23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

Kinda, but it's complicated. The share price is the number that people will buy and sell as many shares are as actually getting traded, but once you get to significant fractions of the whole company, the marginal cost of the next share can diverge wildly — if one party is trying to get all of them, that may drive up the price a bit, and for any given fraction of ownership there's always someone who sees the share price go up and thinks "hey, I can get even more profit if I hold on for a bit longer!"

Liquidity matters

It takes some time to complete the process, so the price is usually based on the likely future value. For companies increasing in value, the offer is usually higher than the current price, and for campanies decreasing in value, it's usually lower.

Also, corrections aren't instant, so if the change of value was for something that had already happened, not something currently happening, the offer will reflect the expected price that the shares would settle at.

When the tide goes out you can tell who is skinny dipping.

(apologies for the below crude metaphor.. but...)

I am 1.80. You can kick me in the nuts and I will fold, but I will still be 1.80 a few minutes later.

Let's see after the kick in the nuts if the price will still be $8.

When there is blood in the water the sharks start circling. And some sharks 'short'. And I know little about their operations of 23andMe, but I understand the _value_ of their data!!!!! So they may be sitting on a pile of Latinum and not be able to fully monetize it (sell it to every pharma/insurance/etc.) company on the planet.

It does happen for many reasons and not uncommon, uncertainty and risk is typically why.

There isn’t one single value, value derived ( let alone perceived) is subjective

In this case, The stock is worth more(or less) to the 49% shareholder than others who are may value the founder holding defacto controlling stake negatively, thus discount the stock less than its book value .

This is also why sometimes same class of shares held by different people get priced (i.e. valued) differently in a single deal. Recently the paramount one is a good example .

Another famous example Yahoo was valued negatively for a long time before its sale to Verizon, I.e. its market cap was less than the value of its alibaba holdings .

One off events like county cases , drug trials likelyhood of a merger approval from regulators are hard to price accurately and can skew.

FWIW, it's very common for stocks listed in the Hong Kong stock exchange to have its share price below assets minus debts..

The answer is yes and no. Yes the board can replace the CEO, but then the 49% owner can almost certainly replace the board

The answer is no. She pushed out the first board, but the second hand-picked board still wasn't having it with these lowball offers. This is a shitshow

Yeah but he mostly analyzes his he relationship between the board and the ceo. Of course 8 usd was not so good at the time, but the stock was falling rapidly and everybody shorted the shit out of the company, even if the ceo would’ve sold its shares under no circumstances would they have gotten over 10 usd besides that the stock was higher

> That's not true, shares are a share of the companies assets and future dividends.

Possibly true 20 or 30 years ago, but now shares are speculative assets, their worth determined by what the market thinks they might be bought for by a greater fool.

Blood is drawn from basically every infant born in the US and then genetically tested for various diseases. And the health departments retain these cards with the blood draws, although I’m not sure how usable they are decades later.

If you have a baby at home with a lay midwife, the health departments retain will hound you endlessly to get this done, although legally you can choose to decline as a parent. Barely anyone does, since most parents want to know if their newborn will have a serious genetic disorder that can be easily avoided by (for example) avoiding artificial sweeteners.

You'd think so, but the government of California was performing involuntary sterilizations until 2014. An ICE facility in Georgia performed them until at least 2020. It's legal under state law in over half the country.

What's different today that would create a massive outcry that there wasn't 4 years ago?

> Parent comment is coming from an ethical person and ethical people often have a hard time imagining how unethical people operate.

This is a trait of delusional people as well as those very deep into some "technocratic" ivory tower without any formed code of ethics, too.

Malicious doesn't just have to be biological in nature just because the data here is biological. That data can be used for a variety of non-biological malicious uses.

>They definitely use targeted approaches if they can get their hands on datasets.

Even on a firesale, I doubt it would be cheap enough for the margins they work on. These aren't exactly large scale, sophsticated operations being worked with here.

>Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think they will. If only because it's an absolute nightmare logistically trying to do it any other way. No country is going to accept a deportation flight of peopel who were not born on their land.

Or perhaps we have an underpopulation crisis decades later which does incentivize that. But that would solve the deportation issue in and of itself, right?

Zionism absolutely targets those with Levantine ancestry. They’ve killed far more people than whoever the op was talking about. Ashkenazis are under no threat.

I think that the sort of people who would snatch up a DNA database to put people on a list would be willing to accept some collateral damage.

Doesn't DNA data have additional statutory limitations on top of that?

Yes, that's the middle-school civics ideal.

Then we learn about the perils of "majority rules" setups, of lobbying, of trying to evaluate thousands of different decisions across hundreds or thousands of legislators, etc. and it becomes a lot less simple.

You live in a democracy until you don’t. It can disappear overnight with the stroke of pen from some populist leader who just ignores laws. Never think you are safe just because you’re in a democracy.

With all those sweeping upgrades to artificial generational technologies, a time will come where no one will trust audio-visual clues and evidence collection will be solely focused on DNA fingerprints.

A gift card from the gas station? Long ago we bought gifts for parents/grandparents and all they had to do was redeem a code.

The impact of lifestyle is undeniable and large. Good genes will not protect your body from alcoholism. And if I were a betting man, I would bet against determinism emerging from a better understanding of combinatorial genetics.

I do think over time we will get a clearer picture of risk predisposition based on your entire genetic profile. However, I believe that genetic predisposion will remain a relatively small contributor for most disease states.

Astrology isn't much farther off, and some still like to believe it to this day. Yes, even some very smart people can fall into absolutely baseless conjecture without peers to course correct.

But there's a difference between forming a cult and trying to convince the minds en masse of something.

DNA sequencing costs for a full human genome have outpaced Moore's law. I wouldn't bet on it.

They can't trawl my DNA in an existing database, because I'm not in it and, AFAIK, neither are my relatives.

Your example doesn’t make any sense, because they could do it right now: most of the kids are never going to get a basketball college scholarship, everyone knows it, including schools, and they don’t care

I'm very glad this wasn't productised before my in-laws were my in-laws

If your (backup-via-redundancy) keys are mutable, you do not have a backup. What happens in the case of a ransomware attack, for example?

You've also added (possibly substantial) latency to every single operation that operates on user data.

That's how GAFAMs size companies do it. They need to comply with European regulations for data deletion, and there are very few other options.

A few reasons:

- you have legal obligations no matter what the customer wants, eg, Amazon and storing transactions for tax reasons

- you do actively delete most of their data, eg profiles, but “deleted=true” on their central account record is needed to propagate the deletion to other systems, eg, customer analytics

- you tombstone it for efficiency reasons and only periodically delete the records as part of your checkpoint/backup procedure; similarly CDN deployments

- you delete all the live copies, but tell customers “retained up to 90 days” because you need backups to age out

I’m not saying companies are all innocent — but there are some legitimate reasons that deletions aren’t fully instant.

I get that a little from the company perspective, but it leads to its own issues of perhaps more important magnitude.

If you have data for a user, who wants to delete it, you can soft delete to allow recovery to prevent complaints.

On the other hand, 5 years from now your system gets hacked, and now you have to email some person you haven't done business with in 5 years to tell them their data that you claimed was deleted was leaked.

Sure you can do soft deletions with some hacky actual delete schedule but it doesn't really solve the problem, only reduces the timeline.

> The same customers that mark your transactional email as spam then complain about not being able to get into their account.

That's on you though - shouldn't have sent spam pretending to be transactional email.

> I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though.

When the data has value to the company and it is legal to keep it it seems very sensible to keep it (out of the perspective of s.o. acting in the interest of the company).

To be fair, tons of companies flag their promotional newsletters as transactional urgent act immediately. It's not hard to see why users don't really react to emails anymore

'Our data design is too bad to allow anyone to delete anything' is not, to me, a valid reason to prevent actual deletion.

Can't delete from backups, though.

The regulatory aspect is one I get.

The problem is that it infected the mindset of almost every company. Those that worked at companies who needed it brought the mindset everywhere. And like many technologies, people who study what big companies do mimic it everywhere, even where it's not needed.

So your simple stupid SaaS company has some simple object that a user wants to delete that ends up living in a db somewhere... forever.

Was the data really important? Is it worth holding people's data hostage because of subpar developers?

I'm not at all saying that soft deletion shouldn't exist. I'm arguing that hard deletion should be the default, and then soft deletion practices should have some justification.

Instead the industry chose to just soft delete everywhere, which is good for the industry, and bad for users.

That doesn’t mean soft delete should be the only option. With some of our processes, we soft delete for a period of time (2-4 weeks) to account for mistakes. Then, if on one tries to recover it after that time, it does the actual delete.

This seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It offers a safety net, while still getting the job done.

With as many data breaches as we see these days, I want my data gone. If someone gets a dump of the DB, a delete flag doesn’t matter.

This was the primary reason I never got a DNA test, even though I want to see what my results would be. I never trusted the companies to store that data long term. If I could get a test where a company didn’t store the results after they were provided to me, I’d get one tomorrow.

Define "easily". As I understand, it would require amending the Affordable Care Act. Assuming some rules are still being followed at the federal level.

someone elsewhere mentioned they use a key (encryption key) per user and just change the key, but A) i don't buy that, how do you prove you deleted a key? and if the user maintains the key and can revoke both their and the service's access to their data, lots of users will do this accidentally. Look at, say, matrix from a few years back, it'd constantly hose your keys and you'd have to attempt to restore from a backup key, but not that key, that's the first key - and apparently you accidentally clicked "backup key" again at some point and now all your stuff is that new key, even though you didn't specify you wanted a new key, you just clicked "back up key" to see what it did.

Also i "permanently" deleted a facebook account 2 years ago, and through a quirk on a cellphone facebook immediately brought the account back like it had never been deleted. I issued another "permanent delete" for that account a week ago, but i bet dollars to doughnuts in 5 weeks i will still be able to "oops i forgot my password, send me an SMS" will reactivate the account again.

If facebook can't or won't do it, i don't really think anyone handles this correctly.

Except people like me that store everything that users upload in tmpfs, and whenever i feel like it, i bounce the box. Good luck recovering any PII from that system. Unfortunately it doesn't have access control (there is no access to the system - that is, ssh, login, shell, whatever - from outside.), so i can't claim hipaa compliance. That and it doesn't log, so after a bounce i can't even verify who did what.

Most users won't stand for this kind of thing, but the users that can, depend on my random reboots if they forget a delete key (usually reloading the tab will "forget" the delete key.)

Why was this downvoted? Your close family also shares your DNA, to 100%! Suppose your parents both test..

Your DNA is not something that you can 100% keep from others.

There is no honour among eugenicists. There's even an own Wikipedia page for fertility doctors who used their own sperm - with a long list of cases.

> they would need to be looking for me specifically

I don't think so. They probably automatically determine how closely related all their customers are, so it just takes one of your (possibly distant) relatives putting in enough family tree.