Yep, we have the same system in the UK. In fact, the envelope looks almost exactly the same so they might even be printed by the same company.

You get two envelopes (one big, one small), a postal voting statement, and a ballot paper.

The actual ballot paper just has a list of options for you to put your X against; there’s no personally identifiable information on it. Once you’ve filled it out you seal it in the small envelope.

You then fill in the voting statement (it has your name and address on it so they can cross your name off as voted, and you sign it so they can check your signature matches the one on file) and both that and the sealed ballot go in the big envelope. That way your vote is still private because they check the vote is valid in one step and then add your ballot to a pile to be counted with the others in a second step, at which point it’s anonymous.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/ways-vote/how-vote-post

People are mostly talking about what a bunch of idiots they are though.

This lot look like they were cast by the daily mail, they couldn’t be more of a caricature. It is absolutely not effective communication.

I get your point but hydrogen isn’t just sea water, you’ve got an awful lot more energy to put in after the “tank is full so wrap up the hose and drive off” stage to separate the hydrogen from oxygen to get the fuel. The difficult bit comes after “get water”.

On the one hand, this is embarrassing for Russia, but on the other hand the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent failed a couple of times in a row over the last few years, so I’m not going to get too excited about it.

It could go that way, but on the other hand they could be more like MorningLightMountain in Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star, i.e. fascists who exterminate every other organism that competes with them for resources.

Great book if you haven’t read it!

Are those things in the middle at the back soft pretzels? They look like conkers (horse chestnuts), confused the hell out of me!

To be fair, she is relatively unknown.

Especially when you consider low information voters (which I expect have similar knowledge to high information voters from other countries).

Her honeymoon period will end as soon as she sits down and does a few serious and unscripted interviews about policy, which she has managed to avoid so far. At the moment it’s pure vibes, but at some point you need to get into the business of explaining what you would do and being challenged on it. That will generate lots of attack angles and media stories, both good and bad.

The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

I’m not going to get into the technical details of manifest v2 and v3, as I think it’s beside the point.

I think we can agree that given Google has announced the end of v2, recommending uBlock Origin on Chrome right now would be pretty mad, right?

Ublock on Firefox. Remember Google just kneecapped adblockers on Chrome!

KISS is great if you want something really simple that works well.

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

Checking in

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

Redreader uses the official API, they have an exception from paying (for now) because they have accessibility features that most apps including the official one lack.

Well it does seem that more people would vote for trump against her as well as more people vote for her. So maybe it’s legit?

Have you turned off Firefox’s built-in enhanced tracking protection? If not, turn it off but leave uBlock Origin on and see if that solves your issue.

I looked into these before and believe the inverters shut off if the mains shuts off. The DC side of the circuit would still be potentially dangerous though.

The inverters need there to be power in the mains circuit because they convert DC to AC and match the phase of the AC power they are generating to the mains supply.

More info on this here:

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/12782/the-troubling-past-of-forced-sterilization-of-black-women-and-girls-in-mississippi-and-the-south

I had assumed the women weren’t sterilised by the normal contraceptive meds, but it seems they used a large dose of Depo-Provera which is a legit contraceptive injection. Not the usual pills but still.

There are also stories in that article of people having forced hysterectomies.

America’s history of racism is so dark.