A story that seems to be begging for a punch line, from John McCormick at Bloomberg Politics:
With Iowa’s first-in-the-nation franchise on the line, Republican and Democratic leaders are showcasing new technology they say will ensure timely and accurate results from their February 2016 presidential nominating caucuses.
That would be a major improvement from 2012, when the results on the Republican side became mired in confusion.
As part of a partnership with Microsoft, the 2016 outcome will be delivered via a “mobile-enabled, cloud-based platform that will allow for accurate, efficient and secure reporting on caucus night,” the Iowa Democratic and Republican parties said in a joint statement ahead of an afternoon news conference…
In addition to mobile reporting applications, each party will have a separate results verification app that will allow headquarters staff to monitor incoming results. Anomalies and potential problem areas will be automatically highlighted, and party officials will be able to quickly connect with precinct chairs if issues arise…
My emphases. This is “an issue” because in 2012, Iowa’s GOP votes were awarded to the Establishment Candidate (Romney) instead of the Deserving Insurgent (Santorum). Apart from the obvious tech jokes (Orca!), I’m not seeing how giving more power to the party heads from behind The Cloud is going to make the rebels happier. Also, I would calculate the odds of some RandPaul-supporting disruptor announcing, in the heat of the evening, that he’s hacked the program TO EXPOSE THE LIES WAKE UP SHEEPLE as… pretty darn good.
***********
Apart from wondering why people always assume the cure for a one-time FUBAR is to add more chances to FU, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
catclub
An open thread?
How about this. why not a bigger deal?
https://news.vice.com/article/airstrike-hits-islamic-state-car-bomb-factory-in-iraq
RaflW
Tweet of the day!
I love it. Even a tribble-headed grifter can see that the Kraut is 100% wrong-o.
Germy Shoemangler
from the nytimes:
catclub
Fast, cheap, good. Pick two.
JustRuss
Let’s see…Microsoft, mobile, and the cloud….all 3 are catnip for gremlins. This should be fun.
Pogonip
This is National Doughnut Day. Until 5 minutes ago, I didn’t know there was such a thing.
catclub
@Germy Shoemangler: She seems to have struck a nerve. Always good to set the terms of battle.
Botsplainer
Useless tech bullshit statements like this makes me want to go back to ribbon typewriters, shorthand dictation, mimeographs (mmmmm, that smell), carbon paper, wire services and pulse telephony, just so I can say “see, it really wasn’t all that inefficient. Just minor delays”.
RaflW
@Germy Shoemangler: Christie as one of the GOP presidential hopefuls, NYT?
Ha-ha.
Germy Shoemangler
@JustRuss: Republican gremlins.
Germy Shoemangler
@Botsplainer:
I saw these rather alarming comments on another blog:
Few things amuse me as much as the idea that ANYTHING is safe “in the cloud”. Techies are so unbelievably naive, they’ll just fall for anything so long as it’s wrapped in a shiny package. Like puppies do.
Well, those of us who’ve done security work tend not to trust even our BBQ pics to “the cloud”… lest that puppy piss on our legs.
Amir Khalid
@Germy Shoemangler:
It sounds like she scored a hit, a palpable hit.
dmsilev
@Germy Shoemangler:
Um, yeah, that’s exactly what she did. What’s the problem again?
Germy Shoemangler
@Amir Khalid: Agreed. I almost heard the old Star Trek sound effect, when Spock or Chekov would tell Kirk “A direct hit!”
Amir Khalid
@Botsplainer:
Useless tech bullshit statements were the stuff of my working days as a journo. That brings back memories, that does …
Mike J
There’s no such thing as the cloud, just other people’s computers.
Mike in NC
@RaflW: The Donald is like a stopped clock.
mdblanche
Obligatory link.
Amir Khalid
@RaflW:
Christie is hoping, even if most sane people don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in Hell.
Tree With Water
Bring that same technology to bear on MLB All Star voting and I’m all ears.
Turgidson
@RaflW:
He still has solid support in the Morning Jo(k)e green room. That’s his springboard to victorah!
piratedan
well I hope that she’s given them enough rope to hang themselves with, lord knows they didn’t require as much ID to buy the guns to shoot themselves with…
mdblanche
I see what yuo did there.
Kay
@Germy Shoemangler:
Nice from a former US attorney, huh? His “sense” is she wants to commit a felony.
What a pandering hack.
Also someone should tell Scott Walker that we don’t rely on poll numbers to tell us whether people can vote or not.
The GOP governors are really modeling good government, I must say. Yes, sir.
Germy Shoemangler
@Mike in NC:
Yes, irritating and useless.
catclub
The least trustworthy, most compromised, actors in the entire charade.
HelpThe99ers
“It looks like you’re trying to count caucus ballots. Would you like some help with that?”
“ACORN! Voter fraud! Benghazi!”
Botsplainer
@Mike J:
…through which they root, looking for some nuggets of sellable information while laughing at people’s dick pics, duckfaces, naked selfies and tittay and ass shots.
catclub
Pierce’s coverage mentioned that she name checked Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida 2000 as examples.
None by accident.
Palpable hit indeed.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Remember that “the cloud” means “somebody else’s servers”, meaning your data is in the hands of somebody else’s overworked and undertrained IT monkeys.
Go to Ars Technica and do a search for articles with the search term “cloud+hack+vulnerability”. Weep quietly.
NotMax
What do clouds do?
Release their contents indiscriminately
It’s a hard rain gonna fall.
catclub
@Botsplainer: IF I were to store to the cloud something personal/valuable. I would encrypt it with something uncommon first. maybe rot13 applied twice.
Tenar Darell
Mad-Max and Pho Pasteur, Special Olympics, Sagamore Beach are all on tap. Maybe a beer too. It’s the great Eastern Massachusetts public transport and highway weekend!
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, sure, go to Microsoft for a secure product. The Anonymous folks are drooling at the possibilities. “Put it on the cloud!” That is, on a server you have no fucking control over. Makes a lot of sense.
“The cloud” is pure marketing asshat lingo. No one who has the slightest fucking clue about it has any illusions about what it means, but beancounting suits, well, they’re twits who deserve to be burned.
Fucking idiots.
Villago Delenda Est
@Germy Shoemangler: Also needs to be removed from the wall and smashed to tiny bits with a sledgehammer.
NotMax
@Botsplainer
That would be dittos, not mimeos.
Kay
@dmsilev:
He’s wrong:
http://www.airsafe.com/issues/security/identification.htm
mai naem mobile
Gawd, I wish Rick Perry would go on Jon.Stewart or Stephen Colbert or,hell, even Jimmy Fallon and they dare him or somehow manage to get him to take off the glasses and put them on and exclaim ” Well, there’s no correction here! You’re just wearing them to look intelligent!”
Villago Delenda Est
@Turgidson: The Morning Jo(k)e Green Room would be a very good place for a meteor to strike.
Redshift
@RaflW:
Calling them GOP hopelesses would be more honest, but unfortunately it’s not possible to be honest without looking like you’re taking sides. Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Villago Delenda Est
@mai naem mobile: “And failing miserably, I might add. The glasses, they do nothing!”
Valdivia
@Germy Shoemangler: of course, the liberal nytimes at work.
I really really loathe political writing of this kind. Who cares about the issue, it’s a fight! And he relishes it! And how cool is that we get to report it? ugh.
But as many of you note, she really hit them where it hurts, nice, even if the media mangle it in the reporting.
Also. Too. My turn with the family summer cold, just in time for teaching on Monday. Yay, me.
Major Major Major Major
Use paper and wait a day. Use paper and wait a day. Use paper and wait a day.
There is no existing computer system secure enough to handle voting. None.
Iowa Old Lady
I’d just like to say that Iowa’s R and D caucuses are run by two different groups of people, and one of them is far better at it than the other. Also, one typically predicts the party’s nominee and the other doesn’t.
Germy Shoemangler
@Major Major Major Major: Exactly.
I don’t know much about the Karl Rove incident in 2004; is it true his team performed some monkey business? And then tried again in 2012, this time unsuccessfully?
trollhattan
China and Russia still share a few things in common.
Germy Shoemangler
Headline:
Massive data breach could affect every federal agency
WASHINGTON — China-based hackers are suspected once again of breaking into U.S. government computer networks, and the entire federal workforce could be at risk this time.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management — the human resources department for the federal government — and the Interior Department had been compromised.
gogol's wife
I’m all in for Hillary. Let’s go.
Today I received my TCM Now Playing guide for July, which is Shirley Temple Month! They’ll be showing both Wee Willie Winkie (dir. John Ford, with a fantastic Victor McLaglen) and Now and Forever (dir. Henry Hathaway, with Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard), neither of which they’ve ever shown before. And there’ll be one whole day of 1930s Stanwyck movies.
Redshift
@Germy Shoemangler:
Other than the fact that terrorists are real and in-person voter fraud is imaginary, yes, they’re exactly the same. Oh, and voting is fundamental to democracy, whereas air travel is a convenience. And we ask for ID for air travel for reasons of physical security, and ID for voting for reasons of… um… I’m sure it will come to me. Oops.
I’d remark on this being one area where “keep the government off people’s backs” conservatives are happy to make government more intrusive in the lives of law-abiding people voting in order to address a problem where they can’t produce any evidence of its existence, but even leaving aside the naked attempt at voter suppression, it’s patently obvious that when they say they want to keep the government off “people’s” backs, the only “people” they mean are corporations.
gogol's wife
@mai naem mobile:
Like Marilyn Monroe in How To Marry a Millionaire — except wait, she actually needed them.
mike with a mic
As one of those six figure income systems administrators that largely deals in virtualization and cloud projects… Microsoft might be the best choice.
There are two real players in cloud platforms out there, at all levels not just the fortune 500 and CIA data centers. Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS. They are used by just about every major player out there and are the only ones really hardened enough for certain work, plus they pack all the federal certifications and regional isolation items to get FEDRAMP or NSA-FIST certified.
Like it or not, for cloud Azure and AWS are the only real game out there. Most top flight companies have both! Just like most top flight companies run Windows Linux and Unix on their backend!
Kay
We actually reviewed this information just last year for Rick Perry:
Maybe Clinton can tutor the GOP governors and bring them up to speed.
Major Major Major Major
@catclub: no no you have to do it four times for it to really be effective.
Germy Shoemangler
@gogol’s wife: “Kiss and Tell” from 1945 is a funny and often-overlooked Shirley Temple film. A nice script and some good performances.
Major Major Major Major
@Germy Shoemangler: Nope, we lost Ohio to voter caging. Diebold just incidentally happened to make shitty machines. Even Kos had to ban users spouting that particular conspiracy.
It certainly would have been possible, though.
CONGRATULATIONS!
They could seriously do it faster and more accurately using paper and pencil. But they won’t. Always gotta cut a big corp in on the grift.
Germy Shoemangler
@Major Major Major Major: I had my doubts about the story; thanks for the clarification.
Valdivia
@Kay: I think the reporters who follow these politicians around could also use some training, since they seem to report each of these lines (about flying, sudafed and voter fraud) as if they were the truth. I know, I know, I am always beating that drum, drives me batty.
Bill Arnold
@Villago Delenda Est:
“The cloud”, i am pretty sure, has its roots in some Microsoft Powerpoint clip art first seen in the 1990s. People doing diagrams would use a cloud icon (maybe with thunderbolts?) to represent “the internet”.
(There are real cloud services, with APIs etc, used by developers.)
Kay
@Valdivia:
It’s an audition, though, for GOP base voters. Which candidate will stand up to Hillary Clinton?
I figure one or the other will go too far and blow it sooner rather than later.
I’m intrigued that Jeb Bush declined comment. He probably wants to stay as far away from his role in his brother’s contested election as he possibly can, because that of course involved purging voter rolls.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Germy Shoemangler: Oh yes, she hit a nerve and those guys are pissed. Please continue, Madam Secretary.
mike with a mic
@Villago Delenda Est:
Microsoft is more secure than most as a platform. Unless you are running hardended linux Microsoft is the best. And that’s local. When it comes to the cloud Azure and AWS are by far the best.
SiubhanDuinne
@mdblanche:
I know, rihgt?
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
My name for the Ditto smell was “cold purple.”
Major Major Major Major
@mike with a mic: still the best of your bad options for security. The attempted RSA backdoor, Heartbleed, who knows what other time bombs are floating around in the open source security/cloud suite–sure.
But no computer is secure enough for voting. The only risks with paper are corruption and rubber-hose cryptanalysis; you can add every other risk that computers hold to that list.
mike with a mic
@Bill Arnold:
That’s not Microsoft, that stuff even goes to the IEEE and bigger players. In IT Engineering and Architect CAD draws the internet has always been that, it’s before Microsoft. The lightning bolt represents hostile area (ie, not secure connection between secure partners). The “cloud” has always been secure external resources that weren’t location specific.
Anyways, a lot of shit exists there now. For example Netflix exists in the Amazon AWS cloud so they can spin up and spin down VMs and instances through scripts and as needed. As long as you geolocate set types of data in set areas, you never half to tell people just how much is in the cloud.
Everything is hybrid now. On site/colo/mirror/cloud is common.
Chris
@Germy Shoemangler:
If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
msilaneous
@mai naem mobile: I keep expecting to see him scratching his eye through the “lens.”
Valdivia
@Kay: I think Hillary was super smart to talk about this. Both because it is excellent policy and a real crisis, but also, a great political play. Precisely because these clowns are auditioning for the GOP base the logic is more and more outrageous statements to appeal to them and, as you say, soon someone will say something that they can’t really walk back. The more Hillary hammers at this the more they will need to address it, very well played.
I still dream of a media that report something like voting rights as a policy issue and not as one side says this, the other says this other thing, who knows who is right.
ETA @Kay: the problem too is that they have thought about it only in terms of their talking points about voter fraud and the wonders of voter id. Never deep enough to get to the logic of it, like you explain.
MomSense
My son came home with a letter from school. Next week they will watch a video about early puberty. The boys and girls will watch in separate rooms. Our children will bring home booklets and we are to have at least one conversation about the booklet and sign a form saying we did.
Well alrighty then.
PurpleGirl
Resting tonight after doing some shopping. Tomorrow having coffee with a friend to remember a common friend who died last year. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of Brenda’s passing and I felt it should be marked in some way. (Brenda was my typing client for close to 20 years; she preferred to write on legal pads in pencil or pen and I produced the typescript of her plays, short stories and a couple of novels.)
I’m also going to a bead work exhibition and sale at FIT sponsored by the Bead Society of Greater New York. I was a member for years and even had pieces on show in years past. Planning on maybe getting some special beads depending on which vendors are there.
Kay
@Valdivia:
Repeating the correction over and over works. Eventually.
I always love the “board an airplane” line myself, because it’s so absolutely fucking clueless. Poor people don’t board airplanes. Federal judges do, but poor people don’t. Where does Rick Perry imagine people who make 8k or 15k a year are going? On vacation? The entire series of lawsuits in Texas was about how poor people couldn’t travel 60 miles to get ID, especially without a driver’s license.
I can tell conservative governors have given this issue a lot of thought.
NotMax
FYI:
mike with a mic
@Major Major Major Major:
I know. I’m an ex-Navy electronics/signals type with a career in DOD and systems administration. Security is a huge portion of what I do. The rule is something is secure if it isn’t networked. Nothing is secure if someone has physical access. These are assumed even if you implement the entire NSA/DOD/FIST lock down. Things happen, other software installs.
But for cloud based stuff, you really cannot do better than Azure and AWS. These are the big players that are attacked all day everyday and the failures that happen are always people using their product and then fucking up the security on their VMs. I don’t think most people understand the complexity of dealing with hundreds of VMs running multiple operating systems and the issues involved.
It’s not that Microsoft (cloud) Azure is bad. It’s the second best in the game behind AWS or best depending on what features you want, in some cases it is the best. It’s that electronic platforms inherently have some security problems, which are usually compounded by idiots after the fact.
Gimlet
@Kay:
There are always 8 or 10 people in line ahead of me using their SNAP card to buy tickets and fly.
Gex
The whole thing reads like some consultant sold them a big fat worthless piece of crapware using a buzzword bingo card.
Gimlet
@Gex:
There’s been a bit of a lull since the IT team set up ACA enrollment for Obama.
Major Major Major Major
@mike with a mic: I wasn’t trying to deny your expertise or anything. You’re right about MS vs AWS as far as I know.
This just isn’t a thing for computers. And I’m a big computer booster, I work in AI.
Brachiator
@MomSense:
For goodness sake, why? Has there been a local outbreak (or would that be an infestation)?
shell
Because voting is NOT, I repeat NOT the same as boarding a plane, entering a government building or blah, blah, blah.
When will someone ask these morons the obvious question ‘Why are you trying to make it harder for people to vote?’
Germy Shoemangler
Open thread:
Here Comes The Sun – the lost guitar solo. George Martin, his son Giles, and Dhani Harrison hear a guitar part that was never used in the final mix.
Dhani looks and sounds just like his dad. He’s hearing this guitar solo for the first time.
It’s sad that George Martin has suffered hearing loss. He had the finest ears in the business.
Kay
@Gimlet:
Hah! Justices on the US Supreme Court believe poor people are traveling by air too. I’m baffled by it as a justification. What does one thing have to do with the other? Why are we even talking about boarding airplanes?
https://www.ustravel.org/news/press-kit/travel-facts-and-statistics
Southern Beale
Where’s Richard Mayhew when you need him? I don’t understand “consumer-based lab testing.” Someone please explain this to me.
Southern Beale
@shell:
“Oh we’re just trying to root out all of the voter fraud,” they’ll say, failing to mention that what little there is comes from Republicans.
jl
Nothing can go wrong. If it works, we can make fun of the GOP results that much sooner, if it does not, then there is so much more to make fun of.
On the Dem side, will the Iowa caucus make any difference? Will any of the candidates going to drop out if there is confusion for a few days?
But if the big party geniuses are foolish enough to keep no paper trail, then a problem may mean the result will always be in doubt, or if a data catastrophe, then the Iowa caucus will collapse into nothing. And if you have paper records anyway, why not just take a day or two to count them?
The only real contribution of the Iowa caucus has been to produce ridicule bait pics of crazy and obnoxious GOP primary candidates anyway. Why doesn’t Iowa just have a primary election?
Chris
@Valdivia:
Totally this. We don’t go on the offensive against Republicans nearly enough, and we need to. And this has the advantage of being true.
Major Major Major Major
@Southern Beale: my guess would be that it’s about device-based detection, like a quickie scan on a mole (which we already have) rather than a visit to the dermatologist. We have at home HIV testing these days too. These are good things.
Especially if you apply the Bayesian thought process, which this comment is too small to contain.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: caucuses have a role to play. It’s all about competing theories of democracy. Colorado has both a caucus and a primary actually iirc.
Germy Shoemangler
@Southern Beale: There’s a market for home-marijuana tests. Parents buy them and check their kids. It’s a big industry, from what I’ve read.
Smiling Mortician
@shell:
Pretty sure Hillary just did that.
Eric S.
@catclub: my company always doubles down on cheap. In the end they never get it.
different-church-lady
It will be the most buzz-wordy primary EVAH! “Disruptive,” even!
Kay
@shell:
The next Voting Rights Act is going to be 1000 pages long. Not THIS, or THIS, or THIS OTHER bullshit you’re going to try to get past us…
They’re not getting it. Two constitutional amendments and a federal law. I don’t know what it wil take.
different-church-lady
@Pogonip: I’m holding out for International Doughnut Year.
gogol's wife
@Germy Shoemangler:
I actually have never seen that one. I’m less of an expert on grown-up Shirley.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: “A well enabled citizenry, being necessary to the existence of a free state, the right of the people to vote, shall not be infringed.”
Nice and short. Let’s see them say how it’s technically different.
shell
@Smiling Mortician: Yes, but I mean face-to-face. Like on one of the Sunday morning political shows….oh, who am I kidding?
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
How is the Donald like a stopped clock? A stopped clock is right twice a day, even if only for a split second. That’s not an honor the Donald can claim.
jl
Both parties are in on this deal, so if the caucus vote count goes south, will be interesting to watch how corporate media reports it for each party.
“Democrats in Disarray. More Problems for Hillary?”
“GOP Bravely Forges Ahead after Unexpected Iowa Vote Setback. More Problems for Hillary?”
joel hanes
I agree with other technically-adept people that the idea that this technology makes the results secure and trustworthy is risible. No computer is secure enough for voting.
OTOH, these are cacuses :
1. Who the hell cares if someone steals the keys to Republican Klown Kar (this year, anyway) ?
2. The IA Dem caucus process is messy and time-consuming, but it’s my understanding that there’s no ambiguity about the outcome — at least from the standpoint of the participants. I think I understand that every participant an Iowa City will know for sure who won – the ballots not only aren’t secret, they’re not even ballots.
On the other hand (I have three!), we must never let them use this technology for voting or vote tabulation in an actual election.
danielx
Sometimes it’s just not worth reading your feeds when you get home from work.
Because it’s Texas, so of course they do.
Words fail.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
You and conservatives do not have the same definition of people. You and I mean humans that live here, they mean old, white, religious (and pretty narrowly defined at that) male, property owners.
Germy Shoemangler
@danielx:
Charlton Heston?
MomSense
@Brachiator:
I guess it’s a part of the 5th grade curriculum or something. I’m surprised they still divide the boys and girls. The video is called “Always Changing”. It sounds really wishy washy. The other night edfoldman posted a story about a teacher who took his students to a sex shop. That may not be such a crazy idea.
Valdivia
@Chris: Absolutely. More of this please, Hillary.
trollhattan
@danielx:
Isn’t Moses a little Jewey to be a Texas Founding Father(TM)?
srv
Thank god for real americans:
jl
@joel hanes: Thanks. Your comment prompted me to read up on the Iowa caucus. I was misinformed about Iowa. I thought both parties used the same process there. The Iowa Dem caucus sound like the Nevada Dem caucus. If the wiki’s correct and I understand it right, the cloud whizzbang gizmo is pointless. Each caucus precinct decides on a group of delegates right there at the meeting. Everything is public, and some people leave the meeting publicly designated as delegates for each candidate.
Why did the Democratic Party even bother with this plan?
danielx
@trollhattan:
Don’t bother Texas with details like that.
jl
@MomSense: We had separate films and parental permission slips for our Middle School puberty films too. They were so bogus and dumb that, at least the boys, started laughing, which lead to stern reprimands, that lead to nothing. Afterwards we no longer innocent boys and girls swapped gossip on how pointless the films were.
trollhattan
@srv:
Suddenly it’s 1975 again in “Bobby’s” world.
jl
@danielx: I did hear a news report that she light on how Texas manages such cheap and efficient government: don’t carry any insurance at all. A lot of city and county departments in flood areas are up a financial creek without a paddle because they carried no property and casualty insurance, at all. Not a penny’s worth. Totally self insured.
I hope Uncle Sugar bails them out, or quite a few places will have no parks and rec, or money to repair K12 schools.
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
It’s nice that we’re on offense, because Clinton’s speech went back to the civic-minded notion of voting that we used to have- from 1965 with the VRA to to 2000 – I think the Bush contested election was a turning point and really started the current Voting Wars. It used to be almost universally accepted that voting was a good thing to do and should be encouraged, rather than treating (certain) voters like presumptive felons and talking about security all the time.
Clinton was talking about expanding access, which was the “good government” position prior to this sort of nasty, narrow, bitter focus on “fraud”.
Howard Beale IV
@Germy Shoemangler: So here we have one branch of the government (FBI) demanding that industry provide a golden key that allows them to snnop an any encrypted message.
And here we have another arm of the government (NSA) who is charged with protecting vital government systems from intrusion (and failed miserably for 4 million current and former Federal workers.)
And lat week the head of the Federal Election commission said that with the budget they have been allocated has all but admitted there is no way they can gaurantee the integrity of the upcoming 2016 General Election-and both parties want to outsource this most critical and sacred function to a coorporation who wants to bring in thousands of workers on H1-B visas to displace more expensive US workers?
Time to go back to paper ballots. 2000 and 2004 were stolen elections and the reason why 2008 was won was because Walnuts made an unbelievably stupid VP selection.
Gaah.
jl
@srv:
‘ “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European,” Reed said. “Gov. Jindal would rather make the world more American.” ‘
What units of measurement did Native Americans use? I guess we will have quite a choice, from around the country.
I remember reading that some NW CA-OR-WA tribes who were into bead money and property and salmon-run ownership, had lots of measurement systems and could count into the millions.
Edit: let’s see Graham’s response. Probably something about starting some anti-metric-system liberty invasions.
srv
Project G650 Is Back On!
You haters, get back in coach.
Redshift
@Kay:
Which, oddly enough is pretty much like what was done all over the country before Republicans decided to use “photo ID” to try to hide their voter suppression efforts.
In Virginia, until the GOP jumped on the photo ID bandwagon, you could bring something like a utility bill to prove residency, and if you didn’t have anything, could swear an affidavit. Which also illustrates the point that the purpose of any ID in voting is to prove residency, not to prove your identity, because in the real world in-person voter fraud never happens.
MomSense
@jl:
That’s what I’m imagining this will be like. I’ll let you know what happens.
Baud
Next up: Hillary does what Obama failed to do — come out strongly against drinking Drano.
Baud
@srv:
Hahahaha. That’s awesome.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: If she does, she gets my primary vote.
Baud
@MomSense:
If you want to create a nym for your kid here, I’m sure we can help educate them on the birds and the bees.
Omnes Omnibus
@MomSense: @Baud: For the love of all that’s good and holy, do not do it. It’s a tarp!
Mike J
@jl:
Same process as the Washington Dem caucus too.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Germy Shoemangler: One thing that really separated the Beatles from the others was the production. The vocals and instruments are really crisp, that’s George Martin’s work.
SiubhanDuinne
@srv:
@trollhattan:
@jl:
For many years, there was (still is, I guess) a useful meme demonstrating a fundamental difference between Canada and the U.S.
At more or less the same time (early 1970s), both countries proposed shifting to the metric system. And the citizens of both countries said “NO NOT GONNA DO IT CAN’T MAKE ME!” And the Canadian government said, Have your little tantrum, but we are going to do this. And the U.S. said, Oh, okay, sorry, didn’t mean to step on your liberties, let’s just forget I said anything, mmkay?
So by 1975, Canada was well on the way to metrication, and the citizenry got used to thinking that 30° is a hot day, and seeing road signs with a speed limit of 100. And the U.S., well, didn’t.
I used to give talks to student groups, service clubs and so on (Canada 101) and I often included some version of this. Well, either this or the Dollar Coin Example, which has a similar trajectory.
Germy Shoemangler
@BillinGlendaleCA: I didn’t really fully appreciate George Martin’s contributions until I heard the original Parlophone releases. I didn’t know that the American releases I’d grown up with had been tinkered with (reverb and wide stereo added) to appeal to U.S. tastes (or what Capitol Records believed were U.S. tastes).
JGabriel
Anne Laurie @ Top:
Because MS software is never buggy nor prone to hacker exploits.
Germy Shoemangler
@JGabriel:
More than once I’ve seen a powerpoint presentation interrupted (and the speech maker stand in awkward silence) while his MS computer launches “updating something or another” without asking. But that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
And a good opportunity for shadow puppets.
Kay
@Redshift:
Democrats fought so hard to get the alternate ID’s in the law in Ohio. It was really moving to me because it was all the AA reps just arguing and positioning and trying to use every procedural rule. You’re just pulling for them. I watched the debate (not in person) and it was so passionate.
I had fun with it when I was a pollworker immediately after the law went in because I;m an access person and part of the text read ” or a government document”. I can just have a field day with that :)
The Pale Scot
Puppy Alert!
I came across this
8 year old Dachshund needs a home
He’s in Sacramento Ca.
Wow, what a face.
I wish he was in FL, he’s not a scottie but man.
Eolirin
Uh, guys am I reading this wrong, or isn’t this pretty much just about the returns being reported via a centralized cloud service, through mobile devices? Like, it has literally nothing to with the way the votes are being cast, collected, or tabulated, and is entirely about how the precincts, or whatever the correct term would be here, report their numbers back in?
Like, other than the fact that Microsoft is involved (and they’re actually good at this stuff, it isn’t the late 90s/early 00s, anymore) and some buzz words are being used here, how is this any different than the typical process, except that the final results can be tallied more quickly and easily?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Germy Shoemangler: I didn’t listen to music much growing up and only listened to and became a rabid fan of the Beatles in college(1978). I’ve never had the displeasure of listening to what Capitol did to their music; when I started buying their records, i bought imports. Now, what I listen to, on my walks, is ripped from CD.
ETA: “Let it Be” sounds different since it wasn’t produced by George Martin but by CDC inmate #G63408.
Tree With Water
“[Pablo] Sandoval appears to be as heavy as he’s ever been in the major leagues..”. So writes sportswriter Bruce Jenkins (son of arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins), who has covered the Giants for the San Francisco Chronicle for years.
When Pablo is overweight, Pablo’s play diminishes considerably. His weight fluctuations were a constant during all his years as a Giant. At times, it meant the worst. He was sitting on the bench for being overweight-and-all-but-useless during the Giants first World Series run in 2010, and absolutely no one second guessed the decision. That was five years ago, and weight doesn’t get any easier to lose as a person ages. $19 million per year, Boston, through 2019.
MomSense
@Baud: @Omnes Omnibus:
Ha!! We could always live blog this conversation I’m supposed to have about early puberty.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Eolirin: Yes, and computers have been involved on the back end of vote counting since the 60’s.
Poopyman
@Howard Beale IV:
Dude. It’s not the NSA’s job. It’s DHS and/or FBI.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@gogol’s wife:
Squee!
joel hanes
@jl:
Why did the Democratic Party even bother with this plan?
Pure guess : can’t affect Dem outcomes, so what can it hurt ?
BONUS: comity points (they count in Iowa)
AND Republicans will help pay for a system that publicizes statewide Dem results.
(Otherwise Dems would have to pay the publicity/facilities/equipment/lighting/setup/teardown costs for their own announcements.)
Tree With Water
If you can spare a minute, wrap your mind around the information contained in this nut shell:
Spencer Ackerman in New York
Friday 5 June 2015 15.06 EDT
“Congressional leaders are warning the latest major government data hack proves the Senate should hand the US government greater cybersecurity powers – even as the stalled legislation to do so would place even more consumer data into the hands of the same government that could not secure its existing information..”.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: I read “My son came home with a letter from school” and (wrongly) assumed you were talking about the son you are/were picking up from college. My head swiveled when I read “Next week they will watch a video about early puberty. The boys and girls will watch in separate rooms.”
The whole thing seemed bizarre until I realized that this would be your youngest son. And of course it’s still a bit bizarre with the secret “booklets” – are the boys and girls getting different booklets related to gender or do they all get the same information?
Mike J
@MomSense:
Wine coolers and a pack of condoms for early puberty. Beer comes later.
Do they still make wine coolers?
Gimlet
@Tree With Water:
That “hack” was certainly convenient for the security people with all this talk of delegitimizing and defunding domestic surveillance.
WereBear
My mother was gifted with a topnotch Windows 8 laptop. Within a month, it was shipped to me, with instructions to find it a home, because if it stayed at her place a moment longer, she was “going to throw it out a window! I’m going back to my Chromebook!”
Tree With Water
Speaking of Boston, there was a horrible incident tonight at Fenway:
http://deadspin.com/fan-at-red-sox-game-hit-by-broken-bat-stretchered-off-1709430661
Chris
@jl:
The funny thing is, the world is “more American.” It’s very much a world of our making (if not our exclusive making). Western Europe and Japan are what they are today in no small part because of U.S. policy after World War Two; the other big pole of influence, Russia, has collapsed as a superpower and neither it nor China today can claim that they’re at that level; international institutions like the UN, World Bank and IMF were created with a huge amount of U.S. input and are disproportionately responsive to U.S. pressure; republican and free market ideologies are all over the place now, and even if they don’t rule everywhere, they’re the standards by which the world is measured (international institutions measure countries’ levels of democratization, not levels of Socialism With Chinese Characteristics).
Of course, their worldview is predicated on being the Alamo of countries, One Last Bastion desperately besieged by the hordes of Socialists and Muslims that they assume compose the rest of the world. So we’ll keep ignoring all that.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’ve always loved the fact that the U.S. military, that most conservative and patriotic of American institutions, uses the metric system and counts hours like Europeans.
(It’s also pretty much the single most socialist institution in the entire United States, so there’s that).
PurpleGirl
@The Pale Scot: Yes, what a face… those eyes and ears. Just so precious.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
I think it’s been discussed her before but unless your window is far enough off the ground it won’t actually fix a computer to throw it through one. Testing has shown that 3 stories onto concrete is minimum but 5 is much better. Another fix is to run it over with a truck. We are talking full loaded semi though, not just a jacked up 4×4.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
Yes! A lovely irony, isn’t it?
jl
@Eolirin: Good point. The story doesn’t talk about how the precincts will count the vote, or what the rules are for keeping a record. Won’t make any difference for Democrats, but from what I read, the GOP caucus uses secret ballot, so if precincts send their data away into ‘the cloud’ and don’t keep good records, then I guess we will find out soon what they do if something goes wrong.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin: Because CLOUD-BASED DISRUPTIVE!
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: i helped with the Iowa caucus in the precinct I was in for 10 days working with the Obama campaign in 2008.
For that caucus, every precinct had to make a phone call to report the results. As I recall, there was some convoluted system related to what number you were calling and what precinct you were calling from. I agree that this sounds like an upload of results rather than a phone call.
Edit: Still, I shuddered when I read “Microsoft” and “the cloud”.
dmsilev
@Ruckus: Bonfires work well. Or so I’m told.
Anyway, at work we have a couple of bandsaws. Anything that is sufficiently obnoxious can get chopped into little bitty pieces.
Iowa Old Lady
@jl: When you walk out of the D caucus, you know exactly how the vote went because they counted noses right in front of you. That vote results in the distribution of delegates to the next level and you know who the delegates will be. In 2008, frex, my precinct’s seven delegates were divided 3 for Obama, 2 for Clinton, and 2 for Edwards. Mr IOL was an alternate delegate. I don’t even see how you could cheat in reporting that because the reports are public.
different-church-lady
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Well, to be fair, both. But Smith had a lot of influence into how the recording approach went. And Geoff Emerick had the same after April ’66.
Martin’s genius was in arranging, orchestrating, sequencing, tweaking song presentation, and knowing when they had gotten THE take. If you listen to bootlegs and outtakes of Beatles sessions, there are extremely few times when the keeper take isn’t the last one of the sequence, and hardly any where you think, “Yeah, they could have topped that one if they’d kept going.”
PurpleGirl
Re: the Metric System… another reason the Rs don’t like science, scientists or the scientific method. They’d have to learn and use the metric system. I’ve forgotten a lot of it but for years in high school and early college when I was taking chemistry classes, I had to use metric measures.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv:
You mean more fucked up like Piyush is?
I’ve got news for the shitbird that is Piyush…the military long ago abandoned “American” measurements and uses the metric system exclusively.
Shana
Just finished a lovely shabbos dinner with Hubby: oven fried chicken, roasted green beans, and macaroni salad with a nice glass of cabernet (I know, but it was left over and open). Tomorrow I’m making strawberry jam! Wednesday I can the dill pickles. Yum.
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
Good question. I’m not sure if they all get the same information but just view it separately or if there have different information for the girls and boys.
@Mike J:
In my day we used to take some out of all of our parents’ liquor bottles and put water back in the bottles so they wouldn’t know what we had done. The mixture we made was probably the most disgusting thing you could ever drink and guaranteed to have you riding the porcelain bus the next day.
WaterGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: From my experience with the democratic caucus in Iowa in 2008, the cheating comes in based on who gets to run the caucus in each precinct. I believe the choice is made “randomly”. (cough-cough)
In our precinct the Clinton person won the “random” choice and there were al sorts of high jinx, from changing the door you were supposed to use so that if you weren’t there to direct traffic, Obama supporters would have ended up in areas for other candidates.
And the rule was set that we couldn’t bring food or snacks – that’s part of how you keep people there over the dinner hour instead of bailing if things take too long. But the state rep for our precinct was on to their tricks, so we DID bring food/snacks, we just left them in the car until the Clinton campaign brought out their snacks and then we whisked our snacks in.
The Clinton person who was running the caucus for our precinct even tried to mess with things during the counting. I seem to recall some check on a count was off by 2 people, so she tried to get all the Obama people to leave the Obama area and come over into the Clinton area and start the whole thing over. I called foul and we stopped her in her tracks on that one, but if we hadn’t been very assertive that could have made a big difference in the outcome.
As I said, there was no end to ways they tried to control the outcome. I came away part horrified and part terribly respectful of the part Iowa plays in the process. Every single person who supports our president owes a debt of gratitude to Iowa for 2008. (in my opinion)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Hah!
Iowa Old Lady
@WaterGirl: Wow. We were in a middle-school cafeteria with signs posted for each candidate, so you knew where to stand. And there were constant announcements and checks. Your caucus leader sounds appalling, but it really is hard to cheat because everyone can see.
Snacks? We didn’t have those.
Bill Arnold
@mike with a mic:
OK, thanks, I did not know that. It’s good to be wrong sometimes.
Netflix’s use of AWS is very interesting, agreed.
Ruckus
@dmsilev:
I was more going with what someone might do at the spur of the moment, and/or with what tools they have at hand. One of those gas powered portable abrasive chop saws might also be fun. But finding enough gravity is probably cheapest and is very, very satisfying.
WaterGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: Yeah, you couldn’t cheat on the actual count, but you could certainly tip the scales by being underhanded. How I came to loathe that woman in very short order!
JPL
Bloomberg has an article on why Biden asked Obama to speak tomorrow at Beau’s funeral….
Mike J
@WaterGirl:
I will admit that I when it came to choosing delegates I told the Clinton supporters what a pain in the ass it was and how the county convention would take all day just standing around, waiting for something to happen. I told the Obama supporters how fun it would be to hang out in a convention center full of liberals and you get to chat and meet people and feel like you’re really involved in the system. We picked up an extra delegate because they couldn’t find a person willing to go.
Valdivia
@Kay: I don’t know if we moved on from the voting as part of civic culture discussion but I have wondered about this. I grew up with voting being a party of sorts. Always on Sunday. People participating overwhelmingly, a sense of community. It was strange to come here and see voting taking place in the middle of the week, during a work day, and seemingly making it as hard as possible for regular folks to do. I didn’t know it was different before. 2000 was the first election I actually paid attention to and that’s when I noticed the difference between here and what I had grown up with.
gogol's wife
@JPL:
That’s very moving.
Randy P
@joel hanes:
Random sci-fi trivia:
In “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, contact with the three-handed alien “Moties” led to humans adopting their language construction “on the one hand… on the other hand… but on the GRIPPING hand [final deciding point]”.
@Anne Laurie:
We just came back from seeing Melissa McCarthy in “Spy”. Amazingly good movie. Hilarious, and a vehicle for McCarthy to trot out several very different personalities as well as do plenty of action-hero stuff. Also a damn good spy movie underneath the comedy, while at the same time satirizing the genre.
I highly recommend this film.
Bizarre side note: The box office puzzled us by asking us to choose seats. This is apparently their new policy at this theater. So we did. And then when we got in, we saw a theater full of comfy-looking chairs. “Wouldn’t it be wild” I joked to my wife, “if these were actually recliners?”. They were. Electric controls in the handle of every seat.
I guess they’re trying to compete with people’s living rooms and big-screen TVs?
Omnes Omnibus
@Valdivia: Why Tuesday?
Iowa Old Lady
@Randy P: Did the recliners make a problem getting in and out of the aisles? I wondered about fire regulations when someone else told me this.
Randy P
@Iowa Old Lady: Matter of fact, yes. People had trouble getting past the reclined seats and you kept having to pull your feet in.
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus: Wow. I had no idea. Thanks that was a really good video. Also, too. Maybe we could change that now that there are cars? (I gather that bill he was talking about went nowhere because we can’t have nice things, ever)
lamh36
@Randy P: I was LITERALLY just posting elsewhere that I want to go see Spy tomorrow, but I’m supposed to see it with my sister and cousin.
I’m hearing GREAT things about it. I mean 95% on Rotten Tomatoes is nothing to sneeze at.
Valdivia
@MomSense: I feel invested in this now, even if you dont live-blog, please let us know how it goes :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Valdivia: FWIW, I have thrown a party on a Tuesday – and I am not even counting Mardi Gras.
Ruckus
OK I just had a real problem. One of perplexing proportions.
Loudest cat in the world, asleep in my lap. Do I wake her so I can move or do I just do nothing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: Is there any pressing need for movement?
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus: Now that I think about it I also have thrown parties on Tuesdays, but with like Mardis Gras, isn’t the iniquity what brings people to these?
I think that would be difficult with voting.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not any more, she got tired of sleeping and moved on.
rikyrah
@Kay:
If California does it…that will be revolutionary.
Kay
@Valdivia:
I believe the 2000 contested election poisoned the well on voting as a civic good (rather than this weirdly almost prosecutorial approach we have now ) because Democrats and Republicans passed a federal law expanding access in 1993. Motor Voter. There was jockying and it went along ideological lines- Democrats wanted voters registered at human services agencies and clinics and Republicans wanted voters registered at driver’s license agencies, but it was about access.
Convenience, focused on the voter as well-intentioned and not plotting a crime, “go vote, good citizen!”, like that.
So. What happened after 1993? What changed? We all watched that freak show of a vote count and the Brooks Brothers Riot and the brother of the candidate and his secretary of state and the completely trumped up accusations that military votes were being supressed and then the Supreme Court grossly overreached and installed a President and it all became very, very bitter and ungenerous and paranoid. I think actions have consequences.
Omnes Omnibus
@Valdivia:
“Just vote, you know you really want to….”
Valdivia
@Kay: Thanks for explaining this. It’s still hard to understand when you come from a place where you get registered when you are born and at 18 you pay a minimal fee and get your national id with which you vote.
I got registered to vote here the day I became an American citizen. The League of Women Voters was at the naturalization ceremony and they handed out packets as we exited the hall. It was one of the happiest moments for me, that I got to register to vote, and it was easy, and accessible. I confess I also kind of shed a tear or two when I voted the first time.
Kay
Back to you, Governor Christie.
I don’t understand why he sponsored federal legislation to restore felon voting rights but “states need to lead the way” on what Clinton wants, but anyway!
WaterGirl
@Mike J: That’s just gaming the system, not cheating! :-)
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Interesting!
Brachiator
@gogol’s wife: Did you ever read the wonderful essay on Stanwyck in The New Yorker? It might still be floating around on the InterTubes. Sounds like they’re including her saucy pre-Code films.
WaterGirl
@Valdivia: @MomSense:
I demand the live blogging! (politely, of course)
Though it would be hard to compete with the live blogging from the woman who sat in on her kid’s class on sex ed. Sorry, no link and no details, but someone here will surely know what I mean.
Kay
@Valdivia:
I went to this voting rights forum in Ohio and there was a Latino Republican there and he was using Mexico as an example of voting reform. They re-did their whole system and he told us all about it as a kind of example that he was there in good faith and wanted to help and “brainstorm” or whatever. Except then come to find out nothing they did in Mexico was acceptable to him here because it was national reform in Mexico and “states rights!”.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: My rule is that I don’t move until/unless I start cramping up or I really have to use the restroom. Kitties first, that’s my rule. And no squirming! They just get up and walk away.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Just apply the Five Minute Rule.
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus: does that go with a special soundtrack? :)
@WaterGirl: I remember that story :)
@Kay: head.desk. head.desk.
They sound rational and sensible for about five minutes until they get to the punch line. Gah.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Yes but they also come back and demand more attention. Like now. Hard to type with a cat walking on the keyboard.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: yep. if you ever see me typing with no caps, bad spelling and no unnecessary words, you know i have a kitty in lap. like right now.
it’s so worth it. love it when my kitties want to sit in my lap.
Kay
This is really an amazing story. The students who were ripped off by a for-profit college want the same debt forgiveness that the for-profit college will get (the college is in bankruptcy). It’s more complicated than that, they have an actual legal claim that they could have brought BUT FOR the actions of the US Dept of Ed, but they (now) have pro bono counsel and it looks like they are getting some back-up from other students:
“Strike” means “debt strike” so withold payment on their student loans.
Rep Kline (R, MN) was one of the biggest congressional cheerleaders on for-profit colleges (and he gets tons of donations from them) and HE came out yesterday and said the student loan debt should be forgiven.
WaterGirl
@Valdivia: she was a hoot! i wonder what her kid is like.
Ruckus
@Kay:
You aren’t trying to use logic to anything randy says are you? Conservatives only know circular logic with really small circles, randy goes one farther and uses Mobius circles with a circumference of 5 minutes.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
If you see me typing without unnecessary words you should send the paramedics, I’m pretty sure I will have had a stroke. And that’s after editing, you should see the things I type and delete before posting. OK maybe better that you don’t.
Kay
@Ruckus:
Well, he never held state office so it must be federal, right? Unless Kentucky just allows him special privileges to “co-sponsor” laws which wouldn’t surprise me. He IS a property owner, I do believe.
I was watching tv with my 12 year old and Ron Paul came on with a dire warning of financial catastrophe. A weird, spooky commercial with his big head kind of floating. After my initial horror and revulsion receded, I was wondering if it’s somehow profitable.
That’s a little awkward for the Rand Paul campaign, I would think.
Kay
Oh, God, they are going to go crazy:
He’s back! It’s like old times.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: I am calling them now. You are welcome.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: I made a note for myself so I won’t forget to send in the cavalry. (As you can see, the kitties have temporarily deserted me!)
The kitties have been extra affectionate lately because I have started giving them coconut oil as a treat once a day. My girl kitty especially loves me a lot more when she gets a special treat like ham or whipped cream or (apparently) coconut oil. How sad is that???
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Fickle they are.
You are a hero one minute and stinky cheese the next. It’s hard being a cat servant.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: That is all very true.*
*Except possibly the stinky cheese part. (I think my kitties might like stinky cheese.)
Oh my gosh, you should hear them when they come racing into the kitchen if I even open the cabinet that holds the hand mixer, because WHIPPED CREAM!!!!
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@different-church-lady: AKA Cloudbusting (6:56)
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Because he thinks that the spigot can be turned off. I don’t think it can.
Valdivia
@WaterGirl: her kid is probably still mortified!
WaterGirl
@Valdivia: Hard to know, I think it could go either way. If he’s in therapy in 10 years, we’ll know you’re right.
Chris
@Kay:
Related: somewhere along the list of Things That Should Be Done For Our Educational System, I’d really like someone (in the Bernie Sanders variety) to put in a word for blanket debt forgiveness for students. Not “in ten years as long as you don’t miss a single payment and work in one of X, Y and Z jobs,” not “renegotiate for lower payments per month,” unconditional and total.
Is it a horrible thing to ask the government to bite the bullet on all the money they’re not getting back? Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s certainly not worse than everything that’s being guzzled up by the defense department or various corporate welfare outlets, or lost in the insanity of our tax cuts. Would it hurt the private sector? Not really: think of all the money that would normally be used to buy a car, buy a house, pay for a better health plan, or just spent on eating out a little more – all things that get more money into circulation in the economy, and give more business to all kinds of people! – and is instead disappearing down a black hole. Is it an egregious handout to students? Oh please: after decimating our blue collar sector and moving to an increasingly white collar, hungry-for-college-degrees economy while allowing the price of the now-much-more-necessary-than-before college educations to skyrocket preposterously, it’s really not. Blame the people who turned something as valuable as higher education into a casino while stomping hard on so many alternatives. And that’s not the students.
Is it realistic? Hell, no, but like single-payer, I’d at least like it to be out there as a goal to strive towards. More generally, we really do badly need some serious discussion of better options for not only reducing the cost of education, but dealing with the student debt that already exists (if nothing else, the fact that it’s not dischargeable in bankruptcy is absolutely outrageous and needs to be opened up on with both barrels). In addition to this, if you’re worried about apathy and disillusionment among the young and/or looking for an issue that’ll definitely make a big bunch of them sit up and pay attention? This’ll do it.
Chris
Gah. In moderation for a spin-off of Kay’s comment on student debt at that university, dunno what bad word I used. I can haz help plz?
Chris
@Kay:
Fucking LOL. So what’s wrong with that? Money is free speech! Why are you all being so mean to that nice Mr. Soros, who if he has that much money must clearly be a successful man who’s much smarter and more hardworking than the rest of us, since that’s the only way anyone gets successful in America? Why do you hate America, anyway?
Valdivia
@WaterGirl: I am sure there will be a follow up interview, maybe even an autobiography
Kay
@Chris:
There’s a history:
The 2004 election was horrible. The Bush voters loved him and they were so belligerent about Iraq- it was right at the height of the “with us or against us” war fever. Then the Hungarian billionaire decided to jump in and do GOTV which just made it more hostile.
I’m pleased at how aggressive Clinton is on this. It’s great how she gave the speech, got the vitriolic denials, and then they rolled out the Soros boogeyman.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
That is the height of understatement.
catclub
I just looked at Kevin Drum’s web page. He had an explanation for why libertarians are all men. It has 926 comments.
I think it is pretty plausible: Libertarianism is a fantasy. Women do not fall for that particular fantasy.
lol
So many luddites here who don’t really seem to understand the advantages and disadvantages of The Cloud(tm).
The Cloud is as secure as the admins who run it. If you can’t keep your AWS server secure, you won’t keep the one in your closet secure either. Of course, thieves will have an easier time breaking into your office and walking off with the entire machine than they would in a server farm, assuming they can even locate the actual machine you’re running off of.
The Cloud means someone else handles the tedious work of maintaining servers, backups, etc. It means that when you need a new machine, you have one up and running in a few minutes instead of waiting days for your machine to show up. (or weeks or months if you’re in gov’t) It also means that when you don’t need that machine anymore, you move everything you want off of it and shut it down. Bam, you’re done with it. The flexibility to spin up an arbitrary number of machines on demand opens up a huge number of tech applications.
@jl:
You still need to report in somewhere. You need to report supporter counts, # of delegates and who the delegates and alternates actually are and ideally you’d like this all to be done accurately the night of the caucuses.
In addition, the delegate assignment logic can be extremely tricky. Lots of precincts made errors in 2008 that weren’t caught until the next day. It’s usually one delegate, but that’s the sort of thing that feed Paul-style paranoia.
That said, for all the buzzwords, it just sounds like a bog-standard web app.
Brachiator
@catclub: And yet the patron goddess of libertarians is Ayn Rand. Go figure.
I have to check out that web page. Sounds like a hoot.
Valdivia
@catclub: we have others but I don’t think they are whole political philosophies thankfully!
Chris
@catclub:
Libertarianism reduces everything to the individual. So, it appeals to the people that society actually treats as individuals: white men. Women and nonwhites are openly not treated as individuals, so the libertarian fantasy of One Lone Man versus The Machinery Of Big Government isn’t quite as relatable.
Furthermore, libertarianism says that all we need to do is have less government and collective power over the individual and everything will be all right. Women and nonwhites know better, because their rights have only ever been won and ensured through collective action and government regulation. Suffragettes and civil rights marchers didn’t win the vote by going Galt.
Chris
@Kay:
Yep. Good move for her, weak sauce response for them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: She’s actually playing a very good game right now.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
I haven’t been following Hillary that closely except through this blog, but this is the first thing in the election season that’s made me sit up and go “okay, she is on point.” If the rest of her campaign follows this example, I’d give her good odds.
Brachiator
The original article on libertarian men is from The New Republic. Here’s an oddly condescending excerpt.
So, women are sissies, not brave, self reliant men. Twaddle.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I went with my husband to a parade that summer. When the Democratic float went by it got really ugly in our general area. People yelling, all red-faced and angry. I was thinking “OMG, they’re horrible”
The Bush war fervor was something else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: As I have mentioned before, I am a rather undistinguished army veteran. In a conversation around the time of the Iraq invasion, an asshole asked me what kind of veteran I was if I was against this. I responded that I was the kind who did not want to see soldiers killed and maimed for no good purpose. It sort of put an end to the conversation.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
It was just so hot- people would go from zero to furious in 20 seconds. My husband opposed the invasion immediately, and loudly. We had to leave a charity dinner raffle because he was arguing with our whole table. All of them. At the same time. It was a bad time. Then it got worse! :)
Ruckus
@Kay:
I’m reminded of the scene in MIB where Tommy Lee Jones tells Will Smith “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
low-tech cyclist
Yeah, my office abandoned Lotus’ iNotes in favor of Microsoft’s cloud-based Outlook Web Application email/calendar/etc. system at the end of last year. And it has been an unmitigated hell. I’m aware that iNotes doesn’t have the best reputation in the world, but OWA is such a piece of godawful crap that I’d pay a thousand bucks of my own money to have iNotes back.
So if this bit of Microsoft tech is as good as OWA is, I’m confident that we’ll know the outcome of the Iowa caucuses by March or April 2016.
rikyrah
@Randy P:
The local AMC theater near us upgraded to those seats this past year…it’s wonderful.
J R in WV
@danielx:
Moses hit a rock with his staff,and it broke open to reveal our Constitution, including the Second Amendment!
And that’s why America is the best country evah! Moses gave us our founding documents working directly under the guidance of Yahway, or perhaps Adonai.
I’m just a little surprised the Texans didn’t figure out a way for Jesus to be involved with Moses and the Constitution!
But that’s their story!