IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

> they have been more than capable to support the industry and take credit for it's successes

Well let's face it, we're all getting a huge break from the government right now in a ton of different ways, so they do get some credit for making the laws incredibly lax around here.

Even Trump's government gets credit until it screws up this sweet deal we're on. And if you wanna see how sweet it really gets, go into fintech. All your opponents with lots of cash on hand are basically operating blindfolded with both hands tied behind their back.

Regulators literally have no idea what to make of us in that space. They largely leave us alone so long as you have even semi-competent legal advice. If you have good legal advice? Well you end up recreating financial institutions in all but name and without any regulation (e.g., Digit).

> simultaneously demonize tech workers as unempathetic racists, sexists, and gentrifiers

I wanna get to the rest of your post, but I just can't leave this alone. I'm sorry to shift the focus here, but we really don't need any external help on this though, do we?

The racist part of the story has legs because folks like the "unnamed" google engineer writing screeds about how no, actually, it's the rich conservatives in the majority who are unsafe. Because tech conferences argue they're a safe space for men who's primary ideological focus for their publications is proving black people thrive under slavery. Because a constant dribble of stories like Kixeye exist to support population statistics that are... statistically unlikely by pure chance..

The sexist part of the story? Gosh maybe if our industry stopped doing so many things that enable abuse of women, the narrative might not be that we enable the abuse of women. Similarly, if we paid women more or less equally within rank and gave them equal opportunity in the workforce... This problem might exist to a much lesser degree. Uber's ripping itself apart not because some women choose to speak out; it's because the public is discovering obviously unethical and probably illegal behavior.

Tech gets special attention, I grant. It's outsized, growing fast, and is consuming and reformatting other INDUSTRIES as its primary fuel source rather than more traditional business models.

> I would definitely consider him to be part of the Democratic establishment.

This is an excellent example of a perception gap. See, I've always seen him as fringe because of his views on transgenderism, his decision that racial slurs are free speech he should exercise, etc.

Unlike, say, Clinton or Obama who've obviously changed their opinions on this subject (or decided to portray an image largely indistinguishable from someone having changed their image) Maher has continue to expand upon it. Maybe he was center-left when he started, but it's difficult to say he's on the left side of the cultural equation these days.

Alt-right is white nationalism. So you've gone from libertarian which is not really left or right (depends on issue but revolves mainly around a weak central government except as it relates to protecting civil liberties and national defense), completely skipped moderate conservatives, conservatives, and right wing, and even hard right, and landed on a blatantly racist movement that has no f'n idea how the economy even works which is why they keep thinking tax cuts for people who make over $10 million a year creates jobs, but bank deregulation is good, but the banks f'd them over in 20008, but for sure stop importing brown people, legal and illegal, and especially if they're Muslim.

Most alt-right are just deeply ignorant people. But some are malevolent. The base ideology requires people believe vicious things about "the other" who happen to be merely different. They refer to liberals as libtards, and prefer strong leaders like Putin, Kim, Duerte, Erdogan, and even weaker autocrats, as compared to "vile libtards" like say Clinton (who is something like a cross between Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Thatcher). No doubt they'd prefer Putin as president of the United States than a Clinton.

They're IT companies that just don't sell any of their tech. But then Facebook don't sell their tech either. Just as a computer is an enabler at Facebook to manage personal contacts and communications, at Google to manage their indexing and advertising business, at Amazon to manage their ordering and inventory systems. Banks nowadays are just as much IT companies as any of these. A typical bank employs thousands of developers. They even develop their own development and service deployment environments, their own IDEs, even their own custom languages, middleware, development frameworks and libraries and database technologies.

Some have even rolled their own internal cloud infrastructure services like mini-Azures or a mini-AWS and systems like Hadoop but using entirely custom tech, not just an instance of an open source solution. There is almost nothing going on in the big tech giants in terms of core technology development that some banks somewhere aren't also doing.

You might split hairs or come up with some technical definition to avoid classifying them in this way, but if you do you will be deluding yourself. The Banks have found that in many areas they cannot rely on external technology companies to meet their needs, so they have to meet them using internal resources and roll a lot of their own tech.

I'm saying that $3 -> $5 is less of a difference than $30k -> $50k.

"The base ideology requires people believe vicious things about 'the other' who happen to be merely different."

The "alt-right" are not the only ones who are guilty of this, unfortunately. This is a characteristic of the extremes of pretty much every political position or ideology.

Personally, the whole "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality of both of the mainstream political parties is what drove me to vote Libertarian last election. Johnson's campaign seemed a lot more focused on welcoming folks with differing political views (which is unsurprising, given the rather long range of libertarianism from libertarian socialism to anarcho-capitalism, and given the fact that the Libertarian Party is in no position to be alienating voters), which was very refreshing amid both Clinton and Trump basing their campaigns on how bad the other candidate is (and further on how bad the other candidate's supporters are).