If your political system does not present you with a candidate that aligns with your interests or beliefs, you should vote to change the political system. Not voting is consent to the status quo.
While I tend to agree with you in principle, that not voting is consenting to the status quo, in the US (outside of swing states) voting is almost an act of futility.
For the executive branch, the US president is not elected by direct vote, but instead by the electoral college, as enshrined in the US Constitution Article 2. The average voter has essentially zero voting influence to change the Constitution, and the plurality voting created by the electoral college intrinsically promotes a two party political system, and further political polarization. There is also a chance in some cases of “faithless electors”.
For judicial seats, while some states hold elections for state/county seats, all federal judges are appointed by the executive branch, which is therefore (IMO) essentially held hostage by the pluralist electoral college.
And for the legislative branch, candidate selection is heavily influenced by the primary elections of the two dominant political parties, before even reaching national elections. It’s also heavily influenced by campaign funds and lobbyist interests. While states have the authority to adopt alternative systems, the vast majority still use plurality voting, and the currently entrenched two-party system is incentivized to keep it that way.
So I can understand why some voters see not participating as a valid protest against the status quo, even if I don’t agree with that action.
Not voting is simply not making a choice. If the choices presented do not align with my preferences then I do not vote. Why would I vote for someone who I don't support? I don't pick the candidates that are offered. Want me to vote? Then get better candidates next time! Until then I will exercise my right to not vote.
Your status quo also assume that either one or both candidates are presenting you with potential change to what has happened in the past whereas most of the time, the choices are simply a continuation of what has been happening aka tinkering on the margins without pissing too many people off.
I think purposely spoiling your ballot is a better signal to the parties that none of them are acceptable. Is that possible in your elections? Around here, a spoiled ballot is scrutinized by the party observers, so your message would definitely be heard.
I'd love to see a ballot with ranked choice voting that includes a none of the above option.
I could technically vote in 3 countries but I vote in none.
My preferred voting system is the ranked choice one in Australia but Australia also has compulsory voting which I disagree with.
I think in a democracy, it is up to the voter to decide if and how much they want to get involved in the democratic process just like a person has the right to join or not a parti, listen or not to a political debate and so on and so forth.
I wish the blank vote was more represented in the democratic process somehow but I don't really have a solution for this problem.
In Australia voting apart from compulsory (with exemptions) as well as anonymous, so the voter is free to mark the paper such that they don't support any of the candidates and suggest what they think is a better candidate. It will be an informal vote, these informal votes are counted and published, but as I've been told, that informal vote count is then split 50-50 between the top two contenders. My locale is in an area with a high informal vote.
Compulsory voting just means that there's no space where some of the population can hop on the high horse of saying the political troubles of the country have nothing to do with them as they didn't vote. I used to work around the loop holes and got out of voting until my early mid 20s when I just didn't give that much of a hoot either way for state or federal politics.
I hate to be that guy, but in this case I think it's appropriate to say that "Blockchain" solves this problem. The core idea behind Bitcoin and (some) derivatives is that it enables digital objects that cannot be copied and have a distinct owner. You are not wrong that from a technical perspective this is a very hard problem (digital objects are just bits of information, and there is no way to restrict making a copy of that), which is why some people felt like Bitcoin is a truly remarkable technical invention. But the practical side of it seems to problematic still (as far as I know there are virtually no successful uses of this technology in digital marketplaces outside speculation platforms)
Blockchain solves the double spend and ownership problems, but it does requires (a) that you be connected to the internet to establish or transfer ownership, and (b) that any consumer of encrypted data respect the blockchain state as well. If I have a video player and I give it a video that I downloaded with an ownership token, that player needs to either confirm that the token is still valid and deny the ability to play the video (even though it could), or it has to get a decryption key of some sort from the blockchain and use that to play the video, and further guarantee that said decryption key cannot be saved or copied.
Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.
> Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?
Regulatory capture. If the handling of user messages requires constant scanning and there are enough rules that you need a team of lawyers, then only Google, Meta and Apple will be able to afford it.
Also without chat control they would have to follow much stricter eprivacy directive laws that makes many of their monetisation strategies ilegal.
It's briliant really... instead of trying to dismantle privacy regulations you push for new regulation that overrides them and make data mining users even mandatory.
Where did you get that impression? The main driver for Chat Control 2.0 is lobby org Internet Watch Foundation where Apple one of the main donors (along with Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI)
In a same way - just because a charity claims they want to solve child porn doesn't mean that their real aim is to help their donors.
In any case the OP claimed "Apple is wholly against Chat Control." i don't think it's so wholly if Apple financially supports biggest pro Chat Control proponents. Even if Apple is aware of it or not.
That is regulatory capture but it really feels like it should be called something else.
If the laws are designed to directly benefit it makes sense like with the FAA allowing Boeing to self regulate to the point of killing a few hundred people. This feels more like bureaucratic capture or some other name, where the entity must be so large to interact.
It has the same effect and you are not wrong, I just wish it was clearer.
I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.
Dream on. X corp is one of the sponsors of Internet Watch Foundation who are the lobby group behind Chat Control. Musk might play how terrible this is for his audience but in reality they sell all the user data and train their models on it just like every other big tech corp.
Blud thinks musk has any principles, he is literally grifting for maga to stop immigration and then goes and facilitates h1b when there are plenty of talented workers that could be hired.
That guy is outright cheerleading fascists in European countries and wants to put them in power. Why would he want to take away such a powerful tool from them?
Once a law is passed that permits abuse of power, that new toy is available to whoever is in control of the government, which could be the parties he likes. Seen this kind of thing over and over again when one group gains control of a level of government, passes a bunch of authoritarian crap under the belief they have a mandate to rule forever, and then lose power, giving their opponents control over that new authoritarian toy. In the end, the political class gains more power and the public loses. What rarely happens is a change in leadership giving up the power the previous leadership gave itself.
The Internet Watch Foundation is one of these NGOs that makes lists of hashed child porn images and URLs. All the big tech companies subscribe so they can coordinate on blocking child porn, as they are legally required to do.
Unfortunately the IWF is also a "charity" and thus engages in political lobbying. Because like all such NGOs they have a single purpose, they lobby for making that purpose easier irregardless of other costs, which they view as out of scope. It's obviously easier to watch the internet if tech firms are forced to watch everything all the time, so that's what they're in favour of.
People actually working at tech firms on messaging systems don't want to do this, however. So they end up funding people who are undermining their own policies. This is very common whenever NGOs get involved e.g. governments funding NGOs that directly undermine the government's own efforts.
The fix would be for tech firms to leave the IWF and set up their own alternative organization that doesn't engage in lobbying activity. However, that would require a lot of cross-org agility that is difficult for big companies to achieve even internally, let alone across the industry, and the leadership is all thinking about AI anyway not EU stuff where they already just assume the EU is going to regulate them all the death anyway. So inertia carries the day.
I think this is basically correct and aligns with Facebook’s massive push toward e2ee in Messenger. They don’t want to be on the hook, and didn’t do e2ee just for the fun of it
The effective tax rates on high income individuals is likely much less. There is a large correlation between income and wealth, and wealth increase through asset appreciation is largely not taxed, or at best taxed at much more favorable rates than general income tax.
Tax on income is not the problem, it's tax on wealth gained through asset value increase.
That is why you have capital gains, which is ~30% in France.
Investment income is flat taxed.
And inheritance taxes, which are very high in France.
If you want to increase taxes, consider taxing income more and capital gains at a progressive rate. Although I haven't seen good data on effects of say a 70% capital gain tax, might hurt th,e economy. I did some reading on this subject last month and the sweetspot was around 20% to 35% on that classification of income.
Do you want to take people's wealth and cap it? IE, nobody is allowed more than $5 million? What are you advocating for instead?
First, wealth tax doesn't work because it requires a ton of work to decide what constitutes "wealth," and then you have to carve out so much crap. The only wealth tax that currently works well is on real estate, as it doesn't move, and the state already taxes that.
For example, how do you tax a private business? In Spain, for example, it is a big carve-out, which leads to people never selling a company, which hurts their economy as you have tons of zombie companies. Or what people do is they take their money and buy apartments and rent them out on Airbnb, wrap them in a business, and get around the wealth tax.
The most effective way to tax wealth is to tax income, capital gains, and inheritance effectively.
But, lets say you can wave a magic wand and tax wealth (France already taxes real estate with a wealth tax + property tax).
What would a 2% yearly wealth tax raise? Maybe 15 to 25 billion a year in France, so it does nothing.
Total French private wealth is around $15 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri... ), French government spending is around $1.8 trillion/year. Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending. Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees.
> Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending
America's $6.75tn budget [1] would blow through our $140tn private wealth in 21 years. Even Norways $0.11tn budget [2] blows through its $1.6tn of private wealth in 14 years.
Perhaps the better metric is deficit as a fraction of private wealth? If that looks unsustainable, the problem is in publicly-held assets and services.
I am pretty certain that if you are in an org where c-suite shifts reasons for negative results to external sources, they will find a way to do the same in the age of AI.
Nothing in Web Components is forcing you to use ShadowDOM. Lit also allows you to make components without ShadowDOM if you prefer, because there are certainly cases where it can be necessary to do so (like for ARIA reference id-matching). For full single application development, it can feel like it gets in the way a lot, and you can make a good argument to use components without ShadowDOM in those contexts too.
All frontend "frameworks" do have some sort of solution to scope CSS to individual components, and without a similar solution, a native component system would not be viable. The implementation has its quirks, but it is a core capability that is necessary for some use cases. For third-party widgets or cross-application components like design systems, the ability to isolate your component from the site it is embedded in is very useful.
Think of shadowDOM as the web component alternative to scoped styles in Vue components (as an example). You don't have to use it, but it would be incredibly inconvenient if it wasn't included in the framework.
> Nothing in Web Components is forcing you to use ShadowDOM
Yes. There is just one thing forcing someone to use shadowDOM: slots. You can't use slots without shadowDOM or at least use something like this.children to capture the content inside the <custom-element></custom-element>.
It's not possible to make slots work without a separate tree like shadow DOM. The browser can't tell what the container for a slot is vs what content should project into it.
Re-implementing Lit from fundamentals is a great way to learn how it works! The core functionality is surprisingly simple, because it mostly relies on platform APIs to do the heavy lifting, like parsing templates.
I made this alternative implementation of lit-html to use as a research bed a long time ago when I was actively contributing to lit: https://github.com/ruphin/lite-html
Judging from this thread, many people have their own implementations, which is great to hear. I think there's a lot of value in solutions that are so simple that anyone can reproduce them.
I guess for most people the standard is to install things from NPM which explains the format of the documentation. If you want to do something completely raw, you can replace 'lit' with something like this:
I estimate the vast majority of "web projects" begin with npm installing something of some sort, yes. React is dominating the web development space (judging from the average "popular web stack 2025" search result), and it and a significant portion of the competing platforms start with installing some dependencies with npm (or yarn, or what have you). Especially projects that compete in the same space as Lit.
That isn't a criticism of projects that don't use npm, and it doesn't make them less valid, but it makes sense for the documentation to match the average developer's experience.
reply