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Re: undefined

#251

Post by NicoJuicy »

davemel37 wrote: post #238
nostrademons wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might very well have set up a "heads I win, tails I win more" gambit. If he wins the election, he's president. If he loses, he has 30 million or so passionate customers for his next business venture.

This is definitely the case...but he doesnt even need the new audience or the new venture. His entire empire is built on a name that is getting billions in free press. The worst thing to happen to a famous brand is not bad press but rather becoming irrelevant and falling out of discussion. Even if the Trump political brand crashes and burns, the broader trump brand of success and money just gets stronger... This elec…

His businesses are declining in foot traffic https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/how-the-trump-president...

Re: undefined

#252

Post by jacquesm »

douche wrote: post #150
daveguy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Trump became president and nominates Thiel I expect it would be one of the rare times that the Senate rejects the nomination -- considering this donation and relative lack of experience.

I would support Thiel, or really, any engineer or tech-related person, being on the supreme court. It is absurd that we have fossils that do not have email accounts making decisions on laws touching on the technological future of the country for the rest of their natural lives.

Well, at least those fossils dedicated their lives to studying the law and whether or not they have email accounts doesn't mean squat. Decisions about technology are made with input from many who are well versed in technology.

Re: undefined

#253

Post by paulv »

ubernostrum wrote: post #189
morgante wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry. It makes me angry too, but also raises (for me) some interesting political questions around what level of disagreement is "too far." I would never fire someone for being a Republican and personally/privately opposing gay marriage. But I would also immediately fire someone if they were a Nazi. So where is the line if what's an acceptable level of tolerance (and…

So consider Proposition 8. This was a ballot measure whose sole purpose was to enshrine in law the idea that "this group of people over here aren't legally equal to everyone else". Privately believing someone has done something wrong, or belongs to a bad group, is one thing. Trying to enshrine that belief in law and disenfranchise the targeted person or group is quite another thing, and if you honestly are unable to…

Look at the timeline. Eich donated after Prop 22 was overturned (Prop 22 restricted marriage to same-sex couples). He wasn't trying to keep the status quo, he was trying to change the California constitution to outlaw something that the court had previously deemed legal. The end result of that difference is subtle, yes, but I find the spirit of the difference significant. Which is to say...much worse.

Re: undefined

#254

Post by Pilfer »

api wrote: post #122
bobsgame wrote: post #38

I'm not very political and I haven't decided who to vote for yet, but I don't understand why the tech industry is so anti-Trump. He seems like a relatively sincere and smart guy to me, and some of his policies seem to be better for business. Is it because of tougher immigration laws? Are there other reasons based on his policies, or is it mostly just emotional?

Can't speak for others, only myself. To me he's an obvious off the charts narcissist... so much so that his narcissism actually seems extreme against the backdrop of Washington politics and the media. That's kind of amazing. IMHO that disqualifies him from the presidency regardless of his policies. It's analogous to why you can't get a pilot's license with bad eyesight. A narcissist is a person with a dangerous addic…

RE: your point on narcissism. My perspective is that if he becomes president, his excessive narcissism might actually be good thing for the country. As a narcissist Trump wants his legacy to be remembered as positive. He doesn't want future historians to see him as a failure or some no name president. Trump's campaign is built on the promise of "Making America Great Again", and if he fails on that promise then history will see him as a failure, a real threat to his identity. Because of this, Trump does not want to be remembered as the president that caused WW3 or exploded the national debt. In my opinion, I think Trump will push for positive changes to the country as a way to protect his identity (and existence).

Re: undefined

#255

Post by yid »

ROI talk aside, and long risks aside, as an entrepreneur in SV, I'll be damned if I touch a dollar of Thiel funding. You can be as rational and cynical as you like, but if you even indirectly support a candidate as abhorrent morally as Trump, I'm going to assume that you have the same vacuousness in ethics that the top of the Republican ticket has, and I'd rather be an impoverished failure than take a dollar of his cynical Paypal money. Fuck you, Peter Thiel, you're on the wrong side of history.

Edit: and I don't care if this is my last HN post ever.

Re: undefined

#256

Post by CptJamesCook »

mcrae wrote: post #179
CptJamesCook wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A comparison between Trump and Hitler is ridiculous. There is simply no comparison, and the idea of is an insult to the millions slaughtered by Nazi Germany. 9 years before Hitler became president of Germany, he wrote in Mein Kampf: "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew." and "Aryans were, and are, alone “the carrier of the development of human culture." He fo…

I don't think the parent is saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but rather that his rhetoric targeting specific minorities is alarmingly similar to that of Hitler's and his National-Socialist party during their rise to power. No doubt the Holocaust was one of the most horrific crimes ever committed -- should we not then be all the more vigilant in preventing such similar hate speech from entering the mainstream?

Sure, we should be vigilant against hate speech. But not by banning speech, and not by manipulating it. And saying that we shouldn't allow a specific faith into the United States, even on a temporary basis, is certainly against the American ethos. But it's not Hitler.

I would say a more apt comparison to Hitler is the language used in the parent to my comment: "If that's the man Thiel wants to stand with so be it. But I won't forget." An implied long-term threat against someone for voicing political support for the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Now that is a tactic straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.

Re: undefined

#257

Post by jacquesm »

The only way out of the current mess I think is to elect Clinton and to immediately impeach her. Neither candidate is looking good at this point in time but Clinton at least seems to be relatively stable and won't do irreparable damage to the country.

Re: undefined

#258

Post by sangnoir »

ubernostrum wrote: post #186
nodesocket wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry. He made a personal decision to donate a small amount to Prop 8, and extreme political activists completely annihilated him and forced him out of his job. "Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California until 2013, when it was declared unconstitutional and…

I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained. I've written at length about Proposition 8 and the fact that it was not simply a matter of opinion or personal belief. It was, shorn of all the attempts to make it sound non-controversial, about taking a basic premise of a free society -- equality of all people under the law -- and putting it up for popular vote . Propositio…

> I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained

I don't know you or what you did at Mozilla: if it were up to me, I would rather had you quit than Eich (no offense). Frankly, Mozilla has lost focus and I think it would have done much better under Eich.

Edit: more thoughts on the politics. Eich's opinion was far from controversial- half of Americans held the same belief. I would guess half of Mozilla users in the US also had the same opinion: were those people also disposable?

Supporting prop 8 (to me as a lefty) is more benign than supporting Trump; yet I don't see any calls to boycott or quit companies with executives that support Trump.

Finally, it was a dangerous precedent for left wing politics to adopt, what if the right wing had adopted it and gotten someone fired for affronting beliefs held as strongly as yours?

Re: undefined

#259

Post by icebraining »

rorykoehler wrote: post #120
solipsism wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom in the Libertarianism context (and in most contexts) means lack of coercion or constraint imposed by government or other institutions. It doesn't refer to freedom from natural or physical constraints. That wouldn't make any sense to advocate for. Does this clear it up for you?

Precisely. The inability of a person to choose their desired path because they need money to feed their family is textbook economic coercion. We've long passed the point where lack of resources (especially food) is a physical/natural constraint.

What does "choose their desired path" mean exactly?

Re: undefined

#260

Post by Tempest1981 »

chroem- wrote: post #198
adjkant wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. To answer your question, yes. 2. Putting Trump and Clinton on the same level simply isn't accurate. I would revise this: |============================X==| amazing candidate |================X==============| normally acceptable candidate |============X==================| Clinton |==X============================| Trump Clinton is certainly worse than most candidates historically, but her corruption and scandals are…

Clinton has been exposed in plain daylight as having done things that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It's so bad that her campaign has been forced to hire a crew of dedicated astroturfers to cover for her, and they have no scruples over doing this either. How does that make her better than Trump?

gwb43.com has become a faint memory for many: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_contr...

"RNC policy since 2004 has been to retain all emails of White House staff with RNC accounts, the staffers had the ability to delete the email, themselves."

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