What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

Thank you for your efforts. I will read more of this when I get a chance. You are right that the new tech barons are waaaaay too cozy with the government. They travel by private jet with armed bodyguards and share our info with the government and tell us to "relax" and "get along" while we are getting felt up by TSA and having our emails read.

Replying to your aside... You are absolutely correct. Thank you.

I'd add that implementing security "at the border" is the lightest touch option available and doesn't infringe on the rights of any citizens. But our leaders won't do it.

Instead they create the TSA to eliminate free travel and get access to our emails & phone calls to eliminate privacy.

Also, while I see both sides of the gun argument, it worries me that the government uses an obvious Islamic terrorist attack as an excuse to push gun control.

In fact, it's almost like our government doesn't mind terrorist attacks, because with every attack they have an excuse to infringe on more of our rights and expand their power.

> Speaking privately, Thiel’s allies could only conjecture reasons for his unexpected partnership with Trump; many expressed frustration with how anyone could support a candidate so unpredictable.

I could come up with a few pretty obvious reasons why a gay libertarian like Thiel would support trump.

1) Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays. Currently in 11 Muslim countries acting out homosexuality is punishable by death. In most others they imprisons gays and extra judicial killings of gays by mobs are not persecuted.

It is not unreasonable for a gay man to fear Muslims and Muslim culture.

2) Democrats engage in political correctness and in vilification of their political opponents (You don't agree with me? You are like Hitler!) to a degree that people who say the wrong things or support the wrong candidate must fear for their financial and in some cases even physical security.

Even a billionaire like Thiel will face repercussions for this as was mentioned in the article:

> In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly selected start-up founders from the database CrunchBase, only nine people supported Trump. Fifteen of them opposed Thiel’s speech for Trump, and 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result.

In many areas it is basically open season on anyone that openly supports Trump, people will attack you, people will key your car and strangers will insult you.

It says a lot when people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams endorse Clinton because they fear for their personal safety: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for...

This vilification pushed by the Democrats is the exact opposite of freedom and democracy. I totally get why a libertarian would support Trump even if he doesn't like him to at least restore the most basic personal freedoms.

3) Trump is very much anti big government. He wants to reduce its size and remove regulations that inhibit the growth of the private sector. Few libertarians would have a problem with that.

Also it isn't sustainable to permanently have a large portion of society completely dependant on government as we can obviously witness by the insane growth of government debt everywhere in the West.

This system almost guarantees that poor people will always stay poor and that their children will be poor too as all they know is dependance and submission to the social system.

Social systems do not help the poor, they never did. Over the last decades it has gotten bigger and bigger and yet poverty never went down, instead the opposite happened.

The same is true for public education which was basically run by liberals since the 80ties. It has gotten so bad that today it can't even guarantee that a child going through this system will not end up as a functional illiterates.

It feels like they are hankering for a period of post-WWII prosperity caused by the decimation of the remainder of the developed world & great demand for American manufacturing, by a restricted labor market for women and minorities in higher end jobs and positions, and the need for lots of bodies in relatively high paying positions due to an absence of automation.

None of these things are coming back - I feel like they are yearning for a dream because they don't know why that dream existed.

Scott Sumner on steel jobs: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31847

That's a reasonable argument, but some of the facts don't fit it. 7% of tech roles in Apple are black [1], while at Google that figure is just 1%.

A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google.

These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire skews the figures. So it's fair to say something is going on here - one of those companies might have a biased hiring process.

And it looks like it is Google that is biased against black people, since 9% of CS graduates are black [3], far closer to Apple's 7% than Google's 1%.

[1] http://www.apple.com/diversity/

[2] https://www.google.com/diversity/

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...