@jonobie@karabaic@mekkaokereke Every now and then I actually feel bad for a Republican politician, because they'll say something like "we need to stop disenfranchising mail voters, because much of our base lives in rural areas where mail voting could actually help us."
These particular Republican voices are usually older -- getting to a polling place may be hard for them too, at that age (there are no "voter busses" in rural areas, as you might imagine).
@karabaic@mekkaokereke This change was made so that voting by mail would be restricted to only those who either had A) access to a printer, or B) maintained one of their own. Both are things that are getting extremely rare today.
And of course, since this is Georgia, you have to pay for your own stamp.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, I am on the "permanent mail vote" list, where for every election I just receive my vote, complete it, and send it back, with pre-paid postage.
@karabaic@mekkaokereke Right before I left the US South for good, I noticed just how much harder it had become to get a mail vote in Georgia, for instance.
In 2021 Georgia changed the law to require you to use a *printer* to:
A) print out the form B) sign it C) scan it D) send it via email.
Prior to this, you could just sign it on an iPad or your phone.
There was only one reason why this change was made, and it wasn't to make voting "safer".
"Another possible route is the cows’ feed, owing to the fairly revolting fact that the U.S. allows farmers to feed leftover poultry bedding material — feathers, excrement, spilled seeds — to dairy and beef cattle as a cheap source of additional protein."
...is one of the main reasons why I don't eat meat in the US
@roadriverrail@djsundog Definitely PalmOS -- and I would love to hear some of your stories about the time spent working on PalmOS. :)
(I used to use the PalmOS "Web Developer" to make phone apps in the seriously beautiful cloud designer circa 2009, or so -- did you work on that?)
My opinion comes from seeing the winners and losers from the 2006-2012 era of phones -- I definitely noticed a trend of "if it launched on CDMA, it was nearly DOA" (PalmOS, the Microsoft Kin, etc.).
@djsundog PalmOS especially -- had they not been hamstrung by the terrible deal with Sprint in the US, I still believe it could've had wider adoption.
But -- let's just make the web app reality happen, ourselves? I have a single page of apps on my iPhone -- that's it. (Most of them built-in Apple apps.)
@thomasfuchs Oh -- look at who the COO of SpaceX is -- it's *not* Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is just a guy who started the company, and then, smartly, handed off the running to other people.
Currently, like you say, he's just a distraction who shows up sometimes. Unlike Tesla, I believe Musk actually has very, very little to do with the daily runnings of SpaceX.
@thomasfuchs Exactly -- SpaceX has stated sometimes that with volume, each launch of Starship could get as low as $1m for each launch.
I don't believe that at all, and that's why said "even at 100X what they estimate". Their current rates to launch a kg to space are something like 30X less than their nearest competitor.
Regardless of where the money comes from, the people at SpaceX (thousands of whom *aren't* Musk), have done amazing things to save the taxpayer money.
@thomasfuchs@Scrappydog This is a valid question. Even with my admittedly amateur understanding of rocket tech, the lack of a flame trench in SpaceX's design is... interesting.
Even fans of the SpaceX program are questioning that now, as I heard on the NasaSpaceFlight (unofficial) Youtube Stream today.
@thomasfuchs Your take is funny -- I give you that. But even if the Starship somehow costs *100* times what SpaceX is estimating each launch could cost, it's still *1/20th* the cost of each launch of the SLS.
Administrator of mcnamarii.town Mastodon instance. Full-time IT consultant for companies big and small, currently focusing on infosec and robotic process automation.