The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.
We've removed some of the structural racism, but we've also gotten much better at hiding and "justifying" it.
Additionally, think about all the votes that were passed when these tests were present. Every one of those votes meant a huge and consistent portion of the population could not participate. Which probably created a situation where that population was at a disadvantage across many systems.
Even if they stopped doing this test in 19XX, it would take a significant amount of time to unwind not only the unfair policies enacted under it but also the damage done by those policies to families. We might still be undoing the damae from them.
A similar case is redlining -- city policies that forced immigrant and minority populations to live in certain areas, limiting those family's abilities to participate in the growth of housing value. A couple generations cannot accrue value from their homes, because they've been forced to live in a low value area. Even once redlining became illegal, those families were 60 years behind in an exponential growth curve. Fixing the policy is a great start, as was removing these tests, but we need to do more to actually make things right.
The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is still very much being felt in the present, as waves and ripples from past decisions and policies led to inequal financial and social outcomes that take generations to repair (if they ever can be repaired.)
Or racist police profiling and felony convictions for things white people would walk for (felony conviction = you lose the right to vote, effectively stripping someone of their citizenship. I don't know if it's for life, is it?)
The implication that acknowledging statistical reality that certain income groups and racial groups have less ID is in it of itself racist is, well, racist. Because then you can use this adject dismissal of reality to apply racist laws and claim they're not racist.
In the naivest, most shallow analysis Voter ID is not racist because black Americans are just as capable of receiving ID. The logic is fine, but purposefully ignorant.
The barrier to ID IS NOT just "do you have the physical/mental ability to get ID". The barriers are economic and geographic. When you don't put DMVs in black areas that becomes a barrier. When IDs cost money that becomes a barrier. When a motor vehicle is required that becomes a barrier.
Movement Advancement Project has some data about the de facto discriminatory effect of voter ID requirements [1] that separately accounts for for low-income people regardless of race [2] and black people in particular [3].
Here's something I wrote on the voter ID topic before [4] (disregard the citation numbers in the quote):
> A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
> Overall, roughly one in eight adults in this country—nearly 30 million people—lack a valid driver’s license, one of the most common forms of ID.
That's a strawman. I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID.
> There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots.
In 2020 "In Arizona, Biden won by 10,457 votes, and in Georgia, he won by 12,670 votes"
Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
Seems like even a small amount of voter fraud could have an effect?
> I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID.
Even so [1]:
> More than one in ten (11%) U.S. adult citizens—or nearly 26 million people— lack any form of government-issued photo identification.
There are also people without birth certificates. Obtaining some IDs can be difficult without having other IDs. For example, depending on where you live, getting a driver's license is difficult without a birth certificate. (Ctrl-F for "Lack of birth certificate" on [2], though apparently South Carolina lets you get a voter registration card before you get a valid voter ID.)
The larger issue is that valid forms of ID for voting differ between states, and (beyond the topic of voting) the difficulty of getting what most people think of as common IDs differs between states. There might well be 100 thousand citizens across the US who would fall through the cracks if every state that didn't already require voter ID were to pass laws naively requiring voter ID for the 2028 election. Voting is a right for citizens, so state governments should go out of their way to make obtaining stable IDs convenient for citizens who lack them (accounting for, among other things, transportation difficulties and time spent on in-person verification that takes away from job time). If the federal government has no authority to unify ID requirements, then states should cooperate to standardize their requirements toward convenience. I would also like if every state (and I do mean every state) allowed payment statements and utility bills as valid identification for voting, because getting stable IDs such as driver's licenses or passports takes months.
> Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
> That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
If the margin were something like 100 votes in a state, I wouldn't know what to do about it, but I would still be dissatisfied if a new voter ID requirement in the state blocked 10000 citizens from voting. When I wrote this before:
> Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
What I meant to communicate was that any states passing new voter ID laws should near-simultaneously pass laws that making getting government-issued, voting-eligible IDs easier, especially for people who lack multiple forms of ID. And for sure, states should not be carelessly closing DMVs the way Alabama did in 2015 [3].
> What I meant to communicate was that any states passing new voter ID laws should near-simultaneously pass laws that making getting government-issued, voting-eligible IDs easier, especially for people who lack multiple forms of ID.
That seems like a reasonable idea and one that many voter ID proponents support.
> the way Alabama did in 2015
Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.
> Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.
That was just Secretary of State John Merrill's claim, and I'm saying that it was a careless one. "There are still places to get voter ID, just 31 fewer places out of about 100" is not the same as "anyone who wants an ID can still get one". The burden of proof was on the Merrill to demonstrate that the Board of Registrar's offices and the mobile ID van (which in 2014 officially appeared 2 out of 25 times on weekends and 23 out of 25 times on weekdays usually during 9-5 hours [1][2]) would compensate for the lack of possibly closer-by DMVs.
Consider the context of the voter ID laws themselves [3]:
> Under the new law, which only went into effect in 2014, only a handful of forms of ID, including driver’s licenses, meet the requirements.
> Civil rights groups vehemently opposed the legislation, noting that these IDs are harder to obtain for minorities, who among other things are more reliant on public transportation. A state analysis showed that 500,000 registered voters lacked a driver’s licenses around the time the law was being put into effect.
What ended up happening after the 31 DMVs were closed was [4]:
> However, since the photo ID voting law went into effect in 2014, only a small portion of the estimated 250,000 Alabamans who do not already have the accepted IDs have obtained the free version. In 2014, an election year, only 5,294 of those IDs were issued, state officials told TPM.
> The number of IDs issued this year is even smaller. As of September 28, 1,442 IDs had been issued since January 2, 2015.
...
> However, as of last Monday, only 29 IDs were issued from the mobile units this year and four from the state capitol, according to the secretary of state’s office.
...
> Civil rights activists point to several reasons for why, they say, the free ID program has been ineffective. For one, many of the black residents affected by the DMV closures live miles from the county offices that issue IDs and African-Americans are more likely to be dependent on public transport.
And then consider what Merrill said about the DMV closures [3]:
> The way Merrill sees it, the closures will cause “a real inconvenience” for those seeking driver’s license, but have no bearing on Alabamans’ ability to vote, since the 67 boards of registrars remain open.
...
> The [state] ID is one of them,” Merrill said. “I don’t know why people don’t have driver’s licenses, except that they don’t drive. Maybe some of them can’t drive, but I don’t know.”
In the best light, Merrill didn't understand the burden of needing to rely on public transportation to travel possibly farther than you would have needed to if the DMV that used to be available stopped being available.
Tangentially, I feel as if Merrill, along with other Alabama officials, was being gaslit [5]:
> Collier reported that Mason proposed closing multiple driver's license offices throughout the State and asked ALEA to put together a plan. It was Collier's understanding that Mason intended the plan to be rolled out in a way that had limited impact on Governor Bentley's political allies. Collier claims he reported this to the Attorney General' s office because he was concerned about a Voting Rights Act violation.
...
> Ultimately, the decision to close the offices was reversed, in part, after the state litigated the issue with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which had claimed that the closures had a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig into Alabama’s situation, but suffice to say finding an example of a state that does it wrong does not mean “we must absolutely never have voter ID because it’s impossible to ever do it correctly”
Almost all of Europe has effective voter ID laws or at least processes by which eligibility to vote is verified.
People love to call out how the US needs to adopt processes from Europe because it’s done in a better way. Voter ID sounds like a great place to start.
I think being completely unable to find a state that does it right does kind of mean "hey, we shouldn't do this"
What you're not realizing is the intention of these laws is to be racist and cause disenfranchisement. Therefore, that being the result is not a "failure" - that's what the laws were intended to do.
> Voter ID sounds like a great place to start
I don't understand why. Why are people so caught up on Voter ID that they're willing to push it even if the risk of disenfranchising people is there?
I think I can guess the reason why, but I don't want to be presumptuous.
We really don't have any problems with widespread election fraud due to identity theft. It's just not even a real problem. We don't have any evidence to support that. So, I don't know what these laws are intending to accomplish. Well, I do know, but for the hypothetical person who is not focused on disenfranchising people - what are they hoping to accomplish with this law? Do you know?
> I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig into Alabama’s situation but suffice to say finding an example of a state that does it wrong does not mean “we must absolutely never have voter ID because it’s impossible to ever do it correctly”
I never said such a thing, and I even ended my second to previous reply saying the opposite. It's completely possible to require voter ID "correctly", but my impression is that lawmakers would rather do it quickly, by passing voter ID laws without even thinking about the millions of citizens who lack ID.
I dug into the Alabama example to support my claim that Alabama carelessly closed 31 DMVs in 2015 (and to suggest that you shouldn't take then Secretary of State Merrill's arguments at face value).
> I dug into the Alabama example to support my claim that Alabama carelessly closed 31 DMVs in 2015 (and to suggest that you shouldn't take then Secretary of State Merrill's arguments at face value)
The funny part is that you’re taking the opposite sides arguments at face value.
“Oh, some random person claimed closing the DMVs makes it harder to get ID, so it must be true”
We haven’t even established that voters don’t have IDs in the first place.
You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US. Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
> We haven’t even established that voters don’t have IDs in the first place.
I have no proof, only evidence. How about this? [1]
> Alabama's chief election official, Secretary of State Jim Bennett, said Monday that registrars' offices in every county will be offering the free IDs, starting this week. The offices are open during regular courthouse hours, he said.
...
> The secretary of state's office reports that a check of voting records with the state Department of Public Safety shows 20 percent of Alabama's registered voters, or about 500,000 adults, lack a driver's license or non-driver ID issued by the Department of Public Safety. Bennett estimated half of that group has one of the other acceptable forms of photo IDs.
The byline is "By The Associated Press". There is no link for the 500,000 claim. (Should I consider the possibility that the Associated Press got the numbers wrong on accident? made up the numbers on purpose? or that Bennett himself replied to a response for comment?)
> You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US.
Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
> Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
The claim is that swaths of people in Alabama lacked ID in 2014 and 2015, and that minorities were overrepresented in that group. Even if you don't believe the second part, what would convince you about the first part? At the very least I find it believable that Alabama had at least a few thousands of people who lost their IDs (due to situations including but not limited to homelessness [2]) or didn't renew their IDs in time. In regards to registered voters who got an ID valid for the 2014 voter ID law by 2015, I don't know how such people would manage to live, but based on the articles I found during this conversation I am inclined to believe that there are such people.
>> You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US.
> Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
You can't get a hotel room or rent an apartment, you can't open a bank account, you can't get a job, you can't get on a flight or a train, and probably most of all - you can't apply for government assistance without a form of ID.
It's factual that black Americans are more likely to not have ID, and therefore a law requiring photo ID would disproportionately affect them. That's not up for debate.
In addition, Voting ID laws have historically been a method of disenfranchisement. I certainly don't trust conservatives to not disenfranchise voters, particularly when the method they're proposing was originally designed specially to exclude black Americans from voting.
In the naivest, most shallow view, voting ID doesn't seem bad. But when you look at WHO is proposing it, the history of voting ID, the distribution of ID in the US, etc. (the broader context), it seems clear that the intention of those types of laws is not pure.
In addition to this, we have virtually zero evidence that voter fraud is a widespread problem. The topic of voter fraud is largely just "made up" following the insurrection on Jan 6th. To me, it seems suspicious that we're proposing and pushing laws to restrict voting when we haven't even been able to verify the problem exists in the first place.
I would have hoped that a more logical place like HN wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming because there is no evidence it’s proof something isn’t happening.
I understand it's not proof of something not happening.
I would have hoped a more logical place like HN would understand taking extremely risky measures, which have a history of disenfranchising people, isn't worth it when the problem they're attempting to solve cannot even be identified.
The reason people are so hesitant to implement Voter ID is that the people advocating Voter ID aren't very honest. They refuse to admit the racist history, they refuse to admit the disparities between demographics, and they refuse to acknowledge their own lack of evidence.
That's very concerning. It makes one wonder what their intentions are. If they are truly not attempting to disenfranchise people, then why not admit to the previous history and then explain how that will be avoided? That would ease everyone's concerns. A win-win. But they don't do it.
In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card.
Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice.
Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family?
Germany, by contrast, requires every resident to register in the city or town they live in for an ID, whether they intend to vote or not, but even small towns have such an office, and as someone else pointed out, every citizen receives a letter 30 days before each election telling them exactly who/what is being voted on, where they are to go on Election Day (always a Sunday), and how to vote absentee if they’re not going to be in town that day.
>In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card.
They're still there, most mid-sized towns still have them.
>Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice.
Yes they opened the big licensing centers and made them appointment only which is an improvement, you waste zero time. "Miles away" means nothing in Texas, the state is bigger than France.
>Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure
There is no public transportation infrastructure in most mid-sized Texas towns.
>or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family?
Now with appointments you can plan ahead with family or friends that are time strapped.
Like many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc.
It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent.
A fun fact is that this is specifically the question the academic framework of critical race theory was formed to address. How can systems that are not explicitly racist, that may actually have racial equity as explicit goals, still create racially disparate outcomes. It's an interesting area of study! No wonder people hate it.
It absolutely is. Go look at the racial demographics of the neighborhoods where DMVs are being opened and closed. And then ask yourself which racial groups, at large, are more likely to have time in their day to sit at an inconveniently located DMV and what party they most often vote for.
It certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally.
Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner.
To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Ehrlichman, White House counsel and assistant to Richard Nixon
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
Not Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and Reich Minister of Propaganda
Poverty is not equal across racial boundaries and geography is also not equal across racial boundaries. Where you put the DPS matters, and the South is still very much segregated to some degree today. Naturally, the state government knows this and takes full advantage of it.
I’ve worked in the ID space and know how the parts work together. When I found myself widowed and having to get a passport for my son, the process of getting a replacement social security card for him was incredibly onerous. 3 different visits! Mind you this was to get a replacement cardboard card - getting survivors benefits is a simple phone call.
Multiple visits is a barrier for folks without paid time off. Physical documents is a barrier for folks without unstable housing or noncustodial parents.
It’s interesting that all of this bullshit is required to exercise your right to vote. But we have the minimal possible controls on the right to bear arms in those states.
Yeah, people forget Ronald Reagan passed some of the nationa's earliest gun control laws as governor of California partly as a response to groups like the Black Panthers arming themselves.
Why not merge them? Voter IDs can be driver’s licenses, passports, etc. So much bureaucracy. For the sake of efficiency, simply have sign ups for a voter ID card (similar to state IDs) at voting centers. Two birds, one stone. Easy.
I'm with you, it's sadly the nature of the beast. Think about the federal government alone: DoD military ID, veteran's ID, passport, social security card, etc. are all separate organizations with different scopes. It's madness.
So what’s one more, for voting? Or better yet, allow a way to quickly issue people state ID cards at DMV voting centers and other similar facilities. That way you get an ID for voting, and for other state identification purposes. Easy-peasy.
Texas does just that! When you apply for a driver's license or other state ID, you can elect to register to vote at the same time. Two birds, one stone.
Texas is hardly unique in this, since every state except those which continuously since 1994 have either not required registration or offered election day registration is required to do this under the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the “motor voter” law.)
Would be nice, but most states do not allow same day registration (New York does not as an example), or same day registration is extremely limited (in California you need your ID to vote and register on the same day).
The aforementioned problem persists, different organizations with different scopes.
Stronger voter ID laws are nice too, until the political will was expended into making it happen. By the same token, smarter ID laws can also be enacted if appropriate effort is undertaken.
Stronger voter ID laws are not nice to haves, they are the law in many states like Texas. Just like anything else surrounding government and laws, you must plan accordingly, appropriate effort is required by the voter.
Since many states don't allow registration on the same day as voting, I'd say the government has planned accordingly after passing the aforementioned voter ID laws. Just found out this is a a standard federally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41921184
Great! So then when they change it to allow for the issuing of voter IDs on election day, it can be done at the federal level in one fell swoop. And who knows, maybe this voter ID can be a national one so no need to deal with state bureaucracies.
And that’s fine. As Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible, and what becomes possible ebbs and flows with the shifting of the Overton window. Stronger voter ID laws one decade, smarter voter ID laws the next.
Assuming that you’re sharing this in good faith, the claim “it’s difficult for black folks to get identification” is a compressed way of saying “ease and necessity of accessing civil services like DMVs is not evenly distributed across the country e.g. very GOOD accessible civil services in Harlem, Manhattan and NOT very accessible civil services in rural Appalachia, and the unevenness tends to correlate with other forms of inequality in our society such as along rich/poor and white/black lines, meaning some types of voter ID laws create systematic bias in who is able to exercise their constitutional right to vote, and given that it is effectively impossible to make any impact in any election via voter fraud even without voter ID laws, the mass disenfranchisement of a non-random sampling of Americans is not worth the upside.”
From a statistical standpoint, there are proportionally less black people with ID than other racial groups.
It's not a matter of capability, it's purely a factual matter. It's not up for debate black Americans would be disproportionality affected, and as such you can easily argue the policy has racist intentions. What some black Americans say, and what some politicians say, does not matter.
Weird how young-ish people in a particularly dense urban setting with plentiful public transit and many DMV offices to choose from — TIL: several exclusively for AAA members — may have a different lived experience than, say, older people in a rural county roughly half the size of Rhode Island with no public transit and a single DMV office.
Tho the county I refer to barely has any black residents so there couldn't possibly be any racial motivations. Just like the nearby restaurant plastered with a bunch of "rules" in giant lettering on the exterior, such as "No sagging pants", isn't owned by a racist. /s
Ruby Bridges is still alive and younger than our last president.
Voter id is so far from this. You might have to jump through hoops to get an ID, but with literacy tests it was almost impossible for blacks to register.
I have been a member of /r/natureismetal and I can tell you without a doubt that most prey are eaten alive. Even baboons and chimps eat their prey alive.
> The HPP seafood meat extraction process involves pressure levels around 3,000 – 4,200 bar (44.1 – 60.3 kpsi) and holding times between 45 – 90 s. Shucking with seawater (4 – 25 °C) improves flavor as high pressure infuses salt into the lobster meat. HPP shucking should occur with live lobsters
What I've read over the years is that when a submarine implodes from external pressure, the implosion happens SO fast that the human occupants are never aware of it. [0]
That sounds to me like the one time I was ever under general anesthesia: One instant I was chatting with the medical staff as they were putting me under, the next instant I opened my eyes and saw my wife standing over me in the recovery room.
Catcher in the Rye was the right book for me at the right age. It really set a North Star for me as to what I wanted to be when I looked at myself in the mirror.
Funny how as I grew older, I found myself understanding more and more about what the older characters were saying, without me sacrificing what made what Holden Caulfield ring so true to me.
Fun fact: in university at the bookstore they had a written poll as to what your favorite book was (before the Internet). I was one of the first ones and wrote down Catcher in the Rye. A month later I read in the school paper that Catcher in the Rye was the winner that year, and it was the first time that the Bible didn't come in first place.
It's one of those books that everyone's heard about, but I find not many people have read. I myself hadn't read it until about six years ago (in my late 30s). I was underwhelmed by it. Maybe the book hit a lot harder when it came out than it does in modern times?
I also read it when I was 16, and throughout my 20s. I haven't read it in 10-15 years now. It's something that speaks to you as a teenager more than it does as an adult, because at least for me it put into words what I hated about the world, ex. phonies, and how I wanted to hold myself to that. I'm in my 50s and I'm not a phony so it won't hit me as hard, but I still remember how much it meant to me.
I love gambling. I go to Vegas 4-6 times per year, and I play poker at the local casinos/card houses almost every week.
I've NEVER liked sports gambling because it's so hard to predict and I also believe that it's rigged by Vegas and the Mafia. The NBA has already been outed as rigged via referees and the insane actions of refs in last year's Super Bowl by ignoring obvious penalties makes it even worse. The games are obviously tainted as this point. And the fact that none of the leagues want to implement rules that correct wrong penalties only solidifies the fact that they want these things to occur.
It would be essentially impossible to create a new prion disease by accident- generating random-ish new things with methods like this would pale in comparison to the massive number of weird random-ish things natural biology is already creating in the wild.
However, this category of technologies could potentially be used to develop new prion diseases on purpose. As well as to develop cures for prion diseases that disrupt the misfolding.
>As well as to develop cures for prion diseases that disrupt the misfolding.
That seems quite plausible actually. You'd need something that can target misfolded PrP and bind it up so it can't do anything and then hopefully your targeting protein leaves normal PrP alone. A bit like an antibody.
The problem, from what I understand as a dabbler in protein research, is that PrP binds into these large very very stable semi crystalline fibers, (I visualize them looking like thick extruded complicated pasta shapes, where the 2d crosssection is kinda the shape of the outline of a single PrP). It makes it really hard to learn about the structure, actually, because x-ray crystallography requires repeated crystalline structures, and these are more like 3d polymer threads that bunch up and make things hard to image (though there's some more modern imaging techniques that are making headway). It turns out that these are very very stable configurations unfortunately and have very few ways to attach anything, and that's the precise problem with building binders. Plus, even worse, it turns out PrP might even be biologically necessary for mammals and we don't want to usually get rid of it wholesale [https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-01...]
The context here is that prions are misfolded proteins that replicate by causing other proteins to change their configuration into the misfolded form of the prion. Diseases caused by prions include Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Chronic Wasting disease. All prion diseases are incurable and 100% fatal.
Someone could fine-tune a model on pairs of existing proteins and their misfolded prions and then ask the system to come up with new prions for other proteins.
ChatGPT found these 4 companies that will produce proteins for you just based on digital DNA that you send them:
It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.
At this point "fascist" is more of an insult than an ideology, very few people who get called "fascist" ever actually live up to any reasonable definition of the word.
> My understanding of fascism is that it is a political system that is founded on a story of lost national glory that can only be restored by a purification of the land by a strong leader
Fascism strikes me as a historical term more than a political one. Its most-commonly agreed upon definition is something like political economic systems that resemble those of Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany. (Both governments embraced revanchism. Both were ideologically incoherent.)
That might be the old definition of fascism; but like many words, it has been completely redefined in today's political climate.
The new definition, it seems, is anyone to disagrees with your political viewpoint and makes an effort to push back. Under this definition, it is politically convenient to call your opponent one and be technically right; regardless of where on the political spectrum you find yourself.
They don't like the rulings that the Supreme Court has made, so now they are talking about limiting the term of justices, and packing the court with more judges. That is strengthening the integrity of the Supreme Court?
Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed from the court. Two more are there through GOP malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at this point.
No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high court justices.
As far as packing the court, I am personally interested in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat, whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices choose a second tier of judges unanimously.
But process only does so much to prevent partisan political interference. At the end of the day, our amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will take something like a mild revolution or major systemic breakdowns to fix it.
Yes, because our current court is illegitimate. Even the conservatives know this. Trampling over precedent in an obviously partisan way and guaranteeing Trump can never face consequences for his actions? Come on now. The American People can only play stupid for so long.
As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the right would regularly agree but they won't now - because they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.
It's not the GOP that is loudly and proudly calling for the court to be packed with sychophants because it ruled against their preferred policy platform...
The Dem leadership has been splitting the baby for years by allowing the ever-increasing radical wing of the party to bloviate about this without ever letting meaning legislation to the floor to enact the changes this group wants, so credit where credit is due, I guess.
I love gambling. I play poker every weekend and go to Las Vegas several times a year, sometimes for less than 24 hrs just to gamble.
Even I think that gambling is ruining sports. I like it when it's off to the side, when people are betting in Vegas and gathered around the sportbooks, but when it's factored directly in the game with TV ads, it's really offputting and highlights how easily sports can be manipulated by corrupt people that want to skew the results.
