81–90 of 148 posts
The "10Ks of millionaires" figure is striking, but the Bay area is ~8M people and ~2.5M households, so thats ~1-4% of households are millionaires. People using liquidity cash to buy houses isn't nearly a strong an effect regionwide as high salaries and building restrictions.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...
The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. But this is just wrong. There are lots of one-percenters who vote Democratic. They just mostly feel more strongly about cultural-liberalism issues than they do about economic ones. But when it comes to economic issues, these folks still tend to lean rightward; they overestimate the degree of s…
The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not an engineer. (not really, but to me it makes as much sense as your statement) How does being a part of the evil "one percent" make you any less qualified to have or hold a variety of political views? If anything, I've found that having more money makes me more aware of issues like unemployment, health care, et…
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled off was convincing Americans that anyone to the left of Attila the Hun was a Communist...
What I find odd is that the article equates libertarianism with Rand and the Koch brothers, as if no other type exists. There's also a hint of conflating liberalism and libertarianism.
One foundation of the entire argument seems to be that support for the Democratic party makes SV progressive. However, in a global context only the minority left wing of the Democratic party could be called progressive. Also, a simpler explanation for the large support for the Democrats would be that SV consists of intelligent, highly educated and well-informed people that wouldn't dream of supporting the extremist,…
I think that's correct. Anecdotally, my personal network in tech seems to side with Democrats for reason like environmental protection, global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and olive branch foreign policy; not because of economic reasons like union support, wealth redistribution, or strengthened regulators.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's correct. Anecdotally, my personal network in tech seems to side with Democrats for reason like environmental protection, global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and olive branch foreign policy; not because of economic reasons like union support, wealth redistribution, or strengthened regulators.
Makes you wonder if the Republican party isn't intentionally taking the wedge-issue craziness to 11 only so that they can rebrand next election cycle and yank the mat out from under the Democrats. Given the effectiveness of Romney's rush-to-the-center in the 1st debate against Obama, the thought has to have crossed their minds. The timing (tossing last election to win the next one) makes sense because next election t…
GWB backed one of the biggest expansions of entitlement programs since LBJ (Medicare Part-D).
Obama seems to have no problem ignoring the international community when it comes to using US force globally.
The only thing that separates the two parties (when in office) are the issues that can keep them in office (e.g. the issue of abortion and guns is pretty evenly split in the US)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conflating libertarians with Republicans doesn't make sense anywhere. The simplified definition I give people who ask me what a libertarian is is "someone who is economically conservative but socially liberal." The conventional "Republican = conservative, Democrat = liberal" model of American politics casts a vector quantitiy as a scalar.
>> "someone who is economically conservative but socially liberal." I don't feel like that defines a libertarian at all. When I hear the word, I think of someone who believes they (and everyone) should have the right to do whatever they like - so long as it does not infringe on anyone else's freedoms or rights.
I've always hated this definition, because it's so empty. The whole debate of politics is what happens when the freedoms and rights of different people come into conflict. Different groups define these freedoms and rights differently, and think different responses are appropriate when there is conflict.
The difference between a libertarian and say a conservative is not that one believes people should be free to do what they want and the other does not. It's that one defines "freedom" narrowly and the other defines it more broadly.
Take something like prostitution. A libertarian would say you have the freedom to sell your body or to buy sex for money. A conservative might believe that people should have the freedom to create cohesive communities based on traditional values, and having your kids see prostitutes on the side of the road undermines that. Similarly, the two react differently when coercion in prostitution brings the prostitutes' rights in conflict with her pimp's. A libertarian might say that we have other laws to deal with abuse and coercion and that banning prostitution is unnecessary. A conservative might note that such abuse is endemic to prostitution and that banning prostitution could prevent the burgeoning of an extremely abusive and coercive business. A liberal might swoop in and say we should legalize prostitution, but regulate it to prevent the downsides.
Or consider something like workers rights. A libertarian would say that people get paid what they deserve when everyone can freely bargain. A liberal might point out that employers have vastly superior bargaining positions. Interestingly, what liberals say about employees and bargaining is not dissimilar to what conservatives say about prostitutes: when you look at the circumstances most prostitutes find themselves in, how "voluntary" are their actions really? Libertarians perceive "voluntary action" to be extremely well defined: basically, if you did it, it must have been the product of your totally free exercise of will. Both liberals and conservatives take more nuanced views (though in different contexts).
A much simpler point the author missed is that wealth doesn't exactly cause the housing shortage so much as not building houses. San Francisco has rent control, and most of the peninsula has severe zoning controls. It would be extraordinarily profitable to build commercial buildings with dense lofted apartments in many areas of the peninsula, however they are simply prohibited by local governments. That's neither lib…
The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter. But this is just wrong. There are lots of one-percenters who vote Democratic. They just mostly feel more strongly about cultural-liberalism issues than they do about economic ones. But when it comes to economic issues, these folks still tend to lean rightward; they overestimate the degree of s…
> But they're all billionaires, so issues that don't affect billionaires personally... just don't get included in the debate. I recently came across this fascinating statistical study[1] of U.S. Senators responsiveness to the political positions of their constituents, which found that both Republicans and (to a slightly lesser extent) Democrats were overwhelmingly responsive to the positions of the wealthiest 1/3 of…
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Political affiliation seems like a red herring in a two party system. It wouldn't surprise me if people in SV vote democrat because they don't like certain things associated with the republicans (religion , anti-gay rights, guns , whatever) rather than agreeing wholesale with the democratic party manifesto.
You just enumerated a significant portion of the de facto Republican agenda. Also, as 2004 demonstrated, voters normally vote for what they like instead of against what they dislike.
I find it somewhat funny that the original New Yorker article about the tech industry's insularity is itself hidden behind a paywall; I actually wanted to submit the Packer article itself this morning but didn't bother. Nonetheless, I do think Johnson does a decent job of giving the other side. But I did send this as a letter to the editor, since it concerns a pet peeve that I constantly see in the media: George Pack…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not an engineer. (not really, but to me it makes as much sense as your statement) How does being a part of the evil "one percent" make you any less qualified to have or hold a variety of political views? If anything, I've found that having more money makes me more aware of issues like unemployment, health care, et…
Well feel better - there is no right/left divide in America. By the standards of anywhere else there is only very right / slightly less right. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled off was convincing Americans that anyone to the left of Attila the Hun was a Communist... What I find odd is that the article equates libertarianism with Rand and the Koch brothers, as if no other type exists. There's also a hint of con…