Vengeance seems to be a large motivating factor in the entire US penal system. If you completely ignored vengence and were looking for pragmatic solutions to problematic behaviour of your citizens which you wanted to rehabilitate to the extent possible, you’d be looking at the scandinavian approach.
Mind you, I’m not from scandinavia. We could learn a lot from those guys too.
I’m amazed at the American obsession with voting machines. A properly organised hand count has an amazingly low error rate. I distinctly remember an article about 20 years ago stating, that even the then newest scanning vote counting machines had an error rate higher than hand counting.
Yes “a human” makes mistakes. But multiple humans paying attention at the same time and also keeping each other honest do a tremendously good job.
And, as a bonus, the old school method has a tremendously low error rate.
I remember an article in a renowned computer mag about 20 years ago measuring error rates. The newest and greatest voting machine, at the time, still had way worse error rates than hand counting. Never mind everything that was around before. Maybe the most modern systems can achieve the same error rates as hand counting, dunno, haven’t been keeping up.
I was absolutely floored with how bad the error rates of lever operated mechanical machines used to be. How anyone accepted those anywhere near a democracy was beyond me.
Microsoft also has always been an aggressive company peddling second rate products (exceptions exist) aiming at domination and extraction. Unfortunately the judiciary never really held MS accountable. Many actually göod, productive and useful American companies were bulldozed by MS. I’m sure quite a few people would have liked to quit MS and have now been given additional reasons to go through the pain.