Makes sense. The biggest sin an American can commit is being poor. Welcome to Calvinism.
Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
111–120 of 378 posts
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#112Paywalled articles seem to enhance the "comment without reading, based on vibes" effect. From the article: "Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk…
And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.
Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#113I think this is one of the cases where someone is just so rich that more money stops resulting in any meaningful additional quality of life. Then the only way to increase their quality-of-life differential (relative, not absolute value is the key metric here), is to make other people's lives worse.
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#114> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society. First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structur…
Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice. So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
To say it differently, if that ends up disenfranchising the powerful, a different argument and set of law would be used
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. You can't separate money and government, because "corruption" to some degree is the default state. Yes there are exceptions, but the opposite if the bad apple concept. You have to get lucky to find the good apples. Which means there is some structural insufficiency in the concept of money and government.
> It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.
There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
Are you proposing that poor people would not be subject to the laws of the United States, as they would be provided no means to consent? That only the wealthy are to be governed, regulated, etc.?
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly just my experience, but I've found it ironic that finance bros in my circle have gone the other way i.e. the effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route. While tech bros are now turning openly elitist, and in some cases, racist. And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
This supports my belief that when being a finance bro was the only way to Croesus-level wealth, sociopaths tended to go into finance, so they could transcend societal norms with their wealth. Then, tech came along, making finance bro-level wealth seem quaint. Where did all the sociopaths go...well, you saw for yourself.
Or... hear me out.
"Tech bro" is finance bro.
Most of the "tech" CEO people we're admiring? as movers and shakers... very few of them actually come from an engineering background.
They're mostly just people attracted to the tech industry as a focus of dynamic high profit capitalism. The technology is only the background buzz.
Many of these businesses (Shopify especially!) -- in particular SaaS businesses -- actually have very weak "tech" innovation, it's really just the deployment of pre-existing engineering solutions (solved by other people usually) at scale in order to run a commercial business that just happens to use a lot of computers.
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#118Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable. I'm rich, so my opinion must be more important, right?
Honestly just my experience, but I've found it ironic that finance bros in my circle have gone the other way i.e. the effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route. While tech bros are now turning openly elitist, and in some cases, racist. And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Maybe an NYC bias here but in my experience finance folks are more closely tied to "well to do" social circles. Summering in the Hamptons, that kind of thing. And that crowd has always had a streak of philanthropy, even if it's as much a status thing as a genuine belief in helping others.
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#119> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society. First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structur…
I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income
Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Words have a well-defined meaning. Fascism, as established by Benito Mussolini, has nothing to do with oligarchy or plutarchy.
I'm referring to how both Lütke and DHH, a Shopify board member, have fascist politics. The word does have meaning. But underlying that meaning is a philosophy that there is an in group that should have power and many out groups from which power should be stripped. There is a long history of industrial leaders supporting fascist ideology.
Yeah, but please google first on what Mussolini preached. State-owned corporazioni are nothing like privately operated businesses of today. Don’t hang on the word. The correct word you are looking for is plutocrat, indeed.