Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"
In the rest of developped countries you can't vote without an official ID, in local, regional and national elections. I am not american, I don't care about your politics, ID voting is the way to ensure that no party or fringe movement gets to label elections as tricked.
How is this such a controversial opinion that I get downvoted, national issued ID is the norm
Most people use state-issued drivers licenses (with varying levels of federal acceptance) as their primary ID.
Historically, US States used "poll taxes" to defacto discriminate against recently freed slaves, who obviously had no money, so we have explicit laws against fees for voting, and an ID that you have to pay for is kind of an indirect way of implementing a fee for voting.
There's a lot of complicated history involved, and I totally get why the system feels weird to an outsider, but you accidentally blew a dog whistle that usually belongs to people trying to find sneaky ways of preventing minorities from voting (that as I alluded too, have the potential to backfire in modern times).
Maybe you wouldn't find it interesting, since you said you don't care about our politics, but the history of voting discrimination, voting rights, and the various schemes to try to surpress then while following the law in the US are kind of fascinating and worth digging into if you're genuinely curious.
I will turn the omelette of sorts, I think that it still worth it as a standard to pursue the federal ID as it would simplify a lot of things overall and the whole tapestry of systems (state Ids and such) actually makes everything more difficult for everyone (minorities included) and more falsifiable which adds tension to an already polarized system.
I am familiar with the history, but from an outsider POV it feels like the story of the sheep that got electrocuted once and then never ventured outside, the path dependency is not really helpful in general.
Also I followed the law in the US to make ID mandatory at voting, and from what I saw the whole debate around it seemed deranged, if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it. Ironically what will happen is that the elderly will be most affected and will stop voting Republican (chat happened in the UK).
> Also I followed the law in the US to make ID mandatory at voting, and from what I saw the whole debate around it seemed deranged, if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it.
1) because as the other commenter pointed out these systems have historically been used to discriminate. Historically being recent history at that.
2) drilling down on “if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it”: If voter fraud isn’t a problem, then it follows we shouldn’t go out of our way to make sweeping, costly, often discriminatory changes to stop a thing that doesn’t really happen. Even Trump’s own team that was looking far and wide in his first term couldn’t find any evidence of meaningful voter fraud. So why should we risk disenfranchising people in an effort to stop a problem that doesn’t really exist, as verified by his own administration and decades of research?
The voter fraud “concern” (politically speaking, some non-politicians believe it’s a large issue because they have been lied to) is fueled by the fact that he can’t possibly believe he lost. He even did it in 2016 when he won, because he couldn’t stand losing the popular vote, going so far as to claim the exact number of fraudulent votes was the number he lost by in the popular vote (as usual with no evidence). I just don’t understand why anyone would think this kind of initiative is in any way legitimate or otherwise in good faith.
3. Fun fact I just noticed, the linked executive order disbanding the group investigating alleged voter fraud (at this point we can just call it a lie) has been removed from the WH site, and in typical Trump admin fashion there’s no explanation given so I will have to assume it’s another example of their removing stuff they think makes them look bad despite the information being clearly in the public interest. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
I keep hearing this, what policy do you think we should have pursued instead of NAFTA? I assume you wouldn't want completely open free markets, so some form of protectionism? Tariffs? Import quotas? Should we have started a trade war with Mexico and Canada?
I could see a fair argument that NAFTA should have insisted on labor protections and parity in minimum wages, but it's weird because NAFTA is already somewhat protectionist, albeit including Canada and Mexico under the umbrella. So even if I steelman that your beef is that it didn't go far enough, that doesn't really explain the vitriol.
>it is unthinkable for some professional with a master's degree to become a warehouse sorter.
I mean I think you do actually have a salient point, but I also think there's a material difference between telling someone that's maybe been paid not a lot for half a of labor that they need to change industries and someone who's tens of thousands of dollars into debt that the implied social contract encouraging that debt was a house of cards and they need to start from scratch with 0 experience even ever being employed.
But AI provides the illusion of communication. Since the AI has no direct access to the user's brain, and has to go off the words they provide, if we're assuming that the person isn't capable generating words that accurately communicate their thoughts, the AI is getting all its information from the same flawed words we'd have access to if they didn't use AI, but destroying any signal encoded in the specific mistakes or choices they've made in its process of shaping their thoughts into something more polished.
AIs don't violate entropy, and can't create information from nothing. They can interpret, and expand, and maybe, just maybe, tease out meaning that a human would have missed. But the more sensitively they're tuned to pick up on small nuances, they more likely they're going to interpret a pattern that isn't there, and the more they're tuned to avoid over-interpretation, the more likely they are to miss something that is there, the same as how a human can aim to interpret something with high or low context.
The difference is, by filtering it through an AI, you're taking that capability out of other people's hands, you're (often intentionally) flattening and damaging signals people usually use to choose how to distribute their attention (often with the cry of "But it's not fair that people want to spend their attention on things that I'm not good at, I have to use AI to convince people to look at my work that they would prefer not to!!"), and when you do that without acknowledging the use of AI, it feels a lot like you don't care about any negative effects your actions have on the existing ecosystems of human creativity and communication, and you're going to get an appropriately hostile response.
I actually disagree that just because something is a popular issue necessarily means there's need for reform, people are perfectly capable of driving themselves into a frenzy over something that, when actually examined, is functioning appropriately.
Well this isn't a new issue to me, I've been talking about H1B reform for a decade now before Tiktok ragebait existed. Mostly based on my experience trying to immigrate to the US and speaking to immigration lawyers. This isn't new and there's endless real examples of poor enforcement. The situation here is even worse in Canada regarding education Visas, it's a giant backdoor for loose immigration.
The visas in the US around education are even more liberal than they are for STEM jobs (which IMO is a bit exaggerated online), there's less or no cap limits in edu and the organizations can sponsor people easier than companies. IT abuse is the big ticket item while no one really talks about education. Both need better enforcement.
I'm not pretending not to understand anything, I'm genuinely unconvinced that's a particularly pressing issue. The actual material downsides strike me as minimal, especially as compared to the upsides, the costs of enforcing any change, and especially as compared to the amount of attention it gets.
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