quesera

Because 10% of US citizens (legitimate voters) do not have the forms of ID required in these proposed laws, and it can be expensive and time-consuming to get those forms of ID which are not otherwise required for their lives (QED), and they might not do so strictly for voting.

Some people think disenfranchisement is bad. Others see it as useful.

Specifically, PartyB thinks those people with inadequate ID skew toward PartyA voters. This has been the accepted wisdom for decades. So they are incentivized to make it harder for them to vote.

Interestingly though, PartyB might be wrong about the current population. PartyA, and those against disenfranchisement and imaginary crises in general (I count myself in this third group), do not want to blow up centuries of precedent especially if the consequences are likely to be undemocratic and unfair.

I don't understand this position. Cryptocurrency exchanges are the primary legal touch point (fiat offramp) for a lot of criminal activity. Of course they will get attention for AML.

FWIW, there are vanishingly few problems with improper voting in the US, and the extremely unusual occurrences are mostly PartyB voters trying to "counteract" the imaginary PartyA violations.

Anyone who tells you differently is lying or ignorant.

You're not wrong, but there is a huge difference between moving US government regulated currency to (possibly) foreign and (possibly) nefarious actors, and this.

I'd have to dig deeper, but generally "storing" (or maintaining storage) is not "processing" in the local US legal vernacular. Where both apply (PCI DSS, etc), both terms are used.

In my personal (business) case, we literally cannot comply with GDPR and also BSA/AML, FinCen, Reg E, KYC, etc, simultaneously. Our "business requirements" can last 7+ years, and our customers' wishes have no bearing on them.

And while we have no operations in any EU country, we are absolutely not obligated to even consider any EU laws about the data belonging to any of our customers, regardless of their citizenship. That's the primary point I'm making here -- the EU has zero jurisdiction over anything that happens outside the EU, ever, or any entities outside the EU, despite any claims to the contrary (which, according to Wikipedia at least, are not even made).

This is intuitive, but also the very expensive legal opinion of our lawyers, who have offices in the US, EU, and EMEA, for whatever that's worth!

In the general case, and as a customer, I'm fully in support of GDPR and CCPA-like protections. They're a great idea, I think! I'm usually the privacy nut in any discussion.

But compliance is obviously more work/expense than not, and small companies are especially allergic to nonproductive work and expenses. So naturally there's resistance to the suggestion that a foreign law compels them to do more of both.

And of course, if we're talking about the US, we have a very different culture around government and regulation. "As little as possible" (except those that protect my interests) is the preference of the landed gentry, and those who would aspire to same.

Reasonable people will recognize this as absurd, but ... you can't spell "absurd" without U, S, and A.

Yes! I'm sure you know this, but for anyone with similar problems:

You can disable this conversion "feature" in the Excel "Automatic Data Conversions" preference pane.

...and I hope you have better luck getting people in your company to remember this than I have! :)

I get it, but the operative point is not "potentially harder", but "literally impossible" to enforce -- unless the corp has some presence in the EU of course.

FWIW, I just checked Wikipedia to sanity-check my memory of our lawyers' guidance. Important differences from our discussion, if my read is correct:

GDPR does not apply to "EU citizens anywhere in the world", it applies to the personal data of "living persons ... inside the EU" or with data processed there.

(So GDPR would apply to a US citizen who is present in the EU, and/or being a user/customer of a vendor that operates in the EU)

From the "Misconceptions" section[0]:

  > ## Misconceptions
  >
  > GDPR applies to anyone processing personal data of EU citizens anywhere in the world
  >
  > In fact, it applies to non-EU established organizations only where they are processing data of data subjects located in the EU (irrespective of their citizenship) and then only when supplying goods or services to them, or monitoring their behaviour.

(So GDPR would not apply to a EU citizen who is present in the US at the time of "processing", whether that's a service or product sale, etc)

This is important to my company. We are US-based, but have EU citizens as customers. For regulatory reasons, we block customer activity from outside the US, and we are not able to comply with GDPR (but we do have to be aware of CCPA[1] which has some similarities).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...

I don't think the "rest of the world" does anything consistently! :)

But the pronunciation difference between Indiana ("short I", in-dee-ANN-uh) vs Idaho ("long I", EYE-duh-hoe) isn't necessarily meaningful.

The letter I just has multiple common pronunciations in English, which I'm told is confusing for learners!

I agree that ignorance is the most likely explanation.

But it's not like these folks didn't grow up with "Italy" and "Italian" being on the radio/TV all the time, spoken correctly by newscasters.

So there's a disconnect there, and it's also undeniable that there was an anti-Italian sentiment in the then-previous waves of naturalized immigrants. So I can't say for sure.

It's written that way, perhaps.

But there's no jurisdictional reality that any of country/union A's rights will protect a person while they are present in country/union B.

In the same way that a US citizen does not have legal protection for free speech when present in, e.g. China, Saudi Arabia, or Germany.

Even if the EU got the text incorporated into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are famously many countries who are not signatories (and it would require a locally-implemented actual law to support its recognition).

The EU can arrange post facto penalties for violations of their citizens' rights, to be (potentially) administered in the future, when a responsible entity enters EU jurisdiction, but absolutely not before then without cooperation by treaty with the nation where these foreign-and-not-real "rights" were violated. Which would be a surrender of sovereignty and basically unimaginable.

(No comment on the goodness or successfulness of the GDPR here, just that no part of it is relevant outside of the EU regardless of how the text is composed.)

(And this is all written with awareness that the US somehow manages to selectively enforce their laws extra-jurisdictionally in weak foreign nations. The EU is not the US, and the US is not weak.)

Yes, I think you're right. The middle ground, which I'll phoneticize as "uh-RON" or even "uh-RAN" is what I hear in most places.

The effete "ih-RAHN" is the voice that you mentioned might get side-eyes. This is the closest to how Iranians that I know pronounce it, except that we don't have a phoneme quite like their R, which to my ears sounds like a D, L, and R all smashed together.

But these side-eyes are mostly fair, I think. It's like Americans prounouncing France as "Frawhce", or Paris as "Pahdee". Ostentatious and pretentious, for an English-speaker.

And Lindsey's provocative "EYE-ran" is very present in some locations, I think because GHWB and GWB's affected pronunciations were pounded into the American consciousness during Gulf Wars 1 and 2. Although Reagan did it too, IIRC, and I'm not sure about Clinton.

I didn't think of it in time to update my previous comment, so I'll add another!

Decades ago, I knew people who pronounced "Italian" as eye-TAL-yun. They were usually older, sometimes WW2 veterans. This was in an area of the US that has a large Italian immigrant population, FWIW.

I don't know if it was due to historical disrespect of Mussolini-era Italy, some contemporary xenophobia, or just simple ignorance.

They all pronounced "Italy" in the normal way though.

Well, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years.

Anecdotally, the pronunciation popularity has split neatly along statewide-prominent political lines. For my four example states, three were correct/respectful, and one wrong/disrespectful.

Correct pronunciation has also had an inverse correlation with the rates of active/former military employment, which might be more directly indicative. And a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect.

National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates pandering to the audience by speaking in real american, no matter how well-educated the hosts might be.

There's no reason for Italy and Iran/Iraq to be pronounced similarly. (Cf Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho?)

But FWIW, the EYE-rack thing is because GWB (most prominently, but others before and after) intentionally mispronounced the name of the country, in a "real american" kind of way, and also to annoy SAD-dumb Hussein as a kind of "we're stupid but we're going to kill you anyway" kind of psyop. Or maybe just "we disrespect you in advance of killing you"?

Americans of other political persuasions usually pronounce the names correctly.

This is perhaps the silliest possible response I could imagine to what is intended to be an amusing example and non-illustrative of the more common real-world confusions.

Which are real.

> I guess your teacher gave you that example, but you ABSOLUTELY FAILED to understand the meaning of their lesson.

Wow, you sure are defensive about the notion that communications protocols are most useful when they are consistent and predictable. You may think you've nailed me as an illiterate, but I conclude that you've nailed yourself as a tilter at windmills.

It's just an amusing example, not intended to be illustrative.

Confusion can be real though, and certainly speed of comprehension is enhanced by proper grammar.

> The reason people actually care is only ever to do with in-group signalling or power politics.

This is just silly. If you believe that, you may have some half-baked adolescent agenda that you haven't grown out of. Good luck out there.

It's "ZIP Code™", trademarked by the US Postal Service (this is mostly to prevent others from misusing the name). It is exactly equivalent to a postal code, and most US residents will know both terms, although they will always say "ZIP".

ZIP is an acronym for "Zone Improvement Plan", but no one knows that and it's not meaningful if you do!

This happens in the US too, and even if you're wise enough to treat postal codes as strings (which they are) and not integers, someone is going to paste the data into Excel which will promptly blow things up on you anyway.

In English: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

:)

> capitalisation is just unimportant

Capitalization is the difference between:

  - helping your friend Jack off a horse, and
  - helping your friend jack off a horse.

(Not original, but memorable!)

> As someone who lives in WA ... it took me 3 months to get a SSN

States don't issue social security numbers. Your complaint is with the Feds.

Your argument sounds like a Smithian adaptation of the Brezhnevian "actually existing socialism".

Neither system has ever existed in its purest theoretical form -- probably cannot, and even more probably should not.

I don't think this is a useful point of argument.

He did!

The database is the data, collected into a coherent structure.

The database management system is (optionally) software. :)

> Capitalism precludes slavery.

Hmm? Capitalism neither precludes nor predates slavery.

I think humanity did introduce evil.

It requires a sense of morality to divide good from evil, and I don't think that existed on Earth before humans. Digging into the Hominid tree might add some qualifications, but I don't see that as a meaningful distinction.

I think you misinterpreted GP's emphasis.

But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.

This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.

In the US, Huy Fong was the only Sriracha that I ever saw (and commonly only on the west coast), until the very early 2000s.

My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.

Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.

And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.

I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!

I think it is necessarily symbiotic.

Society coalesces around sets of social expectations (some of which are regulations or laws), and these formalized expectations are a very strong defining factor of society itself.

> The government is not my guardian and does not do my thinking for me.

This is a quaintly (US) American perspective.

The government is and does literally both of those things, and the arguments in these threads are about the fine details of the manner in which they should continue doing so in the future.

But the critical question is whether it would be possible to create, staff, operate, publicize, and oversee such an "agency", at a cost that is sufficiently lower than a tiny fraction of a heavy explodey thing.