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Admin
The only austerity program that enjoyed any measure of success was budget sequestration a decade ago now. That barely moved the needles too. The system is broken, there are to many entrenched interests. Nobody ever manages to cut anything, and government has its fingers in to many pies for democracy to allow for reasoned discussion about which if any should even be public priorities.
It is time to break stuff, even if it gets people killed, because if we don't the idea of real liberty is dead. This is threat is no small than the great wars of the 20th century.
Admin
Here in Germany we have two votes on federal elections, 1st vote is for the districts direct candidate, 2nd vote is for a parties state candidate list.
Number of seats a party will have in the federal parliament is determined by their share of the 2nd vote only, with those seats being first filled with the direct district candidates that won their district, then filled up with candidates from the list.
There are twice as many seats as districts, for the longest time that was enough to get all the direct district candidates in. This changed with more parties making it over the 5% threshold required to be present in parliament at all.
Up to this year that meant that the size of the parliament would be increased to get all direct district candidates in, but also keep the overall party proportions.
Starting with this years federal election this has changed to "if you have more direct district candidates that made it than your total share of seats then only the direct candidates with the highest margins will get in", as in recent years the original system caused more and more seat bloat, having lead to our federal parliament currently being the 2nd largest in the world.
But back to gerrymandering: it would never really have made sense here in Germany, and with the latest reform it wouldn't make any at all.
There is no need to register to vote either as we have a general duty to register our place of residence anyway, so when elections come you just get your notification sent to your current official place of residence.
to be continued ...
Admin
Germany part #2
We vote on Sundays, and unless you are in a very rural area your nearest polling station would only be a kilometer or less away from you (for the last 20 years I never lived more than some 500 meters away from the one assigned to me). So most of us don't have to take work time off to vote.
Also once you have received your notification letter you can also do early voting at the local town hall, or register for mail-in voting if voting in person at your assigned place is inconvenient to you.
They may ask for your national ID card (or alternatively for your Passport) to verify your identity at the polling station, they especially will if you forgot or lost your notification letter, but if you show up with the letter in hand (and have not reported having lost it, or not received it in the first place) they will only ask for ID randomly, not on everyone.
For our neighbors in Belgium voting is not even a right, but is actually mandatory by law to vote.
Oh, and regarding simplicity: German polling stations still manage to handle all of this with pen and paper only. Digital processing only comes in when polling station results are reported up stream. No computers at the polling stations themselves. Yet we usually have good result predictions within the first hour or two after voting stations close, and an officially certified by the next day.
Knowing who the actual new chancellor (our equivalent of a prime minister) will be takes a bit longer though, as there's never a single party going to have the majority of seats. So a working coalition needs to be formed first, to only then appoint the chancellor.
We do have a president, but that is mostly a formal role only. Technically he can refuse to sign bills, but I only remember that having happened once. And we don't directly elect the president either.
To be continued ...
Admin
A Germans perspective, part #3:
The US election system was revolutionary for the times it was originally implemented in, when communication was basically limited by the speed of a horse. It totally made sense at the time. But it did not age well.
Fun fact: Our German system was actually approved by the three west allies after WW2, even though at lest the UK and the US of A had a quite different system, so they must have seen our plans as being not that bad either.
Admin
I'm not saying that there isn't anything to uncover. But with Co-presidents Trump and Musk the wolves were asked to guard the sheep, so to say.
Admin
The other day a political rant; today another. I opened this article, and the first thing I see is "Abroad, people will die without the support they've been receiving." Disgusting that this trash would be believed. AID is Agency for International Development; it has nothing to do with "aid." It is nothing but a CIA front for all the dirty tricks this govt has been playing in interfering, and more recently, exporting wickedness all over the world. But now, OMG, people want to hold the government accountable! Stick to code stories.
Admin
There's one small variant to the standard first-past-the-post voting system that retains the simplicity but can lead to better outcomes. It's called approval voting. The idea is that instead of saying yes to only one candidate (and, by default, no to all the others), you can say yes to as many as you want.
Here in Canada we have four national political parties, three of which are varying degrees of centre-left and one of which is, by Canadian standards, hard right. It's not uncommon for the majority of people in an electoral district to vote for one or another of the centre-left parties, but because that vote is split three ways, the conservative party ends up winning. With approval voting that wouldn't happen, and the only difference at the ballot box is that you can choose more than one candidate.
Admin
Oh, you'll like Matt Parker's book, "Humble Pi". It's full of real-life problems caused by errors in math, many of which will be familiar to TDWTF readers. But one of the points he brings out is the Swiss Cheese model of disasters, originated by Professor Emeritus James Reason at the University of Manchester, which posits the same thing that Remy points out: for things to go really sideways, there are a lot of systems that have to fail simultaneously.
Admin
Preface: I come from a long line of die hard Democrats and have been one for nearly half a century.
Honestly, if you really think the article that you posted is actually in any way relevant to IT or this site, then you really are lying to yourself. I have been a Democrat for almost 50 years, and everyone in my family has. But so much this article and in the comments is just parroting false information from by MSNBC and similar whose officially published viewership rating have dropped to less than 30k out of a 300+ million domestic; they simply cannot be trusted any more.
Quite frankly, the whole party leadership, to which my family and I have long been aligned, cannot be trusted. Not when they, for starters, so willing flush their own primary completely down the toilet and just pick whoever they want (and illegally transfer funds to [1]) as also go out of their way to hide the true medical status of the then sitting president as well as obscure who was really calling the shots.
I cannot in good conscience continue to support the DNC that has completely ceased to be what brought people like us in way back. They have no desire to want to actually help anyone but themselves. The other side hasn't been saints either over the years but are at least the new administration is trying to do something positive that should have been done ages ago.
Please do not use this site for this sort of thing.
[1] The transfer of campaign funds to Harris from Biden was painfully illegal, since there rare no running mates in the primaries, just individual candidates, so each of them at that point was a separate entity. This was simply a clear violation of their own rules that they expect everyone else to abide by.
Admin
I was thinking of the conceptual simplicity of the various overall systems (first-past-the-post versus single transferable vote versus [long list of other systems]) rather than the physical simplicity of casting my vote.
And in France, I don't even need to bring or use a pen/pencil at all, since votes are registered for presidential, municipal and nationwide legislative elections by putting a pre-printed choice sheet in a little envelope (i.e. if I want to vote for party X, I put party X's choice sheet in my envelope) and putting that in the urne (ballot box).
As you said for German elections, French elections (even the nation-level ones) are also confirmed quickly after the polls close. None of this remaining nonsense dictated by the speed of horse-back / horse-drawn transport in the late 18th Century...
Admin
I am fearful that Remy is forgetting why people come to this site daily. No offense, but I don't really need Remy's political diatribe as much as I need to just see some bad code so that I can feel better about my bad programming. Please, no more of this.
Admin
It's honestly kind of scary to see how many frequent commenters (who seem to know what they're doing) are fans of horrid IT procedures once the right person mandates them. OTOH, it's a nice object lesson for WTF creation and proliferation.
Admin
Here in the Netherlands, the municipal government simply sends voting papers to (AFAIK) everyone who is registered as living in the municipality and is 18+ years old at the time the election takes place (and, presumably, hasn’t had the right to vote taken away by a judge). The municipal bureaucracy knows pretty accurately who lives in its territory and how old they are, so this is trivial to do. Now, of course, if a country’s governmental organisation doesn’t allow for this, then having people go out and register to vote is probably a necessity.
Admin
Observation: this merely says that there's an implicit registration-to-vote, assumed because you registered as living in the municipality, and only functions well if it's mandatory to change that registration when you move to another municipality. (Otherwise, you'd have to go back to where you lived before, possibly several moves before, to vote if you don't deregister in the old place and reregister in the new place, and there's a serious problem if the deregister isn't automatic when you reregister.)
Admin
No, the real problem is the fact that Trump kept complaining Obama wasn't born in the United States and he should be deported back. At the same time, he puts an illegal immigrant in charge of the entire country. King Musk. All hail King Musk. The US has managed to turn itself into a monarchy with a king less liked than King Charles (who is head of every Commonwealth country).
So Trump based his entire platform on expelling illegal immigrants, and yet he gave full control of the government to one. And made it such that King Musk is immune from all those illegal immigrant policies he's implementing to kick out illegal immigrants.
Of course, with all this chaos going on, the effects won't be felt until the summer. Then all h*ll is going to break loose and it's going to be an interesting fall holiday season when the full effects of all those policies will be felt.
Even his "fork in the road" which got around 3% of the people resigning, is half of the average government turnover in any year. Chances are those people were going to do it anyways, now they may get 6 months of severance at it. May, because any contract made beyond the current funding period (which runs out in mid-March) is technically not valid. In fact, the laws regarding promissory estoppel are completely ignored when the government does it - so if the appropriations for such resignations isn't obtained, those people are screwed - they cannot even sue because it was decided promissory estoppel is not binding on the government.
Admin
These things aren't really a big deal for us because we have quite a different life style over here in Europe. For one, we Europeans don't really move around as much as americans do. We just don't have the habit of relocating more than once, maybe twice in a lifetime. We move away from our parents and that's about it.
And when we do move, it's usually within the same city or close region, at least by your standards. It's very rare for someone to just pick up and move house 1000s of km over in a different direction even once in ones lifetime. Let alone multiple times like you do. We just don't have the room to do so.
I mean, just to give one example the total distance between Berlin and Warsaw is just 517 km. Assuming you don't get much resistance from the locals you can drive that in one fuel tank. Just ask the Germans.
So even in the worst case scenario where you deliberately chose not to register your relocation and you refuse to use all the mail voting options AND you literally moved to a different country you could start in the morning, drive to your pooling station back home, vote and still be back home for lunch. Or just take the train. And that's a wildly unrealistic worst case scenario.
This said, of course registering your place of residence is mandatory. Why would it not be? How is the government supposed to reach you for anything if you don't do that?
Admin
They're not setting bones, they are amputating limbs and they are not really checking if there even are any broken bones before they do it.
Admin
It's fairly obvious from the second paragraph that the article is talking about the current situation wrt DOGE and Musk. It is not compulsory to continue reading beyond that point.
If you don't like articles about current affairs you do not need to read them. I, on the other hand, do like getting a technical perspective on what is happening. I am fine with this kind of article occasionally appearing as are many of the other readers of TheDWTF.
Please stop trying to censor its content just because you don't like it.
Admin
I think there might be some dots that need connecting in this argument; I'm afraid I'm not following it.
Admin
If you want to have "articles about current affairs" then go to places where that is a norm. Not wanting a place to hijacked to be used as a forum for something unrelated to the normal content is NOT censorship. I mean where does it end? I have seen the same thing happen on cooking related sites and automotive help forums over years to name a couple of examples, and it never ends well when the normal barriers are broken down like this. Lack of editorial discipline is how sites tend to die.
Admin
What that appears to be getting at is that too much of the post and comments have been echoing blatant false reporting from news outlets that have lost most of their viewers for good reason. And people here including Remy are trying to somehow tie it all to technology with a connection less solid than wet toilet paper in a hurricane. This kind of post stands out a completely out of place compared to the normal content.
Admin
I wrote something about the COBOL/ISO-8609 thing yesterday. I'm not convinced that's the correct explanation, but it's plausible.
It's apparently "Days since reference point," & ISO-8604:2000 does contain the text, "A reference point is used which assigns the year number 1875 to the calendar year in which the "Convention du mètre" was signed at Paris." Similar text also appears in the 1997 draft of the anticipated 2000 edition.
Now, notably, that's not an Epoch. If you were working for IniGov updating a COBOL program for the Y2K changeover after 1997 when the drafts were being written, & needed to count days since a reference point, you would probably want to use a year around 1875, since the oldest living person from 1875 died in August of 1997, & 2**16 (65536) days since 1875 will put you in the year 2054, when we'll probably have another issue.
I have no idea if it's true but it seems plausible.
Admin
You've made a critical error here by assuming that somehow I'm not European. It's an error because I am European, and have been the whole of my life. I'd have thought it was clear by now from everything I've posted that:
(1). I'm British in origin, born actually in London.
(2). I largely didn't have a choice about whether we moved from the UK to the US, since I was 15 at the time, but it was actually a fun experience overall.
(3). In 1990, after some time in the US, I moved to the UK with the (now) late Mrs Cynic.
(4). At the beginning of 2009, we moved to France.
(5). In 2019, I received the French nationality that I had asked for in 2017.
(6). I am not a US citizen of any sort, nor have I ever been one.
Admin
I wanted to add a little more about politics, & separated those comments out in case mods decide to nuke them.
If you're not in the US right now, be grateful. Politics is thick everywhere now & it's unavoidable. You wake up thinking about people you know who are impacted by this, people losing jobs or passports, & you wonder throughout the day if more people you know will be hurt. Should you set up a new bank account? Where would be safe?
They call it Totalitarianism in part because the totality of your existence is wrapped up in the leader, whether you like the leader or hate him, or just want to ignore him. The leader is an inseparable part of every thing you do.
That will leak out into the things you do, whether you want to avoid politics or not. Unless you go total hermit kingdom like North Korea, it is unavoidable.
Admin
All constitutions ultimately depend on the participants to go along. There is nothing you can put in a document that will stop someone with a power base from tearing it up. That’s the wishful thinking of cypherpunks.
Admin
Your moderation policies are just as bad as the Lib coalition. This post will never appear, but I'm happy that you'll have to read it first, you bozo.
Edit Admin
If the argument is that declining readership must be attributed to a decrease in trustworthiness, then I think it's a false argument. There are lots of other potential reasons available, some of which I find much more compelling.
Admin
Not sure where you got "readership" from when I clearly said "viewers", but now that you mention it, yes, the likes of the NY Times, Washington Post, and others have also fallen to rock bottom in recent time as well. News papers in general have fallen but some more than others. There are plenty of local papers that still do well. But what I and others had mentioned is that certain mainstream stations have lost a tremendous amount of viewers (as in people actively watching their content) due to just plain bad reporting and it has only gotten even worse in the last few weeks and many people here just echo what they say without any actual research of their own.
Once again, this whole post/thread just does not belong on this site. There is nothing about bad code here, not even close. Just desperate attempts to make it topical because some people just cannot resist bringing politics as they see it into everything, and cannot understand that there are places like this that people go to to AVOID posts like this. It is not hard to understand by any reasonable mind.