Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a legitimate implementation of such a system. It will absolutely be intentionally flawed in ways that allow the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans citizens. That’s 100% what always happens with Republican initiatives to “protect” elections. It will be made trivial to “accidentally” remove legitimate voter registrations, and a labyrinthian bureaucratic process to correct them.

Not really. They used to have pretty good privacy agreements. I don’t know about now. They do supply agrigate information to pharmaceutical companies, but that has become a pretty fungible resource. The only big consumer of individual DNA information is law enforcement, and that’s more of an expense than an income flow, since reviewing warrants and providing responses costs money.

An important lesson in infosec is that the best way to reduce the cost of discovery and warrant compliance is to regularly delete any data you don’t need or aren’t legally required to retain. Companies like this don’t have that option. Data is both an asset and a liability.

When it’s an inexpensive product that nobody ever has a reason to buy twice yet remains an ongoing cost for the company? (They keep the data available for review and continue to update it with useful information as knowledge of genetic traits and lineages grows). That’s not a way to build an ongoing cash flow to cover expenses. Especially when all the people inclined to be interested have already purchased.

Shit, Oracle was down in the low $400B range in May. Apparently being evil pays well in the current administration.

A little searching finds only one company that really fits the bill. Costco has a market cap of $433B and had a reported $14.8B cash on hand as of May 11. That’s an interesting possibility that I wouldn’t have guessed. Costco is less evil than most big corporations, so that’s a little hopeful if I got it right.

Oracle comes close with a market cap of $583B. That’s indeed over $400B, but that would make the description a bit weird. In any case, Oracle makes more sense from a business angle. Unfortunately, they are near the top of the evil scale.

It’s not a great business model if you think about it. Customers pay a small fee once then never again.

Let me try to explain something to you. “Large” is not a fixed concept, it’s a relative measure. Can you point to me where any bill or proposal for increasing the minimum wage has proposed doing it overnight? They always get phased in, even in the most progressive proposals. When you say “large”, or even “large sweeping”, no body is going to presume that you are jumping to something that far out of scope.

And, where in the thread again was an instantaneous $5.00 raise to the minimum wage mentioned? Alluded to? Implied?

You are absolutely right, I’m not following the thread. I’m following the discussion, but the thread is a figment of your imagination, and I don’t know how to do that.

The Democrats could have run a far better campaign against Trump than they did. Trump was not a better choice, but he did run a better campaign.

If you want people to “wake the fuck up” then you need Democratic leadership that isn’t intent on putting them to sleep. The establishment doesn’t like it’s citizens awake.

Hmmm, “There is nothing else”. I’m rolling that around in my head and I just can’t figure out how that doesn’t imply that Democrats ran the best campaign they could.

It’s just reality that people need more than competent administrators. They need inspiration and they need leaders. Republicans inspire hate and lead people to ignorance. Democrats inspire nobody and lead them nowhere. Then Democrats whine that they can’t win because people are ignorant and hateful.

You cannot win elections by just being a more competent manager. Most voters aren’t competent enough to even recognize it. That’s how voters have always been. It’s nothing new.

What? You just disagreed with that. Fuckin-a

Your plan is the same plan the establishment uses in every single election. It’s the definition of insanity.

It’s absolutely bullshit. Most of what progressives want is stuff we had 50 years ago. The boldest new proposal is Medicare for All. Somehow every single other developed economy in the world can achieve universal healthcare, but the richest country in the world can’t manage it? BULLSHIT! While you wrong your hands people are dying and lives are being ruined every single day. It’s profane, and it’s pathetic. Yes, we can do a hell of a lot better.

I’ve got news for you. The entire party leadership is desperately trying to prevent any change whatsoever.

The Democrats lost ground with every demographic but college educated women. 2020 was an unusually high turnout election. 2024 was a regression to the mean, yet Trump’s vote total went up.

Blaming the voters is just electoral masturbation. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Do you have a plan to get better voters in 2028? Blaming voters is for politicians that don’t care about winning. In other words, it’s for establishment Democrats.

Yeah, consequences like FDR getting elected President four times in a row. That was the last time the Democrats had a popular President.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but America’s ability to do much of anything is being dismantled before our eyes. The Democrats played it safe, so voters looked elsewhere.

60 years of unbelievable productivity gains and new technologies, and life has only gotten harder. I think we could do better than that. Bullshit excuses are easy to accept when it hasn’t hit you yet.

Yeah, the Democrats have actually been doing everything right and have just had a string of bad luck. Bad dice roles on their voter generator. There is no reason for them to reevaluate or change anything. /s

We did continue down that path, and it brought us back to another Trump presidency - not permanent solutions. Fascism was the only place that path was ever going to lead.

We have been hearing constantly about slow and steady progress for 60 years of the hollowing out of the middle class. It’s not fucking working. Not materially in people’s lives, and not politically.

It was Clinton who signed NAFTA. It was Clinton who said “The era of big government is over” as he dismantled federal safety net programs and broke unions. It was Obama who put the impact of the mortgage crisis on the backs of homeowners and bailed out Wall Street. (Then collected millions in speaking fees from Wall Street firms within weeks of leaving office). It was Obama who sidelined real healthcare reform and put in a right wing healthcare system that guaranteed cost increases of 10-15% every damn year.

Biden was a modest improvement, but nothing will forgive his slavish devotion to a genocidal Israel.

Democrats threw the trans community under the bus. They threw immigrants under the bus. Time after time they surrender to Republican framing then wonder why Republicans keep winning.

Know how Hillary got the DNC to put a finger on the scale for her campaign? She bailed them out of near bankruptcy. Why were they bankrupt? Obama funneled money that used to go to the party into his own campaign coffers. That’s how he won a second term while losing Congress. Overall, the Democrats lost over a thousand state and federal seats in the 8 years of his presidency.

This isn’t all about the big bad Republicans. It’s not all about stupid voters. Republicans are no better or worse than they ever were, and voters are no dumber. Democratic leadership has a lot to answer for as well. Quit trying to shield them from the change that desperately needs to happen.

Wealth inequality continued to grow under Biden, and the average net worth of black families decreased.

This neoliberal obsession with “incremental improvement” is a fucking plague. It’s so easy to blame voters for not recognizing marginal changes, but it’s delusional to think today’s American voters are any different from voters in any other era or part of the world. Not recognizing that is political malpractice on the part of Democrats.

This pattern that we are living through is the same pattern behind every fascist movement since Mussolini. It starts with a failure of leadership from out of touch liberal elitists.

Democrats stand for absolutely nothing. They check the polls to figure out what people think they want to hear, but they never follow through because they have no conviction. Someone who is passionate about starving children doesn’t slow down to brag when starvation falls by 10%. Democrats do, and that registers with voters - consciously or unconsciously. Democrats can point to charts and figures all day long but,without genuine passion, they will always fail to break through.

Voters want conviction. Republicans have it, and Democrats don’t. Shaving half a point off inflation won’t change that.