A lot of this hinges on partisan officials choosing (often) black box software and private verification companies. But that’s not even the main problem.

If your Ballot System contains source code, the source code is researched and code reviewed, and then complied by the company and the verification agency. Both checksums must match.

It all falls apart exactly here. With digital voting, all other security is as performative as the TSA. It doesn’t even matter if either party in this step is malicious or if the source is open/closed.

A code review can never make any guarantees. And if there is a bad actor, checksums are not bullet proof. Especially when we’re talking about state actors, who have access to supply chain attacks and unknowable cryptographic abilities.

And all of this uncertainty extends just as far with the hardware. Even if a voter knew what a machine should have in it, they’ll never get the access to verify it themselves.

Even checking a ballot print isn’t foolproof. In a secret ballot system there’s nothing tying a print to your actual tallied vote other than your faith in the process.

Stealing an election isn’t as easy as one might imagine.

Stealing an election doesn’t have to be easy, it has to be possible with a minimal circle of secrecy. And digital voting/tallying makes that possible.

As others have said in this thread, the most important thing is the ability for any voter to understand and personally audit the process. That’s just not possible without paper ballots and simple counting.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can’t relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.

Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it’s hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.

I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can’t visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc… I can’t automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the “image” may just as well be green.

*edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic

I don’t think it’s that crazy or draconian at all. You’re still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it’s a safe location and your drug of choice isn’t cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don’t like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.

There’s a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won’t go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that’s just how a human reacts to the substance.

It’s kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies’ expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?

Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn’t cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You’re undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince

Any safety and recovery programs are a lot easier to manage when you know exactly where your source is and who’s using. Safe injection sites already exist and have been shown to eliminate overdoses and increase access to social services without any honeypot effect or increased drug use. Adding safe and tested drug sales to the site is a pretty logical step.

Requiring transportation is a detail for implementation, you already need it to do anything in the USA. Unless you think every person has a right to get drugs delivered to their doorstep?

There’s reasonable balances between free and total access to liquor stores on every corner and locking up every bathtub moonshiner.

A good part of the reason prohibition failed was 10,000 years of societal dependence with no alternatives. Humans aren’t built for the sedentary lifestyle and structured civilization we’ve built up and we really do need something to compensate.

We now have the technology and medical knowledge to reliably treat mental and physical ailments, we don’t need ethanol as our cure-all. If I could snap my fingers and swap professional treatment and healthy recreational norms for traditional drugs I’d do it in a heartbeat.

with crystal meth the statistics say, that only a few percent (we’re talking 1-2%) get addicted.

Couldn’t find the numbers on meth specifically but I’m highly skeptical.

70% of users who try an illegal drug before age 13 develop a substance abuse disorder within the next 7 years compared to 27% of those who try an illegal drug after age 17.

25.4% of illegal drug users have a drug disorder.

I’d argue that any form of self medication is inherently unhealthy, and free access to legal substances doesn’t fix that. Some people are able to navigate it responsibly but it’s not possible for most people.

The human brain is a complex soup of chemicals and electrical impulses, altering it with a substance won’t result in an objective self assessment of the effects.

Taking your example, plenty of normal and reasonably happy people get addicted to opiods. The first experiences are on such a different scale to regular chemical pleasure your brain generates that it alters your perception of normal feelings.

If you ask someone to compare that high to normal life before or after, they’ll tell you they never experienced “true” happiness before.

There are real, observable, permanent changes to brain structure from drug use. I don’t think that type of change should be taken lightly with personal experimentation. It should have the same scrutiny and medical guardrails that we give other permanent body choices.

For anyone interested, some reading on heroin’s impact on the brain

Deal 🤝

I’m of the opinion that unless it’s regulated in some way, people will be systemically/individually exploited. An addict can’t be trusted to keep doses safe, be sure they’re using in a safe place, or properly prioritize their personal wellness.

Just recognize it’s something that’s going to happen and take reasonable efforts to set limits without glamourizing it. Controlling ease of access is a simple way to do that (look at the bump in gambling problems since the 2018 SCOTUS ruling). You don’t have to kick in the doors of everyone with a personal grow or basement home brewing setup.

If these substances could be handled universally with education and social mores, total abstinence would have already worked. No amount of taboo can make crippling addiction sexy.

I don’t care about health benefits/dangers of any vice as much as I hate how ingrained vices are in our daily lives. I’m sick of beer ads, I hate online sports betting sponsoring every event (and rapidly turning a lot of friends into gamblers), my recently weed-legal state is already flooded with local ads and shitty shops.

I dream of a utopia where no vices are sold in a store or advertised. If you want to indulge you go to the equivalent of a Native American casino on steroids. It’s a massive temple to hedonism, zoning for it is very restricted. You can do any drug you want there, everything carefully dosed and tested. There’s complimentary trip-sitters and emergency services on call.

Things that aren’t an immediate threat to yourself/others (mushrooms, lsd, mj, low abv drinks, etc…) can be sold for private personal consumption off-prem with a reasonable limit per person. You can’t partake in public and can be asked for proof of purchase during transit.

There’s no perverse vice tax that leeches money from addicts who can’t afford it, the government’s best financial interest is to keep people clean and spending money elsewhere. If you need something to routinely “take the edge off” you get easy access to medical services (mental/physical/otherwise) and a prescription from a real doctor.

Any time I hear arguments for full legalization of anything in the USA I just have nightmares of inane Budweiser-style weed/cocaine/heroin commercials.

I might be alone on this but the freezing point of water is almost irrelevant in daily life. Any precipitation from 30°F (-1°C) to 35°F (1.5°C) results in some mix of snow/slush. Less than that and it’s snow/ice.

However if you live somewhere where they use salt as a de-icer, knowing the freezing point of saltwater (0°F, -17.7°C) is very, very important.

I know you said no voice-reading-text and wanted personality, but for my money nothing is better background listening than History of English. You can listen to the whole narrative of an episode or just pick up some cool etymology here and there.

Oh nice! I’m trying to do the same. Looking for more long form, thought-provoking stuff instead of the fire hose of soundbites and rage bait