FTC Approves Roughly $5B Facebook Settlement

The reasons attempts to require voter ID at polling places is currently a partisan issue include:

1. The level of voter fraud is very low, and what little there is almost always would not be prevented by voter ID at the polling place. It usually takes place by absentee ballots, or is based on registering people to vote who should not be eligible (which can be addressed someone by ID requirement--but at registration, not at the polls).

2. When deciding what forms of ID are acceptable, there has been a remarkable correlation between whether a given form is allowed, and whether or not a significantly larger fraction of white voters have that form of ID than do black or Hispanic voters.

3. The same people that pass these voter ID laws have also, in many states, cut the budgets of the state agencies that issue IDs, generally be closing offices that can issue IDs and reducing the hours of those that remain. The closures have tended to be of offices that serve largely black or Hispanic populations, and the cutbacks in hours of the remaining offices have tended to eliminate weekend and evening service. I've read several stories about people who to get an ID had to take a two hour bus ride to reach one of the remaining offices, and had to take a day off work to do it, which was quite a hardship for them.

In short, the current push for voter ID has almost nothing to do with insuring the integrity of the election process. It's about trying to make it harder for to vote for groups of voters that have historically voted against the party that is pushing for voter ID laws.

If we had a national ID, issued by the Federal government rather than state governments, with a strong commitment to make sure everyone who was eligible received their card, and a Federal law that said any state voter ID check must accept the national ID card, it could probably be done in a way that avoids #2 and #3.

I noticed as I read that statement my first instinct was to blindly agree with you, because it feels like it might be true (from inside my bubble). But on second thought, do we actually have voting stats to back up this idea, or is it more of the phenomenon that the minority opinions making the most noise seem to be more numerous than the population who generally keep to themselves?

The mark of the beast is pretty specific in that it requires the right hand or forehead. I once thought maybe we'd see something with embedded RFID in that space get the fundies riled up, but machine learning of faces and gestures and gait and so forth are quite sufficient. The future for us meatbags will look more like an Amazon Go store experience, you carry the mark already as original sin just because of your slight differences from everyone else that machines can pick up on!

Early Christians had a lot of experience with oppressive bureaucracies -- The Holy Roman Empire, among others -- and willfully subjecting yourself to a system for faraway emperors to scrutinize and inject themselves into your personal dealings is generally not a precursor to good times and personal prosperity.

There are some guarantees yes. But it's not universal.

For example, voting eligibility is frequently denied on the basis of age and criminal history.

Assuming that more ethical people are better to work with and vice versa, then as more ethical people leave, the work enviroment gets worse and worse.

Like, payroll issues take longer to deal with, your co-workers aren't as up for beers on Fridays, your boss isn't as on your side as you'd like. So, the elves leave middle earth.

Eventually, the company can end up in a situation where payroll issues are impossible to deal with, where your co-workers are far too free to hit up a bar on a Tuesday night, where your boss could care less about you. So then even some of the skuzz-bucket people say they have had enough.

So, yeah, FB is good right now and can use their funds to pay people to deal with those issues. But fines like the one they got today are going to hamper that process.

As has been said for decades: Culture is everything.