I really encourage interested folks to read the biography (though it's an undertaking).
According to Caro, part of the background is that the relevant southern Texas precincts were well understood to have vote counts up for purchase; over the course of election counting, both sides would have their controlled districts release counts based on what the other side was reporting to stay in the race. These counts would vary in legitimacy and how skewed they were based on the precinct and need of the candidate that had swayed the boss to their side. But tactics like having armed guards supervise the casting of votes to ensure the favored candidate got a large majority, or simply distributing vote receipts to people who never voted at all and recording votes on their behalf, or making numbers up entirely, were quite common. Typically, though, Caro argues that because both sides did this, and they did it incrementally, it usually wasn't enough to sway an election one way or another, but rather was just part of the cost of doing business. He even says that LBJ lost his Senate election earlier that decade because he got cocky and told the bosses of the districts he had bought to just release all their numbers right away, letting his opposition then juice their numbers just enough to win.
It's really the timing, more than the margin, that makes it clear what happened (and the crudeness of the forgery); after every other precinct reported and finalized, they corrected their number by barely more than needed to win. The 100 to 1 vote margin was actually not that far off from the vote margin that the precinct reported in the first place (... which, of course, really tells you that the whole thing was made up from whole cloth).
Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).
> Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
For the better part of a decade people have been buying Teslas under the promise that the cars would drive themselves better than their owner could, or would offset their cost by participating in a self-driving taxi service while their owners were not using them, none of which has come remotely true.
The last third should have been a short epilogue or a full sequel. It's too much of a pivot in terms of tone and focus, and feels incongruous and mismatched with the first two sections (which are excellent). He clearly had a bunch of ideas that didn't fit into the main body of the work and grafted them on anyway; it wasn't bad, it just didn't fit.
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
This only happens because he was inside a computer simulation of the universe created just for him, so the Vortex shows him he actually is important. Had it happened for real it would have destroyed his mind just like everyone else.
The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case".
Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.