or agreeing to tracking cookies.

Now that I think of it - yes. I agree to them, but my browser is configured to discard them on leaving.

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall, it just shows an annoying message you can get past. At least my browser doesn’t prevent me from seeing the article, so I’ll copy the essence.

It was jurisdiction shopping by the oil company, trial errors by the court and manipulation of public opinion, third world oligarchy style. :(

• The jury – the most sacred due process protection available to a defendant – was patently biased in favor of the company. Seven of the 11 people seated had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some had admitted they could not be fair, but the judge seated them anyway. There was no Native American or person of color on the jury even though issues of Indigenous rights were central to the trial.

• Morton county, where the trial was held and where many of the protests took place, voted 75% for Trump in the last election and has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a pre-trial survey, 97% of residents in the county said they could not be fair to Greenpeace. Yet the judge refused repeated requests by Greenpeace to move the case.

• Energy Transfer ran a major television and online advertising campaign in the county lauding itself in the weeks leading up to the trial. A newspaper called Central ND News, with articles critical of the protests, was also sent to county residents; Greenpeace believed Energy Transfer might have been responsible for it. But the court refused to allow Greenpeace to use court discovery procedures to determine how this unethical campaign to taint the jury pool happened.

• Adding to the absurdity, Greenpeace was blamed for the entire protest movement even though it played only a minimal role. The protests were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, on whose ancestral land the Dakota Access pipeline was being built. In fact, only six of the 100,000 people who came to the protests were from Greenpeace – yet Energy Transfer was able to convince the jury to hold the organization responsible for every dollar of supposed damages that occurred over seven months of protests.

• Secrecy pervaded the proceedings. The court repeatedly refused to open a live stream to the public or to create and release transcripts. A request by media organizations (including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) to access the live stream was denied. Thousands of key documents were sealed and thus hidden from public scrutiny.

• The judge, James Gion, made evidentiary decisions that gutted Greenpeace’s ability to mount a defense. For example, a major expert report showed that the pipeline had leaked roughly 1m gallons of drilling fluids into drinking water sources used by millions of people. Greenpeace lawyers needed the document to debunk the argument that the pipeline was safe, but the judge refused to let the organization use it.

• The 35-page verdict form was confusing and the results seemed to prove the jury was in fact confused. It appears the exorbitant damages number was calculated by pulling numbers out of thin air – including millions for public relations expenses, private security costs, which were being paid anyway, and refinancing costs due to various banks withdrawing from the project once they learned about the protests. (Lobbying banks is also constitutionally protected advocacy.)

Interesting, but feels like abuse of the patent system (which is widespread) and feels pointless.

Personal experience: I drive the earliest highway-capable electric car, a MIEV from 2011. It has a “manual gear stick”. Gear B gives hard acceleration and hard regenerative braking. D gives medium. C gives slow acceleration and soft regenerative braking. In reality, there’s only one mechanical gear - the parking lock. All other “gears” including reverse are electronically implemented. As for why the letters are out of sequence, I don’t know.

I use B in summer and D in winter, because applying B on glass-flat ice can lead to skidding. I hear that people in mountainous places appreciate B when going downhill - constant deceleration with no touching of the brake pedal.

But something that’s been rinsed and repeated over the history shouldn’t be patentable any more.

My advise: if voting is a distraction, then don’t get distracted. It costs nothing. Cast it and care no more, focus on other things immediately after doing it. :)

You can’t build a better future by just voting, but you can use it to stop someone from running your society totally into ground.

In my imagined future, a country can climb down from voting to sortition, and decentralize the power of sortitioned representatives further downward until the state is just a label, but abandoning the present because of a future that’s out of reach - that’s not wise.

The present system needs attending to, until the next step is within reach.