Also, go to council meetings for your city and county whenever you can. Talk to your party about becoming a precinct committee officer, find out what local elected positions exist and run for office. We need people who aren't greedy fucks running for office.

I wish I had good advice for how to connect with people after the school years, that's just difficult.

If there is one lesson I could teach my younger self, it would be to have several low commitment relationships while I was younger to learn what is "normal". Once you start making murder pacts, it's usually too late.

Not if you cut the power.

I mean, yeah, they all are.

It's all about property rights here. You can always just make more people, right?

Gotta milk that sweet sweet social media engagement.

Sorry, trolls don't get to request citations.

If you said gold or diamonds I would absolutely agree with you. Potatoes? That's mainly just child labor, wage theft, and giving farm workers cancer.

Evil is a relative term. I could argue that capitalism is evil, or buying things that can't be recycled, or Catholicism. Maybe start with asking yourself how you justify doing things someone else might think of as evil before using it as some sort of magic bullet argument.

I think you misspelled "people"

People have tried to poll me. I ask them to remove my number from their list. I'm not sure exactly sure who they are polling, but it's mainly people who want to be part of polling, which I assume skews the results.

Is that because the only people hand counting now are regressives?

There's usually a four prong power connector on the top left corner of the motherboard. I always forget that one, nothing works without it plugged in too.

I catch myself humming old songs every now and then and have this moment way too often.

Every state has it's own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don't match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn't the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren't scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.

With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.

I'm my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.

You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.

I'll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.

They couldn't even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.

The fact is that this isn't being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.

Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.

It's not just about the speed, it's about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.

I guess I have something similar, but it's all just nonverbal feelings. I don't argue with myself about getting up in the morning, I just feel comfortable, lazy, frustrated, determined, and rarely tell myself "get up" but that's the only voice part.

You aren't imagining things. We take social cues from others. If you have friends who are weird, you will feel more free to be weird. If politicians have to hide their racism to work with someone above them, others will follow suit. If they don't have to hide it... same.

I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?