andrewducker | Interesting Links for 07-03-2012

No reason why you can't have voting allowed for several days except security of ballot boxes, but publishing results as they come in is problematic, especially in single member seat FPTP elections.

Basically, there's a natural tendency for voters to want to "back a winner" or stop the least liked option, if voters are published as you go then that can lead to marginal or third party candidates getting even more squeezed in vote share than they already do, and rewards parties who can mobilise their voters to get out early.

For a yes/no referendum it's less problematic, but still not a great idea-amongst other things it can lead to a depressed turnout if it looks like a foregone conclusion, if "Yes" gets an early lead then some "no" voters may give up and stay home, or vice versa.

It's a known problem in California in Presidential elections, because they declare state by state turnout is significantly lower in CA if there's already a clear winner, and that also depresses the vote for other elections held at the same time, etc. (that's from memory and I'm ten years out of date on the research, but it won't have changed that much).

It's because I'm in a marginal party that I want it - that way I can wait until near the end and then make my decision from the ones with a chance!

I can sort of see it with the student athletes. If just one player accepts a gift from a member of the alumni then the entire team can get suspended - and alumni are very crafty about finding ways to give gifts to athletes.

These guys are already going to university for free while non-athletes have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year and taking spaces in the student body that could otherwise have gone to people who actually want an education.

If you accept the free ride that student athletes get then it seems reasonable for the university to do everything in it's power to make sure you don't shut down their athletic program because you are too dumb to realize that an alumni giving you a car is a NCAA violation and that if you put up images of you and the car on Facebook you are likely to get caught - should you ever piss off one of your "friends."

(A better solution would be to get rid of sports at the university level, but because sports brings in so much money, that won't happen. Another solution would be to pay the student athletes for playing games since their games bring in millions and millions of dollars for the universities. If they got a check from the school they'd be less tempted to accept cash and gifts from alumni.)

Should the university also be allowed to open their mail, tap their mobile phone conversations, and place bugs in their accomodation?

Because I view this as being equivalent to those.

Any many universities the students are required to have the doors to their dorm rooms open at all times if there is another student in the room and if they provide and pay for their mobile phones they tell them there is tracking software on it.

I only know of one college where they open the student's mail - Simon's Rock - but that's because about 15 years ago a guy got gun parts sent to him through the mail, used them to build an automatic weapon and then shot a bunch of students.

As to whether they should be able to do so or not - it depends. If the students are told in advance that this is what will happen if they choose that university then they have the right to make that choice.

My brother chose to go to a university where he knew that he would have no privacy in his dorm at all. The door would be open if anyone was in the room and if he got caught having sex with a girl he'd be suspended for a semester and if he got caught having sex with a guy he'd be expelled. I thought he was out of his mind to agree to that, but it was told to him upfront before he chose the school.

I suspect these athletes are being given the same choice and deciding that it's worth it in exchange for $80,000 to $100,000 worth of free tuition/room and board.

If they don't want their facebook monitored like that they always have the option of going to the school as an actual student and paying for their education the way non athletes do.

I think a point that may be missing is that in America student athletes are not really students in the conventional sense of the word.

They have their own dorms separate from the actual students, they don't have to pay money to be there, they are special classes created for them to ensure they get passing grades even if they can barely read and write, should they have problems with these easy classes they are then given special tutors (that are usually only available to other students for roughly $150 an hour)for free and are, essentially, employees of the university used for fund raising efforts.

Meanwhile to attract them to the schools alumni (who gamble on the games and have a vested interest in seeing the best players possible come to/stay at the school) are legendary for giving them hookers, $100,000 sports cars and all sorts of other shit - that can get the university in a lot of trouble, and the universities have had a real hard problem stopping alumni from doing so, so there needs to be some checks and balances in place.

Why is it that alumni giving athletes sports cars is something that "can get the university in a lot of trouble" (hookers I can see, but cars are legal to own)?

It's against the rules for third parties to give student athletes anything at all to encourage them to go to or stay at a given school.

Some schools have been shut out of competition for years at a time when it came out that alumni were giving gifts to the athletes (which cost the schools millions of dollars in revenue a year.)

The schools agree to be the monitors and enforcers of the NCAA's rules and if the student breaks the rules, the school gets shut out. (Which ends up being grossly unfair to the students who didn't take the bribes.)

weird

The idea is they want to spread good athletes among as many teams as possible and don't want all the best athletes to end up at two or three schools that have the richest alumni who can offer the best bribes.

This all came to a head about a decade or so ago when people started noticing that a ton of talent was suddenly choosing to go to University Of Nevada Las Vegas - an educationally sub par school.

Turns out that professional gamblers (some of whom hadn't even gone to the school) were giving the students tons of gifts to entice them there so they could stack the deck in their favor by betting on the teams.

Some of the players were actually illiterate, but the gamblers were even paying people to impersonate the kids in class and take their tests for them.

Everyone pretends that college football is still an amateur competition, like any other varsity match, when actually it's an incredibly popular, lucrative and pervasive professional sport. As part of this charade, "student" atheletes are obliged to accept compensation and bribes only in a small subset of officially sanctioned ways, and anything else is A Moral Outrage (TM).

A side effect is that there's an incredible pressure on schools to conceal it if the atheletes show up sub-par academically. Remember in Buffy, where the school principle bullies Willow into "helping" an athlete? I think it's like that, but an awful lot more so, not because the schools are stupid, but because they make lots of money from the games, so can only fund themselves by perpetuating the situation.

It's a truly awful system and I can't fault the universities who want to do everything they can to crack down on the rampant bribes.

Yeah. I don't know it first hand, I just know sensible people (like you) have described how ridiculous it is sometimes! :)

It's really amazing too the clever ways the alumni and gamblers try to get around the system. A few years ago when they realized that giving gifts/cash directly to the student was too obvious, they started buying houses and shit for the student's parents, or paying off their entire family's mortgage and credit card debt.

The UK is lucky that their student athletes are actually student athletes and not simply fund raising machines.

The real fault of this is the NFL. When they decided that all professional football players had to have university degrees that encouraged universities to build stadiums so they could have the players the NFL wouldn't accept yet, make money off the games and then give the football players meaningless degrees four years later.

Eventually they realized that it was a waste to simply make money off of this during football season and just expanded the practice to their other sporting programs.

I can't help but think that the alumni must be almost as thick as the players if they risk having their team barred from competition by bribing their own players.

They think they are smart enough to get away with it - which is the downfall of most criminals.

Interestingly, it's widely believed that Moe Dalitz was the first guy to come up with the idea of bribing players to go to certain schools.

He was smart enough to get away with it. But most of the alumni assholes didn't have years of experience as criminal masterminds behind them before they decided to try to bribe people.

I have a vague memory that back in the 80s, one college's football programme was suspended because the coach paid for the flights to enable one of his students to attend his mother's funeral. Which seems a little harsh.

I also find it amusing that while it is possible to be "academically ineligible" as a college athlete, former Washington Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley managed to play four seasons at Oklahoma State despite being (in his own words) "illiterate".

I remember that 80s thing too. I think it was just the NCAA trying to make it as clear as possible what their "no tolerance" rule meant - since so many, many people seemed to think they could get away with almost anything.

Do you remember when three UNLV players were photographed sitting in the hot tub of Ritchie "The Fixer" Perry?

http://www.reviewjournal.com/images/business/perryhottub.jpg

I also remember in the early 90s I think it was a Michigan player who got caught accepting a suitcase with $280,000 in cash inside it and tried to explain it away as a "private student loan" - even though he had a full scholarship already.

I think the point is, not "it's creepy and weird for the school (or government) to tap its employees phones" (although it is), but that it's catastrophically dumb to panic and say "AGH! I don't understand the internet but I think the problem is real, so I will pick a solution at random regardless of how harmful it is and YELL AT ANYONE WHO DISAGREES."

Off the top of my head, reasons why it's a disaster include:

* Decreases security by training people to give out their passwords
* Reduces accountability. "How did that questionable stuff get on your facebook account?" "Well, you can't prove it's me, maybe the coach did it, after all, he has my password."
* Even worse, will be a giant legal clusterfuck if they ever admitted something illegal on facebook. "It wasn't me, it was my coach." "My coach leaked my facebook password and someone ruined my reputation, I'm suing for damages."
* Randomly breaches the privacy of everyone who foolishly friends one of the students. I assume they don't come with warnings "Full name Joe Dobbs (spied upon by UoA, DHS, etc, etc)". May there be legal problems with the coach (in effect) posing as one of their sudents on facebook.

Notice that these are problem with giving up the password. Being required to friend someone in authority is problematic as several of the problems still apply, but avoids the worst ones.

It's like saying "We need to tap your phones to make sure you don't bring the university into disrepute. In order to do so, we need your social security number, birth certificate, and a copy of your passport doctored to show your coach's face instead of your own to make the arrangements with the phone company." Even if you accept the spying is necessary, can you see the potential pitfalls in giving your coach control over your identity like that? I mean, I'm sure universities DO do that sort of thing, but I think they should find a non-stupid way of doing it instead.

(Or, preferably, not at all. And preferably give up the charade of college sports :))

I do see the problem - but see no other solution other than giving up college sports and/or changing NCAA regulations.

Well, other solutions would be difficult and probably involve thinking and spending money. It looks to me like the current "la la la I assume the problems in privacy violation only affect other people not me so I'll stick with it" attitude is worse in the long run, but since I don't know the problems I may well be wrong.

After all, maybe most students are too stupid to make illegal deals on a different social networking platform, but some may not be.

Off the top of my head, other possible solutions would be:

* Install spyware on the student's computer, so you can _see_ what they do, but not by default impersonate them
* Require passwords, but have a well-thought-out policy in place under what circumstances they can be used, and what oversight there is.
* Put pressure on facebook et al to have a "supervision" mode usable by parents and some employers/schools, where someone can give someone else read-only access to their account

I mean, the thing is, to me, "spying on email" is like "spying on phone calls". We have specific laws that you're not allowed to spy on someone's personal phone calls (unless they use your phone to do it?) regardless of whether you have a really, really good reason, honest, unless you get a court order.

I think those laws are a good idea, and should apply to email and so on similarly.

I can see an argument for "some people have to give up their right to privacy for their job", although I _hope_ there's a better way. But it seems bizarrely inconsistent to say "you have an absolute right to privacy on phones, no right to privacy on facebook, and people can sp on you on LJ but they just don't bother." Surely there's no possible way ALL of those can be right?

The thing is if the athletes were actual students at the school for the purpose of learning and had been enrolled in a normal process I'd be against anyone at the school looking at their Facebook. but, since they are essentially employees (and well paid ones at that!)they have the right to sign away their privacy.

After all, they could simply pick a school that won't ask for their Facebook password. Hell, maybe some schools could use that as a recruiting tactic!

I really don't think the coaches will be looking through to see what comments the players are making. I think they'll mostly be looking to make sure there isn't a picture of the kid standing next to a Ferrari.

I almost certainly am being too idealistic here, but I don't think it's ok for employers either.

I wrote a long post and deleted it because I started rambling, but I think "it's ok to give people readily abusable power because you trust them never to take advantage of it, even if nothing's stopping them" and "it's ok, if people want it, the free market will provide it" are arguments that seem insidiously reasonable, but don't actually work in real life...?

I think if you offer someone something of value worth well over $100k, you have the right to ask them for something in return - particularly if their fuck ups could cost your organization millions and millions of dollars.

Would you trust an 18 year old not to fuck up your $20 million a year sports program without oversight?

I think I know what you're saying, but it seems to me there's some things you'd usually want (eg. "acting in an an ethical and professional manner, even at events only tangently related to your employment") and some things that are usually offensive and unethical to ask for (eg. "a permanent tap on your home phone with no accountability over who listens to it").

And it seems like, to me, getting a social networking password is like the phone tap, not like acting professional. But I think many people assume it is a little thing that doesn't matter much. So to be persuaded I don't need fifty-seven million arguments why "assuming it's a little thing that's obviously helpful and doesn't matter, isn't it fair to require it", I need an argument why it's a little thing, rather than a circumvension of anti-wiretapping laws...?

At the end of the day if I was giving someone $100,000 in free money while knowing that if they fucked up I could lose $20 million in money if they did something stupid I'd want to tap their phones, read their facebooks, give them bodyguards who could report back to me, etc...

I don't think that the phone tap or the facebook passwords are little things. I do, however, think, that universities have the right to protect themselves and if you give a giant amount of money to someone they can sign away their general rights - if they want to - in exchange for the cash.

Obviously they should understand this before they take the $100k - but if you take a hundred thousand dollars in exchange for letting your facebook be monitored I think you've made a good deal.

Fuck it, if someone wanted to pay me $100k to monitor my facebook for four years I'd take the money.

The other thing is that the facebook monitoring won't stop the schools from creating specialized classes for these kids that are bribes in an of themselves. A degree from Georgetown University, for example has a huge value for a kid when he graduates and enters the job market. Part of this is that, in general, Georgetown is a difficult university to graduate from because for most students the classes are difficult.

Which is why some people got upset when it came out that in a math class that only the athletes could take on the final exam - which was multiple choice - was the question: "How many points does a three-point field goal account for?"

Even better, all of the classes for the athletes were taught by the same teacher who was paid $250,000 a year to design the curriculum and "teach" the students.

Damn, that's a really good question. Why does voting all have to happen on one day? Surely if it was an all week event, turn outs would be way up... and that would be awesome for democracy.

If, perhaps, very bad for tv stations.

I suspect it is a hangover from when voting was done by acclamation or by hands up and everyone had to be in one place at the same time.

Not convinced by the idea of having updates on the score during the voting but this may be a bit of conservatism on my part.

Releasing as the count went along would be a nightmare. I expect you would reach a situation where huge numbers of people delayed voting until the very end so they could decide if/how to vote tactically.

Yup, I'd expect people who were completely wedded to one party to vote early, and then other people to vote for their favourite of the ones in the lead. This would provide impetus for you to vote early if you thought your party had a chance of winning, so that others would see you as worth voting for.

It would be a ridiculous system and _still_ better than the one we currently have.

I would certainly do that in my constituency when using single member plurality voting.

I live in a multi-way marginal. The Labour majority over the Lib Dems is in the hundreds, the SNP won the Holyrood constituency that my Westminster constituency overlaps and I think the Tories would consider this a target seat.

So, I’d love to wait until the end of the week and then vote tactically.

When it happened in America, and Fox declared Bush the winner even though polls were still open on the west coast, it seemed to result in a lot of people not bothering to go out. Which is odd, I would have assumed that a party being in the lead would seriously motivate the opposition to get out there and vote.

Still. I think updates could be useful, just. Anything that gets better turn-outs in our elections. It's shameful how few people bother to vote.

gotta have people manning (and womanning) the polls

Ah yes, we can hardly have the volunteers taking a whole week off work can we.

We could make it be like jury duty...

They aren't volunteers, they are paid. OK it's only for 1 day, but when I did it I got about £500 (about 10 years ago). I doubt you would find it hard to get more people willing to do it as the pay is pretty good and as I recall all that was involved was 1 evening training.

Crikey! I had no idea they got paid for it. That's amazing. I wonder where you sign up.

The local council organises it. There may be details on your council website. I only got the job because I knew someone who had done it before. I suspect the same people do it every time. It's very boring, but the pay was good (although only for 1 day obviously).

I don't think turn-outs would be increased. A huge amount of effort is put into ensuring everyone gets the opportunity to vote. Pretty much anyone can get a postal vote. The polls open very early and close late. Everyone receives leaflets explaining the numerous different ways they can vote.

There can be very few people who genuinely are unable to cast their vote. I tend to think that if people cannot be bothered to do so on polling day then tough. I also doubt that if people are not interested enough to vote on one day then I doubt they would do so on a different day.

You'd have to be very careful to ensure that information on the count so far didn't get released - I think it's only been in comparativelty recent years that even exit poll results have been published while the polls were still open.

But the whole "disenfranchising people by holding the vote on a day when they can't get to the poll" thing is a complete and utter straw man: it's possible to vote by post.

My suggestion was that information _was_ released. I want actual figures out there so that people know which of the candidates might win, and thus how to place their votes.

If I can't have Instant Runoff Voting then this is better than plain FPTP.

That would mean that you would need tellers (paid) and scutineers (unpaid) for a week rather than just a day. I'm also fairly sure that publicising how a poll is going has got more drawbacks than advantages (numbers at each individual polling station can be low enough that split over a week you've a reasonable chance of being able to tell how a particular group of individuals voted, so you can re-invent the market in buying and selling votes: which is a seriously bad thing).

It's a total straw man, especially given that laws can be changed. You would think that there is nowhere civilised, with a similar country size, using a very similar electoral system, that votes on Saturday, whose law and experience could be referred to.
More than 10% of the votes in the recent NZ election were Advance Votes. Most of those were from people walking into one of the polling stations that were available for the two weeks before polling day. IT'S NOT DIFFICULT!

> daily updates on the ongoing count!

I'm pretty sure there's a very good reason we don't start the count until all voting had happened. There'd be all sorts of chaotic effects as parties and candidates and voters would discover how things were progressing.

In France, there's a total media blackout on elections for the final week (or two) of campaigning, which I imagine is for broadly similar reasons.

In the UK media outlets do not report on political campaigns or exit polls whilst the polls are open. Aside form fairness, it makes sense. If the media started to report exit polls it could lead to mass tactical voting.

See above - I'd want there to be more information available, under a FPTP system. Having heard many reports of people saying "I didn't vote for X because I didn't think they had a chance of winning in my area." this would give them the information to know whether they did.

So it becomes a crazy race of who can run to the polls or drum up more support?

I see what you're getting at, that FPTP is a mockery already. But this would merely expose it more dramatically as such.

Sorry, did you say you wanted my username and password? No, I'm not giving them to you. In fact, I don't think I'm willing to work where my employers will not respect privacy. I'm sorry you wasted my time.

That's great for you, but some people are siginficantly more desperate for a job, especially in the US where it's even easier to be left with absolutely nothing if you aren't employed...

Meh.

Still, I don't live in that mess of a country, so that's not my problem. And considering that it's legally very dubious (the ACLU managed to clamp down on it), I think I'd be well within my rights to say no.

You would also be within your rights not to be able to afford food, housing or clothing, though, which forces people into this kind of thing even though they're technically allowed to say no...

I've spent plenty of time being unable to afford food or clothing. You're not going to persuade me that I'm wrong here. Giving in to that kind of blackmail just makes it more acceptable the next time, and sooner or later everyone will be forced to hand over their passwords. You say no at the beginning, and maybe it doesn't start; organisations like the ACLU can handle the few cases where it does.

Just because I can't let things go, here is some further information about this I found (quoting from someone on slashdot: it's probably correct, but I don't have time to check).

"Accessing another user's account is a violation of facebook's terms of service, even if that user gives them permission, which potentially makes it a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030), i.e. a felony.

"In addition, there are various other questions that employers cannot ask during interviews because doing so violates federal equal employment opportunity legislation, meaning that accessing a user's facebook account opens them up to lawsuits.

"There is however one valid legal use for asking users for their facebook accounts, namely screening out employees who'll create a security risk by being especially vulnerable to social engineering. If an employee will have access to sensitive user or employee account information, then you might reasonable ask them for their facebook account password. If they provide it, you politely tell them they have failed the interview, thank them for their time, and send them home early. If they refuse, then you tell them they answered that question correctly and continue with the interview."

Wow, multiculturalism is hard. I assume many Jews would be willing to vote, but many would not.

I suspect the case of proxy voting is complicated. A quick google suggests that if you ask someone to do something for you, and they happen to do it on the Sabbath, but you didn't ask them to or see them doing it, it may be ok. Here, where you don't specifically require them to do it on Saturday, but you know they almost certainly _will_, I don't know for sure. Of course, it's still unfair if you have to use a proxy vote and other people don't -- people who can't find a convenient proxy will still be disenfranchised.

OTOH, maybe they could hold the vote in winter and/or keep the polls open after sunset? :)

d'oh - the sunset issue solves it entirely, I think! Sunset is around 6:13, so if voting is until 10pm then they're fine.

LOL. Well, yeah -- not perfect, but not worse than people who work on Saturday. But presumably that wasn't taken as given, or no-one would have objected in the first place?

Oh. That looks like it may rule out postal voting (although if you send in a postal vote and it's not counted until the polls closed, it should be after sunset).

But what about some local government elections where the election takes place on a Thursday, but they don't start counting the votes until Friday evening?

I hoped that it was only the actual voting people would object to, providing the counting doesn't _have_ to be on Saturday, but I don't actually know. Technically if you vote, you are very indirectly causing someone to count your ballot on saturday, but to me it feels more like buying something from someone you know is likely to do stock-taking on Saturday -- sufficiently removed it can't be yuor fault any more. But I don't know if people who keep very strict would actually see it that way.

Or, yknow, just walk out of the house to a nearby polling station and make a cross on a piece of paper.

Much though I find religion silly, I'd rather that we took people's beliefs into account where possible.

Right, but when even voting by proxy doesn't cut it, I think it's getting rather too silly.

When even at the last general election people who wanted to get their arses to the polling station couldn't, I think something like this is just a little bit obscene.

I find all sorts of religious beliefs silly, but I still think that we should find ways, where possible, to allow people to both take part in voting and uphold their religious beliefs. The alternative is that we are effectively saying "You may not vote." to a section of society.

But we're not. We'd be saying 'Your combination of self-chosen restrictions on your behaviour are preventing you from doing something reasonably simple.'

My problem here is that I just don't comprehend that kind of inflexibility.

"In order to vote you must violate the explicit commandments of God. Do you want to vote? Yes/No"

It doesn't matter how silly I find it, or you find it. It has been commanded by God. And therefore asking them to be a teensy bit flexible on whether they follow the instructions of The Creator Of The Universe and followed since they were Chosen is not likely to go down well.

If voting on Saturday meant that 100% of the observant Jewish community couldn't or wouldnt' vote but that it meant that turn out increased by twice the number of lost Jewish voters how would that sit with you?

Yeah. If all religions commandments which I thought were silly just went away, the world would be an awful lot simpler, but I don't think that's a realistic practical option :)

I am a bit torn. I think people refusing to vote would be taking it a bit far, and I hope this particular case will be solved fairly easily. But also, because so many religious prohibitions seem weird to me, including ones that I find out later are comparatively sensible, I'm very reluctant to decide for myself which ones are "allowed", and there are other similar cases where something is forbidden and and seems silly to me, but people really would fight and die for it, when hoping the problem will just go away won't really work.

I think it depends on the difficulty and offensiveness of working around it.

If some people cannot vote if it means talking to a woman who is not clothed "modestly" then that seems a step too far to me, and I'd be saying "Feel free to hang around the polling station and hope that a man happens to be on duty soon to help you.

But making sure that we don't hold the poll entirely at a time when some people are forbidden from attendance? Seems doable.

Yeah, I think it's a (2d?) continuum between "letting people make up all sorts of commandments on the spot in order to manipulate and disadvantage other people" and "respecting things that are completely core in someone's identity". If someone can only vote between 5:15 and 5:17 on the first Tuesday of March, then they probably have to accept they can't vote. If someone can only vote if the voting hours are extended to 10pm, for one particularly important referendum, hopefully that can be worked round.

It would be simplicity itself to require everyone present at an important civic event to dress modestly, and not more disruptive than to require all voters to vote on a work day. Just a small polite consideration to your fellow voters who happen to be religious, in order not to disenfranchise them. It does sound to me like your willingness to respect the religious depends on the religion.

How much respect did you have for Sunday trading restrictions? (yes, I know Christian law is an arbitrary and inconsistent set of rules, observant Christians seem to observe just the ones they feel like, and many nominal Christians don't seem to observe any of them. Thank goodness other religions aren't like that!)

The range of "modestly" varies dramatically between cultures. Some people consider women in trousers to be immodest, for instance, and that's a step too far for me.

And I think that society has no business telling individuals when they should open their shops when it comes to religious reasons.

Why are they forbidden from attendance? They can't work, but voting isn't work (unless I'm missing something).

Okay, counting votes is work, but the thing about the postal vote and not letting others work seems rather difficult to justify to me, as the person who'll be doing the work hasn't signed up to the "no work" clause (or else they wouldn't be working!).

They can't do anything which counts as work or causes other people to work.

As "turning on a light switch" counts as work, voting may well do, you'd have to ask a Rabbi. Probably several.

Wow, that's... pretty restrictive O_o

I suspect if turning a light switch counts as work, their religious text might possibly need updating somewhat.

One does not update the word of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat_in_Jewish_law

also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activities_prohibited_on_Shabbat

Edited 2012-03-08 11:19 (UTC)

I just did a quick google search on what you can and can't do on a Saturday. Apparently you can flush the toilet (you must in fact, because hygiene trumps work), but you can't tear anything (such as the toilet paper), so an orthodox Jew must tear the toilet paper in advance.

I remain content being not religious.

Me too. Very much so.

The third one could be framed equally well as 'Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by Judaism'.

How did you become a guy called Nick?

It took a lot of effort, a top-secret government project, $6 billion dollars, and a 55-gallon drum of lube.

But it was worth it.

:D

Interesting Links for 07-03-2012

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Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

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Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

Re: Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.

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