I like how they started with different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.
But hey at least they don’t wear white collars like the old bad guys.
> different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
> And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
> it gave people a nice cognitive boost,
Does nicotine give a cognitive boost, or does it return one to their pre-addiction baseline?
Same question applies perfectly to caffeine. I might just be justifying my addiction, but it’s possible this is still worthwhile as it allows one to manually select when they want to expend their mental energy, overriding the normally semirandom fluctuations brought on by exhaustion, mood, etc.
A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
There are tools for measuring the level of dependence and addiction for different substances (like the severity of dependence scale.)
You may also be interested in studies on caffeine dependence, like: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
> A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?
> Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
It actually helps Alzheimer’s patients regain their faculties, if only temporarily.
There is fairly good evidence that nicotine causes some mild cognitive benefits beyond the baseline. Of course there are also downsides even separate from the effects of smoking.
This is in no way to defend smoking. I've never smoked, and good riddance to it.
However:
Amidst all the talk about the causes of obesity, surely "not smoking anymore" is in there somewhere?
They aren't defending smoking. They're referring to the industry and its ethos when it originally grew. While smoking was established as being bad for health in the mid-20th century, this wasn't as clear in the late 19th and early 20th, when the tobacco industry boomed and brought many jobs to the southern US economy.
Who's "they"?
I take it you're being purposefully obtuse, but I was referring to the person you responded to.
> I take it you're being purposefully obtuse
No, but you're being purposefully hyper-sensitive.
If you're replying to someone higher, you should hit Reply on that comment. Not on someone lower down.
No, that was honestly how I interpreted your comment. That may have been the wrong interpretation, but your two word reply didn't leave me with much. I possibly misinterpreted your first comment also, but I wasn't really sure how you were leaning there, whether it be just an absurdity or a question honestly pondered.
OK. All you see when you hit Threads is what YOU said. Not what the person above you said.
Meth addicts are often very thin as well. /s
Personally I would argue that the addiction simply shifted for most Americans. It was cigarettes, now it is food, particularly ultra-processed food.
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
The connection is even closer. Tobacco company extensively invested in the highly processed food industry and brought their advertisement experts in. The obesity crisis (and addiction to sugary and fatty processed foods) is not an accident, it's the result of a sophisticated advertisement campaign directed by the brains behind tobacco and alcohol campaigns.
Not very surprising, considering it’s the same companies using the same playbook. I’m not so sure that being obese is healthier than smoking, being obese might not give you cancer but it will certainly mess with your heart, and I would not be surprised if someone who smoked for the same amount of time someone else was obese ends up having a better prognosis after quitting.
Obesity is associated with many forms of cancer. See https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o...
This seems ideologically rather than evidence-driven.
Smokers used to claim that it suppressed their appetites. Not being a smoker, or obese, I wouldn't know. But it seems plausible as a (partial) cause.
One similarity between the scenarios: fake democracy, with minimal (and easily compromised) checks and balances.
Theatre at its finest. But this shan't ever be discussed.
> I like how they started with different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense).
They started with the same values: make as much money as possible, even if it destroys the world. Any entreaties to the contrary were a smokescreen to deflect criticism until they could shore up their position. This is the natural end-state of incentivizing profit maximization.
How does your worldview explain the GPL?
RMS is not Mark Zuckerberg?
What does the GPL have to do with profit maximization?
If you let money drive, you end up where money wants to go.
I like this framing.
Anyone care to suggest what money "wants" or where it wants to go?
I know it's a flawed question, because money is in many ways inert, but we have similar caveats around genes and evolution. Non-sentient things can still create persistent structures that we can label with our human values. Or something :)
Its ancestors wanted to feed the Roman army, and to ensure that the recently conquered stayed conquered next year. I don't think it's much different today: provide legitimacy to cases where those with power want to coerce those without.
The modern wrinkle is that our effects on the world are more significant. This design has side effects (re: the climate, to name just one). These are side effects which we may not be able to tolerate forever. I think that money, being a status-quo preserver, "wants" us to ignore them for as long as possible, but since they're cumulative, that's going to be tougher sell as time goes on.
Also, It's an information technology. As the makers of such things I think it's up to us to figure out what the next version should look like.
I think money is simply like mass: it has some kind of gravitational force, so people are drawn to it (the more money the stronger the pull), and it attracts itself (money tends to accumulate like a black hole), if left unchecked.
The only way to interfere with it is by using other unrelated forces, like kindness, just like we can move masses around with electromagnetism.
Money wants to go to where more money is, and accumulate in great pools that can pull in more and more money. Money seeks to erode barriers that would prevent this, so that the money pool can accumulate faster and faster. This force can overcome morals that are barriers to the process of money accumulation.
Money tends to want more money. Thus, it's extremely amoral so we shouldn't be shocked when it does things people consider bad.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
--Charlie Munger
Exactly. Silicon Valley used to be countercultural, an alternative to Corporate America. Yes, there was always a money-making emphasis, and there’s a long history of less-than-ethical practices, but this was countered by many positive aspects of the Valley, such as the paying-it-forward ethos and the feeling that technology matters. There’s a reason Xerox PARC was placed in Palo Alto and not in New England. There’s a reason why many of personal computing’s pioneers had a countercultural vibe.
Today Silicon Valley is the establishment. It seems less like the nerd mecca it used to be (remember Weird Stuff?) and is now a place that is much more obsessed with money. When a basic 1960s suburban tract house within a reasonable commute from work costs more than $2 million, it’s hard not to be obsessed with money. There are still good people and awesome technologies in Silicon Valley, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to stay in the Bay Area, but it seems like some companies in Silicon Valley have gone absolutely mercenary, and they have eroded the goodwill the area had as recently as a decade ago.
But I think this is part of the natural evolution of industry. The same could be said about the history of the railroad and car industries in America. Think of how essential telecommunications and electricity are to modern society, yet I’ve yet to meet a person who loves Comcast and PG&E.
I used to think this was the case as well, even though I suffered through the reality: computing was always a rich person's game. Even more so in the early days. Even a C64 was an upper middle class toy. Cosplaying counter cultural (really well) doesn't change the fact that if you cold afford to build the foundation of the computer industry, you were at least very aligned with capital. Now that alignment has been exposed, highlighted and scaled to global proportions.
My eyes were opened when I started realizing the Wikipedia pages of luminaries in the software field had blue links to their famous parents and those parents also had blue links to _their_ famous parents
Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s
It has nearly nothing to do with the tech industry or counterculture and everything to do with being shit at urban planning and selling land to speculators on the cheap, so you end up with nowhere for the sprawl to go, and the land owner voting block that sabotages any attempt at building high density settlements.
> Silicon Valley used to be countercultural, an alternative to Corporate America.
Turns out this is bullshit.
It's fine I bought into it too. But it's a pretty unbroken path from today back through the history of business in Silicon Valley. It's always been a smokescreen.
I recommend this book, it's highly illuminating and specific: https://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-History-California-Capitali...
You need to watch "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis which outlines Silicon Valley's long Libertarian roots. Making money and greed has been deeply embedded from the start.
> "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace"
This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old.
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
Absolutely love Adam Curtis. I was first exposed to AWOBMOLG in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo as an idealistic undergrad, and bristled at his claims. Since then it has become one of my favorite pieces of filmmaking. Great soundtrack too.
Is it based on the poem or just named after it? I don’t remember anything particularly libertarian about the poem.
It is just named after the poem, as a reference to the SV ideology of stepping back and letting the machines and the networks decide our future.
In terms of numbers, there aren’t that many SV companies that exploit kids via insecurities and screen addiction. But I don’t doubt their impact.
The ones that do are so huge that the number of companies doesn't matter. Facebook market cap is 1.5 Trillion and has $150bn of revenue every year. That's more than many countries around the world. (and I am comparing revenues to GDP).
“I don’t doubt the impact”
Sure, but you led with something that implied the opposite. Were I your editor, I'd've struck it.
I don’t think it’s misleading. SV isn’t the sum of Meta, YouTube, and TikTok (which isn’t even SV despite some roles here) - even if those companies impacts are outsized. The article explicits calls out things like AI; Anthropic and OpenAI are nowhere near like those others. And that’s just one category.
I would hope a YCombinator news site of all places would see that.
I am not sure what your subtext here is. Are you saying it doesnt matter as much because there are fewer SV companies?
My take is that maybe we shouldn't paint all of SV with the same brush. Not every SV company is Philip Morris.
You are right; there are still many good people and companies in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately the Philip Morrises of Silicon Valley have outsized influence since they control major social media platforms, Web infrastructure and standards, advertising networks, cloud computing platforms, and other essential tech infrastructure. Locally, they are also large employers in the Bay Area, and due to the housing crunch it is very difficult for non-“Philip Morris” workers, even in tech, to compete for housing (not every software engineer makes $200k+ in salary and gets RSU grants), which is pushing some of them out the Valley, helping make the Valley even more of a “Philip Morris” shop.
But all of them would kill for Philip Morris levels of product-market fit.
Right, only the ones that touch all of humanity are Philip Morris!
Maybe you shouldn't demonize all of SV, and it's the one working against your self interest?
I admit that's a large ask for a consumer, to keep track of a larger organizations abusing you.
“But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.”
This implies all. I then said I don’t doubt their impact.
They’re not all like this is my point.
Thank you for clarifying.
Tim Wu discussed this at length in The Master Switch back in 2010:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...
Also "The Curse of Bigness" is as relevant as that book. https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Bigness-Antitrust-New-Gilded-eb...
hoodies are the new white collar
Maybe because when the government looks to regulate them, that is why the lobbying effort takes up?
Nothing ever has changed
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain"
Money and power is clearly one hell of a drug.
Also a collective mindset - if most people one knows are doing exactly the same, morality lines tend to conveniently blur, it requires very strong personality to keep the inner compass untainted for decades.
And its a grey business so to say, you can see various justifications for it also here since many folks here work for them, its not some Zyklon-B factory. At the end, everybody under certain circumstances has a price, and kids tend to blur this even more for many.
This is one of the many reasons that tech wants to hire young.
What really gets me, is very young software engineers (not managers or marketers), that emulate the values and behaviors of tech bro billionaires.
It’s not surprising, but it is kind of disappointing.
When I was young, I was convinced that all the bad in the world, was the fault of evil, greedy old men. If young folks ran things, we’d be empathetic, kind, ethical, and positive.
As SV is basically completely run by young folks, of various races, genders, and backgrounds , I have to admit that it is actually worse, than the evil old men.
There is only one reason that tech hires young and that's the growth rate in the number of software engineers. The profession looks young simple because there are probably 10x as many now as there were 30 years ago, so naturally there will be a whole lot less 50 year olds than 20 year olds.
This is not new: read articles of transcripts of speeches from 10+ years ago by Thiel or pg that lionize young, inexperienced founders and the benefits of working at startups pitched to the youth.
Any time the message is "We should do X because if we don't, the bogeyman will do it," it should be a red flag. Seems to be one of the common themes in the article.
It's always admitting that the thing you want to do is bad, but wanting to do it anyways. And more often than not, it relies on a mischaracterization of the supposed bogeyman: "the democrats eat babies and wouldn't hesitate to do X, so that justifies us sinking lower unless we want baby eaters to win."
Or maybe it's just inevitable that anything structurally resembling a race to the bottom ends up with everybody on the bottom.
It should definitely be a red flag and warrant deeper inspection, but that doesn't mean it's always wrong. The dems do eat babies, obviously ;)
The excellent financial podcaster/youtuber Patrick Boyle has a related entry, "Crypto Has Bought The 2024 Election": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpZvC_5leDY
Curious if there is a reference for his 86% win rate from 42 primaries for the crypro Super Pacs that another poster also mentioned?
+1 for Patrick Boyle's channel - very informative and his dry humor is fun too
An unprecedented peek-behind-the-covers at the inside of mainstream media brain.
Man with wide eyes and stock photos and nordvpn sponsorship on set with full makeup and steampunk costume rambles through various headlines, not forgetting to show you how to (mis)interpret facts, and how to manifest life as a rabid political fanatic, ready to ruin any dialog you come across with barking and screeching and red eyes.
There is nothing in that video that even resembles thought or rationality, it is just classic mainstream media non-sequitur that adorns the regalia of knowledge and batters the viewer with meaningless "facts" and "figures" until they are in a state of ready-to-be-filled aporia.
I guess I fell for it, then - I’m not particularly intelligent nor media-savvy, so perhaps that’s no surprise.
In your estimation, what’s an example of a fact that Boyle misinterprets in this video?
It's not about "intelligence" or about any particular factual misinterpretation, I'm sure there's some "source" that more-or-less backs each individual claim made in the video, the problem is, in broad strokes, the standard of evidence for each individual "fact", and the narrative that guides the viewer through the set of curated and disconnected facts to an implied conclusion, which is less like a conclusion and more like a sentiment: "The crypto industry is a bunch of rich scammers like FTX and Sam Bankman Fried that are trying to grease the wheels of power with all of their ill-gotten wealth to protect themselves and continue to rob dopes that are buying into this trash." It's easy to imagine a conjugate set of disconnected and non-sequitur facts that with the right presentation lead to precisely the opposite conclusion.
But, neither of those is thinking. I mean that, the problem is not that the ambiguity of the situation provides for two or more interpretations, which it seems to me that it does, but that this mode of investigation, which outwardly accounts for itself like "Each side go to your corner and gather as many facts as you can, then we'll gather in the middle and compare, whoever has the more and heavier facts shall be found truthful!", but is really more like, "Let's all divide ourselves in two, randomly, and amass as many facts as we can that back up our point-of-view, while dismissing any that support the other, and just for fun let's add in hating the other corner too, because it makes all of this more exciting."
If you hang your thinking on the results of some surveys, and one account of what happened in some particular historical event, plus some truistic phrase like "All's well that end's well" and a couple of well-timed stock photo gags to pull it all together, you will find yourself 1. impermeable to any ideas that don't fit in the point-of-view or framing of the question you already have and 2. completely and willfully uncurious about the world and questions you aren't already asking about the things you don't already have preconceived notions of.
Steampunk costume? Are you watching the same video?
Semi on-topic: Why should the federal government even entertain a "strongly" pro-cryptocurrency agenda, when the real goal of cryptocurrencies is to displace/reduce the power of the U.S. dollar, from which the federal government (and the American people) derive many, many benefits?
That’s not the real goal of cryptocurrencies.
It started off that way—remember people buying pizzas and domain names with bitcoin? That is the sort of thing that people do with dollars.
But it became quickly apparent that cryptocurrencies suck as currency because they are so strongly deflationary. However, that makes them work great as commodity financial instruments.
So viewing crypto as a financial market (not a currency), it benefits the U.S. to have as much of the market transacting within the jurisdiction as possible. Then you get the tax benefits, and ancillary benefits (e.g. rich crypto owners buying things).
Because blockchains can be a great weapon against dictatorships who cannot allow free expression.
US has enough cultural and institutional flexibility to accommodate dissent. First amendment protects almost any speech against the government, including insulting the president.
Compare that against China, who simply cannot tolerate citizens having any freedom of expression beyond what the party allows. See "tanks of tiananmen" smart contract[1] or "winnie the pooh" NFTs [2] - the only thing CCP can do at that point is to ban the entire blockchain ecosystem. But if blockchains are a big success in the rest of the world, CCP also has to cater to it just to keep pace with the West's tech progress.
[1] https://bscscan.com/token/0xb79c9c73e8c7b4be7244e697e6bdb9f5...
Because you need to be/stay elected in order to enforce policy.
As an aside, one could easily replace 'crypto-currency' with 'fascism' in your comment to accurately describe why Republicans are following a similar tact in spite of the benefits of a democracy
“New”
They’ve been this way for decades. The whole “don’t be evil” facade slipped away once the money started flowing
Dirty brainwashing ad tricks sneak into Congress, no surprise: “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.”
Crypto = money from Putin, no? The regular channels for Putin to support disintegration of democracy in the West had dried up, so Crypto is now being used.
No.
Crypto = Crypto
What a politician wants most is to win reelection. This explains everything
One of Microsoft's biggest lessons out of their anit monopoly trial was that they were not political enough.
Before the trial Bill Gates though spending money on lobbying was a waste and its a widely held belief that their anti trust trial wouldn't have happened if they had spent on lobbiest like healthcare, finance, and anything military do.
Post 2000, silicon valley learned this lesson and became one of the biggest lobbyers of the government. To the point where they eclipsed the oil and farm lobbies.
I wouldn't say "new". This has been a thing for decades. While the companies who are the top spenders may have changed, Silicon Valley tech as a whole has been pretty aggressively represented for some time.
Microsoft intensified its lobbying efforts when it faced scrutiny for bundling IE with Windows. Similarly, Facebook, Google, Apple, and others have increased their lobbying over the years.
As you pointed out, this is nothing new. When companies or entire industries feel threatened, they ramp up lobbying – even Huawei hired Tony Podesta to advocate for them.
Hillary Clinton's call to repeal Section 230 for stricter social media regulation will likely prompt tech companies to boost their lobbying efforts.
Sooner or later, companies in emerging industries will start lobbying to protect their interests or advance their agendas.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/23/huawei-hires-tony-p...
A bit more than a decade.
A while ago software companies where taking every kind of abuse from the US government, coming from well represented entertainment, finance, and all kinds of other industries. This suddenly stopped when they started to lobby.
My thoughts exactly. This article calls out crypto but tech lobbying has a much longer history with Amazon, Google, and Meta. I view crypto as an extension of the financial services industry at this point (look at the boards and execs of these companies; they are more finance than tech), which obviously is the king of financing campaigns.
And the corporation that owns the The New Yorker (Condé Nast) is a notorious lobbyist in both the US and EU around AI Regulations and AdTech.
Goes to show that most political op-eds are just entertainment.
Yep! For example, the EFF was notably supported by Google back when Google was taking on Microsoft, the ITIF has been active for decades, and the Obama admin was notorious for being overrepresented by Google leadership.
Ain't no point adding morality to lobbying - it's just what it is.
Innocent question: what other major lobbying monsters are there in the US?
Something that surprised me recently was learning that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a private organization. I assumed it was some office funded by the government in a town, that worked with local businesses—or something along those lines. But no, they're a lobbying group, and they are the biggest lobbying group in the country. I'm not saying they are a monster (I clearly don't know anything about them) but at that size, how could you not be?
Id posit that they are simply from giving themselves that name and not disabusing anyone of the notion.
They like to get puff pieces in the news with their analysis on legislation and most people have the same misconception as a result
Car dealers. Also the biggest financiers of the Republican party.
See also, MLMs and the supplement industry. They're contributing for the legal right to screw average people out of their money.
The trifecta. If we regulated the supplement industry, ended MLMs and removed the requirement of car companies of having to use dealerships the country would be at a much better place.
A lot of the action has moved upstream now that Citizens United is the law (January 21, 2010: "this decision allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns"). Ideally from the corp. perspective you don't wait until a crisis point. You spend early and shape the narrative to prevent a crisis from ever happening. The Koch brothers created a network of donors who operate on this strategic plane more than the tactical "this specific regulation has to be changed" level. See Mayer's "Dark Money" for a comprehensive history.
You can view it sliced various ways here:
Oil/energy, real estate pros, health insurance, ...
Boeing
Makes sense. Lobbyists for legacy competitors tried to screw them so they picked up the game. In Canada and Australia they tried to screw them on the news / search linking debacle. The problem is that when you come at the king, you best not miss.
The Andreessen and Horowitz quotes in this are particularly hilarious and pathetic. The desperate attempts at linking their greed to the fate of the country itself is so nakedly self-serving (as are many of the quotes from these lobbyists and other VCs) that they should make them a laughing stock.
The Citizens United decision will be a cancer in American politics and a boon for the ultra-wealthy for generations.
Citizens United was the correct decision. The alternative is our government deciding who gets to engage in politics. Without Citizens United politics would be even more restricted to a much smaller set of even wealthier people and established politicians who have access to the governemnt approved outlets of political speech.
This is a reasonable sounding hypothesis that has been shown to be completely false.
False dichotomy. Prior to CU, individuals could contribute to any candidate of their choosing (up to an annual contribution limit). Companies are compased of individuals. CU was twisted logic to reach a preconceived, corrupt outcome.
You are misunderstanding what the Citizens United vs. FEC determined. Candidate contributions are still limited, even after CU. What's not limited is independent expenditures.
I can understand how the "up to an annual contribution limit" part of my comment could be confusing. I added that in an attempt to not be misleading / to circumvent spurious disagreement. I've moved it inside of parenthesis to de-emphasise it.
If you read my comment as a response to the parent, I believe it will make more sense.
---
CU opened the floodgates of anonymous, unlimited political contributions to "independent", but not really independent, organizations which can campaign on behalf of candidates.
The goal was/is to replace our democratic republic with an oligarchy. And we're now in the end game.
> which can campaign on behalf of candidates.
Wrong, if the candidates are directing or otherwise leading ostensibly-independent donations this is illegal. Independent donations are exactly that: independent of a candidate's campaign. If they're carried out on behalf of a candidate, they're not independent donations.
You can put up billboards saying, "X candidate's record is the best on climate change, tax policy, etc.". Your spending in this manner is not subject to limits. If the candidate calls you up and says "It'd be really good if you put up billboards saying X, Y, and Z" then that's breaking election laws.
Citizens United is not even remotely close to replacing our republic with an oligarchy. You can't buy elections, no matter how much people try to say so. Clintion received about twice as many donations as Trump in 2016, but still lost the election.
The correct decision is to set a limit on campaigning, and fund it with tax dollars, no outside spending.
Donations to political campaigns are still limited. Even after Citizens United.
What's not limited is independent expenditures. You can, for example, organize rallies or put up billboards advocating more serious efforts to combat climate change without limit.
So we should let the government choose who gets campaign funding? Sounds like an established politician's wet dream.
Oh no! Established politicians! They know how the government works, and could possibly be effective. We can't let them get reelected!
I joke, but the current system is so much more vastly corrupt than this imagined scenario where small potatoes money gets handed out equally to all candidates in a race, that I just can't really imagine what your actual nightmare scenario might be.
The nightmare scenario is that the money is not handed out equally to all candidates.
If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable? Anyone wanting to run against them on this issue would simply be denied the money to do so.
>If corrupt incumbent politicians have complete control of the finances of an election, how could they be held accountable?
The exact same way any relief is sought against the government: the court system.
Ok, and who appoints the judges? And who is responsible for enforcing court decisions?
The government is not the conspiracy your post requires it to be.
I agree that our current government is not.
But what you are proposing is a different government, one in which leaders could operate without the primary accountability that they face now: that anyone can organize a campaign against them.
Assuming that what you say is the outcome of a proposal like mine (which, btw, it isn't): I would rather have the government (which is beholden to the constitution) than the wealthy (who aren't beholden to the constitution) be the gatekeeper.
In fact, this money would be available to anyone who met whatever threshold was legally enshrined, a far better alternative than having to kiss the ring of an oligarch, as you propose.
Many modern, developed democracies do exactly that, and are quite more democratic than 2 parties running the state. As well as not making elections a show might help democracy instead of the best showman.
I will be waiting for the American exceptionalism arguments on why a thing that well functioning democracies/countries do wouldn't work in the USA.
Oh god not gun control! /s
The government should set sensible limits on campaign contributions that avoid a system of legalised bribery, aka. SuperPACs, such that actual people get to choose their representatives, not a handful of ultra-rich with the means to steer politics.
The only candidate in American politics that lives up to your idealised, independent politician of the people, is Bernie Sanders. And guess what? He strongly opposes billionaires buying themselves a government.
Indeed. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, which in clear language protects free speech for corporations. That includes the right to engage in political advocacy, which is what Citizens United v. FEC was about.
A lot of people have a, let's say filtered understanding of the decision, which has become a sort of shibboleth rather than a direct reference to the Supreme Court's ruling.
I encourage reading up on the ruling itself, at least the Wikipedia summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Or should you prefer primary sources (as ideally you should) just read the ruling https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
The canonical source, just for completeness. Justia has the same text https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
citizens united = sell the election to the highest bidder. no need to put lipstick on a pig
Clinton got twice as much corporate donations as Trump in 2016, but she still lost. It's not so simple.
> Without Citizens United politics would be even more restricted to a much smaller set of even wealthier people
Really? Because there are many countries with far stricter regulations on campaign financing than the US had pre-Citizens United, that also have much more working class representation in their politics than the US.[0]
What specifically in Citizens United is bad? Are there any positive outcomes from CU?
For one thing, it equates money with speech, which destabilizes our democracy by giving more power to those who have money. Obviously, money does that in many ways outside of the electoral process, but one would imagine that any serious democracy would want to keep its democratic processes maximally equitable.
I hear you , but that doesn't seem to pass the smell test.
The vast majority (97% ?) of voters are low-information voters. 1 such vote is equal to 1 high information vote (3% ?), those who research, read bills, etc.
So the process is already not maximally equitable - in fact, the system severely punishes high information voters via opportunity cost.
At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit. That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out. That's another plus. Money competes for eyeballs, and your dollars are just as good as mine. If you have more $$, i can pool my friends and beat you. There's nothing more equitable than that we have discovered so far.
Now, enter someone with a ton of money, Musk. You could argue that he would tilt the game. But we then observe the opposite: Billionaires are also subject to the law of diminishing returns. 'Donations' will only buy so much favor, and then they become a losing proposition. So, do you want a billionaire burning his cash in the political process? The answer is absolutely: it signals a level of credibility and conviction, when business opportunity is already a loser.
So in short, you want people to risk all their chips in something they believe, instead of limiting their bets and just get rich off the house, playing the long game .
Perhaps we start from the other side of the table. Maybe money is not the problem. Perhaps it is the power concentrated in too few individuals ? How about cutting off power from those that are selling favors to the highest bidders ?
The massive influx of money has empirically had a tendency to turn a substantial portion of your "high information votes" into "high _dis_information votes"
> At that point dollars positively affect your outcome because with paid mediums , low information voters can now get more information, despite being unwilling to inform themselves via hard work. So that's a benefit. That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out.
I don't believe in this rosy view of the "marketplace of ideas", fear wins out, populism wins out, not the best ideas. The best ideas have nuance, they demand to be understood in context, they aren't catchphrases nor explore scapegoats for societal problems. All of that demands a high-information voter to parse through and judge what's the "best idea" within their context, environment, community, etc.
No, I do not believe that allowing ideas to fight it out inevitably leads to the best ideas raising to the top, people don't vote intellectually, they vote emotionally and the person who tries to fight strong emotions (such as fear) with ideas will lose out.
American democracy does not give special preference to information content of a voter, nor should it. Did you skip the entire Jim Crow era of history where the racially-presumed information content of a particular voter was used to disenfranchise those voters, even spuriously?
Our constitution does not begin, "We, the highly-informed people..."
Anything else, and you are no longer talking democracy.
Our constitution established a republic, not a democracy. The drafters famously despised democracy. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6371
Yawn-inducing attempt at sleight of hand. Despite being a republic, we nevertheless select our representatives democratically. I vote directly on state-level constitutional amendments.
>That information flow is subject to competition, so the best ideas (and information) will win out.
Did you miss all of COVID era on social media?
For the best ideas to win, they must subject themselves to open conflict.
I didn't make a claim on how long conflict would last, but money is not infinite.
Noise is part of the system, and the system is not perfect, but that's a reflection of our imperfections, vs anything wrong with the final outcome.
Yes, well we are discussing elections which very definitely have time frames. We can't wait for Edward Gibbons to come along 2 millennia later and tell us that some bullshit idea's poisoning of this particular election is going to wreck democracy.
Add to that the fact that bullshit is cheaper to produce than truth. Sprinkle in the notion also that bullshit is likely more profitable too. Consider what might happen if the bullshitters control orders of magnitude more money in the first place, and then filter through Brandolini's Law:
Add to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Democracy is too sacred to be left to the loudest.
Dismantle what SV has evolved into under venture capital.
When tech was scrappy and didnt have billions at stake, its products seemed to benefit humanity. Now it is (the most powerful?) part of the oppresive regime.
At least the media and public are aware. The oil industry: not so much: they are destroying the whole planet, and their lobbying is so much more secret and politically motivated
One has to wonder if we are truly aware. How much is AI ruining the environment via its constant demands for electricity and water? I'd expect more harms will come to light way down the line, as was true with big oil, tobacco, etc.
not so far down the line. Deepfakes have obvious harms and Sora/similar is obviously going to get abused (as well as used).
The media is also part of the corrupt system though. They also have an agenda, use clickbait, and focus on the topics that maximize conversions.
If VCs disappear overnight most tech would not change ideologically. It hasn't changed too much ideologically for the past few decades.
Most were libertarian and continue to be libertarian.
The minor shift is from being left libertarian to more right libertarian, though that's mostly due to the political landscape where there isn't much room for contrarian leftists.
> If VCs disappear overnight most tech would not change ideologically. It hasn't changed too much ideologically for the past few decades.
What has changed is that the proportion of people who wind up in tech primarily due to passion has drastically dropped as it became more prestigious. I'll paraphrase something I read elsewhere that rang true to me. In the 80s and 90s, amoral,greed-is-good, get-rich-by-any-means people got into banking and finance because it paid well. Now they go into tech.
Silicon Valley is not Crypto. Most likely Crypto influencers are Putin-proxies, as usual.
There is a part of Silicon Valley that is dabbing in finance and banking, and somehow this part (crypto, X.com, etc) is somehow aligned with Putin’s agenda.
> Most likely Crypto influencers are Putin-proxies, as usual.
What proof do you have for this assertion? I find cryptocurrency influencers to be incredibly distasteful and lame, but I am unaware of any evidence that supports this theory.
Most of that is Peter Thiel and his "friends". The "somehow" is that he made a lot of money off of Paypal and has spent the past 25 years peddling influence and building a police state, because he earnestly believes in what Putin does.
They want the USA to be Russia so they can be the Prigozhins, "caterers" who literally own a 60k strong army.
Except the rest of SV doesn't have nearly as much of a problem with that as you seem to be implying.
Zuck does not care whether the US is a democratic utopia or a Russian style oligarchical hellscape, he is rich and powerful either way. And as a backup, he's going to go live in one of his bunkers if anything goes bad.
YC doesn't seem to care, and is happy to give these people money for dubious or outright scam projects because "it invests in people and teams", as if the team and people who put together an outright scam project are worth even talking to.
Most of SV's big money know each other. Very very few have openly come out against any of this, and fewer still have put money behind preventing any of this bullshit.
>who literally own a 60k strong army
Prigozhin had never own an army. He was just high-ranking Putin's clerk. He "owned" a 60k army in a meaning, in which any general owns an army.
>Russian style oligarchical hellscape
Russia has nothing to do with oligarchs. There's none left. Because oligarchy is about political power via the money, political will of capitals. And capitals have about zero political power in Russia.
>he is rich and powerful either way.
In Russia it works the other way around: you are powerful - and because of that you have money, and Zuck is NOT powerful. Literally one government decree - and he owns nothing and decides nothing, and considers himself lucky enough if after that decree he is allowed to get tenth of the marketprice for meta, or maintain his position as formal owner of de facto government controlled meta
It seems like a bad move though, I mean these are nerdy investor guys, right? They do well in this meritocratic system. If I was a tech billionaire I’d be very worried that a guy who’s only skills were catering and gangster stuff would have had a lot more time to study the latter, than me.
These tech moguls assume they will be in charge in the event of any sort of revolution or apocalypse. Look at some of what the Reddit founders have said for an example
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
I don’t have a subscription, but does their plan involve preposterously loyal soldiers who have no motivation to follow their instructions for any reason other than suddenly valueless money?
Yes.
It’s not unique to the wealthy in tech, most nouveau riche seem to forget at some point that the only reason most people attend to their needs or are in their orbit is to get money and if that becomes useless or turns off they will be dropped like a bad habit
> he earnestly believes in what Putin does
According to what? I've never heard him say anything positive about Putin. He also reportedly tipped off the FBI when the Kremlin invited him to meet with Putin.
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Both quotes by Peter Thiel in a Cato Unbound[1] blog post, 2009. The second quote is - let's call it "interesting" - considering Thiel is the patron of a VP candidate who may be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
1. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
You're likely reading the quote wrong, since it reads completely differently out of context. He was referring specifically to how beneficiaries of the government are incentivized to vote for policies which provide government benefits to themselves, thereby continually maintaining or increasing the size of the government. His implication is that as the government grows bigger, as it does with continually increasing beneficiaries, who vote in order to increase their benefit as the system allows, the freedom of those who are not advantaged by a growing and naturally increasingly regulatory government will decrease, due to a higher tax and regulatory burden.
I presume that "franchise" here is meant as voting enfranchisement, i.e., women having the right to vote?
Your presumption is correct - the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, amd its passing allowed women to vote in the US
If anyone needs to see what happen, read Marc Andreesen's cringy posts on X. The guy is a MAGA promoter and sounds more and more like an elderly "the country is going to hell in a handbasket" geriatric conservative every second.
Too many years in a bubble of undeserved wealth where people suck up to him constantly.
YC helped fund/promote Palantir, the dystopian surveillance company.
The Iraq war defense contractor boom pumped tons of money into pro-war entities and this is just the result of that capital finding its way into new ventures. Ideology comes along for the ride. It's the very definition of dystopian, government propaganda and big-lie-driven malinvesment and (in hindsight) massive financial fraud on taxpayers.
I'm personally shocked that PG touches any of this dirty money. When is enough enough?
YC does fund defense companies, esp tech innovative ones, a posture change they made due to the situation in Taiwan and Ukraine [1]
But they didn’t fund Palantir or Anduril or any of the companies that blew up during the Border Panics of 2016-2020.
Unless you’re playing guilty by association games in which case ..carry on.
YC gave Palantir a massive platform at startup school to present the company and vision and recruit talent. Far more than the seed investment would have been worth.
With respect to the ares industries, YC buys into the neocon view strongly enough that it wants to help create the next wave of military tech. The only reason anyone perceives these "threats" and perceives the US to be "woefully unprepared" because of the marketing budget the defense industry has after profiting handsomely from the Iraq wars, etc.
The US is not in danger and does not need new and state of the art weapons systems. We are not losing in Ukraine because we don't have adequate weapons but because we are playing a very stupid and risky strategy. See the comments of Jeffrey Sachs on all of this.
PG is good buddies with Peter Thiel. Why do you think he’s not a part of this neo-monarchist SV milieu?
> Porter, who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote.
She was running against Adam Schiff, who had much broader name recognition. It also didn't help that she's overweight and "Porker" became her nasty nickname.
This is a shoddy piece of reporting. Tech lobbying didn't start with Chris Lehane, Uber, Lyft, or crypto. Anytime government is capable of helping or hurting an industry, they form a lobbying group. The more money involved, the bigger the lobbying effort.
It didn't help that the Schiff campaign (backed by the CA democratic party) donated to the Garvey campaign to force her out of the primary. Seems weird to not mention this.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-06/californ...
From "Don't be evil" to "We're the baddies".
"Political VC" has been the worst and most damaging industry trend I've ever seen. From overt Zionism, to Gary Tan constantly whining about SF politics, to Reid Hoffman interfering with elections... Peter Thiel funding Trump, Vinod Khoslha fighting zoning laws...
None of that has to do with technology or innovation, yet as innovators we are forced to navigate some of the most toxic politics known to man. I no longer seek venture capital because I don't want to work with any of these people. We need alternatives to fund innovation.
Oh "we, the innovators" need a new "innovation fund" what an awesome idea. I wonder what kind of innovations has been brought by these innovators.
You get a much more usable framework if you drop the idea that there is some "pure" tech or innovation that politics are a corruption of and instead realize that technology and innovation are always political. Politics were there from the beginning, but they may have been invisible to you in a previous era.
Understanding how that could be and articulating what the politics were before is key to deciding what to do about the changes now.
I agree, so much of our tech was built out as part of the global war machine. It was easier to keep your head in the sand with "libertarian-esque" ideas (at least for me), but as those ideas came to fruition and social media exposed the thoughts of the people behind the money, the reality of the situation became easier to see.
> We need alternatives to fund innovation
I know! A federal Department of Innovation! How about that?
> None of that has to do with technology or innovation
Liberalism was the greatest innovation we ever came up with as a species. VCs are paid to have strong opinions on technological innovations. Why wouldn't they have strong opinions on the institutions and systems of governance that make tech possible?
Because their strong opinions aren't enabling technological innovations, they're enabling commercialization and regulatory capture so they can make money.
Oh my. And you think the prior attitudes were honest on their face, and not about undermining the prior incumbents so they could eat their lunch - to get the new folks here?
The prior incumbents were the way they were because they were incumbents. all incumbents end up doing these things. Because they work.
At least until someone figures out the chink in the armor, and it stops working.
Welcome to the new set.
Die young a hero, or live to be a villain.
>Liberalism was the greatest innovation we ever came up with as a species
Pottery, agriculture, control over the electromagnetic field, basket weaving, LANGUAGE, formalized society, written language, MATH, metalworking etc
and you posit UNREGULATED MARKETS as the greatest innovation?
NONE of the above monumental achievements of humanity are even remotely related to people being able to do business with slightly less regulation and slightly fewer taxes. Nearly all human innovation has occurred when being murdered by your king for petty reasons was the norm.
Integrated circuits as a commodity mostly exists because the US air force wanted it to. None of that is about liberalism.
The Navy trained up hundreds of thousands of people essentially to the level of electrical engineers, basic information sciences, and computers and computation and electric fields for WW2, to improve radar and targeting, including building and deploying a networked computer system for automated fleet defense and intercept tasking in the fifties, and then these people are mostly just let go, to spread their paid for knowledge to anyone in the commercial space, no non-competes. Wouldn't you know it, training up a bulk of people in a brand new but important field, with minimal cost to them, and then just freely giving that away reaped insane rewards for the next 50 years!
I don't agree at all that Liberalism was the greatest innovation. Neo-liberalism is quite the opposite actually. VCs are part of a rigged system of global capital. They get paid to be part of that system and continue its existence. It has nothing to do with innovation other than occasional random bets that pay off.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down. The HN guidelines clearly state downvotes are not to be used to express disagreement. Your point was politely and concisely made, and stuck to the topic.
Do better, voters.
What is supposed to happen and what actually happen are two different things. Example: Liberalism was supposed to make everyone prosperous, but it actually made everyone more prosperous according to metrics that don't matter (CPU cores per pocket) while taking away all the prosperity that does matter (stability of living space, nutritional quality of food, etc).
It has everything to do with tech an innovation. Nothing shifts the balance of power in a society like technological advancement. How could you possibly think a multi trillion dollar industry could avoid politics? You can't just bury your head in the sand.
The comments in this thread are rather disheartening. Very few here were complaining four years ago when The Valley did all the bidding of politicians in the form of canceling those who questioned the Covid origins or the need for masks and vaccines, deplatformed/banned/mocked anyone talking about Hunter Biden's laptop, or disagreeing with oppression-movement du jour.
Now that the tech bros have flipped sides it's a sudden problem. It's (nearly) completely one-sided on here. The honorable thing to do would be to acknowledge that this is an echo chamber if you're going to complain. Now, I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion for this take, but don't let that stop you.
I was ostracized at a right-wing small military contractor during covid for being skeptical of the novel medical treatment being offered for free with zero liability for those profiting from it.
I almost stopped trying to rationalize the world around me at that point in my life. I assume my experience was simply because the CTO had everyone under his thumb and he decided it was a good idea.
The authoritarianisms that came from both left and right wing sources during that time continue to baffle me. Very dangerous precedents were set during that time.
Money loves power, silicon valley will continue to vanguard political causes that extend political, economic, psychological, and spiritual control over people, through useful idiots at the IC level that actually love the fart smells and don't care which direction the wind is blowing the farts, an HR machine that marches to the beat of a global borg-impulse, tirelessly filling any structure vacuum they can find with pointless systems in order to restrain any remnant of human spirit, and a psychopathic management class that is unrepentantly self-serving.
I don't know that I agree with this, but it is rather poetically written.
Those articles kept reminding me that I am right to be very cynical. Is lobbying #foundermode? /s
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Hillary Clinton went on TV and said we should get rid of Section 230 in order to moderate content. So is it really that surprising that SV made a right turn?
This argument doesn't hold water. Hillary Clinton is kind of irrelevant at this point. She doesn't hold any kind of elected office and remains pretty unpopular among lefties after losing in 2016. Meanwhile Trump openly tried to reduce the protections of Section 230 while he was president[1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/05/28/what-is-s...
Donald Trump is strongly against Section 230.
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know
SV made the choice before (by accepting money from dictatorships for political influence via social media). Attempts at regulation were a reaction to that.
There's no way the situation can stay like that forever. There will be regulation like there's regulation of TV, radio, press, etc.
Without regulation you don't get a libertarian utopia - you just get oligarchy.
Wait, the libertarian utopia IS oligarchy. So it is all right by their standards.
There's orders of magnitude more libertarians than oligarchs. It's even in the name :)
Most libertarians aren't rational egoists, they are just naive losers oligarchs take advantage of to get more power.
They still firmly believe they'll be the oligarchs, just like lots of people think if they were in medieval Europe they would be nobles or knights.
The worst are the seed stage founders complaining about the proposed paper gains tax (while not knowing enough about it to answer if it would apply to startup equity) because they’re definitely going to have enough value for the $100MM threshold to apply to them.
When the income tax was first passed it applied to less than 1% of citizens, yet look where we are now. Just because a new law doesn’t apply to you personally doesn’t mean you can’t be concerned about the potential downstream effects.
Slippery slope arguments with taxes make no sense. A new tax could appear any day on any income level.
> because they’re definitely going to have enough value for the $100MM threshold to apply to them.
Tax cutoffs have this habit of drifting downward over time (the whole, "eventually you run out of other people's money" thing). See the original revenue act of 1913 (modern US income tax). At first it was 1% starting at today's equivalent of $93K and didn't go any higher until you made the equivalent of about $500K. And today, well, it's a little different.
New taxes are always pitched this way -- "oh it'll never affect you, just those rich people, what's your problem?"
> cyber-libretarians like Ron Wyden
This dude is a certified ghoul.
In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage in boycotts against Israel.[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel
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Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? Your account has been doing it a ton, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I don't want to ban you because you clearly know a lot of things and have posted quite a few good things over the years. But your comments include so much name-calling, swipes, snark, and nastiness that you're not leaving much choice.
Here's one of many examples, on an unrelated topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630774. That's a great comment, ruined by name-calling and personal attack. On the subject of cartoons of all things! There's no need to treat other people this way, or use the comment section to vent bile like that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This isn’t a flame war style, and you’re off base to even try to moderate me here.
If you want to ban me over this or my previous comment, do so. It’d be a fitting bit of evidence that this place has truly gone off the deep end. N gate died far too soon.
The entire premise of trying to dig peoples comments up and shame them has failed to do anything except embolden me even more. Maybe you should focus on moderating the significantly nastier comments in this very thread rather than targeting me unjustly yet again, or focus on adding the sorely needed PM system this website lacks rather than engage in airing out dirty laundry in public.
And if you really are the cyber detective you like to larp as, you’d know that my whole body of work is in argument mining and competitive debate. Simply being argumentative is not flame-bait or whatever other nonsense term you’ll claim it to be. Of course I’m going to be argumentative and political, and that’s okay.
There are so many worse comments in this very thread which you ignored yet you focused me, and this has happened several times now despite in every thread you do it in, others are far more egregious in their violation of the rules.
Seems you need some help with moderation.
I don't know what a cyber-libertarian is but Bernie Sanders is completely irrelevant (literally). The 3 bills he sponsored that became law were renaming highways and post-offices. The guy is a meme at this point. Look how he rolled over for the DNC two cycles in a row.
Here are his accomplishments: https://www.congress.gov/member/bernard-sanders/S000033?q=%7...
If you look at co-sponsored, its more of the same fluff. I'd say he's pretty ineffective.
FWIW, your post prompted me to take a bit of time to research. I found this interesting:
"According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others."[146] During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[147] Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills,[148] many of which became law."
Thats the conclusion I came to. It seems like he'd be more effective as a consultant/advisor or non-elected official. Taking up a valuable senate seat to make amendments seems like a waste of influence.
My take is that he's still a successful lawmaker, it's just that he is more successful implementing his agenda with amendments rather than standalone bills.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both cyber libertarians so I don’t see the problem.
> Folks that think that Trump and his friends like "freedom of speech" or any of the type of techno freedoms we take for granted are in for a deeply rude awakening. The reality is that democrats are so, SO much better on most cyber issues that you're actually a deplorable if you are voting for trump.
I'm curious as to why you conclude that Democrats are better than Republicans in terms of IT liberty. Trump ended operation choke point, a program of essentially harassing banks into dropping certain customers [1]. De-banking is, in my opinion, one of the most important threats to "cyber liberties" since it's absolutely crucial for any business to survive. Individuals who are de-banked also find it incredibly difficult to survive: Plenty of services, including apartments and HOAs, do not accept non-electronic payments.
The censorship of "misinformation" (much of which later turned out to be true) also grew considerably under the 2020 administration, which did in fact reach out to social media companies to try and influence their decision making. One of the more salient examples was covered by HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 To be clear, I'm not concerned about private companies autonomously deciding what to host. I take issue with the government coercing companies into making moderation decisions. This has huge potential for abuse, such as forcing the takedown of politically disadvantageous material.
Both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of getting rid of Section 230, but for essentially totally different reasons: Republicans seem to want to return to the precedence set by Cubby Inc. vs. CompuServe [2]. Democrats seem to want to narrowly repeal Section 230 to empower the government to dictate the contents of social media. Both are negative in my opinion, but the patter seems more insidious and prone to long term harm.
And to be clear, these issues are far, far from enough to get me to vote for Trump. I'm interested in hearing the counter-claim, that the Democrat party is better in terms of cyber liberties.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Bernie Sanders is a cyber-libertarian? What does that mean?
> The right-wing turn is absolutely disgusting and should be shattered as soon as possible with prejudice.
Do you understand how you are the problem here?
Silicon Valley didn't care about politics until politicians started getting involved and attempting to impose censorship regimes, aggressive unrealized gains taxation, and killing crypto assets. Tech startups were find being ignored.
But as you illustrate, you can't ignore DC if it chooses not to ignore you. If people like you want to use the power of the state to "shatter" anyone you politically disagree with, well, of course the tech companies will hit back.
Why are you being a Democrat shill? Didn't you see that recent video of Democratic party boss Hillary Clinton saying the quiet part outloud? If the social media isn't censored, "we lose control." And by "we", she didn't mean you and me.
I just don't see this as "SO much better."
Lobbying is a necessary evil to counter populism, brainwashed people (from TikTok, Reddit).
No, good policy that benefits a wide group of constitutes instead of a few key donors is how you counter populism.
Lobbying makes it worse bc the response (populism) will have credible grievances, which is why you will see populist candidates all over the west.
so-called “deliverism” as a cure to populism has empirically not worked very well.
actual material changes do very little to defuse populist cultural moments in modern wealthy societies
I've seen this analysis before, but I'm really not sure what it's supposed to mean beyond "modern populist movements want changes I don't consider to be material". There's no big mystery here - Denmark successfully defused their populist movement by delivering what populists say are their biggest priorities, stricter immigration policies and an increased focus on small towns (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/denmark-europea...).
There is no big mystery; I believe it is proposed as that because the politicians just want to act in their own self-interest or that of lobbyists and not those of their constituents.
Even bringing up immigration policies leads to vitriol online, and all I can do is think "to whose advantage is this really"..
This comment comes of as over-intellectual incoherent internet babble. I do not even know what you are saying.
because I used the word 'deliverism'?
HN is a safe space from anti-intellectualism, thankfully
Source?
Making your people first world is extremely good at defeating "populist cultural moments" like communism, unless of course you consider may 68 in France of evidence of the contrary.
I'll even go further and claim that Occupy Wall-Street died because the US economy boomed from 2012 on (return to embarrassed millionaire)
The US is already first world. OWS was much smaller than the media might make you think - the US economy really only started booming 2017,2018,2019.
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliveri...
The people handing money to lobbyists in washington are the same people funding these misinformation campaigns that brainwash the populace.
Can we use ChatGPT to neutralize them?
Tools of the master etc. etc.
Who’s “we”?
Who’s “them”?
Them
YC was cool like 15 years ago when I first joined this forum now they kinda sux
What's a cooler place you could go instead?