“Why does man print gimme gimme gimme at 00:30?”

In 2010, artist Blake Fall-Conroy produced a “Minimum Wage Machine.”

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. For as long as they turn the crank, the user is paid in pennies… For example, if minimum wage is $7.25/hour (the current US Federal rate), then the worker is paid one penny every 4.97 seconds. If they stop turning the crank, they stop receiving money.

The machine was originally programmed to dispense one penny every 4.97 seconds, corresponding to the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour ($14,500 per 2000-hour year) as of 2009. A decade later, the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour ($14,500 per year).

If you haven’t seen One Pixel Wealth yet, take a moment and see it. Serendipitously, the green square at the beginning represents approximately 69 years’ worth of wages at $14,500 per year.

The California Republican Party has admitted setting up rogue ballot boxes and marking them as “official,” despite cease-and-desist letters from the California Secretary of State. It’s not clear what the Republicans’ plan is, other than to sow confusion.

For an idea of what Republican voter intimidation has looked like in the past, take a look at the Ballot Security Task Force, a successful effort by the Republican National Committee to suppress the black vote in the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race.

The task force consisted of a group of armed off-duty police officers wearing armbands, who were hired to patrol polling sites in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods of Newark and Trenton. BSTF patrols challenged and questioned voters at the polls and blocked the way of some prospective voters.

Roger Stone served as “chief strategist” for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Thomas Kean, who ended up winning that race thanks to the Ballot Security Task Force. Earlier this year, Roger Stone was convicted of seven felonies stemming from the “Russiagate” investigation; he was then summarily pardoned by Donald Trump.

Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 11, 2020

Most recently he’s been calling for Trump to declare martial law and void the election results, in a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach.

I’ll leave the last word to Republican Utah Senator and anti-masker Mike Lee:

We’re not a democracy.

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020