The vast army of Georgia poll workers report for duty only about three days a year and get paid about $7.25 an hour. Every time we come in, the rules have changed, so we train for eight hours to learn the new protocols. Election day itself, including set-up and break-down, starts at 5:30 am and ends at 9:00 pm, two hours later if you’re a manager delivering the ballots to the regional office. Most of us are retired, and many are elderly (read: not tech-forward).

And poll workers are not perfect. One of them puts on a sweater and inadvertently obscures her name tag (not allowed). Another shows a new person how to work the check-in station (not allowed). Another tells a nonprofit they can set up their food hand-outs inside the building so as to stay out of the rain (not allowed). And at some point during the 15 hour work day, all of you find yourself accidentally socializing with one another (also not allowed). Likewise, the clerks are socializing with the voters (you guessed it: not allowed), which, worst case, is akin to being smothered in grandmas.

This sounds very like my experience back when I used to work the polls. We all did the best we could and we all knew a fair chunk of the voters, so chatting was frequent.

I believe the main issue is that it doesn’t get ‘clicks’ these days because everyone already knows about it. “Dog bites man” doesn’t get as many clicks as “Man bites dog” and all that. Still, a quick search brought up a couple articles from the last 12 months that weren’t stifled:

• https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/produced-water-midland-pollution-18561991.php
• https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/31/texas-oil-gas-fracking-wastewater-spills-railroad-commission/
• https://www.cleveland.com/open/2024/05/fracking-waste-wells-owned-by-an-ohio-senator-are-leaking-the-state-paid-13-million-to-clean-it-up.html
• https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/04/30/athens-co-fracking-leak-inaction-show-the-dire-public-health-dangers-of-ohio-regulatory-capture/
• https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/erie/an-erie-oil-well-surrounded-by-homes-leaked-toxic-chemicals-as-cleanup-continues-neighbors-fear-health-risks
• https://www.alleghenyfront.org/rager-mountain-equitrans-gas-leak-fine/

tangential: https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2024/09/12/methane-emissions-much-higher-than-gas-industry-targets-study-says/

Are you trying to greenwash fracking??? Industry never cleans up. There’s no profit in it. You would hear them advertise their ‘commitment to nature’ if they rescued one tree or bunny from their own contamination. When you hear nothing, they are continuing to wreak havoc.

It’s because of the electoral college. Most states give all their electoral college votes to whomever wins the state rather than dividing the votes equitably. This means Pennsylvania – a swing state – will go either all-red or all-blue. The state has a lot of fracking, and a lot of people making money off it, so Democrats are trying to appease pro-fracking to get votes.

The people getting harmed by fracking are stuck without anyone on their ‘side’, but will presumably be more likely to vote blue because that side favors more regulation and pro-environment stuff. Note that all Harris said was she wouldn’t ban fracking. She didn’t say she wouldn’t make it difficult to do. My guess is any attempts to make it cleaner will get crushed by Congress and the Corrupted Supreme Court that has sided against Unions, workers, citizens, and the planet – all to favor of their sugar daddies. So even if the next President wants to do something about fracking, it would be a hard to actually do anything.

And for hot peppers.

Well, yeah, but that’d take a government not captured by Corporations.

This should be addressed by fixing the software, but it seems to be easier or cheaper to instead further burden the workers.

Does this archive version render any better for you? https://archive.ph/xIOUo

I saw ‘ants are everywhere’ and thought it was going to be a nature story about the secret lives of ants – something like this: https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/02/24/weekend-diversion-down-the-ant-hole

The actual story was a much sadder read. :-(

Exactly! In fact ENCOURAGE singing to get a better data set for fixing the software!

No, it isn’t. If it was just for liability, they wouldn’t have to care what the driver did until someone filed an accident report or other complaint.

This is about crappy software that COULD be improved, but it is cheaper to threaten thousands of people with punishment for singing than it is to pay programmers to refine their ‘distracted’-pattern recognition.

You say that because you’ve never had the good stuff. :-P

Alternate story from https://www.etymonline.com/word/cheesecake

The modern slang meaning dates from 1933; a “Time” magazine article from 1934 defined it as “leg-pictures of sporty females.”

Is it any good? I used to like Lidl and Aldi breads before COVID, when you could slice it right there. They stopped that, and so I no longer had a reason to drive 5-10 miles out of my way to go there. I’d go back for a good sauerkraut, though.

I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:

After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”

OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”

While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.

“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”

A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.

I’m going to be repeating this whenever this ad blitz is mentioned because it is MUCH WORSE than you think. America PAC is partially funded by Musk and his old pals at Palantir. They sell data and analyses of it. You might get registered to vote if your state is a solid red or blue, but CNBC reports (archive):

[…] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Again, Palantir sells information, so in all likelihood they are going to take that input to figure out exactly how to target people to ‘vote Trump’ using the very information the public gave them for free!

Thank you!

I’m so sorry.

Why can’t the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count ‘canned’ but I don’t reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.

Is the statement at the bottom of the article new or did the earlier posters simply miss it?

… One of Best Friends’ recommendations for due diligence within the adoption process was to focus on the shelter’s existing system, Chameleon, which pulls information related to animal welfare cases. This includes animal abuse and animal cruelty cases. Checking MyCase was discouraged, as its use was problematic and could lead to biased, inequitable vetting of potential adoptees.

This story does not have enough detail, so I looked for more.

First, I looked up Best Friends and they are firmly no-kill to the exclusion of all else. I am guessing the ‘Chameleon’ referenced is this CMS, but I could be wrong. If that is the software, it looks like there is a way for people to add notes about specific animals, but it isn’t clear if you can enter notes about specific people. It certainly doesn’t look like it has a way of automatically checking police records for criminal records. It does suggest you can enter these types of ‘field’ data:

• Calls for service
• Citations
• Bite reporting
• Field staff dispatching
• Shift control and tracking
• Laptop implementation
• Case photos

I’m guessing MyCase is this free Indiana-specific portal.

Now: if they aren’t talking about the free MyCase link I found, then perhaps they are using software that charges the Animal Shelter for each search. I can see getting fired for incurring costs that aren’t in the budget. Alternately, perhaps ‘Best Friends’ is giving them funding based on the shelter NOT rejecting any adopter ever for any reason – or at least thinking that is a condition based on this statement from the Best Friends ‘who we are’ page:

We’re making sure that everyone has the same access to loving pets and that every adoptable pet has access to the comfort of a foster home instead of a kennel in a shelter.

– note that the above is meant to foster diversity and its links to their diversity page (which seems focused on income disparity), but that quoted bit COULD be read to mean ‘everyone gets a pet, no matter what’.

I would think it incumbent on all employees to create notes/warnings about known abusers and have that be a flag if they come back to adopt, but I do see a case for allowing people to re-adopt an animal they voluntarily gave to the shelter because they had gone through a patch where they couldn’t afford to feed it, but now they can. Others might argue that this is abuse or that the owners don’t deserve a pet, but it is clear that Best Friends thinks that refusing such people is discriminatory.

That doesn’t mean that the particular abuse getting uncovered with MyCase was simply surrendering a pet until people got on their feet. Mostly, it just feels like there’s a bunch of stuff going on that no one reported.