There is no one process for identifying fraud, there are many processes as the elections are run by the States, not some, "central voting authority."
That being said, in California, specifically, it's analogous to dual-factor authentication.
On your ballot, you write your signature. You have ballot checkers who look at that signature, and check it against one already on file with the State Government, from sources like a voter registration application or driver's license.
So to make a claim that, "Fraud is high enough to make a difference," - let's say, 0.1% over those ballots not already rejected to be charitable, you would have to fake a percentage of 22 million votes (assuming rounding up to 10 million).
So keep in mind, 220,000 ballots were already rejected for not being able to be verified by the State. Beyond that, the 0.1% requirement would mean that 21,780 additional ballots within the remaining 21,780,000 ballots would need to be, "fraudulent," in order to make the election, "not valid," using a charitable definition.
What is the definition of fraudulent? It doesn't mean, "I don't like this person who voted," or, "voting with malicious intent." It means - the law was broken, creating illegal interference with the process of an election. Election fraud can take place around in-person voting and absentee/mail-in voting. It can occur at different points of the election process, from registration to the tallying of ballots. Types of election fraud include [ballot stuffing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud#Ballot_stuffin...), voter registration fraud, absentee/mail-in ballot vote fraud, and using fraudulent signatures.
To support the claim, "fraud is not extremely rare," you would have to demonstrate that 21,780 ballots were illegal, by either party mind you, through any combination of the above reasons. Or, you would have to at least define how many votes need to be illegal in order to mean, "not extremely rare," and then demonstrate a case for why we passed that threshold.
I have not read any convincing arguments on this entire thread demonstrating anything convincing even in the slightest, either evidence based or even just a semblance of a rational argument explaining why it might be true. All I read on here is hand waving ignorance and raw emotions.
On the other hand, what I see election authorities in California do, is A) Maintaining a list of possible registered voters or drivers licenses tied to addresses with signatures on file. B) Cross referencing those signatures on the ballots submitted. C) Allowing observers in to observe the process at any time.
So there's a ~6:1 difference in rental price between the two, on the low end as listed online. Presumably there are even cheaper deals to be had which are not listed online. Food, labor, transportation and other expenses in Kenya are going to be similarly less expensive, perhaps by even greater multiples.
So no...outsourcing is definitely cheaper in the short run, and for simpler tasks.
I'm not going to tell you how to outsource or not outsource, and when it is and is not appropriate but labor can definitely be had for much cheaper than in the US. The US is now the richest country in the world per capita, more so than Luxembourg and the other traditionally richer countries because the USD is so strong.
Of course this will fluctuate over time, but that's the present status as we have this discussion.
"Yeah but outsourcing is dumb and people don't know how to code."
It's dumb? They don't know how to code? Could it be that some people don't know how to manage projects remotely and across cultures? Could it be that some projects can be outsourced while others can't?
Since so many comments on this thread are so absolutely negative, I will try to play devil's advocate here.
Is a given blockchain a more efficient database? Not efficient measured by percent of data stored in any given entry, which of course throughput and any other, "engineering metric," will suffer because of that. As an engineer, the idea of wasted energy, memory, space, etc., makes one cringe.
Efficient from the standpoint of preventing loss of human life or preventing sickness? Well, in the United States where likely most of us live, this is not as big of a problem, but likely in many other countries such as China, "food authenticity," is a problem. Let's keep in mind that Walmart has more stores and customers in China and more problems with food than the United States by orders of magnitude.
If I'm an actor within the food system in China which presumably has multiple middle-men, and I want to move one product up the supply chain through multiple, ultimately ending up on the shelves at Walmart, then I will not want to give away my source, because I want to get preferential pricing. However if I can convince my suppler upstream to use this tool (it doesn't matter if it's IBM, Google, Alibaba, or some startup or whatever, it's just a tech tool), to track and register when food was, "picked" or "harvested" then I don't have to give information to my buyer about the source, yet the database is all, "standardized," in terms of labeling. Keep in mind the alternative would be some kind of bar coding system which perhaps Walmart would have to impose. Well, I don't want my upstream partners knowing that this is going to Walmart either, otherwise they will jack up the pricing. If everyone is using some IBM tool, and assuming the IBM tool sees increasing adoption, then no one (hopefully) knows where or who a particular food is going to, yet any problem foods can be tracked back to their source by the end seller, without having to impose multiple types of key-value pair, bar-coding database systems, which - while technically easier to implement and run more smoothly from an engineering standpoint, perhaps do not take the entire use case into mind, because parties within the supply chain may be unwilling to share their source or destination due to pricing incentives.
Mind you, I am no food systems expert, I am just trying to talk hypotheticals here. I think the knee-jerk reaction on Hacker News within this thread is an almost Redditian "reaping karma" approach by putting down Blockchain, because many of us have had bad experiences working with corporate executives who have no idea how various types of technology work, and implementing non-technology buzzwords ends up being painful. That being said Blockchain at its heart, stripping away the history, is just a mathematical concept, and it's a math tool that can be used to point from one source to another. Calling it a, "mind disease," is losing sight of that.
Typically the types of discussions on hacker news that I enjoy reading are more angled toward how do you reverse engineer things, not just insulting an idea without backing up one's insult.
Spectrum fallacy. There is no "scale of morality," which goes from 0 to 10. Each of these can be viewed as wrong from different perspectives. Also, "exploit labor," is a leading term - there is labor exploitation going on, but also free association, while at the same time there are companies that engage in almost outright slavery. It's all over the place and you can't loop them together. If you give a 6 year old poison candy, it's clearly indefensible. If it's a 20 year old, "kid" well, most people will think that's his or her choice.
So your argument is, "Self-interested entity A wants to gain something, therefore they should take it."
There is absolutely zero substance to what you are saying. You are basically saying, "the strong survive! Yay on strong! Boo on weak!"
That is the basis of what you are saying. Then you back it up by saying, "This is the way it has always been done! Timmy jumped off a bridge too, so I should do it!" Did you know that it is completely possible that other Governments are doing things wrong as well?
The story of Henrietta Lacks has less to do with whether the acts were deliberately malicious and more about medical researchers, and humanity as a whole, coming to a realization that patient consent is a fundamental ethic, whereas going back to ancient Greek times, doctors would deliberately mislead patients about their condition because it was thought to be, "within their best interests," and because, "doctor knows best." Nazi medical experimentation where human beings were treated like animals in the holocaust was being brought to light around this same time in history, and in the subsequent decades the entire practice of patient consent was changed - it was the biggest thing since the Hippocratic oath.
Framing the conversation into the typical American oppression zeitgeist is ignoring the fact that Henrietta played a role
in changing how humans looked at this ethical conundrum, period. This change in thinking will last forever, whereas America will not, just like the Ancient Greek civilization did not last forever, but much of the thinking and discovery influenced the rest of history (such as the Hippocratic oath). She allowed her cells to be used - she choose to be trusting to the doctors who were treating her, having no idea whether she would be OK or not, having no idea what would happen in the future, and then the doctors turned around and shared her cells for free with thousands of other doctors because they saw it as a medical miracle. This has subsequently been discovered, from an ethical sense, to be totally immoral, regardless of the good intentions of the doctors, whereas previously it was considered a moral imperative. Her decision and role in this part of history didn't "remind us to think about ethics," it completely changed how this area of ethics are even thought about, and that will be a benefit to anyone who ever visits a doctor or has any medical problem, ever, which is pretty much 100% of everyone.
Plausibly be trusted in what context? In a court of law? Or in the court of public opinion?
I think the general hypothesis among mass communication studies doctorates is that as soon as a technology is created and adopted by a mass audience, there are immediate examples of humans immediately using it to manipulate public opinion in some way. For example, as soon as telegrams became a thing used to manipulate public opinion (like the Zimmerman telegram), fake telegrams became a thing. As soon as online video became a thing, fake online videos became a thing (like Lonleygirl15).
Isn't what you are really saying is, "humans like to create fake things, and then a lot of people fall for those fake things." Right? Why should we buckle up for that? Isn't it already a foregone conclusion?
Google and people deep in Silicon Valley do not have the capability to judge whether they are seen as evil because evilness is a matter of taste and ideology. Of course no one sees themselves as evil - that is never the question. The question is, "do others see us as evil?"
One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s.
Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears."
So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies.
You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe.
> Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans
and
> They used state-of-art statistics to analyze endocasts of various fossils and present-day humans.
There's nothing uncomfortable about this. They analyzed modern day humans and compared it to humans 35k years ago and found a statistical difference. "Uncomfortable" thoughts fall into the category of pseudoscience which has been long discredited - phrenology, essentially.
What you pointed out is a very astute answer, but comes from a creationist perspective rather than an evolutionary perspective. His main answer is:
> Firstly, fully reduced (oxidation state 0) metal has a high energetic cost to create in reduced form.
Basically, it takes a ton of energy to make steel. We are literally burning gigagallons of over a billions years worth of pressurized organic matter to have made all of the steel we have made in the past century and a half or so. We could make a super inaccurate but somewhat plausible estimation that we have used something like 150 million years worth of the entire earth's lifeforms at the time's dead bodies and converted that into 150 years worth of steel. So if my orders of magnitude are correct...it would be something like a million times more difficult energy-wise for an organisms to create steel from scratch than calcium-based hardened material.
That's assuming we have burned through 15% of a billion years worth of oil from bacteria, that 100% of the bacteria converted into oil and then converted directly into steel, and that there was only a billion years of bacteria to oil creation. I am sure these numbers are off, but maybe that means it's only 100,000 times or 10 million times more difficult for organisms to make steel rather than bones.
I don't know what college or University you went to, but at the large public University I went (University of Minnesota) one literally receives no governmental authority and extremely little guidance dictating what path you should take whatsoever. Students are literally tiny specks of nothing helping to finance an ivory tower and they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, it's an extremely lax environment behaviorally speaking. There are no authority figures, no hierarchy, and professors do not know your name or care if you come to office hours, because you are one of 500 students in a class. There were classes that I never showed up to except for the first day and tests. People who manage to come across the financial means to get a degree are able to finish while others drop out over time - so I think it's seen as more of a financial stability indicator, which could perhaps be a surrogate metric for submissiveness but not necessarily as you purport. I slunked my way through an Electrical Engineering degree while running a landscaping business I had started in high school, because I wanted to build stuff rather than be a landscape dude for the rest of my life. I see nothing in the University world resembling the corporate politics world what so ever. Perhaps you attended Hogwarts?
You are trying to communicate a wonderful message with an extreme amount of vision to people who sling code and do devops all day. What many of them may hear is you are asking them to do a bunch of work. But if you think 10-20 years in the future, your server was running something like a Phoenix type environment, then scaling wouldn't be as much of an issue. There are ways that updates and other problems can be abstracted away in a non-cloud environment. There are ways of running lean technologies on commodity hardware for servers.
The bottleneck I see is bandwidth and government regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. If Amit Pai gets his way then what you are talking about will be much more difficult.
He didn't directly say, "You have no idea what you're doing," he said, "Google [as a company] has no idea [in which new verticals] how to invest its money, other than advertising, [and therefore] Google is no longer a tech company, [in the new technology sense of the word]."
He goes on to say that an investment in Google is a bet against new search engine technologies. Eric Schmidt rebuts by saying that there have been many business process technological innovations within the company, such as Chrome, which represent Google being a tech company.
Something happened to me recently when I was attempting to browse a Gopher site via Firefox...I opened the site, and that site opened another tab to the same site, and so on recursively every ~200mS or so until my computer's RAM was saturated. I had to force terminate Firefox. It was funny because it reminded me of the type of malicious WaReZ that you would see in the 90s.
That being said, in California, specifically, it's analogous to dual-factor authentication.
On your ballot, you write your signature. You have ballot checkers who look at that signature, and check it against one already on file with the State Government, from sources like a voter registration application or driver's license.
So to make a claim that, "Fraud is high enough to make a difference," - let's say, 0.1% over those ballots not already rejected to be charitable, you would have to fake a percentage of 22 million votes (assuming rounding up to 10 million).
So keep in mind, 220,000 ballots were already rejected for not being able to be verified by the State. Beyond that, the 0.1% requirement would mean that 21,780 additional ballots within the remaining 21,780,000 ballots would need to be, "fraudulent," in order to make the election, "not valid," using a charitable definition.
What is the definition of fraudulent? It doesn't mean, "I don't like this person who voted," or, "voting with malicious intent." It means - the law was broken, creating illegal interference with the process of an election. Election fraud can take place around in-person voting and absentee/mail-in voting. It can occur at different points of the election process, from registration to the tallying of ballots. Types of election fraud include [ballot stuffing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud#Ballot_stuffin...), voter registration fraud, absentee/mail-in ballot vote fraud, and using fraudulent signatures.
To support the claim, "fraud is not extremely rare," you would have to demonstrate that 21,780 ballots were illegal, by either party mind you, through any combination of the above reasons. Or, you would have to at least define how many votes need to be illegal in order to mean, "not extremely rare," and then demonstrate a case for why we passed that threshold.
I have not read any convincing arguments on this entire thread demonstrating anything convincing even in the slightest, either evidence based or even just a semblance of a rational argument explaining why it might be true. All I read on here is hand waving ignorance and raw emotions.
On the other hand, what I see election authorities in California do, is A) Maintaining a list of possible registered voters or drivers licenses tied to addresses with signatures on file. B) Cross referencing those signatures on the ballots submitted. C) Allowing observers in to observe the process at any time.