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from the push,-pull,-swipe,-turn-and-Pong dept.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:22AM
(1) You don't use machines for voting. You just don't. It's too important. The effort needed for fraud should not concentrate in the hands of few programmers like me and Diebold [wikipedia.org], but be spread out over all the vote counters and officials in all the polling stations. Nobody guards voting machines for the three years out of four that they're stored in some padlocked community shed filled with rusting gardening tools.
It's also a very important, but underappreciated, function of the process, that everyone of modest intelligence can understand how it works.
Blind people and people who can't move from their home or hospital should just be inconvenienced to trust someone to delegate doing the physical voting to. Sorry.
(2) You're right; the judicial branch should decide, because they should be the most a-political of the trias politica.
It was just VERY odd for us, 6 billion foreigners, that the richest and most powerful country in the world couldn't even add up the number of popular votes in one of their provinces without a whole floor show and rigmarole. Do you have any idea how famous the USA is for its lawsuits?