Wandering Adventure Party

@peter The AIristocrats!

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl A lot of the US is heavily racist. After slavery was limited to prisoners, states used a variety of techniques to prevent Black people from voting. Poll taxes and poll tests (literacy tests, civics tests with biased answers) were favorites. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 explicitly made poll taxes illegal for federal elections. The Supreme Court of the United States also declared poll taxes unconstitutional in 1966.

Incidentally, the literacy tests are where the terms “grandfather clause” and “grandfathered in” come from. Many states allowed a man to skip the literacy test and vote if his father or grandfather had voted before 1867, a date selected to exclude most Black men.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl “Legal name” in this case is talking about the voter registration. We register to vote at the US state level. The registration involves name and address (to determine which county, city, town, etc. elections we vote in). We get a registration card (mine arrived two days ago) which lists all of the information about which districts we vote in, and we’re added to the voter rolls available to polling places.

Since US states run their own elections, they all have different rules about how to determine who someone is so they can use their ballot. Many have been adding photo ID requirements, and the name on the photo ID has to match the name on the voter roll. This proposed law is saying beyond just a photo ID, you also have to prove you’re a citizen using documentation with a name which matches the photo ID and the voter registration.

A passport is both a photo ID and proof of citizenship, so it fills both requirements. Everybody else would need to bring a birth/naturalization certificate. When people change their names, they often don’t go down to the county registrar’s office to get a new copy of their birth certificate. They usually just keep the original one and a copy of the name change documentation, as that’s enough for everything else we use a birth certificate for.

It’s ultimately a poll tax, just like the photo ID requirement. Blatantly unconstitutional, but we have an illegitimate Supreme Court.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Births are registered at the local level (county/parrish, below US state), but they confer citizenship at the federal level. The US federal government is the entity which issues passports and social security numbers (basically our national ID number for financial purposes). Driver licenses and most other non-passport IDs are managed by the US states. Depending on who is asking for identity and why, we may need a birth/naturalization certificate, passport, social security number, driver license/state ID number, or a paper utility bill (sometimes needed to prove residency for state and local elections).

US states run their own elections, so rules for voting are all over the place (which is why the USA doesn’t meet the minimum standards for election monitoring by the Carter Center).

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl Yeah, the EU+UK situation is separately awful, since there’s no super-state authority you can directly be a citizen of (i.e, you can’t be a citizen of the EU directly, only of a state within it). Instead, there’s a mess of individual states all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. Most allow non-resident citizens to vote. Some allow non-citizen residents to vote. Ridiculous, inconsistent documentation standards like the passport situation you mentioned. All based on imaginary lines on the ground.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl > If you arrive without any papers then how can you prove an identity that matches your birth certificate and hence claim your right to vote as a US citizen.

That’s already a problem today, regardless of this proposed law. It sucks because, yes, the people most in need of asylum protections are often the least able to produce documentation. The barrier is the naturalization process, though, and this proposed law doesn’t affect that.

@the_wub @alice @amydiehl People with new identities courtesy of witness protection get birth certificates for their new names.

Very few countries allow asylum-seekers to vote in national elections at all, regardless of how well-documented they are. If one becomes a US citizen, they get a certificate of naturalization, which is explicitly listed as acceptable proof of citizenship in the bill.

This proposed law is awful, but those two specific concerns aren’t affected either way.

@oschonrock @PeterSommerlad @cstross This gets at a particularly dumb part of “banning VPNs”: the VPN is just the transport mechanism the proxy service uses.

No, we’re not a VPN, we’re a SOCKS proxy.

No, SOCKS is banned now, so we shut that down. We do offer a QUIC proxy, though.

And so on.

@IronManIV @jwildeboer Unfortunately, a lot of the cost of a car is the frame and body, and techniques which have dramatically lowered the cost of entry have also dramatically increased the cost of repair. Unibody construction is simpler and cheaper (and lower-rattle, etc.) than body-on-chassis-on-frame, but if it bends in a collision, good luck straightening it out and restoring it to spec strength.

@jpaskaruk @jwildeboer Early hybrids did have battery longevity problems. The first few Prius versions used a big, heavy NiMH pack which could store around 0.8 kWh (exact capacity differed over the models). It lasted around seven years before showing significant degradation in capacity, manifesting as steadily declining fuel economy.

They switched to lithium batteries a while ago, and those are both lighter (and “Lightness makes you [more efficient] everywhere.”) and longer-lived.

@npt_writes @jwildeboer It depends on the car. Most now reserve some capacity from the top for longevity reasons. That is, the vehicle only charges the pack to 90% of the pack’s nominal charge, and calls that 100%. This both helps the actual capacity to degrade slower and hides the degradation for a while.

Plug-in hybrids also typically reserve about 10% of the capacity for KERS, which similarly keeps the charge above the minimum.

@david_chisnall @jwildeboer With cars being so expensive to repair, EVs get totaled by insurance pretty readily. With the cells lasting so long, there’s very little demand for used EV batteries. As a result, they tend to be really cheap from junkyards.

I was recently looking up how much a replacement battery pack for a particular hybrid costs. Turns out it’s about $1800 for an 11 kWh pack, but while looking I also found a local wrecker selling a 75 kWh pack from a Mustang Mach-E for about $3k.

@evacide Abolish ICE is too wishy-washy. I would much prefer to see calls to *prosecute* ICE.