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.

Those are IPv6 addresses that work a bit differently than IPv4. Most customers only get assigned a single IPv4 address, and even a lot of big data centers only have one or two blocks of 256 addresses. The smallest allocation of IPv6 for a single residential customer is typically a contiguous block of the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses mentioned.

If Google’s security team is even marginally competent, they will recognize those contiguous blocks and treat them as they would a single IPv4 address. Every address in that block has the same prefix, and it’s actually easier to track on those prefixes than on the entire address.

the people that can afford those can afford a lower than desirable resale value

You sound unfamiliar with the average American consumer. Americans tend to buy the most car they think they can afford. They also might have been counting on the fact that electric vehicles cost more up front, but return that value and then some the longer you drive it.

it doesn’t really look like the used market for these has taken that hard of a hit either.

If it does, I might go out and buy myself one. As I said before, we don’t want these vehicles to be retired before their time.

At the very least debadge that heap, when I see that I like to think the owner is trying at least.

I would definitely suggest that people do this, but I wouldn’t call it “the least”, at least in regards to owning a Tesla. Removing the badge is probably the most effective thing they can do. That stuff gets noticed and has an impact. If they sell the car, it will just be bought by someone else and continue to be a billboard for Elon. I see a lot of Teslas in my area and have been looking for badge removals or “Elon bad” bumper stickers, and so far have just seen one without badges.

I could see this administration contracting for 100k cybertrucks for the USPS right before shutting down the USPS.

Plenty of Teslas were bought before most people had any idea that Elon was a fascist sociopathic asshole. Not everyone who bought one can afford to just dump a functioning vehicle with shitty resale value. Anyways, we don’t really want to see every Tesla on the road retired at the same time, so somebody will be driving them.

Cybertrucks are a bit different in my estimation. Anyone who bought a Cybertruck should have known who they were buying it from. Those owners bought that car to signal something, and I think it’s fair to let them know that the signal was received.

Adding in cost of ownership, EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles. Electricity is way cheaper than gas, and electrics require almost zero maintenance. Also, even 200km meets the needs of a whole lot of drivers just fine. Our family’s secondary vehicle is a Gen-1 leaf with 140km of range and I think we’ve used a public charger 4 times in over 10 years.

$5000.00 will buy me a lot of ketchup…

…or a dozen eggs.

It didn’t help my kids growing up to have Trump in the Whitehouse either.

That’s not a new war. It’s the war behind all the other wars.

Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.

Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.

Um, really? Darwinism is now the dividing line between right wing and liberal? Hitler was a liberal? Are you unaware of how Nazi propaganda equated Jews with wealthy bankers and merchants to harness class resentment?

I’m not saying he is Hitler, but your bar for right wing is pretty damning of the American educational system.

It’s an amazingly accurate stereotype that right wingers change their opinion on an issue the moment it impacts them. I’m sure you’re on track with his motive, but that doesn’t make him a liberal.

The computers we have today help to do logistics to “feed, clothe and house the homeless”. They also help you to advocate to do more. How much of that would be comprehensible to someone living in 1900?

I’m not sure that homelessness is a problem quantum computing or AI are suitable for. However, AI has already contributed in helping to solve protein folding problems that are critical in modern medicine.

Solving homelessness and many other problems isn’t resource constrained as you think. It’s more about the will to solve them, and who profits from leaving them unsolved. We have known for decades that providing homes for the homeless in a large city actually saves the city money, but we’re still not doing it. Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels for almost as long. Medicare for all would cost significantly less than the US private healthcare system, and would lead to better results, but we aren’t doing that either.

There is a lot more than liking right wing media figures. Class solidarity is a bit of a stretch since his family wealth is closer to what that CEO had than most Americans.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Maybe. I’m just not sure this guy is a great banner carrier. I respect your opinion and realize I’m in the minority. I’d be much happier if he was never caught. I don’t desire to see him punished, but I don’t see it being helpful if he gets painted as the next Ted Kaczynski. His background is just not helpful.

It’s worth noting that we don’t know exactly why they called the cops. It appears the cops didn’t know who he was until they had him pull down his mask. I’m guessing he was quite the sight after several days on the run, and probably several nights without much sleep.