Same could be said about the civil war... and yeas slaves were a part of that fight but that was certainly not the main reason for the conflict. They didn’t want the federal government dictating to the states how to govern, so they seceded from the union.
Thank you for your thought provoking comment. I would like, if I may, to comment on the one small point you made about slavery and the civil war.
I remember when I first heard the idea that "the civil war wasn't about slavery. It's about state's rights, including whether states had the right to have slaves." (which is how my friend stated it to me.)
Unexpectedly, I was surprised because that's not the traditional narrative. But I love the truth, and I know that official narratives are not always accurate, so I checked into it.
What I found was that slavery was a HUGE part of it. If you look in the documents of succession or whatever you call them -- the state's individual declarations of independence from the union -- you find that many of the southern states explicitly made very strong arguments that slavery was key to their existence and that their way of life would collapse without slavery.
Then looking a little farther, I found that the southern states were going to form their own "country", and they were drafting their own "constitution."
According to their "constitution," any state who wanted to be a member of the southern country would have to agree to a number of things. Yes, they would have the right to choose whether or not they held slaves.
HOWEVER - they would have to ALLOW THE TRANSPORT OF SLAVES through their states!
In other words, if a member of the southern states felt that slavery was illegal, they still had to allow other states to be able to transport slaves back and forth to sell slaves to other slave states, and to capture runaways.
In other words, southern member states would have to allow kidnapping and human trafficking within their borders as long as it was being done from out of state'ers. (And remember, slave owners could kill their slaves whenever they wanted too - so add murder to that list.)
In other words, member states would NOT have the right to prevent human trafficking, kidnapping, and murder within their borders.
And this brings us to the next problem - if there are non slave states, guess where the slaves will run away to? So then what happens is you have a non-free state with run-away slaves. That non-slave state recognizes those as human beings, who do not belong to another human being. Free men.
But then slave owner comes to free state and captures the run-away - but in the state that the capture happens, that is considered a free man - so it's kidnapping. And if the slave tries to flee from capture, possibly murder. Or if the slave is caught and took back, it's human trafficking.
So, let's just say the US divided, had a slave free half and a slavery side. What would happen?
War. No, really.
Slaves would run across the border to the free side. Slave owners would pursue - the free states would say "Hey. We don't allow slavery here. That's a free man, you can't touch him."
Before long, more and more and more slaves are gonna run away, till finally the south declares war on the north.
It would not have worked to have a slavery free and slavery laden halves. It had to be one way or the other, and it had to end in war.
Any dispute about whether people are humans or animals ends in war.
I don't do weed, but I have friends that do who I have known for decades before. Also worked with pot smokers (coworkers.)
I think thc changes people by changing the lens through which they see themselves - so they don't realize they are changing, they can't see it, but it seems to make them irritable, short sighted, and mildly belligerent -- and it makes them think they are good liars even though everyone else can see through the lies.
And judging from how people literally spend their last dollar then borrow money from friends to buy pot when money they ain't got, it's obviously addictive, although again they will tell you it's not addictive (but this is one of the ways it causes them to lie to themselves.)
Addiction is a form of bondage. It may not be mechanical chains, but it's chemical chains.
And any time you have people making off of people's bondage, whether it's physical chains or chemical incarceration, THAT IS SLAVERY. Sorry, it is.
A drug pusher offering free samples of an addictive substance is no different than a slave catcher offering free snacks to entice potential slaves into the cage.
Now, in America, it is each individuals to hurt themselves however they want, as long as they don't hurt anybody else. So while I don't advice fellow Americans to hurt themselves, I recognize it is their right to do, including putting themselves into bondage to a chemical which they cannot break free of easily, possibly never will.
But for others to make millions of dollars off of that changes the whole thing into slavery.
And minors absolutely should not be allowed to be enslaved ever. Once they are 21 or whatever, then it's their choice to make.
In my opinion, a state should be allowed to outright ban recreational thc. But if a state allows recreational tch, then people should have to grow their own. Nobody should be allowed to profit from another's thc addiction.
(I feel the same way about alcohol, tabacco too. Grow it or brew it if you want it, but it should not be for sale.)
Now - it is extremely important one person's right to hurt themselves doesn't hurt another. Huge numbers of people die every year from drunk driving, and they haven't even had a drop to drink. That is absolutely terrible. And it continues.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me understand this!
Would this be a permissioned, or a permissionless blockchain? Public or private?
Would each voter run software on their PC or smartphone that was the nodes, then the election workers (heh or any other voter) would basically have access to everybody's ballot and could tally up the votes?
I'm grabbing at straws here obviously :D
I would be so grateful if you could lay out the topology and flow. Would there be paper ballots, or would it be all electronic?
What software would users install, and what interface would they use to input their votes?
How would election workers count votes, and how would independent parties audit votes?
What would the workflow be like -- in other words, what would voters do on election day, where would they go, and where would the information flow?
(And I guess what would election workers do before election day - they need to formulate a ballot, or a list of candidates, which ultimately needs to be ready to be viewed and voted on election day.)
Thank you so much!
Yeah, I think that's about it.
Maybe in-person only, and a vote-time check against state database on driver's license to make sure the person is a resident, not a felon, and is a real person.
That closes a lot of opportunity for fraud.
Then as you say bi partisan teams mandated by law to do the actual work, along with ample observers and videos.
Maybe vote count's must be transmitted within seconds of being scanned/counted, and current tallies displayed for all to see? Something to make it impossible to secretly subtract counts, and obvious to see if counts jumped up.
That's been suggested to me in real life :D
Thank you for chiming in! I really appreciate it!
And if it was guaranteed that only honest people were allowed access to the computers and software, that'd work great.
But if if the dems are the ones managing the software and key generation and management, they could make duplicate ballots that had the correct hash or whatever. When the fox has the keys to the hen house, it doesn't matter how secure the hen house is, the hens still aren't safe.
The problem is the lack of practical transparency with any cryptographic system of security: 99.9% of people (or maybe even more) simply do not understand how crytpo works at the bit level.
Heh, I've been into computers and technology all my life (I'm over 40 now) - Firmware, and software programming, etc. I'm not boasting but the statistics are that 99.9% of people don't understand that stuff. While I understand the general principles of blockchain, I cannot wrap my mind around it at the bit level. If you asked me to put my hand on a Bible and swear that blockchain was inherently foolproof, I could not do it.
Many consider it to be, but then again, many considered lots of cryptos to be secure, but then they kept getting busted. Even md5sum used to be used to hash passwords. Now there's a program that can append on trash to the end of an arbitrary file to make that file match any md5sum you specify.
But even if I were smart enough to know for an indisputable fact that blockchain was in fact secure, and even if I was convinced there was no way for the dems to cheat with it even if they were the ones running the servers and generating the ballots, 99.9% of people could not understand the process and know for themselves. They would have to rely on expert witnesses, and they would never know the true integrity or motives of those expert witnesses or the people who chose those expert witnesses.
That's why I think it's got to be something simple and primitive. Something everybody can understand and personally see that it's above board.
If the dems were the ones running the servers/holding the keys for blockchain and printing the ballots, then the republicans would not trust them to be doing it fairly. And the reverse is true - if republicans were the ones "holding the keys" then the dems would not trust it.
It's got to be something simple that the average citizen, no matter their affiliation, can see and understand and know that it's above board.
What is going on? It's asking me to captcha untold times an hour. And mostly I'm just reading stuff. I even installed that Privacy Pass extension, which seems a bit buggy, I'm not sure if that's helping or not, but I do keep getting the captcha, and when I don't get that I still often get that 5 second delay page while it's checking for something.
I agree with others here - we could run the vote here and it would be the most secure in history.
Except I suspect cloudflare doesn't like this site and probably turned on the "Annoy people out of here" setting.
Thanks! I've actually been watching quite a bit of Edward's videos - but it'd be a lie to say I was watching all of his daily 12 hour live streams :D (Gotta work and sleep too.)
I did reply to one of Edwards comments on this website, and also in his livestream chat and as comments to his videos, but I'm sure it's exceedingly busy.
That's why I signed up and asked here :D
Thank you! Much appreciated!
I have all of the NYT timeseries data for all of the states, but it's based on that "percentage of total votes" model, which makes it hard to look for exact ratios and stuff.
I also have Edward Solomon's CSV which appears to be made from 175 separate files (but I'm not sure) and it seems to actually have exact vote count numbers. But some things in that file are confusing to me.
In writing this, I did examine it more carefully and noticed some patterns to the structure of the data.
There are 175 timestamps. Almost as if it was created from 175 updates. This most be what Edward calls a "Global update."
Each and every update has exactly 4 entries for each precinct.
But why? I don't know. It could be they had 4 ballot scanners at each precinct, but that doesn't make sense because the ballot scanners sent stuff to the main image cast server (? guessing?) or the adjudication server(?) regardless of which scanner it came from..
But there is a column called Locality and any number of precincts can live at any given locality.
But I don't know if that means the locality is where the voter lives, or where the ballot was counted.
There is a column in the CSV file which has a unique number for each entry in a given update, but I don't know if that was just a line number in the update or if it relates to the other data. It's only one not labeled in the CSV file.
So I guess my questions are "Why are there four entries per precinct per global update?" and other questions like "What is the meaning of life?" ha ha!
Thanks! I did however already get the NYT data. But it's not very good because it doesn't actually list vote counts in the timeseries, just total votes and %share to the nearest tenth of a percent.
My understanding is that Edison Research got their data from SCTYL (a Spanish company....? Why are our votes being counted by a Spanish company? Nothing against Spain, but you'd think we should run our own elections.)
As to the NYT data:
For example, if you look in data -> races -> 0 -> timeseries -> 714 -> voteshares
You see the following: Total votes: 6917583 bidenj: 0.5 (which would be 50.0%) trumpd: 0.488 (which would be 48.8%)
The difficulty is that the percentage is only shown to the nearest tenth of a percent. So you can "calculate" the votes, but not exactly. 48.75% to 48.8499999999999% would all round to 48.8%. That's a 0.01% range of ambiguity, which translates to 692 votes if the total vote count is 6917583.
So obviously a big change in votes that is greater than a tenth of a percent is obviously a problem, it becomes harder to figure out what's going on with changes that are less than a tenth of a percent.
There is a field earlier in the json as follows:
data -> races -> 0 -> candidates -> 0,1,2 or 3 -> votes
and these are for bidenj, trumpd, jorgensenj, and "write-ins."
They show actual vote counts, but they are not a timeseries, just the final "result."
I'm under the impression that Edward Solomon did get a hold of the SCTYL data, and that it actually had time series integer vote counts in it. Or perhaps he just downloaded the NYT data 160 times over the period of several days, and constructed the CSV file from the data->races->0->candidates->*->votes fields. (But that doesn't make sense, because the vote counts change when the file and time stamp didn't change in his CSV.)
I did download the CSV file so generously shared, but I'm confused about exactly how the data was processed to be put into the CSV file.
Now don't get me wrong, the NYT data shows huge discrepancies too. It's just harder to look for some specific patterns relating to exact ratios because, well, the vote shares are rounded off to the nearest few hundred votes during the end.
Edward Solomon, thank you so much for sharing!
I'm trying to understand exactly the meaning of the contents of your 1GA_Precincts_Timeseries_Full.csv file.
It looks like it's extracted from 176 different json data units, or from 176 different files.
Where can I get the original data from? I'm a perl coder so I don't mind dealing with hundreds of files and parsing them as needed.
Also, is this the same as the SCTYL data, or where can I get that too?
Thank you!
I think I know who's pushing the swing.