You’re thinking of the 24th Amendment, which reads:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

The way your state (and many others) gets around this is because the fee to get your ID is not technically a tax. It’s a fee. It’s a rather silly semantic difference, but that’s how the law works. You’re not paying a tax, and your right to vote isn’t being restricted because you didn’t pay a tax. You are being required to have a photo ID to vote, and the form of photo ID you’ve chosen to get (which might well be the easiest to access) requires you pay a fee to acquire.

Yes, this seems like a minor pedantic difference, but that’s kinda the point. The people who push these voter ID laws are doing the exact same thing people in the Jim Crow South did when they created poll taxes, poll tests, grandfather clauses, etc. They are trying to skirt around a law (in this case, the 24th Amendment, back then the 15th Amendment) in order to restrict the right to vote from people who should be protected.

If Wengrow and Graeber were required reading every civics/government/social studies curriculum for high school age students, the world would be a much better place.

Honestly, I think the issue here is more your lack of education/awareness than anything else.

Like electing citizens to office at random

Ancient Athens had a system to do exactly this for a period of time.

Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense

Check out the Democratic Confederalist system currently in practice in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (commonly called Rojava). It’s not strictly pure democracy, but that’s a core principle, and it’s MUCH more participatory than virtually any other governmental system on the planet.

The big issue here is that education is always political, even if you don’t think it is. I’m guessing, based on your writing here, that you were educated in a western liberal democracy. The curriculum you were taught in school, especially with regards to governmental systems, civics, and history, is heavily influenced by the ideology of your country: liberal western representative democracy. I had the same education in school growing up. The curriculum is only interested in presenting alternative forms of government as a way to show how great the one you were living under is. “Monarchy was bad for these reasons, so we replaced it with liberal representative democracy.” “Fascism is bad for these reasons (while ignoring all the ways it’s very similar to our current system), so be happy you have a liberal democracy.” “State communism was authoritarian and bad, so be happy you have what you do.” Etc.

They never talk about the shortcomings of their own system, or the benefits of others, because they aren’t trying to educate a bunch of radicals who might one day overthrow the system.

There are a lot of people thinking of alternative forms of government. For my own personal ideological biases, I’d recommend reading stuff by people like Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), David Graeber (1961-2020), or Abdullah Öcalan (1948-).

You can use those AI image detectors, but they’re not foolproof and the companies that produce AI image generators will always be trying to improve their product so that it can’t be detected. It’s a place to start, though.

Realistically, it’ll be fear of prosecution. The real question is who they would prosecute? If a random individual posts an AI image on WeChat that isn’t tagged as AI, is the Chinese government going to fine them? Or will they go after WeChat for allowing unlabeled images to be shared?

They can shut down companies that make AI image generation software if the software doesn’t automatically tag the image as AI generated, but that will only apply to companies within China. They’ll probably look to ban access to all AI image generation that isn’t housed within China (if they don’t already).

And this will only ever apply to images shared publicly. If someone send a private message to someone else with an untagged AI image, nothing will happen.

Are you sure you’re really dating? If he doesn’t call, doesn’t want to hang our, doesn’t initiate anything, and is very dry in his texting it sounds like he’s just a distant acquaintance…

I’m not a fan of ‘starter packs’

This