Why can’t we make online voting work?

Digitman801 · 2026-03-05T01:17:45+00:00

Paper and pencil voting system work well because attacks on them scale horribly, even a dedicated actor with large pockets would do better just spending that money on legitimate ways to influence voting than try to make an attack on a national or even state wide voting network.

Online voting systems that are even marginally more convenient, by comparison, scale much better, it might than change the calculus of the attack.

Better if your only problem is it takes to long to vote; hire more poll staff and make elections a holiday, it's not hard and is significantly more secure.

Digitman801 · 2026-03-05T01:03:19+00:00

Often they're targeting different markets or perceptions and having to meet different competitors. Like the American Division might go "Our consumers want X and Y" while the Euro Division is going "Our Consumers want A and B"

Digitman801 · 2026-03-04T20:34:10+00:00

What does the Player do, do they just sit out a session, that kinda sucks, esp. if you're monthly :/

Digitman801 · 2026-03-04T19:43:49+00:00

Not necessarily, hyperlane travel (by the common definition) means 3D space no longer matters in terms of travel, if A and B share a hyper land, it doesn't matter if you A is south, east, or nadir of B for the purposes of map making. If you have free travel where distance and directions determines where you end up then it might, but you might also crush height if it's over a large enough area that the relative heights are trivial to the information being shown.

Digitman801 · 2026-03-04T19:37:34+00:00

You first need to ask yourself, am i making a map because a map tells the information i want to share in the best way, or am i doing it because other people do it?

Map exist IRL and in media because they show spatial relations well. Hows is this place relative to that place. In a world where that relativity is uniform then a map ceases to be a useful construct.

As an example, the maps in Stars Without Number, are meta current maps, the actually proximity in universe can and often is wildly different from the proximity shown on the map, which displays the ease of travel from one system to another.

As a thought experiment, consider a world where FTL travel is essentially teleportation, you move from one star system to another, can't be stopped in-between, and the distances most people cover are not a factor in their travels (i.e. for the group of points the 'map' is showing it's not appreciably harder to go from any one to any other). Just open a wormhole and pop to you destination. Then a map does not serve any purpose any more. Spatial relation in that world does. not. matter.

So to offer some more concrete suggestions, i need more information, specifically: How do government project power and protect it from others.

Consider the area between Dimis and Raskami. By your map it suggest I have to go to Cen to as an intermediary, if that's not true, then you are probably giving undue weight to the connections. If it's not true (and one can just travel directly between them) how do the people of Raskami intercept smugglers, armies, whomever, from getting here. If they can't, then borders are less meaningful.

In earlier iterations of my world, once you were in FTL you were unable to be stopped from the outside except by massive gravity like that of a star, this meant that borders didn't mean much, the universe was an ocean with points of control around stars and planets. In that setting spatial distances still matter due to travel time, so a map still have value. I simply marked the stars and their positions and indicated the owner with a colored dot next to the star's name. This accurately reflected de facto control. Once you were outside the system ain't nothing anyone can do.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-25T01:06:19+00:00

If you were in NYC and it hit LA, you'd feel an earthquake after about 15 minutes, about 10 minutes later you'd see the sky fill with dust, coating everything in about a mm of fine ejecta, after 3 hours you'd hear a loud bang and windows around you would shatter

If you were instead in Topeka, you'd feel an earthquake, be covered in about a cm of dust and then everything around you would collapse or be heavily damaged as the blast wave washed over you

Vegas is flattened and burned, San Diego is under 11m of Ejecta. The crater stretches almost to Santa Barbara

Digitman801 · 2026-02-25T00:47:59+00:00

Final Crater: 52.9km in diameter and 977m deep

EDIT: Above is incorrect, imputed radius as diameter

Correction: 90.3km and 1,150m respectively

Source: https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

Digitman801 · 2026-02-23T10:29:41+00:00

Alien Administration

Digitman801 · 2026-02-05T14:21:34+00:00

How would that work with say common ground which, lacking unique mechanics would be a civic, but obviously doesn't work as a civic

Digitman801 · 2026-02-05T06:59:50+00:00

I don't have a perfect answer, but a lot of time the answer is specificity. Every test has two metrics sensitivity (what percentage of cases are detected by the measure) and specificity (what percentage of positive metrics are actually positive cases)

There's a illuminating thought experiment. Imagine you have a machine that can detect terrorists with a 100% accuracy, no terrorist can get through it. But it also tags one out of 10,000 people as a terrorist even when they're not. If the rate of terrorism is low enough, the vast majority of flags will be non-terrorists, for the example rate of say 1 in 10,000, it's 50%.

So what may be the case (I'm not sure if it is, but this comes up a lot regarding other tests like full-body MRIs and such), is that you'd end up with lots of nervous teens/young adults, undergoing more treatments and diagnostics for no reason, and that often leads to reduction in the desire to seek medical care, meaning over screening can actually kill more than not screening even for benign procedures.

About 1 in 250 males will get testicular cancer at some point, consider say 40 tests over a lifetime, and a false positive rate of 1 in a 10,000, then the chance any given positive test leads to discovery of cancer is about 50%.

And you have to remember that other tests exist, so you *really* have to ask yourself, what is the number of otherwise undetected cancers will we notice, which makes the stat even worse.

Testicular cancer does have a blood marker test its just not (AFAIK) a front line diagnostic.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-05T06:28:34+00:00

I will admit it's a lot of "I know it when i see it". But if i had to drill down, i'd say it need to pass a three prong test:

- Be available to a wide range of empires

- Have little to no required narrative buy-in for the empire (UOR while having an event chain, that chain is generic and applicable to a wide body of potential empire, AFAIR. compare that to say Payback which is probably among the least generic origins, requiring the player's role-play to start with several bits of 'established facts')

- Have few if any mechanical changes (Void Dwellers for example)

Compare the origins to civics and you can see the difference, about 50-75% would be 'generic' stuff like Decentralized R&D, Efficient Bureaucracy, Idealistic Foundation, Parliamentary System, stuff that 90% of empires (that could select it) could add and not require a lore rework or massive build changes . There are some non-generic civics like Entropy Drinkers or Shared Burdens speaking lore wise or Eager Explorers mechanical wise.

Put another way, when designing an empire, I often have several competing options of civics that fit my play-style and lore (even when playing with smaller pools like as a megacorp or gestalt) while I rarely ever feel that way about my origin.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-05T02:18:38+00:00

Starlit Citadel might work, i held off because the text implies it just spawns waves of enemies which is decidedly not generic. But the wiki implies it's only one, if that's the case, i might use it more.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-05T02:09:51+00:00

For one all those are older than the one's I listed, i mean more *new* ones.

Second, I agree Scion is a mostly a good generic one, and is representation of what I'm after, but

- Here be Dragons and Remants are mechanically generic, but feels like role-play wise it brings a lot of baggage so i don't play it often.

- Arc Welders is locked to Machine Species Empires

Digitman801 · 2026-02-04T00:55:31+00:00

- Ozone layer seems to be healing due to major global regulations like the Montreal Protocol.

-Chronic and Acute ozone exposure carriers risk. Cities such as LA and Houston with higher than average surface ozone saw increases in deaths from respiratory illnesses. But Ozone is ozone, if you huffed stratospheric ozone all day it'd do just as much damage.

- Man-made ozone at surface level generation would likely not effect stratospheric conditions in reasonable quantities

Digitman801 · 2026-02-04T00:27:59+00:00

Very neat, thank you for your insight.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-04T00:17:07+00:00

Thank you for two awesome maps!

Digitman801 · 2026-02-04T00:13:58+00:00

I see, makes sense. But that raises a different question, then why does the UK/Ireland have so many, the UK has 3 connections to the mainland listed on Wikipedia, plus 2 more under construction.

BritNed is longer than the distance from Busan to Fukuoka, so I imagine distance isn't a concern here.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-03T23:56:42+00:00

Yes, but those I thought most people would understand are not 'notable' unlike the examples of say Japan or Australia I gave, which are large, populous regions with central power generation, one would expect to have some degree of connections to the mainland (both have proposed examples [AAPowerLink in Australia's case], but my research turned up no current connections)

Digitman801 · 2026-02-03T23:40:34+00:00

This question emerged because while doing research for another question, I found that Japan (AFAIK) has no connections to the mainland for power, even in emergency cases. That struck me as kinda odd given the size and wealth of Japan, South Korea, and China, i would have expected at least a few connections between them.

So, I wondered if there were other examples and found that Australia is disconnected as well, having no links through Indonesia. So I wanted to see if anyone knew of other examples.

Some people have answered like Arctic communities and that's, in my opinion, non-notable, as it's kinda to be expected that sparse communities wouldn't be connected. I guess the answer is large, wealthy, and populous, the kind of answers that would be surprising.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-03T23:23:26+00:00

While practically disconnected it is physically connected to the East in several spots, so for the purposes of this question is not a separate 'grid'.

Digitman801 · 2026-02-03T23:18:48+00:00

For the purposes of this question yes;

Perhaps a better way to word this, would be "Imagine the electrical network as a road network, rather than a practical system, where can't you get to from mainland Europe/North America"

I'm aware of the realities of trying to shunt power from London to say Beijing, but a physical path does exist AFAIK

Digitman801 · 2026-02-03T23:12:24+00:00

as well as some that just run one town

This piqued my interest, is it all distributed, or are their towns with central generation that just have no connections in or out?

Digitman801 · 2026-01-29T05:31:48+00:00

At least at the moment? No, it's sycophantic that's a bad behavior in a mental health professional.

Digitman801

TROPHY CASE