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Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

fortune.com

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Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#341

Post by senordevnyc »

vrganj wrote: post #338
Timon3 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's literally only one comment by one rich dude! No need to look at any further evidence, case closed!

Yeah ignore the Oracle CEO saying everyone will be on their best behavior because AI surveillance will keep people in check [0]. Or Thiel saying that "democracy and freedom are no longer compatible". I wonder who's freedom to do what he's talking about? Surely he's concerned about the little man? [1] Or Elon Musk cutting USAID and causing all sorts of death and destruction around the world [2] while enriching himself…

[flagged]

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#342

Post by senordevnyc »

unknownfuture wrote: post #330
senordevnyc wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Thing about offhand comments from random guys like Lutke is a) they're born of the cultural pool in which he's swimming, which is made up of many other very influential rich guys, and b) they have the power and influence to actually make their ideas happen. One only need look at Peter Thiel's private rich club for assholes and the ideas they're circulating or the absurdities espoused by the effective altruists that b…

The fact that you think Thiel’s dumb little conference is some kind of conspiracy theory shadow group tells me all I need to know about what you know about any of this.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#343

Post by vrganj »

senordevnyc wrote: post #341
vrganj wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah ignore the Oracle CEO saying everyone will be on their best behavior because AI surveillance will keep people in check [0]. Or Thiel saying that "democracy and freedom are no longer compatible". I wonder who's freedom to do what he's talking about? Surely he's concerned about the little man? [1] Or Elon Musk cutting USAID and causing all sorts of death and destruction around the world [2] while enriching himself…

[flagged]

How many people in that position are there even? Global reach tech oligarchs? Maybe like 10? That'd make four 40% and that was just a small sampling.

And you know as well as I do the others sound the same. I'm sure you can find Alex Karp, Mark Zuckerberg etc saying similarly despicable things.

At this point it takes actively closing one's eyes to the reality in front of us.

There doesn't need to be a secret meeting with smoke-filled rooms and passwords (though ironically I guess Thiel's "Dialog" actually sounds like that?!). Good ol' class interest is sufficient to explain all of it without extra coordination.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#344

Post by hollerith »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #332
rayiner wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to e…

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

The person you're quoting is a lawyer.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#345

Post by rayiner »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #333
rayiner wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to e…

I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate. However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that…

It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#346

Post by rayiner »

hollerith wrote: post #344
wolvesechoes wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

The person you're quoting is a lawyer.

I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#347

Post by rayiner »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #334
rayiner wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones who suffer the most from dysfunctional government. Every unit of inefficiency or dysfunction in public services—every late bus or bad teacher—is a tax on the people who can least aff…

You seem to imply that allowing poor people to vote leads to a dysfunctional government, whereas it seems clear to me that allowing corporations to influence politics is far, far worse.

You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive.

Say you cut out the third of the electorate that’s most susceptible to advertising. That would increase everyone else’s voting power by 50%. But it would greatly reduce the actual power of rich people, because the remaining electorate would be much harder to influence by buying advertising.

The other thing is that narrowing the electorate by a third would be less elitist than the systems the Wilsonians came up with in response to the Jacksonians. Today, everyone votes, but votes don’t matter very much because the government is actually run by a small elite of credentialed experts and civil servants, and lawyers. APA litigation has a far outsized impact compared to voting.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#348

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

rayiner wrote: post #345
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate. However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that…

It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.

> It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate

I agree, but that's not really the argument here. My argument is that it is very easy to abuse certain distinctions and so we should not seriously entertain those distinctions. Proof of worth or intelligence can be easily gamed to prevent certain classes of people from voting,

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#349

Post by andsoitis »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #115
andsoitis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, "decolo…

> Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not

What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#350

Post by ElevenLathe »

andsoitis wrote: post #349
ElevenLathe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, "decolo…

> Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.

I -- just some working stiff in flyover country, USA -- can buy African stocks from my phone while on the shitter at work. Until quite recently, if I wanted to invest in a meaningful way in Africa, I would have had to basically be an elite of some kind in a European power, and even then only in that power's sphere of influence. Even then, that would probably be almost my entire career and, to make a real go of it, I would have had to move there, and all transactions would have taken place at the speed of physical goods on boats.

And that's just what I can do from my Etrade account. It's even more effortless if you have teams of accountants in various jurisdictions pushing paper around for you.

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