I thought I was going to rely to this question, but you covered it so perfectly that I’ve nothing useful to add. Thank you for putting in the time.

The vast army of Georgia poll workers report for duty only about three days a year and get paid about $7.25 an hour. Every time we come in, the rules have changed, so we train for eight hours to learn the new protocols. Election day itself, including set-up and break-down, starts at 5:30 am and ends at 9:00 pm, two hours later if you’re a manager delivering the ballots to the regional office. Most of us are retired, and many are elderly (read: not tech-forward).

And poll workers are not perfect. One of them puts on a sweater and inadvertently obscures her name tag (not allowed). Another shows a new person how to work the check-in station (not allowed). Another tells a nonprofit they can set up their food hand-outs inside the building so as to stay out of the rain (not allowed). And at some point during the 15 hour work day, all of you find yourself accidentally socializing with one another (also not allowed). Likewise, the clerks are socializing with the voters (you guessed it: not allowed), which, worst case, is akin to being smothered in grandmas.

This sounds very like my experience back when I used to work the polls. We all did the best we could and we all knew a fair chunk of the voters, so chatting was frequent.

It’s because of the electoral college. Most states give all their electoral college votes to whomever wins the state rather than dividing the votes equitably. This means Pennsylvania – a swing state – will go either all-red or all-blue. The state has a lot of fracking, and a lot of people making money off it, so Democrats are trying to appease pro-fracking to get votes.

The people getting harmed by fracking are stuck without anyone on their ‘side’, but will presumably be more likely to vote blue because that side favors more regulation and pro-environment stuff. Note that all Harris said was she wouldn’t ban fracking. She didn’t say she wouldn’t make it difficult to do. My guess is any attempts to make it cleaner will get crushed by Congress and the Corrupted Supreme Court that has sided against Unions, workers, citizens, and the planet – all to favor of their sugar daddies. So even if the next President wants to do something about fracking, it would be a hard to actually do anything.

And for hot peppers.

Well, yeah, but that’d take a government not captured by Corporations.

This should be addressed by fixing the software, but it seems to be easier or cheaper to instead further burden the workers.

Exactly! In fact ENCOURAGE singing to get a better data set for fixing the software!

No, it isn’t. If it was just for liability, they wouldn’t have to care what the driver did until someone filed an accident report or other complaint.

This is about crappy software that COULD be improved, but it is cheaper to threaten thousands of people with punishment for singing than it is to pay programmers to refine their ‘distracted’-pattern recognition.

You say that because you’ve never had the good stuff. :-P

Is it any good? I used to like Lidl and Aldi breads before COVID, when you could slice it right there. They stopped that, and so I no longer had a reason to drive 5-10 miles out of my way to go there. I’d go back for a good sauerkraut, though.

I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:

After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”

OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”

While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.

“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”

A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.

Thank you!

I’m so sorry.

Why can’t the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count ‘canned’ but I don’t reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.

If you are willing to switch, tell your current carrier and sometimes that will light a fire under them to actually address the Support call. We had that happen recently. Internet went out. The issue was outside our house with the provider’s line. They said they’d send someone a week later, so we pointed out it would be faster for us to switch providers, to which they replied, “We can’t get there tomorrow but how about the next day?” We accepted and they actually did fix it in two days instead of seven.

We already had the Expanded Access Program (thank you ACT UP) and we don’t want a repeat of thalidomide babies like we had before there were strong protections on how drugs get tested.

So now we have Expanded Access (EAP) with FDA oversite and Right to Try (RTT) without that oversight. Having both is confusing for everyone and most people don’t know which covers what. From Journal of Law and the Biosciences (they only sampled 17 neuro-oncologists from 15 different academic medical centers):

Many physicians described having difficulty in distinguishing between RTT and EAP or demonstrated misconceptions in their responses. A physician with knowledge of both pathways spoke about his colleagues generally: ‘I don’t think a lot of people understand the difference between expanded access and Right-To-Try’ [Participant 1]. The confusion resulted in conflation with the different features between EAP and RTT including structure, intent, and processes of these pathways. In response to our question ‘Have you provided a drug through Right-to-Try?’ one clinician erroneously replied, ‘I think most compassionate use is under that category’ [Participant 2]. Another drew a rough equivalence between the two despite the absence of FDA oversight for RTT: ‘I guess the way I try to think about Right-to-Try is like compassionate use.

Quote from María Corina Machado (opposition leader kept off ballot) per CNN:

We definitely need to open markets in order to take advantage of that huge potential and turn Venezuela into truly the energy hub of the Americas.

How the how the country will benefit from that? We will have fiscal flows, and other resources, mechanisms through which the state will get taxes.

She seems to like money.

I had never heard the particular sentence, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” as a phrase, but seeing the video, there did not seem to be any hostility in her voice nor actions. The article says:

In the church, he said, to rebuke is to cast out a demon, or keep a demon from using a person to do something bad. The phrase can be said casually, though, in response to someone’s misbehavior. When Massey says it, her voice is louder and clearer than it has been before, but she doesn’t sound angry. It’s the tone of voice that you might use while saying: For goodness’ sake, this is really getting ridiculous.

That fits with her actions: totally non-confrontational, but with the mildest of chastisements.

Find an individual reviewer you agree with and follow them.

Exactly! You can also find more than one to follow, and take note of which never match your tastes. For me, I will avoid any movie recommended by PBS’s Patrick Stoner until/unless someone I trust tells me otherwise. I used to have two critics I particularly followed. One had the same taste in foreign film as I, and the other was ready to enjoy a stupid Hollywood rollick. Alas, I’ve lost track of the former and the latter is now at Slate doing a variety of stuff. The result is I pretty much stopped going to the theater.

Saved you a click (I added the bold):

Also, holding a college degree doesn’t necessarily translate to success in the workplace, Nguyen added, particularly in rapidly evolving fields like technology, where information and skills learned in school can quickly become outdated.

Other industries in which companies are loosening degree requirements for job candidates include finance and insurance, health care and social services, education, and information services and data, according to Intelligent’s report.

Some states have even passed legislation to open up job opportunities to applicants without a college degree. In January, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order eliminating college degree requirements for more than 90% of state jobs.

Nearly 60% of business leaders said they removed degree requirements for entry-level positions, while 54% said they did so for mid-level roles and 18% said they did for senior-level roles, according to the survey.

Personally, I favor requiring a degree for most education jobs – specifically for teaching k-12. First: teachers need to learn how brains develop over time and what the developmental markers are. Second, teacher should learn different methods of learning and teaching to better reach all students. Third, teachers should learn how to create useful tests and what IS a useful test at different age levels. A 2nd grader is not going to write an essay that displays synergistic understanding of two unrelated fields, but a 2nd grader CAN display synergistic learning in other ways. I’ve gone on too long, but you get the idea.