I don’t know, I doubt it.

Please stop bending over backwards for the corporations.

Who’s bending over backwards?

The customer shouldn’t have to control the taxi when they’re calling for emergency support like this

I agree. The car also shouldn’t drive in circles around a parking lot, but here we are. In that situation, you do whatever works. If the fastest or easiest way to resolve the problem is to do something with the app on their phone, then so be it. It does no good to complain about what the solution should be when you’re trying to resolve that. Save that for later once the problem has been resolved.

He was on his way to a flight. Flights are expensive.

Yes, and again, that’s something to address after you fix the problem. Stop interrupting the person who’s trying to help you to ask about compensation for a flight you haven’t yet missed (and probably won’t miss) rather than just do what they say to resolve the problem.

He has no idea for how long he’s going to be continually going in circles

But, it’s going to be a lot longer if he keeps interrupting and bringing up the cost of his flight rather than just doing as the person trying to help him asks.

This is a customer in distress

No, this is a guy trying to make a viral social media post, who obviously cares more about an exciting story than trying to fix the situation. If he cared about fixing it, when the agent asked him to bring up the waymo app on his phone he’d have done it. Instead, he needed to keep his phone in hand so he could keep recording for social media.

Waymo comes out of this looking incompetent, as they should. But, this guy didn’t do anything to make the situation better.

How did he not allow them to help?

He kept talking over the woman who was trying to help. He brought up his flight about 3x. When she asked him to bring up the Waymo app he pushed back rather than just doing what she asked.

He’s right that it’s dumb if he has to use his phone to do something. But, if she thought that would work, why not try it? I suspect the reason he didn’t want to do that is that he was using his phone to record his social media post, and was more concerned with getting his viral post ready vs. trying to actually resolve the situation.

This doesn’t make Waymo look good. Their car getting stuck looping a parking lot is ridiculous. The passenger not having an obvious button to push to get the car to immediately stop (or find a safe place to pull over and stop if it’s on a highway or something) seems like a big oversight too. The person answering the phone also didn’t seem to know how to handle the situation either. Like, this seems like one of the primary things someone on support should know how to do: stop the car and let the passenger get out if there’s a problem. But, she seemed to be fumbling to find a solution.

Having said that, the guy seemed to be making the situation worse instead of trying to resolve it and get to the airport.

“Spins in circles” makes it sound like the car was drifting, when it was just doing laps around the inside of a parking lot. Also, this guy starts talking about them “taking care” of his flight when this has been happening for what, 5 minutes? I get that it’s annoying, but if 5 minutes circling a parking lot would have made him miss his flight, he’d also have missed it if there was even a hint of bad traffic. He also doesn’t even allow the customer service person to help him.

Also, the screen in the car has a “pull over” button on it. I guess he missed that? Or, maybe he hit it and it was stuck in a loop trying to find a safe place to pull over? It seems to me that a software button on a touch screen isn’t good enough though. They should have a physical big red button that a passenger can’t miss and can hit if something is going wrong. But, that’s just me.

Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1973/05/08/how-the-chicago-tribune-exposed-city-vote-fraud-in-1972-and-won-a-pulitzer-prize/

Nobody can prove that there’s less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it’s more honest.

Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.

Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.

And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.

First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.

Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.

The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.

Yes, and again, it’s all based on trust.

The scary thing about elections is that, by design, nobody can ever “prove” they won.

Votes are designed to be anonymous. They have to be. If they’re not, they’re very vulnerable to manipulation. If someone can prove how they voted, then they can either be bribed to vote a certain way, or threatened to vote a certain way. If you can check that your vote was counted successfully for the candidate you chose, then someone else can check that you voted for the candidate they chose.

That means that, by design, the only security that elections can have is in the process. In a small election, like 1000ish votes or fewer, someone could supervise the whole thing. They could cast their vote, then stand there and watch. They could watch as other people voted, making sure that nobody voted twice, or dropped more than one sheet into the box. They could watch as the box was emptied. Then, they could watch as each vote was tallied. Barring some sleight-of-hand, in a small election like that, you could theoretically supervise the entire process, and convince yourself that the vote was fair.

But, that is impossible to scale. Even for 1000 votes, not every voter could supervise the entire process, and for more than 1000 votes, or votes involving more than one voting location, it’s just not possible for one person to watch the entire thing. So, at some point you need to trust other people. If you’re talking say 10,000 votes, maybe you have 10 people you trust beyond a shadow of a doubt, and each one of you could supervise one process. But, the bigger the election, the more impossible it is to have actual people you know and trust supervising everything.

In a huge country-wide election, there’s simply no alternative to trust. You have to trust poll workers you’ve never met, and/or election monitors you’ve never met. And, since you’re not likely to hear directly from poll workers or election monitors, you have to instead trust the news source you’re using that reports on the election. In a big, complex election, a statistician may be able to spot fraud based on all the information available. But, if you’re not that statistician, you have to trust them, and even if you are that statistician, you have to trust that your model is correct and that the data you’re feeding it is correct.

Society is built on trust, and voting is no different. Unfortunately, in the US, trust is breaking down, and without trust, it’s just a matter of which narrative seems the most “truthy” to you.

Give them a break, it’s really erarly.

Thank you for proving that the left lives in a bubble just like the right.

It’s propaganda. But, it’s not just propaganda, it’s effective propaganda.

The fact that it’s so effective is somewhat new and very concerning. We have to understand why it’s effective if there’s any hope of eventually stopping it. And, it’s effective not just because the propaganda is well crafted, it’s effective because there’s a whole system that immerses the audience in it and never lets them see an alternative point of view.

In North Korea the only information you get is information specifically selected by the state. The US free market and first amendment was supposed to be a shield against that sort of propaganda. Unfortunately, while people have the right to find other forms of media, a lot of people want the comfort of living inside their own media bubble. Then the propaganda channel tells them that every other source of media is full of lies, and controlled by the jews, and who knows what else, and those people get even more locked in to their propaganda source. Then they’re told that scientists are getting rich (ha!) by selling out, so you can’t trust scientific papers. So, you can’t trust the government, the media, scientists, doctors, schools… you can only trust them.

Then they’re told that if they ever do try to do their own research, they’re not going to get results because of censorship. Some censorship exists. Sometimes it’s formal, sometimes it’s informal, like YouTube taking down videos that hurt their bottom line, or cause them headaches. But, the convenient thing about claiming that information is being censored is that it’s unprovable or “unfalsifiable”. You can’t prove that something that doesn’t exist was censored because you can’t prove it ever existed in the first place. And, of course, when an idiot is told that information on “turbo cancer” is being censored, they search for it and get no results, that just reinforces their belief that the news is being censored.

Add to that that the same group that wants to lock people into a pipeline of disinformation also wants to defund schools and universities. You can’t hope that someone can learn the truth from a teacher or a professor if the school no longer exists. You can’t hope that the next generation learns critical thinking in high school if the high school is defunded and shut down.

Big tech companies making their platforms extremely engaging is yet another element in this shitty soup. Most of these companies actually employ mostly liberal people, and the culture is at least somewhat left of center. But, they get their money by keeping people engaged, which means feeding them things that are shocking, angering, etc. That keeps people in their bubbles, and keeps them from engaging their critical thinking abilities.

The end result is you get people living in bubbles, listening to, watching and reading news that makes them feel good because it reinforces their existing biases. They cut off people in their lives who have dissenting views because either they’re angry about that person’s views, or it’s just too much of a headache to constantly fight with them. Social media keeps them in a bubble that keeps them engaged, and keeps them seeing the same point of view over and over. And so-on.

Because the whole situation is so complicated, it’s not going to be easy to reverse. It’s not just a matter of shutting down Fox News, or Newsmax or MSNBC or any other propaganda fountain. It’s also going to have to involve breaking up tech monopolies, or at least removing their Section 230 protection for their editorial decisions. It’s also going to require major educational system reforms, ensuring that all kids go to schools that teach critical thinking skills, and because this is the US that will involve major fights over property taxes and religious freedom. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be possible.

gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor

I don’t think people realize how close that means the race was. 50/50 is like a coin flip. 35% is like rolling a six-sided die and getting either a 1 or a 2. It’s not the most likely outcome, but it’s not a surprising result either.

Your well come.

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

Or do it the other way around, the amount of money that the government can spend is limited by voter turnout.

Clearly if you can’t get people excited enough to vote for your policies, you don’t have a mandate.

Yeah, and some of the biggest states (like California) solidly go for one party. So, the non-voters really don’t affect the presidential race there.