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Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

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Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#71

Post by yo-scot-99 »

justanthrtchguy wrote: post #7

Maybe they are donating to candidates who they believe are good for everyone ( including themselves ) and not just good for their employers who could care less about them in most cases. Voting on one issue is a sure way to get a candidate who is against you when they ignore that issue.

also donating to reality-based candidates; even those who want to break up larger companies at least align themselves with a bit more with science and scepticism in things as they are. And to be honest as an employee if you end up in Facebook.codebase.1 or Facebook.codebase.2 who cares, your downside is minimal.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#72

Post by [deleted] »

esotericn wrote: post #31

This is only surprising if you subscribe strictly to Sinclair's quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times. But ultimately, people can and will vote against "their own self…

[deleted]

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#73

Post by zozbot234 »

confidantlake wrote: post #61
zozbot234 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the left wing tends to be more science based Sorry, but the left wing is not "science based" at all when it comes to the social sciences - their attitude to social issues is very much religious in nature (see any mention of "socialism" and "wealth taxes" as perhaps the clearest and least controversial example) and "the antithesis of the enlightenment". Both sides are playing this game.

Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all. They have a largely ideological component. I expect there to be disagreements there. On the other hand denying hard sciences seems much worse.

> Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all.

That's quite wrong. Even as we speak, hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, thanks in no small part to the gradual adoption of saner policies based in the social sciences. That's not "ideology", it's real results.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#74

Post by ajross »

mc32 wrote: post #59
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #54

What a surprise. I'd love to be a billionaire, but I like Sanders opinions about whether they should exist. I'd love to be worth enough for it to hurt me, but I like Warren's wealth tax idea. I'd love to pay lower taxes, or less progressive taxes, but I'm happy to support those less fortunate. As a matter of fact, I'm not even a single-issue voter! Perhaps most controversially, I think altruism is good for society. S…

>”What a crazy idea, voting against your own interest. gasp!” I know you mean it differently but people in the middle class get accused of voting against their interests and it’s said as something negative in their political choices.

Only in the same sense that's happening here, though. I assume you're talking about takes like "Why don't working class white voters vote for democrats?", which isn't fundamentally any different as I see it. It's a legitimate question, and the answers (in both cases) tell us things about how politics work in a way that simple analysis doesn't.

And FWIW: as far as tone, this one seems more "accusatory" to me. There's a clear hypocrisy angle being teased in that headline, where the lefty takes tend to be more about exasperation on the part of the author.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#75

Post by epistasis »

whateveracct wrote: post #69
zozbot234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate. A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most. If you care about lowering inequality without hurting folks more than you have to, what you want is a mildly-progressive consumption tax. (I.e. an income t…

I'm impressed HN is downvoting this brutal capitalist nonsense, give what this forum is all about :)

There's brutal capitalists that want to maintain the current set of winners and losers, there's brutal capitalists that want to become the kings of the hill, and then there are those who want to enable creativity throughout society and enable all those with a vision for a better future to have the tools to make it happen.

I think HN has almost zero of the first category, and some mixture of categories two and three.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

epistasis wrote: post #67
zozbot234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate. A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most. If you care about lowering inequality without hurting folks more than you have to, what you want is a mildly-progressive consumption tax. (I.e. an income t…

> A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most. This doesn't really follow at all, and is directly in contradiction with your desire to get rid of Prop 13. Property taxes are the most common wealth tax!

Wrong. Property taxes mostly bear on land, not capital. Especially in heavily urbanized areas with lots of land value, as we see in CA. Landed property is not "wealth", it's just undue appropriation of something that is created by the community. Land taxes reverse this undue appropriation and let the community that actually created that wealth benefit from it, as it should. It's like the opposite of a wealth tax!

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#77

Post by methodover »

wpasc wrote: post #4
sedeki wrote: post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

I think a variety of things get conflated. (anecdotal insight here): Many people at tech companies are not software engineers. I believe they are more often to the left of the general tech workers. Tech workers can be pretty left still, but I have found to tend more libertarian/a-political. In general though, many people employed at tech companies are young, coastal (by virtue of where they work), and work in cities.…

I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones.

That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends.

My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#78

Post by michaelt »

sedeki wrote: post #2

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

Both parties make strategic decisions about which voters they'll particularly target, and which they'll worry less about attracting.

In recent decades the Republican party has had some quite big successes taking a fairly anti-science stance - if a politician thinks creationism should be taught in school, or that climate change is a hoax, chances are they're republican rather than democrat. Neither GW Bush nor Trump marketed themselves as intelligent men, and they were successful despite that.

I think it's fairly understandable how that would sit poorly with STEM workers - even if many of them would naturally be conservative on fiscal issues.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#79

Post by xen2xen1 »

esotericn wrote: post #31

This is only surprising if you subscribe strictly to Sinclair's quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times. But ultimately, people can and will vote against "their own self…

The quote is highly contingent on one thing, that a man's salary is hard to replace. For most of humanity, it is. I'd wager if you work at a FANNG company you don't view it that way. Hard to get quite as much, maybe, but getting some making $250k to move to $200k a year is much, much different than someone moving from $45 a year to $30k a year, or $25k a year.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#80

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #12
changchuming wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Being in extremely left-wing Bay area with historic ties to the free speech movement. 2. They're not, it just benefits both the tech companies and the media to portray them that way. Based on personal observations.

Add in the visa/immigration issues. A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country. While the business wing of the Republican Party loves cheap labor, there are other wings that oppose it. Once upon a time the labor wing of the Democratic Party would have been against importing labor but the influence of that wing has waned considerably while the business wing has established itself in…

> "A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country."

Imported mostly from East and South Asia, from very socially conservative cultures. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that they're necessarily aligned with the Democrats.

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