Curiously, the USPS changed when it postmarks mail this year, resulting in postmark delays. In Washington state, the number of ballots rejected for being late is up 32% compared to 2024.

Depends on your employer. Per https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...

> Surprisingly, Facebook is among friends. Every payroll period, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle also provide an electronic feed of their employees’ hourly work and wage information to Equifax. So do Wal-Mart, Twitter, AT&T, Harvard Law School, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Even Edward Snowden’s former employer, the sometimes secretive N.S.A. contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, sends salary and other personal data about its employees to Equifax Workplace Solutions.

The caveat to that is as of today you contribute 4.4% of your salary / year into the pension fund, in addition to 401K savings + social security. The Obama administration raised it from 0.8%.

The other callout is clean APIs over a network can just be clean APIs internally. This is true in theory but hardly in practice from what I've seen. Microservices tend to create boundaries that are more strictly enforced. The code, data and resources are inaccessible except through what is exposed through public APIs. There is real friction to exposing additional data or models from one service and then consuming it in another service, even if both services are owned by the same team (and moreso if a different team is involved). At least in my experience, spaghetti was still primarily the domain of the internal code rather than the service APIs.

There's also a number of benefits as far as non-technical management of microservices. Knowledge transfer is easier since again, the scope is narrower and the service does less. This is a great benefit as people rotate in and out of the team, and also simplifies shifting the service to another team if it becomes clear the service better aligns with another team's responsibilities.

As for how to fix it, I'm no expert but off the top of my head

1. Allow public submissions for districts to prevent rigging choices

2. Create an objective set of measurements for scoring districts with the , e.g. maximize compactness, minimize perimeter, other measures that would help combat gerrymandering

3. Highest score wins? Top N finalists are voted on by legislature?

Hardly perfect, and I'm sure someone's thought about this harder and could do better. But nearly anything has got to be better than "the party in power every 10 years is given a carte blanche opportunity to further solidify their power"

Nevertheless, consent is still paramount. Removing consent on the basis that most users are incapable of being informed is a poor excuse.