In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.

I wish advertisers would realize that forcing me to watch their ad against my will makes me actively hostile against their brand and/or product. If I remember their brand name from an intrusive ad I will not only not buy their products, I will go out of my way to give my money to their competitors.

Ah, yup. There it is.

It’s definitely happened. I think the technical term is “vertebral artery dissection.” I don’t think it’s like a daily occurrence or anything, but there is a very real risk of it happening whenever you get a chiropractic adjustment on your neck. Basically you have some delicate arteries running through your neck bones and the sharp sudden movement of certain chiropractic adjustments have the potential to rupture them. It can cause a stroke and some various other bad things that can happen when blood flow through the spine is interrupted.

Didn’t Costco’s pharmacy get in trouble for this exact thing a couple months ago? I have a feeling we’re going to see a story about this for all the major pharmacy chains.

Now I’m imagining Scruffy as Zorg.

Is it just me or is this article written under the false assumption that Facebook not serving you ads is somehow the same as Facebook not collecting your data? Because just yesterday I read an article about Costco being in trouble for allowing Facebook’s tracking pixel to collect their customers’ HIPPA-protected medical information through their pharmacy’s web interface. I can’t imagine that serving ads or not serving ads is going to stop Facebook from collecting and exploiting all the personal data it possibly can. Paying to opt out of seeing ads seems like it would, at best, just make Facebook’s data mining less visible.

That is Larkspur. I’m from Denver, and recognized it immediately (also I image searched Larkspur ren faire to double check I wasn’t misremembering what it looks like). I’m sure other ren-faires have similar things, but that castle facade has been there since at least the 1980s, and I kind of doubt that was something you could get pre-fabricated back then.

I don’t think it’s from anything, but it has kind of a similar look to Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, so maybe that’s why it looks familiar.

Are you sure touching the armrests was necessary to make it work? In a hospital setting I would think it might have metal armrests just because metal surfaces can be easily disinfected, whereas wood could potentially harbor bacteria and other nasties. Kids aren't exactly famous for hand washing, hygiene, or keeping their fingers out of their mouths, after all.

There's also Under the Cherry Moon, and Graffiti Bridge.

Nah, there is no reason an employer needs to know anything about your banking details. Maybe some basic routing info if you’re doing direct deposit, but even then that’s after you get hired. This sounds all kinds of sketchy. I bet they used the words “kindly” and “dear” a lot.

I’m guessing they live in a large sprawling suburban apartment complex whose trash facilities were designed to be out of the way and unobtrusive rather than functional and convenient.

My last apartment was in a place kind of like that. It sat on a lot that was probably about eight city blocks. For the entire complex they had eight dumpsters in four trash enclosures around the perimeter, two of which were toward the front of the complex, and the other two toward the middle. If you lived at the back of the complex you’d have to carry your trash for at least a block and a half to dispose of it. It wasn’t uncommon to see people driving to the trash enclosure with bags of trash balanced on their car’s trunk lid.

I would say, “These products are found to have health risks,” or, “These products may negatively affect your health.”

It’s not. Nobody’s smoking crack out of the tip of a compressor hose. If people are stealing them for drug reasons the most likely answer is that they’re made of solid brass and have a decent scrap value. They’re selling them to the same guy they’re selling stolen catalytic converters and the copper wire they’ve stripped out of newly constructed homes to.

I think it might just be meant to depict a fat little Japanese peasant/laborer. The bandana-style headband tied in the front smacks of some kind of worker like a farmer or a fisherman. I don’t know why people keep suggesting it’s the Buddha. It’s clearly not (too fat, and has none of the defining physical characteristics). Nor is it Budai/Hotei (which is the fat guy a lot of people confuse with Buddha).

It’s a neat little inkwell though. Looks like it’s meant to be a stand for your pen as well. It reminds me of a lot of the tourist junk my grandpa brought back from Japan in the '50s when he was stationed in Korea during his military service.