in their back yard, they didn't want their religious sites disturbed, and they didn't want there to be a risk that their water ends up contaminated with oil, and the pipeline company didn't want to pay the cost to navigate around the reservation.
So of course the government stepped in and forced the protesters to accept the pipeline and now idiots that don't understand the reasoning behind the protest mock them after the fact.
Are you sure this isn't a strawman? The recent Dakota pipeline protests for example were very clearly about water safety and building through native burial grounds and other historic native sites. Pretty much every pipeline protest I can think of is more concerned with environmental danger of spills, not reducing oil. And a catastrophic pipeline spill can be much worse than isolated truck spills, though I'd love to know more about research on that front.
There is a clear difference between "I don't want to look at the pipeline" and "pipelines have an established track record of cutting corners and avoiding regulation wherever possible which leads to leaks and spills, leaks and spills cause irreparable damage to the environment including the environment in the middle of our community, and the company is attempting to exploit our already historically exploited community"
The term eco warrior, in the UK at least, long predates social justice warrior. As the peer reply says, it's long been applied to members of Greenpeace and I think I first heard the term in the late 80s or 90s. As they said, maybe it was because of their ship Rainbow Warrior which was sunk by the French government in 1985 and prompted Greenpeace to continue the name with future boats.
I don't think it particularly had a negative connotation until recently though, to me at least it was always just someone who had strong opinions about protecting the environment, and Greenpeace always had quite a lot of support from the general population and they weren't actively disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens in the way Just Stop Oil do for instance.
I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.
Article says room and board, plus cost of transportation, are covered. So that $13/hr goes quite a bit further than it would if a chunk of it was going towards paying for food and rent. (And if you were paying for the cost of the plane flight, then nobody would take the job). Can't calculate the equivalent compensation without knowing where the author lives normally, but it might (VERY rough guess) be the equivalent of $20 to $25 per hour.
Can probably ignore rent savings. In the article the author says she missed her husband, kids, and dog so she still had some of the same costs going on back home.
And Wikipedia says she earned a Ph.D. in 2004 and lives in NYC [1]
The "compose" key on Linux is one of my favorite things about the Linux keyboard system. You can pick which key is your "compose" key, choosing from about a dozen options. Then just as you describe, you type it in sequence (though on Linux, compose then c then s produces š, because compose then c is the shorthand for the "caron" diacritic: compose, c, g is ǧ, compose, c, h is ȟ, and so on).
Because most websites won't have two separate fields for "ZIP code" and "postal code". Even if they knew that ZIP Code is a trademark (I didn't until you mentioned it), they would (wisely) know that putting in two fields would just confuse most people. So they put in one field. Many sites label it as "ZIP code / postal code", but some just label it as "ZIP code". But the intent is clear: put in the multi-digit string that identifies your address, whether your country calls it a ZIP code or a postal code.
I've seen so many LLM-generated articles by this point that obviously had no human editing done beforehand — just prompt and slap it onto the Web — that it makes me wonder every time. If I read this article, will I actually learn only truth? Or are there some key parts of this article that are actually false because the LLM hallucinated them, and the human involved didn't bother to double-check the article before publishing it?
If someone was just using the LLM for style, that's fine. But if they were using it for content, I just can't trust that it's accurate. And the time cost for me to read the article just isn't worth it if there's a chance it's wrong in important ways, so when I see obvious signs of LLM use, I just skip and move on.
Now, if someone acknowledged their LLM use up front and said "only used for style, facts have been verified by a human" or whatever, then I'd have enough confidence in the article to spend the time to read it. But unacknowledged LLM use? Too great a risk of uncorrected hallucinations, in my experience, so I'll skip it.
"Just use Postgres" (which defaults to UTF-8 encoding unless specifically configured to use something else) is looking like better and better advice every day.
Doesn't help those tied to legacy systems that would require a huge, expensive effort to upgrade, though. Sorry, folks. There's a better system, you know it's a better system, and you can't use it because switching is too expensive? I've been there (not databases, in my case) and it truly sucks.
That's the kind of thing that people like to hand out to people walking by. Many people, if handed a booklet they didn't actually want to read, will just toss it on the ground.
As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.
If you choose to accept a book because you are too uncomfortable to say the word "no" then you should accept that it is your responsibility to dispose of the book appropriately.
Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
Best thing, if you accepted the book but realize within a few steps (maybe immediately) that you didn't actually want it, would be to walk back to the person handing it out and say "Changed my mind, don't actually want it, why don't you give it to someone else?" I know some people who hand out religious tracts or other such materials, and every one of them that I know personally would accept the item back with good grace. They'd rather give it to someone who will actually read it.
And if they're the kind of person who won't take it back with good grace? Place it on the ground right next to them, and walk away. Make it their responsibility to deal with it. (If you don't want to go out of your way to find a trash can: some public spaces make them easy to find, but others not so much).
I didn’t say that I chose to accept the book and then threw it away. I said that I said no and the other person proceeded to drag out the interaction in a way that made everyone there uncomfortable.
reply