Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.
Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
So you double-count, you checksum (our table just tallied 100 ballots, do our vote counts sum to 100? good, keep going), you checksum some more (does our total vote count amount to the number of registered votes in this poll station), you film everything, and ideally you do this with volunteers drafted on election day.
More importantly, you want your system to be bulletproof before it's audited. By the time you're talking about audits, the populists have already started flooding the zone.
The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".
If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.
> The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well.
No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.
The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.
Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.
>The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.
The systemic failure is not in a voting system in this case, unfortunately.
We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.
How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?
The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.
If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.
I have to seriously disagree on the particulars, here.
The Russia allegations ranged from "Russia hacked DNC servers/accounts to interfer in favor of Donald Trump" (demonstrably true in several instances) to "Russia hacked voting machines" (very probably false). And then in 2024 the DNC quickly accepted election results.
By comparison, Donald Trump still claims that he legitimately won the 2020 elections, the majority of his base still believes it, Fox News spent years spreading that message even though their own journalists thought it was bullshit, etc.
I maintain that this is a systemic problem and a better system would not have given Trump the leeway to do this, but let's not pretend it's a bipartisan issue.
If you're referring to ICE, that's gross hyperbole, and honestly a little insulting to people who live / have lived in regimes with an actual secret police.
The US is still a rights-based state, which means that when they arrest someone (legitimately or not), lawyers and human right advocates can eventually track them down.
When a secret police disappears someone, they actually disappear. Families can spend years wondering if their loved one is still alive, or was murdered by organized crime, or ran away, or was secretly taken by the state. The US these days is pretty bad, but it's nowhere near that bad.
The arrest of a Turkish graduate student in Boston looked a lot like a kidnapping.[1] More recently, ICE responded to a judge's order to release a detained refugee by threatening to detain her family and send them to Texas if they came to pick her up and then forced the minor child to stay in a hotel room with three agents. [2, p.8] These may not be cases where people are secretly being taken by the state, but it's not hard to see why people might call the government organization detaining people and moving them around so as not to be found "secret police" or "disappearings".
Have you been paying attention? There are reports about hundreds of people going missing in ICE detention. Maybe they aren't being shoveled into mass graves, but if we don't where they are and can't reach them and ICE themselves don't know where they are because they no longer exist in their databases, is there any difference for their families?
> Does anyone with more battery knowledge know if this could be some kind of supercapacitor hybrid being marketed as a solid-state battery?
A few Youtubers have pushed the "if it's not a scam, it's probably a novel capacitor" hypothesis, but in their video announcing this test series last weekend, Donut Labs claimed "it's not a capacitor", so I don't know what's going on.
I have seen so much engineering scams over the years and this is precisely the thing that they all do.
It reminds me of E-cat. Anyone remembers cold fusion? They had same modus operandi. Lots of revolutionary claims but testing was so contrived and limited and lots of conditions that in the end no one was allowed to truly confirm it. .
This repeats the exact steps of that purported miraculous energy device.
Photos and "looks pretty small" are not technical parameters that you pay tens of thousands for a lab to certify.
There are a bunch of cutting edge cell technologies out there right now with gangbusters specs but have some kind of fatal flaw.
If Donut was serious they would put the full specs of the tested cell in each report, so people could have higher confidence that each tested cell is the same chemistry. VTT would have no issue weighing and measuring each cell before and after testing.
> Energy density: No weight and volume was mentioned
Note that the report includes some photos of the battery, so we can assume that it's not, like, several orders of magnitude larger than what they advertised.
EDIT: Honestly, I'm pretty excited. Even if their promises on cost and materials don't pan out and the lifetime turns out to be terrible, what they've just demonstrated is already a game-changer.
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