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Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.

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A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.
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Nothing that is really landmark legislation. Dem legislators also didn't do anything about net neutrality. They deferred entirely to the FCC (which is largely why the rules were subsequently struck down).
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Multiple attempts at net neutrality legislation have made by democrats, in the meantime the FCC pushed for neutrality under Democrats while republican administrations have a much worse track record of support
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You write like the senate and its filibuster doesn't exist. They can't pass legislation without GOP votes. Of course they use the FCC given that fact.
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The filibuster exists as a convenient excuse to not do anything without offending constituents
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It's not as if democrats are using the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to not even try. Putting forward legislation they believe in, even when the odds of it being passed are slim, demonstrates intent and if the filibuster is used to stop a law that would benefit the people, that means that someone was actively doing something, it's on record, and the people should hold the obstructionists accountable for what they prevented.
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"Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party"

And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?

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No, because they are anti-“corporate ethics”.
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> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party

I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.

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The DSA branch has almost zero political power. Yes, Mamdani was elected. No, it was not because of DSA.

DSA has very limited understanding of the politics of power. Agree or disagree with their policy and advocacy, but they lack a unified, coherent policy platform. They take stances from (imo) good places and suggest proposals that are politically untenable (to say the least) and realistically ridiculous.

Mamdani is a unique politician. He is generationally charismatic, articulates the pragmatism behind solutions, and taps into the everyday struggles of citizens. When he talks about ideologically, it's soaring rhetoric about who we can be. His critiques, however, are often strongly tethered to tangible concerns (rent, food, education) vs. the DSA-type far left.

Source: worked in democratic politics, on a presidential campaign, with a wide range of people on the left (and "left") including DSA die hards.

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Can't there be more politicians that talk about the pragmatic aspects too? Didn't El-Sayed win the Michigan nomination? I don't understand how this is hard for politicians to grasp, it happened with the Roosevelts and the New Deal, not sure why it can't happen now, even despite money in politics, as Mamdani and El-Sayed winning shows, who both had much fewer dollars spent on them than the competition.
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>> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party

> I suspect this is changing.

Nope. The democrats have been on the cusp of becoming serious for as long as I've been following politics. It's a con to get your hopes up. Don't.

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Dodd-Frank? CFPB?
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> Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).

I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.

Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.

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> ACA?

How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?

The 15/20 rules is what resulted in recorder profits in health insurance business, how’s this anti-corporate?

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> How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?

"You must sell insurance to sick people!", "I don't wanna!", "I don't care, the law now says you must."

I mean, the whole insurance industry had spent the better part of a century (basically its whole existence) denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and the ACA fixed it via fiat.

Not only is it clearly "hard-hitting", I'd argue it's probably the single most "hard-hitting" invasive change to corporate regulation of the post-war era. Certainly it is in terms of the amount of money involved in the affected market.

> how’s this anti-corporate?

And this is where the rub is. You're not saying that your desired regulatory structure is something different than existing proposals, you're demanding that your government engage in behavior that is expressly "anti" whatever you perceive "corporate" interests to be.

That's not democracy, that's just warfare. You have enemies and you want to win. And the problem there is that the structure of our government requires compromise.

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ACA literally forced every person in the US to become a customer of health insurance companies.
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It "literally" did not. What enforcement exists is financial (a tax penalty) and not compulsory. And obviously most people are covered via employer plans or Medicare, as has always been the case. A quick Google says that 19.2M Americans are enrolled in ACA plans. I don't have statistics, but I'd bet that the overwhelming majority of those are willing purchasers. Most people view health care as desirable.
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No, it didn't. If you didn't want to buy health insurance, you just had to pay a couple extra thousand in federal income tax:

https://landline.media/affordable-care-act-tax-penalties-end...

>The penalty for not having an ACA-compliant plan or forgoing coverage in 2018 is the greater of $695 per adult and $347.50 per child for a maximum of $2,085 or 2.5 percent of adjusted household income. The percentage penalty is capped at an amount equal to the national average premium for a bronze plan, the minimum coverage available by law

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Ah yes, the very hard hitting anti-business rule that says if you don't become a customer of my friend's company, you must give me money. I'm sure the businesses were quivering in their boots when every citizen either became a customer, paid a fine, or became a felon.
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The "everyone has access to the ER" has to be paid somehow, which is through tax dollars. The USA has a for-profit health system but typical neo-liberalism has a safety net where corporates get to dip into a different bottom-less pot. So it makes sense that we make this visible by taxing everybody who isn't paying their own insurance, since they still expect access to ER.
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Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?

If their profits are so good, their shares would be worth owning.

Could it be because their profit margins are actually terrible (3% if lucky), and they have to get the price of their product approved by 50 different state government employees, and the federal government constantly changes their customer’s subsidies making revenue and expenses extremely volatile and difficult to forecast?

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If you bought shares of those 7 companies in 2010 when the ACA passed, how much would you have today? More or less than if you bought the S&P 500?

If you're looking for policies to blame for insurance companies having a rough 2025-2026, look to the Republican-led efforts cap Medicare fees and alter eligibility requirements.

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You would have about the same or less. Maybe UNH gets you a couple extra percentage points per year, but that's because they have an enormous healthcare provider business instead of just being an insurer. But it's still nowhere near a positive risk adjusted return when comparing to a relatively risk-less investment in SP500.

https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/

Since Jan 1, 2010, 18% for UNH, 15% for MOH/CNC, 14% for CI/ELV/HUM/SP500, 8.5% for CVS.

Also, these businesses are competing to sell a completely fungible commodity good with tons of non profits like Kaiser Permanente, HCSC, Cambia, Independence Blue Cross, and many others. It makes no sense to expect those businesses to be able to earn any decent profit margin when their competition only needs 0%.

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> Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?

CNC is up 90% YoY. That's far more than any of the largest tech companies. Alphabet is the highest of the tech stocks, and it's up 38% in the same period. When we look at the performance of the seven large U.S. publicly traded health insurers, their returns were extraordinary in the decade following the ACA.

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Seeing Dodd-frank in the list is pretty hilarious, because it was put in place for the issues that arose from repealing Glass-Steagall by Clinton. Which arguably was one of the biggest causes of allowing the activities that lead to the Great financial crisis in 08.
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This is why this kind of stuff is so difficult to argue about. G-S was repealed primarily by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...

And it is true, that it was signed by Clinton. But it was otherwise an entirely partisan bill passed with exclusively republican votes. All 44 democrats voted nay.

Now, given that, do you really feel that that's a supporting argument to the upthread contention that Democrats are a corporate-dominated party and not interested in regulation?

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Please point to the hard-hitting ones, almost all the big co's at the time thought they got off too easy and were expecting a lot worse. At the end of the day, Sarbox and Dodd-frank basically just required those businesses to increase headcount 10%.
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The comparison should be compared to the Republican party, the Democrats have done more and that's all that matters when you are making a choice between the two.
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I thought the Democrats were the party of big government and regulations whereas the Republicans were for reducing regulations?
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More like the opposite in practice
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Compared to the Republican party you believe they create less regulations?
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That has never been true, it’s just a Republican slogan.
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What about the ACA or Dobb-Frank?
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MAGA hates capitalism and free trade. MAGA loves government abuse.
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I would argue the democrats are more a process oriented party. They wouldn’t pull this shit because they care about process - so much so that they wouldn’t even consider half the stuff that’s going on now as it circumvents process.
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Democrats are the same side of the coin as the Republicans.

We, the people, are on the other side.

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Making it a 0/1 situation is really reductive.
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What a load of bullshit. There are better candidates and parties and worse ones, they are not all the same. This sort of attitude just feeds voter apathy and resignation.

Democracy is an imperfect system, but its much better than the alternatives. If more people paid attention and participated, we would have much better outcomes.

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"Both sides"

This is such a tired argument that over simplifies an entire group of people on both sides into a single entity that happens to be the same.

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In recent history:

* removed filibuster for lower-court nominations ("nuclear option")

* impeached the president twice in a term

* tried that former president in the Senate after his term ended

* expanded mail-in voting en masse

* repeatedly attempted to eliminate 60-vote rule for legislation

I'm not claiming these were illegal, I'm just saying the process adapts to the needs.

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> democrats are more a process oriented party

Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?

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That's not responsive to OP or coherent at all really, even if rhetorically structured like a gotcha.

Incumbent Presidents in the US almost always run for reelection to a second term, that's the normal expected outcome with vanishingly few exceptions in the last century.

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> That's not responsive to OP or coherent

The claim was Ds are more procedural than Rs. Asking what process the Ds followed to attempt to run, and then back out of running, biden (who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent) is clearly a rebuttal to a presented point.

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> who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent

You can repeat that as often as you want, but it doesn't seem well grounded. He's always had a stutter, and since he left office he has given speeches which suggest his mental faculties remain intact. Is he slowing down? Yeah. He's got quite a long ways to go before he's in McConnell territory.

In any case, what does his choosing to run have to do with process? Did he violate the process? Seems to me he was following it to a tee.

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Exactly. Their process prioritizes seniority generally, and this is another case. The process is, if the president wants another go, he gets another go; and he sure as heck wanted another go.
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So one man's desires become the rule for everyone else? That doesn't sound very democratic.
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There's no reason picking someone every 4 years is democratic but every 8 years isn't...
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Don't forget how Harris wasn't even nominated.

And all the shenanigans around 2016 when Bernie Sanders was shut out by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said outright that the DNC rigged the 2016 nomination. I think the outcome would have been very, very different if the DNC didn't fuck with the timeline and forced Hillary as the Dem nominee.

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You got that exactly backward. Modern republicans are the ones that get the most in corporate PAC money, at the high end it's like 60/40% split... the majority to the GOP. Also, the fact that modern republicans brought Citizens United and just earlier this year NRSC v. FEC.

You really can't make a valid case to say the dems are the corporate dominated party. ffs, they are the only ones even attempting to put common sense regulations on the financial industry, something Trump called "bad for business" when he undid antitrust legislature that got passed under Biden.

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He didn’t say they were _the_ corporate party, just that they’re dominated by corporations. It’s notable because it’s an accusation that they pitch at Republicans often (not that R is doing any better there, but it’s part of their platform more or less).

The dems haven’t done anything notably anti-corporate in ages. There are rumbles about doing it (anti trust, supporting unions, climate change), but it never _quite_ seems to actually materialize into anything.

Cynically, that’s why both sides lean so hard into the culture wars. The men in suits would rather we argue about how to interpret history than whether a wealth tax makes sense.

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> There are rumbles about doing it (anti trust, supporting unions, climate change), but it never _quite_ seems to actually materialize into anything.

There's only so much they can do when dealing with obstructionism, but the party is still putting forward legislation. For recent examples see The American Homeownership Act (https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/senate-demo...) and the Stop Corporate Takeovers of Physicians Act (https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren...)

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He actually did say dems were the corporate party. He contrasted the democrats not do something that the Republicans did because Dems were dominated by corporations.

The contrast implies that Republicans are in your words "anti-corporate"

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> climate change

Trump just removed Obama era greenhouse gas finding.

"President Trump and Administrator Zeldin Deliver Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History"

https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/president-trump-and-adminis...

Democrats also had massive number of anti-trust regulations during Biden and Obama.

You're claiming they've done nothing on anti-trust?

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IMO, it's almost certainly being abused. I just assume that all US domestic communications are being recorded whenever possible.
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I’m worried why many big companies aren’t worried about when the shoe is on the other foot.
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I worry that they don't expect to leave power because they're acting like they will never be held accountable.
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None of them really believe our economic or political systems will be recognizable by 2029. Everyone's playing for position in the short takeoff.
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Democrats don't control the courts.
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Whose fault is that?
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Whose "fault" is it that the judiciary has become an extension of the executive branch and been taken over by a single party? You tell me..
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Mitch McConnell's?
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Leonard Leo's
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What's to stop indeed? Some of us in the tech industry want the dems to slice and dice every tech company into irrelevance. They've betrayed society and they should be rightfully punished in fun + creative ways.
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How would this destroy Anthropic, exactly?
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Not just Anthropic, but practically speaking, the leading foundational model labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are burning through enormous amounts of money, and will need to pay that money back. If they are designated as supply chain risks, or controlled technologies, their ability to achieve that ROI is severely constrained.

They are not turning a profit, and aside from enterprise token billing, every other offering they have is a loss leader. In order to flip that around they need to drive down the cost of inference significantly, either through massive compute improvements, more efficient or lower cost models, and either one lowers the barrier to entry for local and/or private cloud inference for open models. The moat established by the expertise in model training is effectively dissolving as they approach recursive self improvement because any mechanism that prevents model distillation effectively reduces the quality and utility of the models, so each improved model makes their competitors better by default if they want to realize those gains.

The reason for the pivot to control and regulation seems to be more about erecting an artificial moat in their market, and having these technologies controlled or highlighted as supply chain risks will continue to drive investments in alternatives, especially in other countries where data sovereignty and domestic tech has become a priority given the last decade of the US dominated tech industry.

I don't think that AI is going to go away, but I think the future of AI in the next several years looks alot like massive overfunded foundational model providers collapsing, their employees launching dozens or hundreds of direct competitors, and the leading hyperscalers buying up datacenter capacity the way they bought up dark fiber 20 years ago.

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The supreme court, I guess. What makes you think they would allow that as long as Trump cronies have the majority there?
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Can you clarify what a GOP aligned company is? Is that any company thats willing to do business with the U.S. government or any businesses thats willing to sell products in red states?
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Maybe it's the companies that flank the US president at events in an attempt to gain favor? Or the companies that own private prisons that lobby for immoral policies on policing?
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You mean the ones that have been doing so for many administrations across both parties?
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You think this admin is like others?
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This doesn't appear to be unique to the GOP. Plenty of companies flank to whomever is in office. Even at that local government level. "Immoral policies" is subjective and would be in the eye of the beholder. If this was truely quantiative the U.S. wouldn't be a divided nation.
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The mere existence of private prisons in the US is immoral. To argue otherwise is a failure to extrapolate what that means at every level of gov and society. Maybe this isn't uniquely the GOP but private prisons have been some of the largest donors to the GOP since Covid.
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> The mere existence of private prisons in the US is immoral.

This doesn't pass a basic logical sniff test.

What if the private prisons provided much greater comfort, rehabilitation, medical and mental care, and so on? How could you call it immoral just for existing?

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That's a great what if despite what we currently know of these prisons and what we know of private companies seeking profit at the expense of whatever you're stating.

There's a country in the 30's that used misinformation to sell what you're suggesting and they, at one point, had a thriving prison system in less than a decade.

Don't be so polyannish.

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So if I follow your logic here you feel the same about grocery stores being private? Because if they were run by the U.S. government you wouldn't have 47.9 million people (about 1 in 7 Americans) living in food-insecure households? All because a private company that employs people are tryng to make money?

SRC: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

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You're definitely not following my logic because of your false equivalence WRT private companies and private prisons.

If you think prisons should have profit motives where growth only comes from continually seeking punitive policies to imprison people then I don't know what to tell you. The extrapolation isn't that hard and I don't see anything good coming from it. Weird takes.

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> If you think prisons should have profit motives where growth only comes from continually seeking punitive policies to imprison people

Prisons don't get to sentence people, courts do.

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Lol if only. CoreCivic once accidentally left their logo on a bill they wrote for a congressperson and the congressperson forgot to remove it when presenting it. Actually it's happened multiple times. Most "model bills" that are tough-on-crime are written by them.
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I think I am because the "equivalence" is private vs government run service. The arugment is equal. There is no public service thats better then the private equivalent. Period.
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Oil and gas and the GOP are one and the same.

Dems still subsidize O&G but they have other constituents they need to pay lip service to.

Banking and finance own both parties.

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I don't see a need to come up with a complete definition at this point. Let's start with cancelling all SpaceX and Palantir contracts and see how we're feeling; that may be enough to keep corporations in line.
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Because there is none. Its rhetoric and its personal to you. Its like me saying I haven't spent a nickle on anything Nike because of their narative selling. Hence anyone who wears Nike products is a bad person. Its ridiculous, narrow minded and undemocratic.
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Telling my mind about anyone or any company is the ideal expression of free speech and democracy. Using government force against a company that refused a contract is the opposite of democracy.
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> Using government force against a company that refused a contract is the opposite of democracy

If democracy is working, isn't using the government to express the collective will of the people exactly how it should work? Else why are we bothering to vote in the first place?

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Collective will of the people cannot supersede your ownership over your business and its right to engage with anyone it wishes to free of government retaliation. The business is people. Feel free to go to a communist country if you want collective action against companies. What other things do you think the collective vote should permit if the numbers tally? Do you support the collective will of the people to gag your free speech? To vote to shoot you dead in the street? Certain rights supersede voting, at least until somehow people manage to repeal the 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment etc.
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You seem to have escalated that argument a long ways towards hyperbole. The government refusing to have anything at all to do with a company seems like a perfectly valid position to take, and I expect my representatives to exercise that authority on my behalf. There is some nuance to how much that should extend to companies who themselves do business with the company you are refusing to contract with, but it is not completely wrong.
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And I think the governments reaction was driven by trump's thuggery not any real reasons, any reasons given were after the fact. I mentioned those examples because you mentioned the collective voice of people, sometimes one needs reminded that unvarnished collective vote is not permitted to do certain things as rights of free expression and property exist, nothing more nothing less.
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It sure isn't democratic when only the top 1 percent in charge make those decisions that inflame you. These companies have thousands, if not tens of thousands of employees, that I can guarantee don't agree on statements or positions that the people at the top make as a company whole. So why would you want you punish people who have nothing to do with this. In the end its the regular employees who pay, not the corporate leadership.
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Aren't you the one who said this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694185

>For me the end of buying anything Nike for my household and owning there stock was 2018. After their embracement of kaepernick and circus of marketing schemes that followed its no surprise what the outcome would be. Now Lululemon hired one of architects of all this as their CEO. They followed the nike playbook and are already suffering from it. Now their doubling down in a race to the bottom.

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I am the last person to "enjoy" that openai is getting boycotted. I respect both companies. And openai themselves probably did it under pressure knowing that Trump is a thug.
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Please provide a source or medical documentation of suffering from TDS regarding:

>> Trump is a thug.

I only use OpenAI since Claude was deemed a a supply chain risk. I never looked back.

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Trump is a thug who needs protection money to be paid or he will randomly declare you or your company a threat.
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I don't suffer from Trump Dicksucking Syndrome so I am afraid your diagnosis is mistaken. I use all models freely, why the fuck would I care about some bs military designation, I don't work in defense. Do you work for a defense company? If not why are you so stupid to refuse to use a model for this designation?
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Seems completely rational to me? Why would I do business with a company that doesn't share my moral values? I find the influence money has in politics more undemocratic than anything else.
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I doubt any company shares your moral values. Though a few of them might pay some lip service do some of your moral values. You tell me, have you audit all the companies you do business with to see if they share your moral values.
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It's certainly rhetoric! Corporate leaders must be made to understand that the business risk of collaborating with fascism is greater than or equal to the business risk of standing up for the rule of law. Really, we're being generous if we only punish a few companies and only hit their contracts; a strict application of the law would put quite a lot of CEOs behind bars for their overt bribery of the Trump regime.
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the cold political war turned hot with the prosecution of Trump (he made it easy by being an idiot). there will be no considerations for retaliation now, both sides will be using whatever means they have available to damage each other.

also if you look at how the two factions separate from each other decade by decade (there used to be overlap, almost none now) it's obvious that there will be no reconciliation.

it's a musical chairs game at this point, whoever is in power when the democratic facade cracks will be able to seize power and transition into whatever single party state follows.

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You mean the president than literally ran on "lock her up"? That's the victim here?

Stop trying to both sides this.

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are you seriously equating empty rhetoric to legal action?

Trump was an idiot who made himself an easy target for nobodies with no strategic bones in their body to go after him. note that his guilt or lack thereof is irrelevant, what matters is that legal action was initiated against a past president. this one action doomed the republic just like it did the previous Roman one.

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There's a difference between campaigning on something and actually doing it.

Letitia James campaigned on putting her political opponents in prison and then proceeded to try doing so.

This isn't difficult to understand.

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I think the blue team has been in a cold civil war since 2016. They can't come to terms with their progressive hegemony ending, but also can't pivot to a new politics because elections are too close to risk a mass preference cascade needed to revitalize the party.

I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms, and will increasingly do so as the blue team continues to maximally exercises power against their opponents instead of revitalize the tarnished reputation of instituions.

Around 2030, the US will need to spend 100% of it's tax revenue to service the debt, and California will need to a federal bailout or risk either default or wiping out their state pensions. I believe the coming financial disaster will likely be the catalyst that quiets the 'nothing ever happens' crowd, and both teams will need to reset their politics to the new world, distinctly different than the post-WW2 open society liberal consensus.

A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe.

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> What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?

They probably will, and the comment section here on HN will overwhelmingly applaud it. Next question?

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I don't think Palantir is concerned? Palantir is LLM agnostic and holds IL5, IL6, compliance with ICD 503, etc. Their entire platform is built around eliminating risk.
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They are suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.

If:

1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated

2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.

What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?

It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.

Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.

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