I, for one, hope that a driver's license in not an acceptable ID for voting. It certainly is not sufficient to prove citizenship.
Perhaps you think we control for that as part of voter registration. We do not. I registered by walking into a post office, filling out a form, and handing the clerk some pocket change for a stamp.
I was responding specifically to a claim that people without a car must be poor and on government support. That was followed by a question about how many adults don't have Driver's Licenses. To the first claim I responded with experience of people without cars who were not poor. To the second question I provided experience with people that don't have a Driver's License.
To your statement, I will respond by letting you know that he does not drive. I agree that he should be arrested if he is found driving without a license.
I will also point out that you have made some of the same poor assumptions as the first comment. If he wants to bail out of jail after his arrest, he will open his wallet and pay cash for his bail. If he doesn't actually have the cash in his wallet, he may send his driver to retrieve more cash.
People without a Driver's License are not necessarily poor. Or uneducated. Or dim-witted.
This is completely separate from voting issues, but I tend to avoid settings where I am treated like a suspect. I certainly don't pay people specifically to treat me like a suspect. As you might guess, this means that I don't do business with commercial airlines.
It also means that I avoid sporting events that require pat-downs. Or neighborhood parties that require criminal background checks. Or schools with metal detectors at the entrance.
In general, if an event is so sketchy and risky that it requires those measures, I take it as a signal to avoid that event. When I see somebody dressed in full combat gear I know I am not where I want to be.
I live in a small U.S. town. There are not 10K people living within 25 miles of my house. While few here would admit to being rich, people who don't live here might see them as pretty well off. There is probably something close to 1 car per capita. That includes infants. If you throw in motorcycles, four-wheelers, tractors, loaders, golf carts, boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, personal fork-lifts, etc. we have to go well above 1 vehicle per capita.
Still, there are many functioning people here who do not own a single vehicle.
That doesn't make them poor or stupid or government-dependent.
Your ignorance and prejudice are undermining your ability to mount a convincing argument. I happen to think that a voter ID is not an unacceptable idea. But I run across so many people who seem to mount the kinds of uninformed arguments that you have here. These arguments scare me. They make me worry about the capacity of our society to enact a reasonable voter ID program. It seems like it should be so simple. Then I read the thinking of people like you and worry that it will be botched.
I have an ID. Last time I renewed it I specifically spurned the "Real ID" option. Which supposedly means I can't get on an airplane. I have since been on an airplane. But not one that required a loss of dignity.
I did not provide a driver license to my employer. I have worked legitimately for them every day for many years.
I did not provide a driver license to my ISP.
I can't fathom why my bank would need to know if I am allowed to drive. They do, however, have a legitimate reason for wanting my SSN.
This current year I have traveled across 4 states several times. Nobody asked me for my license. I've spent many thousands of dollars with retailers. I've stayed at multiple hotels. I've been to the airport a few times. And I've lived in the home that I own all year long. In none of these situations have I been asked for a driver license.
I have been asked for my driver license in what seemed odd circumstances. I gave them a puzzled look and declined the requests. Once or twice they persisted and I asked them why they needed to know if I was permitted to drive. They sputter something about their computer screen. I ask them if we can proceed if I don't have a license, and they eventually figure out how to do that. We complete our business; I get in my car and drive home.
Honestly, I wish people like you would put up a little more resistance. But I recognize your right to do whatever you want with your license.
But as to your idea about life without an ID... I routinely refuse to show my ID to bank tellers, doctor offices, trains, planes, etc. I avoid most activities the require ID. There is one obvious exception--I drive every day.
I carry my ID with me at all times. But I refuse to show to somebody who is not writing me a traffic ticket. That refusal has not impeded my ability to conduct a normal life.
FWIW, I am not opposed to voter ID. I am opposed to universal ID. My voter ID should not be required to open a bank account, or rent an apartment. It should be for one purpose. I recently tried to open a bank account. They asked for my SSN. I gave it to them so they could report taxable income to the IRS. They asked for my drivers license. I refused. They asked for my employment history. I refused. If they asked for my shoe size, I would refuse.
Over-collection of personal data is a big problem right now. Most people facilitate it. I try to resist it.
I wouldn't say that Google is high on my list of trust, either. But TypeScript and VS Code do not jump you into a #2 ranking. Go and Chrome easily trump them for starters. Then you get things like node that ride off V8, and Atom that rides off Chrome. The Google ecosystem of community building blocks is still much, much more significant than MS. After all, Google actually dogfoods OSS.
FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use a source code repository of Google's or Facebook's, either. In fact, rather than open a GitLab account, I started self-hosting a year ago. GitLab made that easy. I also looked at Pagure.
I don't think so. See, for example, Wells Fargo. It's hard to imagine an institution that has abused their customers in a more ridiculous way and suffered fewer consequences.
People just don't seem to care how many times they get ripped off by WF. They don't move to the competition. They just stay there and take it over and over again. There is absolutely no incentive for banks to improve. Indeed, it is against the interests of big banks to improve the customer experience.
I very deliberately don't participate in loyalty programs. Every single time I go through a checkout at a local business, they ask me for my loyalty info. Every single time, I decline.
Then I swipe my credit card through their machine and give them the exact same credit card number to associate with every purchase I make.
I fully understand that they can track me. I am sending the message that I don't want to be tracked. I am also sending the message that I am willing to pass on their incentives to be tracked, but I am not willing to pass on the convenience of my credit card.
Then I make my credit card company send me a new card every year. So vendors get to track me through less than 50 purchases before I switch.
For businesses that track loyalty by customer name, I will give them the name of a neighbor or other acquaintance. It's astounding how often they are willing to give me back information about that person.
I wrote a very small resolve hook for node that does this. It makes the directory of the initial module / for all imports. Node has made resolver hooks like that dead simple.
I think this is important. In the bad old days, I always developed in Firefox. I made a point of following standards. I despised IE.
I still use Firefox as my personal browser, but some recent development I have done has been in Chrome. Mostly because Firefox is missing one critical feature for that project. It's not quite in the standard yet. It is Stage 3 with TC39[0].
Stage 3 means, "The solution is complete and no further work is possible without implementation experience, significant usage and external feedback."
So they need browsers to implement it and provide feedback. Chrome has had it since v63. Firefox has had a bug for it for more than a year, but no public progress. Node will have it next month.
I chose to move ahead on it six months ago, figuring Firefox would be on board before I was ready to release. I was wrong. But I'm not going back. Partly for the same reason I stubbornly developed in Firefox during the IE years. This one feature is all that prevents my code from working in Firefox. They will get there eventually. I will not go back to giant build frameworks and bundlers and code splitters and transpilers and gigabytes of tooling. My code works now without those. I look forward to Firefox stepping into this world. I'm eager for that to happen. In the meantime, my users can use Chrome.
Zuckerberg should invest in a competing startup. Something that can cash in on the anti-Facebook mania of the moment. Give users a cut of the ad revenue specifically generated from their pages and let them decide how much they will get paid per ad. If somebody doesn't want any ads on their content, they can demand 5 cents per ad. But everyone could have some skin in the game. Or do something else that will generate a lot of buzz and attract Facebook quitters.
Put some spare $millions into it, pump it to a $2 billion valuation and decide from there.
No. Sorry. They did not cause an accident. It is important that your understand this.
Note that I am not sympathetic to the driver of the car. They probably deserve criticism, but not blame for your slide. I know that you want to blame somebody that is not yourself. That's human. But when any pedestrian, bike, car, airplane, drone, skateboard, etc. runs into a stationary pedestrian, bike, car, airplane, drone, skateboard, house, fence, animal, etc. it is almost certainly the fault of the moving object's operator.
In your case, you failed to change lanes safely. It sounds like you really blame the lane design for having a bevel between lanes. It's interesting to me that the bevel probably has almost zero effect on cars/trucks but a significant effect on bikes. That seems like a bike-hostile design. The fact that it is only two feet wide seems questionable to me. A slow-moving bike would also encourage you to change lanes, navigating the bevel twice.
I think you are making the wrong argument here. A bicyclist should have control of their bike. If there is injury involved, that is on the cyclist. (Dooring is another issue.)
But I think the problem becomes very clear if you allow another car to pull up next to the one in the bike lane and stop in the middle of the lane to berate the first car. Just for 30 seconds or so. If somebody rear-ended that car, the person in the moving vehicle should get a ticket. But what should be the consequence to the person stopped in the middle of the lane? Would the mayor be so casual to "30 second" stops if car lanes were blocked by parked cars 40% of the time?
I am not anti-gun, but this argument tends to trigger me. What "level of destructive power" do you really need to feed your family? Not much. A single-shot rifle would suffice.
I have neighbors who own dozens of guns. Some of them hunt. They don't hunt with the Gatling guns or automatic shotguns or any of the really impressive stuff. And yes, there are some pretty impressive guns in my neighborhood. But when they hunt, they break out a .308 or .30-06 or even a little .270. Bolt-action. Their hunting rifles carry 5 shells.
So let me offer a different answer. With what level of destructive power should George Washington have been trusted? Or Sam Houston? Is a cannon too much? With what level of destructive power should anti-Assad Syrian rebels be trusted? Or Ukrainians fighting a Russian incursion? Are shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles a little overkill? If you lived on the Estonian border, what might you be willing to own in partnership with some like-minded neighbors? If you lived in a remote mountainous region and were surrounded one day by "officials" who shot your domestic animals, your wife, and your house without explanation, what level of destructive power would you wish to possess? Would it make a difference if that mountain was located in Idaho? Or Yugoslavia?
You trust individuals with F-22s and tanks. You trust BLM employees with sniper gear. BLM!!? You trust individuals with bombers and nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads. You may justify this as not trusting individuals, but those things are literally in the hands of individuals.
This month a SWAT team was called out against a local police officer. Both sides were trusted with major fire power including grenades and assassin robots, and with major defensive gear. If it takes a SWAT team to deal with a cop having a bad day, what recourse are the neighbors allowed?
This is written by one person who is one small part of gun culture. There are lots of angles in "gun culture." I live in a place that goes pretty strongly pro-gun. I think that most of "gun culture" around here is not much connected to the gun culture described by this author.
A lot of the gun supporters live in rural America and only experience the types of threats related here when watching Hollywood productions. Everybody these days is feeling the threat of all the mass shootings, but very few in rural America have been personally touched by them. They also haven't really experienced gang violence, home invasion, mugging, etc. We all know those things happen, and some feel some distant anxiety about them. But most in rural America have not experiences them except through news reports.
Yet, gun support is strongest in rural America. Some point to hunting. Some will talk about self-defense. Many are just enthusiasts who like to target-shoot for enjoyment. Some feel some nationalistic pull to defend against Germany^H^HRussia^H^HChina^H^HNorth Korea^H^H or whoever is the latest poster child threat to the American Way. And some think that from the very beginning of America, there has been one constant threat--the one threat the founders new first-hand and the reason for the right to bear arms.
It seems like terrorism to actually say it, but for some the main reason to bear arms is to be able to rebel against tyranny--foreign and especially domestic. In other words, it's important for people to be able to occupy a wildlife refuge and "take it back" from the government. Taken to the extreme, this right is for the express purpose to allow civilians to kill policemen and military personnel in a pitched battle. It's not really about hunting or defense against home invasion. It's about an armed citizenry to keep the government in check.
That's a part of "gun culture" with which the author may not be able to relate. That's very scary to a lot of people. And to some that thinking is no longer needed to keep people safe in the modern world. But to some, it's absolutely vital to the preservation of the Constitution.
You may not agree with it. The author of this article may not agree with it either. But it just goes to show that there is not one true gun culture. There are different reasons to oppose guns and different reasons to support them.
Perhaps you think we control for that as part of voter registration. We do not. I registered by walking into a post office, filling out a form, and handing the clerk some pocket change for a stamp.