I mean, yeah, they all are.

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

Yeah, they agreed with you. Their point is that they agreed with you. Sometimes people just share their thoughts and aren’t trying to start a fight.

Gotta milk that sweet sweet social media engagement.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, I don’t have to be polite to people who try to invalidate my life experience. Don’t tell me how I work.

Feel free to tell me how YOU work, but telling me that “it doesn’t work that way” when it obviously does for me doesn’t make your experience somehow universal.

Also, this is the Internet, if you can’t handle some people not being polite then I have bad news for you…

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.

I love how we are all here talking about how we all think and perceive differently and you decided it was important to tell me that the way I process trauma isn’t real. You can go ahead and fuck right off.

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.

Faces are hard for me too, but not impossible. It’s like AI. It’s easy to get a “teapot” but it takes more work and focus to get a specific individual.

Maybe. One way to process trauma is to re-visit it until it becomes more familiar and less of an extreme experience. Seeing it in your mind may make it more real, but it also means you can just picture a teapot instead if you need to get away from it.

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?

Picture a teapot. Picture it turning over so you can see the other side. Sort of like that.

Look, I’m a man, I’m not feeling insulted by this at all. If you are, maybe it’s time to ask why.

I have no problem being a man while also acknowledging that sexual assault by men is a problem that is big enough that it has created a “caution culture” where people teach their daughters to be vigilant and women will cross the street if someone is walking behind them to stay safe. It isn’t like this is overblown, studies vary but all agree it’s somewhere more than one in ten women are victims of sexual violence in their lifetime. That’s a non-dismissible statistic.

Sure sexual assault by women is a thing too, but men tend to handle it differently than women do. All we are doing here is acknowledging that in our culture “male stranger danger” is a thing that exists and is pervasive and strong enough that many women would be willing to risk the bear because at least it won’t rape them.

Why would you be taking that personally?

The fact that you think the point of this is your status and not someone else’s safety says so much.

Last time I asked the pharmacist, they recommended Zyrtec, or other allergy medication. It targets the same mechanism, apparently.

It worked for me at any rate.

Because the customer has become an entitled piece of shit and you don’t tell an abuser “you’re welcome.”