Pantheons that include a trickster have the trickster break rules that sometimes works out well. Eg, multiple pantheons where the trickster steals fire from one or more of the other gods and gives it to mortals. Some of the Southwestern Coyote stories go even farther, with Coyote stealing light in the form of the sun, moon, and stars and making those available to the benefit of mortals.
That sort of origin story simply doesn't work in the Abrahamic religions.
Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom.
The main purpose for all the tricksters in mythology seems to be breaking rules. That could be an interesting discussion.
I know in California, and I’m sure in Colorado as well, an enormous effort goes in to writing those instructions to make them clear.
This is a primary, so there are more ways to make a mistake, and the instructions are more complicated then they will be in November. The question the state had to answer was, how do you do open primaries in a vote by mail state (where now >50% of voters are not affiliated with a party)? The answer here is every unaffiliated voter receives two ballots, one for each major party. The instructions say to vote one of the two ballots and return it, discarding the other. Most voters do that. Some vote one ballot but return both. Some vote both and return both.
After another couple of days, I have to revise my estimate of the "can't follow the instructions" rate down, significantly. During a break I asked a supervisor about it. She told me that the people who run receiving and the sorting machine and "assemble" the hundred-envelope batches have the machine separate out envelopes according to some set of parameters, and that problematic ones do tend to come in bunches.
Yesterday we got the first envelope where someone included a thank-you card with their ballot. Like all other non-official items found, it goes in a collection to be either returned to the voter (eg, drivers licenses) or destroyed. No pinning on the walls.
The extraction team gets Monday off. The QC group, OTOH, gets to go in early and learn the QC process for tabulation, which will be starting.
The price of giving incompetents no bid contracts.
If this were an entirely private dealing, I'd be going through the follow-up care parts of the warranty, and having made sure that I was in compliance (pouring in H2O2 makes that unlikely for the NPS or whoever), would be clawing back my $14M or bankrupting the coating company in the effort.
In the latest at the reflecting pool, the blue epoxy coating has started peeling off of the walls and bottom. Lots of hypotheses about why it's peeling are being advanced. My own advice to the people who take care of the pool, based solely on anecdotal observations here and there around the country over the years, is "The only real non-lethal way to control algae is turnover. You have to be replacing water from a pretty clean source at a rate that produces an observable current in the pool/pond. Otherwise the algae will win at some point during the summer."
@Charles, today I also learned that either there is an enormous fraud going on undetected, or there are a bunch of grandmas and grandpas propping the whole thing up. Honestly, as we walked through the various processing sections, I kept wanting to offer an arm to some of the old ladies hobbling along.
Tomorrow morning I will be learning the QA system and software along with two women half my age, who were the only youngsters in the group.
Today I learned that some people include their drivers' license in the envelope when they return their mail ballot. Also, in a non-rigorous sampling, 6-10% of people don't/won't/can't follow all of the instructions.
Coors Field in Denver has a small colony of feral cats that are tolerated because they keep the rodent population under control. From time to time one of them makes an appearance on the field during a game.
Basketball, in contrast, is practically incomprehensible on TV. To follow what’s happening, you really have to be there in person.
16:9 aspect ratio and big screens and directors that make use of them have helped a lot.
American football pretty much requires television.
I went to high school in Nebraska when the Cornhuskers were becoming a national football power. Due to the broadcast rules of the time and the importance of market size, there might be one regular season game on TV in a season. But a good radio announcer, some imagination, and some knowledge of how the team played was sufficient.
I blame the same thing for the decline of reading. Building a picture in your head of what's happening in the story from the printed words takes effort, and practice. Free TV was the beginning of the end.
This week the University of Denver -- founded as a non-sectarian seminary operated by the Methodists -- closed its Department of Religious Studies. A university closing a humanities department isn't exactly news these days. At the same time, they closed the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering, which is somewhat less usual.
Full disclosure: I have a Master of Public Policy degree from DU. As I understand is often the case for private schools, the connections I made via the faculty were as valuable as the actual coursework.
Colorado was the first state to elect a woman to the legislature; Nevada was the first to have a majority female legislature.
There are currently nine state legislative chambers where woman members hold 50% or more of the seats. All nine are in western states. Four of the last five Speakers of the Colorado House have been women.
Probably repeating myself, but it's hard to think of an issue that is more likely to give a regional secession movement some traction than SCOTUS trying to ban vote by mail. There are 13 western region states. 3 of them have no-excuse mail ballots that require once-per-year sign-up (AK, ID, and WY). All three have 20-30% of voters sign up in any given year. 3 more have permanent no-excuse mail ballots with one-time-only sign-up (AZ, MT, NM). MT has >75% signed up, AZ has >90% signed up. NM's list is new, all the history of the movement suggests they'll get to the 75-90% range soon. The other 7 have "every registered voter gets a mail ballot, period."
The western region does recalls. It does initiatives. And to almost the same degree, it now does vote by mail.
I’ve had far too many union grievances where a “should” in place of a “shall” effectively negated the negotiated protections.
I spent an unpleasant couple of years where my job included providing feedback to and interpretations of a couple of developing international telecommunications standards. Should. Shall. May. Must. OTOH, years later when I worked for the state legislature, more experienced staff remarked favorably about my fixation on getting should/shall correct.
Access to polling stations to be made as easy as practicable, with a limit – 30 minutes say – on time spend waiting to vote, and polling stations situated with facilitating voting as the main criterion.
and
Voting by mail to be allowed. States may choose for themselves the deadline for posting or receiving these votes.
I've probably written this before -- it's a hot button for me -- one of the reasons western states have been moving to vote by mail for the last 30 years is the greatly increasing cost and other difficulties of achieving the first item here in an area with a very rapidly growing population. Colorado found it was getting very difficult to find suitable venues, to continue buying (and storing) more and more equipment for those venues, and to staff them. "My" precinct location moved every election, often by miles.
Increasingly common in vote by mail western states is the vote center model. A small number of locations where in-person voting can be done, aimed at edge cases: mail ballots lost at the last minute, same day registration, those sorts of thing. "I prefer to cast my vote in person" draws the warning, "It may be time-consuming for you to get to a vote center and then wait. If you want it to be easy, well, we send you a mail ballot." For the primaries this month, my county of 380,000 people and 2,600 square miles will have three vote center where you can vote in person. For the general election when higher turnout is expected, a couple more will be added.
I urged my Democratic Senators to vote against the bills named for John Lewis when the Dems held Congress because of language like that in the second item. Not "to be allowed." Vote by mail is the current gold standard for security, accuracy, and ease of use. The legal language has to make vote by mail a first-class option (in the way that's used in programming languages). Nor can the language require states to do both vote by mail and precincts on a scale where either could handle the entire election.
Interestingly, the first thing that happened to the John Lewis bill, when Biden got elected and there was at least a chance the bill might actually be passed and signed, was that it got pulled from the floor calendar and sent back to committee. Every appearance of the term "precinct" was replaced by "vote center." Every appearance of the term "absentee ballot" was replaced by "mail ballot". It wasn't enough, but the East Coast/Midwestern sponsors had suddenly discovered western Blue states had been building a new, better system and some of their representatives weren't going to vote to backwards.
Says something that notoriously ultra-liberal states like Idaho and Wyoming do no excuse mail-in voting.
Utah went full vote by mail several years ago. Their system is a new contender near the top of the lists of expert ratings for security, accuracy, and ease of use (their Secretary of State and county clerks made multiple trips to Colorado to ask about what worked and what didn't). The Republican legislature and governor have now passed a bill to roll that back over a period of years. As far as they rolled it was a permanent no-excuse mail ballot list starting by 2029. I understand that surveys suggested if they made mail ballots any harder than that, there would be a wholesale turnover in the ranks of the legislators.
Need to change the time of year in that case. As I recall, Colorado added its permanent no-excuse mail ballot list, and I signed up for it immediately, the year after I stood in line outside in a blizzard to vote in November. The only two months w/o any recorded snow where I live now are July and August. And August is close -- there has been measurable snowfall on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
Voting slows down considerably when the staff is, in addition to the rest of the job, trying to keep the floor mopped well enough that it's not slick, and people have to do something with their coat to keep from getting water on the ballot.
Those countries probably do not have a postmaster general who gives strong hints that he would meddle with those ballots, if he thought that he can get away with it.
As I've mentioned before, vote by mail is an issue that might get a secession movement some traction. In the 13-state western region of the US, 10 of the 13 states have permanent no-excuse mail ballot lists. 7 of the 10 just use the full registered voter list, 3 require voters to take a small extra step, once. Of those three, >90% of AZ voters are on the list, >75% in MT, and NM's list is relatively new. The three w/o a permanent list are AK, ID, and WY. All three require you to sign up once each year, which covers all elections in that year. On the order of 25-30% of voters do the annual request in each of those.
"You can take away my mail ballot when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
Not to put too fine a face on it, but electronic communications just aren’t as secure, and the audit trails (e.g. for recounts) are less robust.
xkcd has a comic where airplane engineers explain why airplanes are indeed the safest form of travel, and civil engineers explain why it is almost literally impossible for an elevator to fall down the shaft, and software engineers... run screaming from the idea of online voting.
Colorado's system sometimes loses points when evaluated by experts because a very small number of disabled voters are allowed to submit their ballot online. I don't know the details, but believe there's significant effort in qualifying each election and individual one-time credentials are delivered by US mail.
Well, I was going to throw in something to start...
As I've mentioned, I volunteered to be an election judge. Yesterday afternoon I stopped by the election office to show them my I-9 documents for employment (basically, citizenship and a state photo id). Late in the afternoon I missed a call from the election office. The voice message said they wanted to talk about changing my assignment.
The timing seems suspicious. I mentioned this to a friend who said, "You showed them papers that indicate you're serious, so they actually looked at the background form you did initially. They don't get a lot of real computer geeks. They want you to do more hours, more training, and keep the computers happy."
Well, I'll call them Monday morning and see what it is.
I haven't seriously considered running for Canada since I was a senior in high school, the draft hadn't been closed down, and my lottery number was 25.
I'm old. I have a wife in memory care here. I have granddaughters. I'm staying here and fighting. My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say that taking part in an armed insurrection was not part of my retirement planning.
Best of luck, `wonkie. I lack the relatives, my entire family tree seems to have spread west along the Ohio River, then into Iowa, then Nebraska, and now me here in Colorado. I'm too old to qualify on points, and not rich enough to simply buy my way in. My remaining family is pretty firmly tied down, so I'd have to leave them behind as well. And of course, my French is -- as my graduate school housemate who was a Romance language linguist said -- "limited".
To annoy me, though, he would stop behind me when I was sitting at the kitchen table in the afternoon struggling with a math proof and ask me something in Spanish or French, like whether I wanted to go to the seven o'clock or nine o'clock showing of the the new movie. And I would tell him, "Seven, I'm supposed to get up early tomorrow." (In English.) Then he'd switch to the other language I didn't know and say that was fine, he'd have dinner ready at 5:30. And I'd look at my wristwatch and tell him that was cool, I should be done with the math by then. About that point I'd suddenly realize he'd done it to me again.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Monkey business”
Since we're going there anyway...
Pantheons that include a trickster have the trickster break rules that sometimes works out well. Eg, multiple pantheons where the trickster steals fire from one or more of the other gods and gives it to mortals. Some of the Southwestern Coyote stories go even farther, with Coyote stealing light in the form of the sun, moon, and stars and making those available to the benefit of mortals.
That sort of origin story simply doesn't work in the Abrahamic religions.
"
Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom.
The main purpose for all the tricksters in mythology seems to be breaking rules. That could be an interesting discussion.
Go. Write. Post.
On “Open Thread”
I know in California, and I’m sure in Colorado as well, an enormous effort goes in to writing those instructions to make them clear.
This is a primary, so there are more ways to make a mistake, and the instructions are more complicated then they will be in November. The question the state had to answer was, how do you do open primaries in a vote by mail state (where now >50% of voters are not affiliated with a party)? The answer here is every unaffiliated voter receives two ballots, one for each major party. The instructions say to vote one of the two ballots and return it, discarding the other. Most voters do that. Some vote one ballot but return both. Some vote both and return both.
"
After another couple of days, I have to revise my estimate of the "can't follow the instructions" rate down, significantly. During a break I asked a supervisor about it. She told me that the people who run receiving and the sorting machine and "assemble" the hundred-envelope batches have the machine separate out envelopes according to some set of parameters, and that problematic ones do tend to come in bunches.
Yesterday we got the first envelope where someone included a thank-you card with their ballot. Like all other non-official items found, it goes in a collection to be either returned to the voter (eg, drivers licenses) or destroyed. No pinning on the walls.
The extraction team gets Monday off. The QC group, OTOH, gets to go in early and learn the QC process for tabulation, which will be starting.
"
The price of giving incompetents no bid contracts.
If this were an entirely private dealing, I'd be going through the follow-up care parts of the warranty, and having made sure that I was in compliance (pouring in H2O2 makes that unlikely for the NPS or whoever), would be clawing back my $14M or bankrupting the coating company in the effort.
"
In the latest at the reflecting pool, the blue epoxy coating has started peeling off of the walls and bottom. Lots of hypotheses about why it's peeling are being advanced. My own advice to the people who take care of the pool, based solely on anecdotal observations here and there around the country over the years, is "The only real non-lethal way to control algae is turnover. You have to be replacing water from a pretty clean source at a rate that produces an observable current in the pool/pond. Otherwise the algae will win at some point during the summer."
https://compote.slate.com/images/6d6cf2c2-a484-4f33-a133-38497803fef6.jpeg?crop=1560%2C1040%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=840
"
@Charles, today I also learned that either there is an enormous fraud going on undetected, or there are a bunch of grandmas and grandpas propping the whole thing up. Honestly, as we walked through the various processing sections, I kept wanting to offer an arm to some of the old ladies hobbling along.
Tomorrow morning I will be learning the QA system and software along with two women half my age, who were the only youngsters in the group.
"
Today I learned that some people include their drivers' license in the envelope when they return their mail ballot. Also, in a non-rigorous sampling, 6-10% of people don't/won't/can't follow all of the instructions.
On “Sports fandom”
Coors Field in Denver has a small colony of feral cats that are tolerated because they keep the rodent population under control. From time to time one of them makes an appearance on the field during a game.
"
Basketball, in contrast, is practically incomprehensible on TV. To follow what’s happening, you really have to be there in person.
16:9 aspect ratio and big screens and directors that make use of them have helped a lot.
American football pretty much requires television.
I went to high school in Nebraska when the Cornhuskers were becoming a national football power. Due to the broadcast rules of the time and the importance of market size, there might be one regular season game on TV in a season. But a good radio announcer, some imagination, and some knowledge of how the team played was sufficient.
I blame the same thing for the decline of reading. Building a picture in your head of what's happening in the story from the printed words takes effort, and practice. Free TV was the beginning of the end.
On “Open Thread”
This week the University of Denver -- founded as a non-sectarian seminary operated by the Methodists -- closed its Department of Religious Studies. A university closing a humanities department isn't exactly news these days. At the same time, they closed the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering, which is somewhat less usual.
Full disclosure: I have a Master of Public Policy degree from DU. As I understand is often the case for private schools, the connections I made via the faculty were as valuable as the actual coursework.
"
Colorado was the first state to elect a woman to the legislature; Nevada was the first to have a majority female legislature.
There are currently nine state legislative chambers where woman members hold 50% or more of the seats. All nine are in western states. Four of the last five Speakers of the Colorado House have been women.
"
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/the-supreme-court-and-californias-election-deniers-are-on-the-same-page-about-at-least-one-thing
Probably repeating myself, but it's hard to think of an issue that is more likely to give a regional secession movement some traction than SCOTUS trying to ban vote by mail. There are 13 western region states. 3 of them have no-excuse mail ballots that require once-per-year sign-up (AK, ID, and WY). All three have 20-30% of voters sign up in any given year. 3 more have permanent no-excuse mail ballots with one-time-only sign-up (AZ, MT, NM). MT has >75% signed up, AZ has >90% signed up. NM's list is new, all the history of the movement suggests they'll get to the 75-90% range soon. The other 7 have "every registered voter gets a mail ballot, period."
The western region does recalls. It does initiatives. And to almost the same degree, it now does vote by mail.
"
FYI, Pro Bono… looks like this forum might be putting real names on the “edited by” tags.
Yes. I believe the fix is for Pro Bono to go to their user profile and use Pro and Bono in the first and last name fields. Fr*ckin' WordPress...
"
I’ve had far too many union grievances where a “should” in place of a “shall” effectively negated the negotiated protections.
I spent an unpleasant couple of years where my job included providing feedback to and interpretations of a couple of developing international telecommunications standards. Should. Shall. May. Must. OTOH, years later when I worked for the state legislature, more experienced staff remarked favorably about my fixation on getting should/shall correct.
"
Access to polling stations to be made as easy as practicable, with a limit – 30 minutes say – on time spend waiting to vote, and polling stations situated with facilitating voting as the main criterion.
and
Voting by mail to be allowed. States may choose for themselves the deadline for posting or receiving these votes.
I've probably written this before -- it's a hot button for me -- one of the reasons western states have been moving to vote by mail for the last 30 years is the greatly increasing cost and other difficulties of achieving the first item here in an area with a very rapidly growing population. Colorado found it was getting very difficult to find suitable venues, to continue buying (and storing) more and more equipment for those venues, and to staff them. "My" precinct location moved every election, often by miles.
Increasingly common in vote by mail western states is the vote center model. A small number of locations where in-person voting can be done, aimed at edge cases: mail ballots lost at the last minute, same day registration, those sorts of thing. "I prefer to cast my vote in person" draws the warning, "It may be time-consuming for you to get to a vote center and then wait. If you want it to be easy, well, we send you a mail ballot." For the primaries this month, my county of 380,000 people and 2,600 square miles will have three vote center where you can vote in person. For the general election when higher turnout is expected, a couple more will be added.
I urged my Democratic Senators to vote against the bills named for John Lewis when the Dems held Congress because of language like that in the second item. Not "to be allowed." Vote by mail is the current gold standard for security, accuracy, and ease of use. The legal language has to make vote by mail a first-class option (in the way that's used in programming languages). Nor can the language require states to do both vote by mail and precincts on a scale where either could handle the entire election.
Interestingly, the first thing that happened to the John Lewis bill, when Biden got elected and there was at least a chance the bill might actually be passed and signed, was that it got pulled from the floor calendar and sent back to committee. Every appearance of the term "precinct" was replaced by "vote center." Every appearance of the term "absentee ballot" was replaced by "mail ballot". It wasn't enough, but the East Coast/Midwestern sponsors had suddenly discovered western Blue states had been building a new, better system and some of their representatives weren't going to vote to backwards.
"
Says something that notoriously ultra-liberal states like Idaho and Wyoming do no excuse mail-in voting.
Utah went full vote by mail several years ago. Their system is a new contender near the top of the lists of expert ratings for security, accuracy, and ease of use (their Secretary of State and county clerks made multiple trips to Colorado to ask about what worked and what didn't). The Republican legislature and governor have now passed a bill to roll that back over a period of years. As far as they rolled it was a permanent no-excuse mail ballot list starting by 2029. I understand that surveys suggested if they made mail ballots any harder than that, there would be a wholesale turnover in the ranks of the legislators.
"
Needz moar “block party” also too.
Need to change the time of year in that case. As I recall, Colorado added its permanent no-excuse mail ballot list, and I signed up for it immediately, the year after I stood in line outside in a blizzard to vote in November. The only two months w/o any recorded snow where I live now are July and August. And August is close -- there has been measurable snowfall on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
Voting slows down considerably when the staff is, in addition to the rest of the job, trying to keep the floor mopped well enough that it's not slick, and people have to do something with their coat to keep from getting water on the ballot.
"
Those countries probably do not have a postmaster general who gives strong hints that he would meddle with those ballots, if he thought that he can get away with it.
As I've mentioned before, vote by mail is an issue that might get a secession movement some traction. In the 13-state western region of the US, 10 of the 13 states have permanent no-excuse mail ballot lists. 7 of the 10 just use the full registered voter list, 3 require voters to take a small extra step, once. Of those three, >90% of AZ voters are on the list, >75% in MT, and NM's list is relatively new. The three w/o a permanent list are AK, ID, and WY. All three require you to sign up once each year, which covers all elections in that year. On the order of 25-30% of voters do the annual request in each of those.
"You can take away my mail ballot when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
"
Democrat Michael Bennet seems like the best bet.
This morning, Polymarket has Bennet at 74% in the primary, and generic Democrat candidate for governor at 91% in the general.
"
Not to put too fine a face on it, but electronic communications just aren’t as secure, and the audit trails (e.g. for recounts) are less robust.
xkcd has a comic where airplane engineers explain why airplanes are indeed the safest form of travel, and civil engineers explain why it is almost literally impossible for an elevator to fall down the shaft, and software engineers... run screaming from the idea of online voting.
Colorado's system sometimes loses points when evaluated by experts because a very small number of disabled voters are allowed to submit their ballot online. I don't know the details, but believe there's significant effort in qualifying each election and individual one-time credentials are delivered by US mail.
"
Well, I was going to throw in something to start...
As I've mentioned, I volunteered to be an election judge. Yesterday afternoon I stopped by the election office to show them my I-9 documents for employment (basically, citizenship and a state photo id). Late in the afternoon I missed a call from the election office. The voice message said they wanted to talk about changing my assignment.
The timing seems suspicious. I mentioned this to a friend who said, "You showed them papers that indicate you're serious, so they actually looked at the background form you did initially. They don't get a lot of real computer geeks. They want you to do more hours, more training, and keep the computers happy."
Well, I'll call them Monday morning and see what it is.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
i think i have a comment in jail. i was going to add to it…
Triggered the "six or more links goes to moderation" limit.
"
...and michael cain...
I haven't seriously considered running for Canada since I was a senior in high school, the draft hadn't been closed down, and my lottery number was 25.
I'm old. I have a wife in memory care here. I have granddaughters. I'm staying here and fighting. My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say that taking part in an armed insurrection was not part of my retirement planning.
"
Best of luck, `wonkie. I lack the relatives, my entire family tree seems to have spread west along the Ohio River, then into Iowa, then Nebraska, and now me here in Colorado. I'm too old to qualify on points, and not rich enough to simply buy my way in. My remaining family is pretty firmly tied down, so I'd have to leave them behind as well. And of course, my French is -- as my graduate school housemate who was a Romance language linguist said -- "limited".
To annoy me, though, he would stop behind me when I was sitting at the kitchen table in the afternoon struggling with a math proof and ask me something in Spanish or French, like whether I wanted to go to the seven o'clock or nine o'clock showing of the the new movie. And I would tell him, "Seven, I'm supposed to get up early tomorrow." (In English.) Then he'd switch to the other language I didn't know and say that was fine, he'd have dinner ready at 5:30. And I'd look at my wristwatch and tell him that was cool, I should be done with the math by then. About that point I'd suddenly realize he'd done it to me again.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.