Wait until you see what they do to avoid learning SQL or Regex or JSON Pointer or XPath.

The FDA was already fucking worthless. I got severe food poisoning from some grocery store pre-boiled eggs some years ago, and when I asked them to look into it to prevent other people getting sick, they just connected me with the grocery store lawyers who were just useless and defensive.

Any solution that starts with purges is bad.

Democrats aren't authoritarians. It's a bad comparison. Democrats are always fragmented, it's virtually a defining characteristic. Post-Biden unity has been quite unusual.

The fixation is because there is no clear line of succession. If he fails, who steps in? They'll splinter and fragment. They'll still be deplorable, but less effective when not united behind a single authoritarian leader.

There's a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn't have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn't enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

That's part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they've mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.

His communications director who?

Military, sure, but driver's licenses are state-level, not federal. Health care has been using birthdate like a password (one that is largely publicly available) for way too long now. At least financial institutions can use account numbers and financial history and code words, but even all that isn't great.

It's a messy patchwork, but I think at the time of the creation of the SSA, the US may have still thought of itself as a land of second chances. IBM numbering Holocaust victims probably didn't help the idea of a national ID, nor did the victim narrative of groups like the NRA.

I'm not sure if it's possible not to have a national ID anymore, so denial of it just forces a terribly kludgy implementation from whatever is around.

I love living in Washington. But I i fear the backlash as Inslee finishes his last term. He's been a great, green governor, but absolutely vilified for it by the right.

No, I'm sorry, that's dangerously naïve, and a self-serving, solipsistic moral panic. How old are you?

If we used RCV or anything better that winner-take-all, that would be different, or if we had a parliamentary system. But we don't.

That's not what you said. Your original "only" indicates that you think that votes + splitting your opponents votes isn't a strategy.

If splitting votes didn't matter, there wouldn't be so much effort put into gerrymandering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Voting is a practical, strategic act, not an ideological one.

It's worse when the "random" dude is you.