Because this isn't just a private matter. Peter is very vocal about his vision of society - in which tech plays a big place - and this donation definitely gives some interesting color to that vision.
I would say so if he's a YC advisor. He doesn't have to justify his actions but it would be interesting to understand or at least try to understand his point of view. My guess is it has to do with taxes.
From the article: "If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand."
Do you really think that Thiel's advice has no effect on Mr. Altman's decisions?
That's why it's surprising.
They're "I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with you if a world catastrophe happens" kind of buddies, according to this NewYorker Profile:
Hacker News has a very, very, very well-established history of political pieces. Everything from EU politics, tax policy, candidate elections, and law enforcement practices.
Technology has always been political, even moreso today. to ignore that in search for purism around codebase discussions is at the peril of this forum.
I've enjoyed reading the well thought out arguments on this page. So, where is a better political forum? I've tired of reddit as the noise/signal ratio has grown intolerable.
> “Across the country, wages are flat. Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago,” he said. “But health care and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees. Our economy is broken. If you’re watching me right now, you understand this better than any politician in Washington D.C.”
I would like to know what Peter Thiel's solution to our broken economy is.
Unfortunately I can't take a policy position made by Donald Trump a little over a month ago seriously because his policy positions have been known to change day to day or even within a single speech.
Available jobs increase with population. Additional people need more services, goods, etc. This leads to increased demand. In other words, more people are needed to produce stuff for more people.
Required jobs scale very very poorly with population. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate was something less than 1 additional person in the workforce for every 10 additional people in the population.
It would mean that any poor country could simply become wealthy by allowing unlimited immigration...Most poor countries are nicer relative to some worse-off country, so certainly there would not be a shortage of immigrants wanting to migrate.
Immigration can be very selective. Eg. Meeting minimum education standards, having certain amounts of cash on hand, or targeting those that will start a business. research on this suggests immigration policies tend to create jobs.
Since there have been several submissions that have made the front page and then have been flagged by users, we're going to try turning the flags off on this one. If you're going to comment here, please take extra care to do so civilly and substantively.
Edit: we've turned the flags back on since the discussion has gone well beyond civility.
The hypothesis is that the many flagged submissions and associated meta-discussion amount to more disruption than a single discussion thread which might otherwise have been judged as off-topic for HN.
Politics aside. What does it say about his judgement to continue investing in something that is statistically on track to fail. Not only that, but its also a toxic brand to attach yourself to.
Or do we just put this in the "expensive new hobby" section and leave it at that.
----
Update: I want to hijack my own comment to ponder something.
As someone with no money and no influence, I find it hard to think about how to use money to buy influence as part of a grand plan, like many of the comments here are suggesting.
As a layman, I think in simple terms like discrimination, racism, sexism, etc... and my belief in fighting against all those things.
Am I short-sighted? Is there some greater human social structure that I am not aware of that can only be achieved by making such calculated investments? Despite all the immediately negative rhetoric.
I'm not betting on a Trump presidency, but I'm fascinated at what the electorate is going to look like in the general. We've been basing so much of the polling on projections over 2012/2008 turnout. I would not be surprised if the final margin is within 2 points.
I would be more surprised if the margins are huge. I have come to expect team politics to give us close margins. I would be surprised, in either a very happy or very sad way, if instead the margins are big.
True; I wonder what impact a 9 point poll-implied spread turning into 1-2 points in the ballot booth could have on future political activities by "alt right" candidates. It feels like many are treating this as a "beat Trump and save the world" situation without realizing that the underlying movement isn't likely going away. If Trump brings in a large enough group of non-voters, that will have long lasting impacts (people that start voting tend to keep voting).
It can still be "save the world" situation even when understanding this. Long-term, it would be nice to have a SCOTUS that would be more of a check on someone like Trump, and less of a rubberstamp.
I'd be happy with a SCOTUS that checks the executive branch in general. We're already in full-on rubber stamp mode and have been for 16 years, if not longer.
I wouldn't call the current court a rubber stamp. There have been some very unfortunate decisions, sure, but there were also quite a few decisions that prevented either the states or the feds from running wild.
The real problem with being a true check is partisanship on the court. By now, it seems to be essentially accepted that there are "liberal judges" and "conservative judges", and that they will rule accordingly. I cringe every time I hear that, because SCOTUS, like any other court, is supposed to rule on what the law is, not on what it should be; and one's political affiliation should not affect the former. In practice, of course, it does matter these days, and it is a really bad thing, especially in an institution that is 1) so small, and 2) not providing any mechanism to hold them responsible.
Super Tuesday voter turnout in 2008: 8,228,763 for Democrats, 5,025,685 for Republicans.
2016: 5,557,243 Democrats, 8,307,884 Republicans
If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on Trump. I think it will be close. That said, I also believe electoral fraud could decide the election.
That doesn't make much sense. Super Tuesday primaries included all likely Republican voters. But Trump only has the support of about 40% of them and nothing he has done to date indicates that number is changing.
And there is no evidence that electoral fraud is likely to decide the election. In fact it's looking like efforts to prevent it e.g. in Indiana are far more likely to influence the election.
The record-breaking Republican turnout was due to Trump, and I think it is reasonable to believe that the vast majority of Republicans will vote Trump over Hillary, or 3rd party. At the same time, many independents and Bernie supporters will vote Trump as well. In my mind, Trump is the Republican Obama, and will benefit from many first-time voters, and a large turnout in general. It does not seem to me that Hillary has the same draw. I don't mean to argue with you, only to clarify.
You're confused again. Trump had record breaking PRIMARY turnout. All polls taken so far have him only getting about 40% of Republicans. And there is no evidence what so ever that he is drawing in independents or Bernie supporters at any significant rate.
He is down by on average 7 points nationally for a reason.
Correction: 75% of Republicans, 40% overall. He seems to have a fairly hard ceiling. His support among Republicans is shockingly low, but likely to rebound a bit to keep it from being a total blowout.
Depends what you mean by electoral fraud. In the US, the only electoral fraud that has a significant impact is one where groups of voters are prohibited/prevented from voting. Pennsylvania is particularly vulnerable to that one due to very broad rules that allow people to question the legality of other people to vote. It's why Trump has been calling PA supports to do exactly that.
Other types of fraud (ballot stuffing, voting multiple times, voting when you're not allowed to etc.) are exceedingly rare, and it would have to happen at a massive scale for it to make an actual impact.
That's just not going to happen, especially with it being a felony.
At least one presidential election has been decided by a margin so close that a few hundred votes made the difference. That's not so massive a scale that it couldn't happen.
Yes. And far more than hanging chads, that election was primarily decided by thousands of potential voters being incorrectly purged from the voting lists.
I think it's very difficult to find truly unbiased statistics on this. Every current well-known analyst has been repeatedly egregiously wrong on the matter throughout this election cycle.
On matters of opinion, ABSOLUTELY. On matters of polling, absolutely false. Even Brexit was predicted by the polls, it just didn't happen until a week before the vote. (It's worth noting, of course, the same could happen here. And that's probably what Thiel is counting on).
Can you provide some links about the Brexit polls? I was following the betting markets and the prediction markets and they were dramatically wrong, even the day of the vote.
I get what you're trying to say, and most polling seems to be pretty objective, but you can absolutely do subjective polling. You just have to target the right demo and you can make any poll say anything you want.
Just say you were going to vote for Trump. Someone stops you on the street, or call you up; would you admit it?
I wouldn't.
The guy is an absolute joke of a person on so many levels. He's stupid. He's just aweful.
But there's a tiny bit of Trump in a lot of us buried deep in that ID.
Personally, I do think we need to get much more vigilant on immigration, even though Obama has sent more illegials home than any other president. Would I admit this in public--hell no.
And I have never believed in Globilization. Would I admit this at work--hell no.
I really think a lot of people will vote for Trump in the privacy of that booth.
I won't because I won't vote for a president this year, or will I?
Well, we know that net migration flows to Mexico (and possibly all of central america?) are positive. They turned from inflows to outflows during the recession. Perhaps this is where someone came up with "Obama sending illegals home".
Of course, I'm more than open to being wrong; certain classes of illegal immigrants have been given defacto amnesty, and Obama's spoken in their favor, but no doubt others continue to be persecuted.
> I really think a lot of people will vote for Trump in the privacy of that booth.
I think so too. There is an interesting phenomenon there. Just guessing but suspect on the surface it is a very accepting, liberal place, perhaps one which encourages and celebrates diversity.
Depends on whether you care about the billions of people around the world or the millions in your own corner of it. I'm not sure most people are really ready to take in that expansive view of who their tribe is yet.
With Brexit the reporting of what was going on was dodgy, even the leader of UKIP thought he'd failed. The bookies had Remain at something like .90 probability.
Yes, this poll is an outlier because their methodology is very different than most other polls.
Yes, Nate Silver has a very different outlook on the election, but Nate Silver was also not very reliable during the primary season (although that is, by his admission, because primaries don't have very good polling).
If I had to make a[n extremely uneducated guess], it's because most polling is done over the phone, and I don't think "people who answer their phone when they don't recognize the number" is a very good random sampling of voters in the US.
I don't think this race is nearly as over as most people seem to believe, which is why, if you want to beat Trump, it is REALLY IMPORTANT (all caps!) that you get out and vote!
You've just selected the national poll that is the most favorable to Trump. An average over polls >> any individual poll. Note that I am not saying that poll should be thrown out. But picking one poll in isolation is almost useless.
Looking at this specific poll in isolation is fine as long as you understand that you are looking at it in isolation.
I say so because of its polling methodology, which is unique.
If you're a politics/polling nerd, this poll is interesting. If you're not, then yes, you are probably better off either just reading 538, or looking at the RCP polling average.
Most politics/polling nerds look at aggregations of polls. Not sure where you get this idea that they are interested in a poll like USC which is such an outlier.
But this poll performed well in 2012[1] with the same methodology. As a polling nerd, wouldn't you be interested in why it is producing unusual results this year and what implications that might have for polling in general?
> Where they eliminated that one 19 year old, and saw very little effect on the poll.
How is that a compelling answer?
It's like if a news investigation found that a company had poor quality control and features a photo of a defective product in their writeup and the company's response was "we issued a refund for the product the news team purchased."
All I can say is that you sound an awful lot like the 2012 talking heads who were convinced Romney would win despite all the polling pointing to the contrary. For the record, Nate Silver's biggest mistake in the primaries was not listening to the polls enough. For him (and every other data-driven forecaster) to be getting the general wrong they'd have to be making the exact opposite mistake as before.
I'd be happy to give you 10:1 odds on Trump losing. And I'm biased here: a few months ago, I was convinced Trump would win.
I haven't seen the crosstabs on the USC polls, but my gut feeling is that you're right; the kind of very fine demographic reweighting they're doing isn't common, because (A) it's a pain in the ass and of dubious real-world value; and (B) it's vulnerable to magnifying sample-size and selection problems, of which the skewed Trump support amongst young African-Americans is one example. So while I'll be interested to do a retrospective on the poll's accuracy and precision after the election, I'm personally not putting much faith in it for now.
> Of the poll’s 14 weeks so far, there were three times when removing that weight switched the result from a Trump lead to a Clinton lead. Generally, the shift was between one and two percentage points...Some people have ignored the margin of error in order to make a political point, but there’s not much we can do about that.
This is exactly why you should never blindly trust a single poll.
We don't know who is right/wrong until after the election so it is better to assume that a range of different polls taken at different times with different methodologies is likely to be more accurate.
It's, of course, very possible that "this time it's different" as they say every time. He is certainly an unconventional candidate. However, I'll throw my lot in every time with the MANY polls who are trying to account for this, and the MANY poll aggregators who are trying to make sense out of this madness.
I think 538 was actually quite reliable during the primary season. Pretty much bang on, in fact.
Everything they said anti-trump was basically opinion and they have been roundly chastised (as deserved) for treating punditry as fact.
There was a good documentary on polling on BBC Radio 4 in light of their very weak performance in IndyRef and the UK General Election. One pollster said that he actually has a high regard for outliers which statistical aggregations do not capture. In cases where the majority of pollsters got it horribly wrong, there have been outliers at some significant distance from the herd that have been on the money but ridiculed at the time.
The reasoning is that pollsters have herd behaviours - they believe publishing an outlier they will lose them credibility so they suppress inconvenient results and will rework methodologies and weightings to avoid it. For many, election polling is a loss leader - its publicity to get their name out there for commercial services. The credibility of the outlier is increased because it has escaped the herd pressure despite the incentives.
I think problem is deeper. If one predicts heads as result of coin toss and other predicts tails, than one of them will be right. It says nothing about their abilities to predict.
We always can find some outlier who predicts results different from majority of pollsters. The keyword is 'always': if such a possibility always exists (probability of existence P=1), then we can't extract any information from it (-log_2 P == 0).
To extract information we need to carefully revise methodology behind outlier predictions, and such an activity is a complex task for skilled data analyst.
Do we have any evidence that number of people at campaigning events correlates to more votes? If not, why would we conclude that?
Is it not (in absence of any evidence) equally plausible that the type of voter that will vote for Trump is more predisposed to attend a campaign event than other voters?
Which is why thats an awful gauge of the electorate. The vast majority of voters do not attend political events, and "attendees at events" is really just an uncorrelated measure of "enthusiasm for a candidate amongst their base". If 40% of the country loved him so much that they all showed up at every single rally, yet the other 60% hate him, and will vote for HRC despite not really loving her, then you see a rally filled to the brim with Trump supporters, and nobody at hers, yet his chances are zip. Rally attendance is a meaningless metric.
Clearly you haven't read those emails: they show nothing of the sort, which is why you couldn't provide any evidence to back that claim.
You can find signs that people in the establishment personally favored the establishment candidate – the least surprising revelation in political history – but there's no evidence that lead to any concrete action. That's why the only claims of rigging have been intentional misrepresentation based on the knowledge that some people like you would repeat those claims without checking the sources.
When you have Donna Brazile feeding the Clinton campaign townhall questions so that she can prepare the answers. Threats for super delegates switching to Bernie and Debbie Wasserman Shultz stepping down. It's clear evidence of a rigged election. Who knows what was happening that is not in the emails.
Try citing specific ptimsry sources for events which actually happened. There's plenty of hyperventilating and outright propaganda on right-wing blogs but there's a reason why nobody with credibility is claiming the primary was rigged.
Hint: it's the same reason why the alleged victim is going around telling his supporters to vote for Hillary. If you trusted his judgement enough to think he should be president, why not trust his analysis now?
There's a reason why nobody with credibility is claiming the primary was rigged
And that reason is elementary game theory. The only people with incentives to claim that the Democratic primaries were rigged are those who will be left with no political influence if the Democrats fare poorly.
When the Republicans do well, it's because they value party unity over literally everything else. One of HRC's strengths is that she brings the same thinking to the Democrats. For anyone within the party, working against her carries no conceivable upside. And as we've seen in DWS's case, working for HRC means you'll be well taken care of, no matter what.
Basically, if Sanders or anyone else on the left has beef with the DNC, they will be much better off if they wait to bring it up until after the election. And maybe not even then.
Except Bernie's rallies were full of young people, who are always up for a rally but who can seldom be bothered to vote. Meanwhile, Trump's rallies are full of old people who have nothing else to do but vote.
I'm sorry, but offhandedly dismissing "these dishonest polls", when, frankly,
1. They're the best data we have
2. We have no reason to believe they're incorrect
3. There is REALLY no reason to believe they're dishonest
Is 100% intellectually dishonest.
This is exactly what happened 4 years ago, and apparently some people have not learned from their tremendous mistake.
If you want to know why "turnout at a campaign event" is a crappier metric than "real actual scientific data", I don't know how else to help, other than to point to other instances in which it has failed:
I do not know or care who you support in the Presidential election. However, I suggest you get realistic about your metrics, as you're way off in fantasyland at the moment, as far as I can tell.
If you turn out to be incorrect, I hope you learn from this experience. I know I will, if the data turns out to be wrong.
I'm in fantasy land?
If you think the polls aren't manipulated for political advantage you are in fantasy land. You're appeal to 'real scientific data' is childish, since the data can be easy manipulated.
And yet, Trump supporters never had any trouble believing the polls when they showed their candidate leading during the primaries. Every single time, Trump would open his rallies with "have you seen the latest polls?".
When the polls show him to be ahead, it's evidence that the voters love him. When he's behind, it's evidence that the polling is rigged.
Campaigns also conduct their own internal polling which may or may not have biases, but they're not released; they're used for the campaign. So it only benefits them to know what's actually going on. Trump's is one of the few campaigns that seems only interested in good news, and in not learning from what their internal polling tells them.
That said, of course all campaigns will selectively brag about the polls that make them look good, and quietly ignore those that don't.
Again, the polls are extremely reliable in this country. If you can't see that, you're unlikely to be swayed by yet another data point when this election is complete.
4% in national polls (that's the number averaging across the polls) is a huge difference given the strong alignment of so much of the electorate. And it isn't even the interesting way to analyze the election, winning the national popular vote isn't what wins the race.
If you look at states that are contested, things look bad for Trump, even in the ones where demographics favor him he is not getting polling results that point to a win (an example would be Pennsylvania).
Nate silver personally hasn't had a good record of making predictions in the primary this year, but his model had trump winning through most of the primary season. He just didn't believe his own model.
Pretty much all of Thiel's investing thesis is to invest in things that are statistically on track to fail, but whose payoff if they succeed is greater than most people imagine. PayPal, Facebook - both of these were terrible ideas when they came out (along with a number of other ones that did, in fact, fail). His idea is that people consistently mis-price risk, and so investing in a portfolio where everyone else thinks it's a terrible idea but you have reason to believe it's a better idea than others suspect will give outsize returns. (Note: it doesn't actually have to be a good idea, it just has to be better than everyone else thinks it is.)
Supporting Trump fits perfectly into this: if he loses, he gets egg on his face (which most people will forget fairly soon) and may lose out on a little startup dealflow, but if he wins, he becomes the sole connection between the Presidential Administration and Silicon Valley. That's worth a lot more than $12.5M.
I'm assuming 1/10 probability of Trump winning. Most poll aggregators are going 1/6; I actually suspect we'll see a bigger Clinton blowout than expected, but that's just MHO.
From the numbers so far coming out from early voting you should add +2 to the poll margin. The Clinton ground game is looking like being more formidable than the famed Obama one. And with RNC bailing on Trump and moving money to down ballot races expect to see there being a massive discrepancy in late minute advertising and GOTV operations.
That is one plausible interpretation but there are several layers to this. It is not a coincidence that RenTech and Thiel are supporting Trump.
I hesitate to be explicit about what I think is actually going on but if you've read my posts on the Stagnation Hypothesis or watched Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube (low view counts, so I know you're not watching them!) you'll know there is a rather disturbing big picture which most people are oblivious to.
Look this isn't really a temporary interest for me, I'm something of a 'Thiel-logist'. You know how there exist Kremlinlogists? Same thing as that. I watch every video and read every book he writes or reads. This is not some celebrity fetish, but to do with the rich vein of ideas.
This is because I am convinced something very very important is going on and I want to understand more. I think I understand about half of it and I had a holy fuck mind blown moment a few years ago. Remember how Thiel took out Gawker nearly a decade later. This is as nothing in comparison, this is the grand-daddy of all long games.
Actually if he loses, he becomes the first investor in a ultra conservative right-wing media empire, Trump Media, which appears to already have quite a large following.
I wonder if launching this media outlet is the real purpose of the campaign. It's at least more plausible than the Trump is throwing the election for Hillary conspiracy theory.
He might very well have set up a "heads I win, tails I win more" gambit. If he wins the election, he's president. If he loses, he has 30 million or so passionate customers for his next business venture.
This is definitely the case...but he doesnt even need the new audience or the new venture. His entire empire is built on a name that is getting billions in free press.
The worst thing to happen to a famous brand is not bad press but rather becoming irrelevant and falling out of discussion.
Even if the Trump political brand crashes and burns, the broader trump brand of success and money just gets stronger...
This election was the ultimate win win for Trump.
This is why he can take all the risks he is taking, he has nothing to lose...which is the ultimate trump card!
I don't buy this. What was the cost--in brand, but also in actual revenue--to losing his role in The Apprentice, losing the Macy's sales, the Miss Universe thing, etc? I expect the backlash has had real consequences.
No doubt starting a cable network is a good fallback position, but I don't buy the idea that this is all according to plan.
More likely, some in his campaign know he's going to lose and are looking for an out, while others (maybe including the candidate) still think he may win.
I don't think you can make judgement calls from short term things like the examples you gave.
His brand recognition is way up throughout the world and my experience tells me that the negative view will not translate into his business brands once his political brand is not front and center.
Short term changes have little to do with long term brand recognition and value.
I've studied branding extensively and I think, if he loses, his presidential run will still be a net win for him and his brand once the political fallout falls out of the news cycle.
This is spot on. He's building an audience with the presidential bid. After he loses, he'll cry fowl, start an alt-right online news network, and spend the next 4 years complaining of a stolen election. He's enough of a draw to pull talent from The Blaze (Tomi Lahren), Breitbart, Fox News, etc. $1.25M seems like a small gamble for what could be a pretty big payoff.
You have the personalities in Trump and Giuliani etc. You have the news content courtesy of Brietbart. You have lifestyle content courtesy of his real estate assets e.g. golf/travel shows etc. And he already owns a TV production company that made the Apprentice.
And don't forget that Lachlan Murdoch is now firmly in charge of Fox News and has always talked about it being less alt-right and more centre-right. This will leave a massive opening for Trump in the alt-right space. The real question is whether Fox will allow it on their global cable platforms.
Ultra-conservative? Not by a long shot. I was a Ted Cruz backer and Trump to me is as bad as Clinton.
Trump isn't conservative. He's a big government populist. Completely different despite him having an 'R' next to his name.
He is about as close to Cruz as Sanders was to Clinton (in terms of policy philosophy.)
By the way, I understand downvotes because I mentioned Cruz in a positive way, however let's keep in mind that we can disagree with economic philosophy and role of government and still be friends!
I want a flat tax and a repeal of FATCA and Cruz was the only candidate that supported that. If some Democrat comes along with that proposal, they'd get my vote too.
FATCA and it's unintended consequences have caused serious harm to many Americans overseas, so that was my primary issue this election.
The only reason I support the RNC this election is because they have FATCA repeal in the platform while the Democrat side both enacted FATCA as wel as expressed support for continuing it.
As a foreigner, FATCA seems to be a logical reaction to the US system of taxing citizens instead of residents.
If a candidate had proposed to switch to only taxing US residents, plus apply some international pressure to close down tax havens, then I could see the point of repealing FATCA.
I don't think he's investing in the hopes that Trump will pull of a long shot. I think he has a different goal in mind. He said in his speech at the RNC that the country is broken and that Trump is the only one who can fix it. I have no doubt that he believes the first part - he's said as much for a long time - but I do doubt that he really thinks Trump is the man to fix anything. Thiel may be nutty according to some, but he's not an idiot and the only thing Trump has ever been good at is self-promotion and entertainment.
I think he thinks the country is broken and _someone_ has to fix it. He's supporting Trump and investing in his campaign even at this late, seemingly forgone stage, in order to build credibility with Trump's base and conservatives in general. If he wasn't an immigrant I would think he might be aiming for the presidency himself, but he probably just wants to be an influencer or power broker.
Considering how divisive Trump is even among the conservative base, and especially in the RNC, seems weird to support this particular candidate if what he wants is to assert himself in the republican base and party.
Maybe the point is to signal his willingness as a backer to other potential candidates.
Though I find even that a bit odd. Would people not take a pledge seriously without having seen his demonstrated willingness to lose large sums of money?
When (as seems likely) Trump loses this election, a weird new space in the Republican party. The "establishment" (whatever that is) will still be the enemy, but the rejection of any one more serious than Trump will have to go.
This will be opportune world for all kinds of right-wingers whose ideas are too extreme or too kooky to have been taken seriously before, but who are more toughtful than Trump.
In very different ways, Paul Ryan and Peter Thiel are positioning themselves for that world. As are a lot of others.
> Famously, the only reason he went to seek fortune in the Silicon Valley was because he was denied a highly prestigious clerk position for a Supreme Court justice.
> It seems to me that Thiel originally wished to become a politician, and only stopped pursuing that path to seek his fortune in the Silicon Valley when he hit his first setback when applying to clerk for the Supreme Court.
When it comes to a company 15% isn't too bad as you have a long time to test and figure out whether you make it. It's never just about one exact moment.
With an election it can usually be summed to important event: the vote. So that's why it doesn't terrify me at all. There's enough evidence now and in previous elections to show me he's not going to win the election. If the situation were say closer to Gore/Bush or even Romney/Obama pre-vote polling numbers, then maybe I'd be scared.
yep. this is Thiel just playing with toys because he has left the reality tunnel the rest of us are living in. he's off in his own world now imagining ways to amuse himself.
Because the greatest threat to a hegemony of the wealthy is democracy.
And a candidacy that threatens opponents with prison, encourages voter intimidation, enlists foreign powers for cyberwarfare, intimates that any result will be rigged, distroys the norms critical to government functioning and a dozen other things, is the best investment someone who hates public control of policy could make win or loose.
He's making a wise investment decision - if Trump wins he will probably gain a lot in favors. If Trump loses, he will lose a little bit of money and some goodwill of some people. I'm sure he can live with that. Cynical.
But why is he making the donation now? That logic would have made a lot more sense when Trump's odds looked a lot better. You have to multiply the upside by its (low) probability. I also think the reputational cost is more severe than you let on: look at what happened to Brendan Eich, and his "crime" was a lot less than supporting Trump.
I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry. He made a personal decision to donate a small amount to Prop 8, and extreme political activists completely annihilated him and forced him out of his job.
"Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California until 2013, when it was declared unconstitutional and marriages were allowed to resume. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Gay activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with OkCupid declaring they would block access to the Firefox browser unless he stepped down."
> I didn't know about Brendan Eich. That makes me angry.
It makes me angry too, but also raises (for me) some interesting political questions around what level of disagreement is "too far." I would never fire someone for being a Republican and personally/privately opposing gay marriage. But I would also immediately fire someone if they were a Nazi. So where is the line if what's an acceptable level of tolerance (and where does Trump fall on it)?
Is Nazism really that bad? They want to favor some groups of people over others, even if it means killing some of those others. That's also what patriotism does (see every war ever) and we seem to be fine with it.
Yes. Please take your Holocaust apologia elsewhere.
Killing millions of people for no other reason than that you don't like their ethnicity is pretty much the baseline of immorality. Heck, killing millions of people for more legitimate reasons (being Nazis) also would be pretty abhorrent.
Also, for the record, "we" are not generally okay with senseless wars. There's a reason that murdering innocent civilians is considered a war crime.
Maybe it's just practicality: there's not much business sense in having leaders that publicly work against some of the most deeply meaningful interests of a significant portion of their employees.
So consider Proposition 8. This was a ballot measure whose sole purpose was to enshrine in law the idea that "this group of people over here aren't legally equal to everyone else".
Privately believing someone has done something wrong, or belongs to a bad group, is one thing. Trying to enshrine that belief in law and disenfranchise the targeted person or group is quite another thing, and if you honestly are unable to see the difference between the two I'm unsure how to assist you.
As I walked home from work yesterday I was listening to a podcast about economics which mentioned that the Trump brand has been permanently devalued by his campaign -- people no longer want to stay in a Trump hotel, for example. And people have been leading efforts to drive potential students away from his "Trump University", and potential customers away from his other businesses.
It's possible you haven't seen such efforts, but that is not identical with "no efforts are occurring".
I've definitely heard about direct economic effects for Trump (though I think he'll end up gaining a lot more economically from the massive diehard fanbase he has now built) but why hasn't there been more backlash against Thiel? In my book his cause is a whole lot worse than Eich's.
Would you feel comfortable working at Peter Thiel's company?
Look at the timeline. Eich donated after Prop 22 was overturned (Prop 22 restricted marriage to same-sex couples). He wasn't trying to keep the status quo, he was trying to change the California constitution to outlaw something that the court had previously deemed legal. The end result of that difference is subtle, yes, but I find the spirit of the difference significant. Which is to say...much worse.
Thank you - I think that is the thing that pro-Eich people consistently ignore. The Prop 8 campaign to retroactively strip people of human rights once those rights were re-affirmed by the state Supreme Court was an act of pure malice and spite. I don't know what Eich's personal reasons for donating were, but it speaks very poorly of his character that he did.
Retroactive or ex-post-facto law is unconstitutional. I am a big fan of this principle. It protects all of us.
> it speaks very poorly
Speaking ill of me based on false information does not reflect well on you. Let's back off and perhaps we'll meet on better terms another day. (FYI, I do not support Trump.)
I wrote something too long about your confused post (for example, you must have meant "opposite-sex", not "same-sex"), then set it aside. I'll just note that of course I supported Prop 8 after the California Supreme Court overturned Prop 22 in its May, 2008 "In re Marriage Cases" ruling. Prop 8 was not even on the ballot until June, 2008!
Your argument that my support was pernicious is based on bogus chronology.
As for "status quo", that was exactly the issue, or one of two big issues. Judges do not make law, they are not our dictators, not even in extremis. It's up to the people and the legislature to correct course, based on judicial review and judicial nullification at the limit, but with new law coming from the legislature and the ballot initiative process (in California, anyway).
A lot of us in California supported Mark Leno's work over more than a decade prior to 2008 to enact CA Domestic Partner law, precisely to address injustices, even as Leno, et al. did not attempt to redefine marriage. That we saw judicial overreach and moved against it does not make us opponents of the status quo.
If you think courts should rule us, just wait long enough. The "next Trump" may give you the judges you deserve. I sincerely commend rule of law and judicial restraint to your attention, even if you don't agree with me on anything else.
Non-flat taxation are an attempt to make the impact of the law be equal on everyone.
Affirmative action is an attempt to alleviate the impact of prior laws and practices which made people unequal.
I am generally fine with trying to redress previously-enforced inequalities, and suspicious of anyone who isn't (protip: Google "libertarianism, starting right now" for an explanation of why this is important that you're more likely to agree with if a "LOL look how hard I rekt that dude by shoving affirmative action in his face" type sound-bite is the first thing you reach for in this kind of discussion)
I'll just repost an old comment, advocating that the limit is: is it speech and ideas? Then do not fire.
"I fundamentally disagree with you about this very important issue, and we should still find a way to cooperate" is a crucial idea, hard won and, as we are seeing, easily lost. It underpins multi-religious societies, working democracies, and in general, any group of people that need to do something. Unfortunately, right now we have groups of people that say the polar oposite: "It is good and moral to shun people who disagree with X".
I totally agree with marriage equality. But I think it can be (and mostly was) won on dialogue, not shunning. And I will always be against the shunners (though I hope not to shun them :P).
btw, all I just said applies just as well to klanspeople/nazis: Are they harming the employees? No? Are they aligned with the mission? Them keep them. And tell them they are stupid over a beer. Talk the shit out, and fight their stupid ideas in the right places. Do not allow political disagreement, even of the most grievous kind, to cut oportunities for dialogue and cooperation.
What if you have an employee who consistently comes in and talks about how he'd like to kill all the non-white people? What if he talks about how many guns he has? I think this would make the office an unworkable environment for most of my other employees (particularly any PoC) and I would be very justified in firing them.
I wonder what kind of outrage will be exhibited, if any, in this case and which companies that Peter Thiel has stakes in would be boycotted en masse. My guess is nothing.
I'm not in favor of Brendan Eich's personal choice, but I feel the reaction was far too strong in that case. Here we have something more than a thousand times larger that supports many oppressive things.
I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained.
I've written at length about Proposition 8 and the fact that it was not simply a matter of opinion or personal belief. It was, shorn of all the attempts to make it sound non-controversial, about taking a basic premise of a free society -- equality of all people under the law -- and putting it up for popular vote. Proposition 8 was literally a ballot measure to say "these people shouldn't be equal to everyone else". I am OK with applying social pressure to people who attempt that sort of thing, to make them feel as alienated from the core principles of society as they actually are.
> I was working at Mozilla when this was going on. I likely would've quit if Eich had remained
I don't know you or what you did at Mozilla: if it were up to me, I would rather had you quit than Eich (no offense). Frankly, Mozilla has lost focus and I think it would have done much better under Eich.
Edit: more thoughts on the politics. Eich's opinion was far from controversial- half of Americans held the same belief. I would guess half of Mozilla users in the US also had the same opinion: were those people also disposable?
Supporting prop 8 (to me as a lefty) is more benign than supporting Trump; yet I don't see any calls to boycott or quit companies with executives that support Trump.
Finally, it was a dangerous precedent for left wing politics to adopt, what if the right wing had adopted it and gotten someone fired for affronting beliefs held as strongly as yours?
As I've said in other comments, I think the line is when you decide to move from "I believe this" to "the law should enforce my beliefs on everyone".
There have been plenty of people calling to pressure people who support Trump; pg is one of them, and has been getting lit up on Twitter recently for continuing to work with Thiel.
Finally, you seem to think this is something unique to "left wing politics". Which is perhaps true: left-wing movements tend to resort to social pressure, boycotts and similar methods. Right-wing movements tend to attempt to outlaw or in some cases just literally exterminate the people who disagree with them. Which sort of world would you rather live in: the world where people who disagree with you simply refuse to associate with you, or the world where people who disagree with you seek to have your existence made illegal?
(and for the record, I no longer work for Mozilla, but that's unrelated)
>left-wing movements tend to resort to social pressure, boycotts and similar methods. Right-wing movements tend to attempt to outlaw or in some cases just literally exterminate the people who disagree with them.
Do you have any evidence that those politically aligned to the right are more accepting of, say, murder than those on the left? Because I don't believe it.
It's not just multiplying the upside by the probability. The upside depends upon how many people are in the crowd with you. Right now, everybody else is deserting Trump - and so if Thiel doubles-down on his bet, Trump and his loyalists will remember that all the moreso, and so if Trump wins Thiel stands out even more from everyone that deserted Trump but then came crawling back when times looked good.
Eich and Trump are in very different roles. Eich was CEO of a non-profit: as a non-profit, they depend crucially on his ability to fundraise, and so pissing off big Mozilla donors makes it impossible to do his job. Thiel is an investor of his own capital: pissing off other people is generally neutral to him, as he doesn't depend on anyone else for anything, and being able to piss people off allows him to take risks that are underpriced because other people are too afraid of pissing others off.
> It's not just multiplying the upside by the probability. The upside depends upon how many people are in the crowd with you.
Sure, it's true that his upside is greater thanks to Thiel's unitary status. But I don't think that effect is any greater now: Trump enjoyed 0 SV support a month ago, so the investment would have had just as much impact then as now, but the probability is much lower now.
> Eich and Trump are in very different roles.
Absolutely, Thiel and Eich have very different roles. But to think public image is unimportant to Thiel is also naive: I could easily see this having a negative impact on his deal flow, either because founders are personally offended or because they'e afraid of tainting their reputation. There's a reason that VCs have PR and at least pay lip service to things like Women in Tech.
I'd absolutely agree if I thought:
1. Thiel needed favors
2. Trump was going to hand out favors
3. It wasn't too late.
#3 is really what gets me. We've got 3 weeks. Mail-in ballots are out in a bunch of states already. Peoples' minds are made up. The election is basically over. If you believe in extreme polling error, sure, Trump could win -- but, again, it's so late, will this have made the difference?
I almost wonder if he believes Trump will win, and thinks his last-minute donation will merely give the impression of having made the difference, when he was going to win anyway.
Has he spotted a political party that's to some extent going to be up for grabs over the next few years? Is the cash just so he looks like he's being loyal this election?
I'm genuinely curious what the rational for Thiel is in doing this. He's a smart guy, but I just don't see the ROI.
At this point, it seems very unlikely that Trump will get elected. So Thiel isn't getting access to a future President.
Plus, in addition to the monetary cost of the donation there's definitely a very real reputational cost. A lot of people in SV hate Trump and are completely mystified as to Thiel's support. (Personally, I'm also confused as to how a self-described libertarian would support a candidate who opposes freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and increased government control over the internet.)
If Trump became president and nominates Thiel I expect it would be one of the rare times that the Senate rejects the nomination -- considering this donation and relative lack of experience.
I would support Thiel, or really, any engineer or tech-related person, being on the supreme court. It is absurd that we have fossils that do not have email accounts making decisions on laws touching on the technological future of the country for the rest of their natural lives.
Well, at least those fossils dedicated their lives to studying the law and whether or not they have email accounts doesn't mean squat. Decisions about technology are made with input from many who are well versed in technology.
More precisely it is the high level implications of the Stagnation Hypothesis. You won't know it from HN or a survey of typical developers but the people who really run Silicon Valley have a set of beliefs about the world which are very different to the people who work for them.
Lots of top technology leaders have come out vehemently against Trump, [0] including Sam Altman, who I would definitely include in "the people who really run Silicon Valley." [1]
To be clear, I'm not disputing Thiel's politics. I think he's right about a lot of things. They have near-zero overlap with Trump's policies. Trump is easily the least libertarian Republican presidential candidate in recent history.
I believe you're missing a puzzle piece. Take the time out to watch a few of his Youtube videos. They are long and have very low view counts but they're important.
Sorry, but the priors on a random Internet commentator insisting that the only way to understand his farfetched, radical theory is to watch hours of videos are not very positive.
It would be helpful if you could provide a rational and concise summary here. I'd genuinely like to learn more.
Short answer: globalization hurts the developed world in the absence of real technological breakthroughs (energy too cheap to meter, something we use a lot gets can now be made for half the price, etc.). A richer world just means more competition for scarce things. The rational policy for a self-interested superpower might be to ease up on globalization.
I've always found the right-libertarian philosophy to be extremely confused. They want freedom to do whatever they want but they also want to base everything off of capitalism which by definition means you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. It just doesn't make any sense (unless of course you're already a billionaire in which case your world is already quite libertarian in reality).
I have my problems with Libertarianism, but I don't understand what you don't understand. Libertarians think everyone should have freedom to do whatever one wants, but that says nothing of having power to do whatever one wants.
Freedom in the Libertarianism context (and in most contexts) means lack of coercion or constraint imposed by government or other institutions. It doesn't refer to freedom from natural or physical constraints. That wouldn't make any sense to advocate for.
Precisely. The inability of a person to choose their desired path because they need money to feed their family is textbook economic coercion. We've long passed the point where lack of resources (especially food) is a physical/natural constraint.
What would a person who had a family that needed feeding do in the absence of government entirely? My guess is that they would perform some kind of activity in an attempt to feed them. You can take money and even capitalism out of the equation entirely and people would still work. That Russian family that cut themselves off from the outside for 40 years in the wilderness still worked to survive. The food didn't grow itself and then climb into their mouths to be eaten.
The lack of economic freedom experienced by many is a direct product of the economic policy enforced by government and advocated for by libertarians, ie, it's directly the result of government coercing people to adhere to its decisions and libertarians support sufficiently many of those decisions to be culpable.
Libertarians are nothing but outright hypocrites in arguing that government shouldn't be required to pay the economic damages of its coercing people to adhere to policy they favor (eg, maintaining a free-market, private-property based economy with courts enforcing contracts) while preaching about how people shouldn't be coerced.
Libertarians disagree with your assertion that the government has implemented free-markets, and therefore reject the idea that they support current policy.
Even in theory, libertarians are hypocrites because they fundamentally advocate for failing to pay for the externalities of their coercive system, and all supposed benefits of libertarianism can be traced to temporary boosts caused by (inefficient) capitalization of that failure to pay for externalities. Libertarianism enriches a few by creating 0.9 units wealth for every 1.0 units of collective suffering it implements over the current system, but hides this fundamentally externality driven mechanism behind the spread of the suffering (not a lot to everyone) and calling it freedom for many to be allowed to suffer at the hands of others without the instrument of state to implement collective relief.
Libertarianism is nothing but a sham political and economic movement that is wholly and fundamentally dishonest about its benefits and costs, by design, deeply self-inconsistent in its models and policies, and is intended to trick people in to accepting serfdom in a return to feudalism by calling it "freedom".
Libertarians, as a rule, just seem to have not thought very hard about their position or be selling you something (usually that you should be a serf because they fancy that they won't be a serf too in the new system).
Sure, lots of them. Now, many of them are still hypocrites, in that very often a model will claim to address something as a top priority, but not actually address it. (Ed: not a hypocrite to propose a model that doesn't work out; hypocrite to continue to claim it will work when errors are discovered or it can't help, even in theory.) Which is why I called Libertarians so -- they bark about externalities when their model is fundamentally about not being accountable for externalities of coercing others to obey your model.
However, the dishonesty of American Libertarians stems from something further than that. Namely, American Libertarians are neo-feudalists in practice, but won't own up to being neo-feudalists.
I find this to be dishonest: they, so far as I can tell, have done this purely because they want to advocate neo-feudalism and its benefits without having to justify the benefits in terms of the costs, so they use terminology where it's harder to find the costs in academic literature and deny that any such costs exist. Nothing different than creationism rebranding as "intelligent design" or anti-abortion as "pro-life".
It is simultaneously amusing and frustrating how completely wrong this is. Coercion and constraint imposed by government (or similar institutions) is absolutely central to libertarianism! The whole point of property rights is to constrain people from doing things. E.g., you own a beachfront property? You get to constrain other people from swimming there, and the government is there to help if necessary. And so on.
Saying that libertarianism isn't about coercion and constraint is like saying that the GPL or copyleft in general isn't about copyright. Both are equally wrong: the GPL absolutely requires copyright law in order for it to work, and similarly libertarianism absolutely requires coercion and constraint.
It's just that there's this sleight of hand where for some reason, most people are so used to property right that they don't even notice it anymore. Talk about successful framing!
This is pedantic. The clause, "except when necessary to prevent the violation of one's rights" is understood by most, and isn't relevant to this conversation.
Libertarianism isn't about doing whatever you want. It's about protecting your rights and the rights of others. This means you can do what you want, as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others.
That last clause is often overlooked or misunderstood, but it is critical.
> Libertarianism isn't about doing whatever you want. It's about protecting your rights and the rights of others. This means you can do what you want, as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others.
It is, however, "do whatever you want" in that it implies no non-negative social duties, ie, it doesn't require you proactively do anything to be part of society or that you seek to help others in society -- merely that your harm to them come through passive actions or side-effects of legally permitted actions.
It might be better to explain libertarianism as "rights over duties", in that it essentially asserts you have no social obligation which is more fundamental than your rights.
But but...that is what communism is about too, just with a different set of rights. Making "rights" some abstract thing means you end up saying nothing at all.
'… base everything off of capitalism which by definition means you can't do whatever you want unless you're rich. '
Capitalism is of course not an -ism at all. No one invented it. It's that freedom in the context of democratically agreed regulation whereby we can all trade goods and our labor with others and thereby generate value, usually monetary but by no means exclusively. We can even trade kind words and actions - they too contribute value.
Over the last century, billions of people have had the repertoire of 'things they can do' dramatically extended by the extension of an environment which allows people at all levels of income to take part in this productive exchange of items (abstract or physical) of value.
>It's that freedom in the context of democratically agreed regulation whereby we can all trade goods and our labor with others and thereby generate value, usually monetary but by no means exclusively.
The very idea that people can have exclusive control of some goods and then have to trade for other ones is capitalism. Property is not the default state of the universe, it had to be invented and enforced before it meant anything.
And while it can be called a freedom in a certain sense, property is also a restriction. In order for me to own something, you have be denied the right to use it without my permission.
Which is not to say property rights are not a good thing on the whole, but they should be compared as one economic system, in terms of their outcomes, alongside the alternatives.
There are two notions of freedom to consider: One is the notion of a liberal society in which the collective notion of rights lead to freedom from slavery. This notion underpins modern liberal society.
The other notion of freedom developed in the late Roman empire which came to mean a lord's right to do whatever he wants with his property, including his slaves. This notion of freedom, indistinguishable from power, lies at the heart of the Neo-Reaction movement.
Why doesn't someone just ask him why he's giving the money.
He's participating the democratic process, would be interested to hear his rationale rather than a bunch of speculations about what he may or may not believe.
Senate races? Enthusiasm for Trump is falling and if republicans don't show up to vote then it's very likely that democrats will get control of the senate.
Then there's Palantir. Even if Trump doesn't win, the "law and order" rhetoric is resonating with a lot of americans. Trump wants to ban muslims, put together a deportation force, bring back stop and frisk, more border control, nukes for everyone, boots on the ground to fight ISIS, more surveillance, more military spending. All of these would lead to more government contracts for Palantir.
Because he's a bully with a dangerous trigger-finger mentality. He doesn't have any actual policies. There's the formal GOP policy which he frequently contradicts and his own viewpoints are extremely fluid as well. His only consistency is attacking those who he views as lower than him.
This explains why you won't vote for him, but that wasn't the question. The question is why the tech industry would differ from the population at large, where Trump has >40% support.
Because voting behaviors and income levels are highly correlated. Stop right there if you believe that people dislike Trump because they are "smarter". It is a cheap to make you feel good about yourself.
Please accept my apologies then, this is something that I have often seen followed by a direct attack on his electorate's intelligence and/or how democracy is not working since those poor uneducated masses are given a voice. Same happened after Brexit (and some lunatics arguing that London should become a city-state). So because it matched part of the pattern, I assumed this is where you wanted to take the discussion.
not really. it is really true. can almost guarantee that the IQ percentile of those supporting trump is on average 20+ points lower than the opposite camp. Both income and education level are highly correlated with both IQ and voting against trump.
I'm not sure why people don't bring up the fact that Trump has never done anything for anyone other than himself. When has Trump tried to help someone else other than himself? That is the test that both Mitt Romney and Trump have failed for me.
Secondly, this idea that they are great businessman because the regularly bankrupt businesses for a living makes me question their ability to actually run a busines and more so a government.
Mitt Romney has bankrupted loans from governments which makes me seriously question his actual strengths. Trump stiffs people who work for him which makes me question his strengths as it relates to helping people.
They've failed at the helping people level and they mostly used failing businesses as a vehicle to get rich without actually helping the businesses and their stakeholders.
How is a Trump going to balance a budget? He's never been able to with all the resources he's had available to him before. Why would he be able to now?
People don't risk openly supporting Trump unless they have the kind of fuck-you money/assets that allows them to do so. Truth is that the tech industry is probably leaning toward the Democratic party a lot less than it actually seems simply because of the politically motivated discrimination you would face should you endorse the wrong candidate (or embrace the "wrong" opinions in public).
I have seen what happened to a couple folks who told "unappropriate" jokes in a private discussion to their friends while at a public event. They lost their job.
I have seen how tons of progressives (not to say most) are so entrenched in their own bias that they fail to realize that dissenting opinions to their beliefs are not morally reprehensible. And that their cultish attitude with respect to diversity is as stupid as the white nationalistic obsession of homogeneity.
Finally, I have seen how the democrats/progressives systematically demolish the lives of the people who oppose them. That's why I will remain silent. Post anonymously and take action with my vote. And that's why everyone at my workplace believes I am a staunch HRC supporter.
And before you accuse me of paranoia or to have a persecution complex I recommend you try to first figure out why so many people are behaving the exact same way I am: telling one thing in public (or to pollsters) and do another when they are protected by the opacity of a voting cabin.
edit: I posted this comment 4 seconds ago and it is already at -1. You read very fast!
I think you are correct that the Democratic Party is much more socially acceptable to support, and that especially today, the penalties for holding the "wrong" opinion are severe and cause people to retreat to the anonymity of venues like Reddit and the voting booth.
However, telephone polling generally matches actual election results closely enough to assume that people feel a similar level of anonymity in the voting booth as they do in a telephone poll. The dismal polling results for Trump in the Bay Area are not because of secret Trump voters, it's because even conservatives don't want to vote for a candidate whose capability, sanity, behavior, and temperament are so clearly unequal to the job at hand.
Also, "conservative" today increasingly means "socially conservative" which in turn often means "evangelical Christian", to such an extent that the terms are usefully interchangeable.
This is the result of a direct and honest strategy of courting socially-conservative religious people who believe the country is being dragged "in the wrong direction" by people with "a radical social agenda".
While there are people who disagree with the general mainstream of socially-liberal belief in this country who aren't motivated primarily by religious beliefs, they are rare enough compared to the religious majority to not be worth mentioning most of the time.
I'd argue the opposition to Trump has very little to do with politics -- or, at least, no more so than the (generally Democrat) opposition to (generally Republican) candidates.
Most of the repulsion is due to his tone, his personality, his unpredictability, and how generally erratic he is.
Frankly, to the extent that you ascertain any coherent political principles he has, they're more moderate than the other candidates in the Republican primary.
On top of that, his tax plan, such as it is, would save many of us more money than that of many of the other candidates.
I think the reality is successful people hate uncertainty. If you're not doing well, you're more likely to roll the dice and say "what's the worst that could happen?"
People who have benefited from society as it is today (and, let's admit it, most of us in tech are in the top 5-10%) believe we have the most to lose from an erratic unpredictable leader.
Politics is about access to power.
Trump's views on women - pieces of meat that which he should be free to sexually assaulted - are a direct attack on the rights and power of women. Rights which were hard won over decades of political engagement.
Likewise his views on minority populations.
So yeah, many of us oppose him in political grounds. Because he's a misogynistic white supremacist, and having such a person in the White House would be a disaster for a huge swath of the population.
It's late, and I'm not quite sure how to reply as I absolutely agree with you, and I don't want my comments to be construed in any way as pro-Trump who I view as the absolute bottom of humanity's barrel, but I didn't want my comments to appear too "political" and not adequately rational. I apologize if politics got in the way of humanity.
My best way to describe it is that I was commenting about "politics" as a set of partisan principles; he is far less Republican than the average primary victor; far more moderate in terms of what policy positions he checks the box of. (The usual guns, abortion, marriage, gay, free speech, trade, etc).
That was not meant in any way to say that his views on women and racial minorities are "moderate"; clearly they are not, and clearly his own views denigrate him as a person in ways that no words I could ever summon would.
Might be that engineers prefer candidates who demonstrate logic and reason, vs enticing followers into an emotional frenzy. I was hoping for more intellectual debates, and analysis of the issues.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest that opposition to Trump is either based on disagreements with his public policy statements or 'just emotional'.
Sometimes people are just not qualified for a position, even if they can occasionally say some of the right answers at the interview.
If a tech company is considering hiring a CEO or CTO who has ruined several companies, refused to do business with black people until specifically ordered by a court, sexually harassed dozens of subordinates, publicly and verifiable lied about important topics on a regular basis, or bragged about being exploiting his fame to get away with groping women, it doesn't really matter which tech stack they've been praising. Trump has actually done all of those things, if you don't already know.
He actually bought a teenage beauty pageant and then frequently ogled and sexually assaulted (nonconsensually groped and kissed) the contestants backstage. That should tell you everything you need to know about his attitude towards abuses of power and how he'd exploit the Presidency. Please don't dismiss this stuff as 'just emotional'.
And you can hardly tell what his policies are anyway because he contradicts his own statements on most topics.
On the policies that have been clear, the tech industry is opposed to Trump for the same reasons they're opposed to other Republicans. If you're wondering why he's more unpopular in the industry than a generic replacement-level Republican, it's for the same reasons that he's exceptionally unpopular among Republicans themselves.
Actually, it is. Prove that Hillary's 30 years of being a political stooge qualifies her to lead the largest democracy in the world? When has she ever created an actual job? How did she make her hundreds of millions of dollars? Did she produce anything? Did she build a product and sell it? Did she build a company? Did she follow through on her promise to create 200,000 jobs in New York as a Senator? How have her foreign policy decisions impacted the world in places like Libya and Syria? How did spending $500 million to train 60 Syrian rebels end up? The left is so hyper-focused on trying to assassinate Trumps character that they can't even talk about her dismal record as a career politician and complete lack of real leadership skills. Pathetic.
The Clinton foundation employees 2,000 people for starters. I'm sure there is much more, shes been in politics 30 years. You don't go that long without doing something.
> The left is so hyper-focused on trying to assassinate Trumps character that they can't even talk about her dismal record as a career politician and complete lack of real leadership skills.
Despite the fact she hasn't got the best record it's still shiny compared to Trumps. Nobody is saying shes the best ever, but shes the best compared to Trump in every respect. And by the way it's not "the left", it's everyone but your bubble. It's the world, it's the left and it's most of the right. Who wants a fascist[1] in power?
> Pathetic.
Out of 320 million people it's pathetic that the best you can produce is two old, unhealthy liars. One a serial conman seemingly from another planet and the other a serial politician from somewhere just as bad.
To me he's an obvious off the charts narcissist... so much so that his narcissism actually seems extreme against the backdrop of Washington politics and the media. That's kind of amazing.
IMHO that disqualifies him from the presidency regardless of his policies. It's analogous to why you can't get a pilot's license with bad eyesight. A narcissist is a person with a dangerous addiction to domination, attention, and approval, and giving such a person the power to start wars is just irresponsible.
(Of course IMHO the president should have less power to act unilaterally with the military, but that's another matter.)
I am not much of a fan of his politics either, but he has said some good things. He is the only politician in the lineup who has made an issue out of the collapse of the American interior. That wins points with me and many other people. If he were constitutionally fit to be president I might consider it.
I also wonder if Thiel, being from Cleveland, is perhaps also affected by this last issue. I am also from Ohio and I can relate. You coastal types have no idea. I am not being hyperbolic with "collapse." Huge swaths of the American heartland are essentially de-developing. Maybe Thiel just wants to make some kind of point. He's rich and that's not a lot of money for him. Might just be a costly f-u.
I think your last point holds a lotof the key. I'm technically coastal, but where I come from is more Rust Belt in character. Things used to be good, maybe not great, but a lot of people made a living doing honest work and supported strong communities a generation ago. People in those areas today look around and see a gutted, graying, opiod-dependent third-world wasteland where they used to thrive. Things are not better for them.
I'm not sure whether what he has proposed would actually be beneficial. But he's one of the few that hasn't told these people to go pound sand, and taken positions on issues that they see as impacting their livelihoods, like immigration, outsourcing, free trade, and tariffs that might possibly help them, rather than exacerbate their problems.
It's a tough complex issue and Trump just has populist drool. That never works. See: Chavez, Hugo. (Populism tends to work out the same regardless of whether it's left or right. This is also why I got cold feet about Bernie pretty early.)
RE: your point on narcissism. My perspective is that if he becomes president, his excessive narcissism might actually be good thing for the country. As a narcissist Trump wants his legacy to be remembered as positive. He doesn't want future historians to see him as a failure or some no name president. Trump's campaign is built on the promise of "Making America Great Again", and if he fails on that promise then history will see him as a failure, a real threat to his identity. Because of this, Trump does not want to be remembered as the president that caused WW3 or exploded the national debt. In my opinion, I think Trump will push for positive changes to the country as a way to protect his identity (and existence).
An alcoholic might seem like the life of the party, but only if you leave before they transform into bad drunk.
Same goes for narcissism in leadership. Superficially it can seem effective until you hit an issue that makes the narcissist choose between their duties and their fragile ego. Then the life of the party throws up on your shoes.
You're assuming a narcissist behaves rationally and thinks long term. Trump's overinflated ego causes him to vastly overestimate his abilities (eg. "I know ISIS more than the generals do") and makes him unable to admit blame or failure (eg. if I lose the election, it'll be because it was rigged), which is a terrible combination. If he was rational and wanted his legacy to be good he would improve on constructive criticism, but based on his campaign he seems unable of taking any kind of criticism. Trump is already remembered as the candidate for president who had a habit of starting unnecessary twitter feuds whenever he felt insulted. If Trump could do whatever he wanted as president, he would ban everyone from criticizing him. If he has to choose between a long-term benefit for the country and a short-term personal benefit, he will choose the personal benefit.
As for not causing unnecessary military conflicts: "And, by the way, with Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people, that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water."
"Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know much about climate change. ... "
"NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?"
"I don’t believe in climate change."
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
Saying the Chinese invented Global Warming is batty, but it is certainly true that they have become more competitive in manufacturing by game theoretically "defecting" on it -- going crazy with cheap coal power to undercut all the other nations who have taken at least some steps to reduce CO2 emission.
Of course Trump's point was not that nuanced. He said the batty thing as near as I have heard, and I have not heard any substantial proposals on how he might correct the trade imbalance without wrecking the economy by starting a trade war in a fragile economy.
He suggested banning folks with a particular religion from entering the country...that's some crazy dangerous fucked up shit. He has a bunch more crazy policies, but this is the most dangerous and frankly unheard of before Trump.
*Temporarily banning. He's since changed his tune, saying that we need to heavily scrutinize those coming from countries that are terrorist hot beds. Jimmy Carter did something similar, so don't say it's "unheard of."
I upvoted you because I don't think you should be downvoted for stating a political opinion. Democracy is about everyone getting a vote, even if the other side thinks your vote is wrong.
There is no way you're incapable of making the distinction between Trump and HC. I can get why people would vote for Trump. He's obviously a dangerous idiot, put we all knew there's a market for that (though the size is somewhat scary).
It's simply not possible to be undecided between these two for anyone who has spent more than five minutes on it.
Regarding your question why people hate Trump: he's openly stigmatizing minorities including calls for violence against African-Americans at his rally. He's threatening to use his power as president for criminal persecutions of his opponents. He advocates for laws making it illegal to criticize him in the media. He has a history of ventures peddling get-rich-quick-schemes to barely literate people for tens of thousands of dollars. There are now more women accusing him of sexual assault than Bill Cosby. He has recently spend a week calling some woman nobody knows fat on Twitter. Reading any of his interview transcripts makes me doubt he'd pass a Turing test.
> [Trump's] position on immigration is the opposite of the tech industry’s
Is this true? I'm not familiar with Trump's policies because it doesn't sound like he talks about them in much detail. Isn't he all for "legal immigration" and was just extremely against illegal immigration? Has he even addressed H1B or T1 Visas?
Although he has mentioned making immigration harder through intensive testing/vetting, which sounds like it could filter out some smart people arbitrarily. Having personally experienced Canada->US secondary screening most of the questions were already very arbitrary. Especially those without great social skills who can't talk their way through immigration will be at risk. That will also hurt business travel if TSA gets even more power and becomes even more aggressive.
The vagueness of it all makes it a risky bet regardless. That being said, I'm not sure what's worse, vague policy positions with just high-level strategy and no details or over-promising everything in detail and not following through on the majority of them. But I'm generally cynical about all of this stuff.
Actually you're leaving key points out, like most people/media...
He wanted to temporarily block immigration from countries with islamic terrorism (syria / libya) until our country found a way to better vet them. American Muslims, or any other Muslims are not an issue. He also wants to protect our southern border with a wall to prevent ILLEGAL immigrants from easy access into our country.
Why is this alleged key point not included in the statement he made?
> Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.
That press release is from "December 2015". He's clarified this position after the backlash and impracticality of such a plan since then on a number of occasions. He now only apparently plans to block a few muslim-majority countries where terrorism is a problem (such as in Syria as the OP mentioned), instead of all muslims. This came up in the first debate. Although I'm not sure the executive branch even has this power.
This is one of the few things he's actually been somewhat specific about. His approach to legal immigration is still not clear.
Its unclear what Peter Thiel is supporting with this donation. This candidate is highly inconsistent. Perhaps his bet is that if this candidate is elected, it will result in chaos. A sharp, rapid upheaval will enable him to accelerate his overall agenda. Given his net worth he is insulated from the negative effects this chaos will have on everyone else. Given his net worth he, and others who support his agenda can quickly capitalize.
This is my thinking too. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that he doesn't have anything closer to a consistent policy in his platform. To be fair, there is a lot of copy-paste from standard GOP platform, but his own speeches and interviews give out the impression that he doesn't have a handle on any of them. So to think that Thiel might have hitched his wagon based on ideology or policy is illogical. On the other hand, some of Trump's impulsive ramblings (dishonor NATO agreements, refuse to pay US debt, start a trade war with China etc.) shows that, if elected, he can potentially create huge massive disruptions to world order. Thiel might be thinking he can either benefit from that or that the status-quo deserves to be destroyed.
I've seen him flip flop on foreign policy. One day we're going to stop fighting wars abroad, revert to isolationism, and just focus on improving our own economy, and then at the second debate he was talking about how he was going to destroy ISIS. In a separate instance, when accused of disagreeing with his running mate, he admitted that he hadn't discussed much foreign policy with him. I enjoyed that honesty if nothing else.
Yes, his campaign staff has a policy list. But does the man consistently stand by them and defend them each time? Nope[1]. Take the recent contradiction with Pence on Syria, for example. The traditional republicans are hoping he will implement their party's platform. But with a man so erratic and impulsive, and with mostly unchecked power of executive, how can anyone be sure?
Profiting off the chaos seems much more likely than relying on Trump to keep his word or re-pay favors. I'm not sure which is more reprehensible, actually supporting Trump's general platform, or 'merely' hoping his election destabilizes the country enough for Thiel to advance his personal goals.
Interesting to see that many comments on money buying influence. Yet no one seems to consider the possibility that the most pro-establishment candidate, with a proven track of money-for-favors trafficking is, in Thiel's opinion, a worse outcome.
You are joking? The Clinton Foundation has left an overwhelming trail of evidence that points to their wrong doings, whether it is in Haiti, at the WHO or through the pay-to-play scheme and deals they have with petro-monarchies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The latest Wikileaks dump shows that Bill Clinton received a million dollar "birthday gift" through the Clinton Foundation directly from Qatar. At the very moment it was clear to the State Dept. that the governments (not private individuals or royal family members - this is a game changer) of SA and Qatar were actively funding ISIS, sunni militias and mercenary groups to destabilise Syria and Iraq.
We could talk about Haiti, the gold contracts landed to HRC's brother and the obvious collusion and conflict of interests she was part of during her time as a Secretary of State.
There's simply no proof for any of that. Specifically, there might be a pro but the quid's missing.
Considering US relations with Qatar and Saudi Arabia have always been good (in the 'he's a monster, but he's our monster' sense), there's just no reason to suspect any influence. Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11 was known early on by the Bush administration as well.
It is amusing that you think Bill Clinton actually received any of that money. Bill Clinton started the foundation for aids relief in Africa. None of the Clintons draw any salary from the foundation:
So any donation would have gone to aids drugs for kids in Africa. Haven't you ever told anyone "don't get me anything, just donate to charity"?
Like Matt said, there was no benefit to the Saudi's either. They have long been allies of the US and that means visiting the state department is a regular thing.
It looks good as a conspiracy on infowars, but the truth is not particularly scandalous.
It is sad that when a conspiracy theory doesn't stick beyond a fringe group that lack of traction is used to fuel the claim "See! The media is in on it too!". Rather than "oh, multiple Republican led investigations found nothing -- looks like that was wishful thinking"
There are similar donation limits in the USA, but the recent Citizen's United supreme court ruling allows individuals to give large sums to "political action committees" which can act in support of a candidate as long as they don't get caught directly coordinating with them. This has lead to some pretty egregious influences on politics, especially in smaller races with less scrutiny where elections can now be bought for sometimes as little as $10k.
Thiel thinks several steps ahead like a chessmaster. Donating to Trump is likely an effort to thwart the current money influenced political system not about morals.
IMO, Trump will stumble and fall with every step like he already is right now.
My breaking point with Trump (when I decided he is a menace to American society) was reached a long time ago with his proposed ban on Muslim immigration. It was demagoguery not unlike the kind used by Hitler -- attempting to place blame on a very clearly defined minority group to make his followers more motivated. Doing this was simply not right in the most fundamental way and painted a target mostly on innocent people. If that's the man Thiel wants to stand with so be it. But I won't forget.
A comparison between Trump and Hitler is ridiculous. There is simply no comparison, and the idea of is an insult to the millions slaughtered by Nazi Germany.
9 years before Hitler became president of Germany, he wrote in Mein Kampf: "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew." and "Aryans were, and are, alone “the carrier of the development of human culture."
He foreshadowed the Holocaust by saying "that the ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas."
12 years later, he killed (among others) over 15 million Jews, gays, Russian civilians, and Roma people.
Trump on the other hand, has said "“total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” He also said "And by the way, many, many, most Muslims are wonderful people."
I challenge you to find a quote of Hitler saying something this nice about Jews.
I don't think the parent is saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but rather that his rhetoric targeting specific minorities is alarmingly similar to that of Hitler's and his National-Socialist party during their rise to power.
No doubt the Holocaust was one of the most horrific crimes ever committed -- should we not then be all the more vigilant in preventing such similar hate speech from entering the mainstream?
Sure, we should be vigilant against hate speech. But not by banning speech, and not by manipulating it. And saying that we shouldn't allow a specific faith into the United States, even on a temporary basis, is certainly against the American ethos. But it's not Hitler.
I would say a more apt comparison to Hitler is the language used in the parent to my comment: "If that's the man Thiel wants to stand with so be it. But I won't forget." An implied long-term threat against someone for voicing political support for the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Now that is a tactic straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
I find it interesting that you went to "banning speech". I don't equate anything the parent said with wanting to ban speech. Further I thought the comparison to Hitler was thought provoking as many German intellectuals looked the other way when Hitler and began instituting their policies. The "First they came.."[1] poem comes to mind.
No one is coming for anyone. No one has said a thing about American citizens. Your comparison is unfair. Comparing people whose policies you disagree with to Hitler is McCarthyism.
Hitler:
Before he even gained power, he said he wanted to gas the devil jews. Before he won power democratically, he tried to seize power in a violent coup that left 15 people dead.
Once he gained power, he quickly imposed a series of laws that made it illegal for jews to work in academia, own property, work as judges, work as doctors, etc.
Trump:
Enforce immigration laws that are already on the books, provide extra scrutiny to Muslims ("most of whom are wonderful people") before they are allowed into the country.
We're not banning or manipulating speech, we're simply labeling what Trump said. It's demagoguery.
And no, your attempt to turn the tables and characterize the parent comment as Hitlerish is not convincing (it's obviously utter bullshit). But, it does actually undermine your original argument that it's bad to compare things to Hitler. If it's so unfair, then why are you doing it?
I'm glad to see our Dutch friends have stayed sensible, I'm not-white and I'm voting for Trump because he will not prioritize blacks/mexicans over asian/indian people. There's a huge resentment in the asian communities, and it's super common to say "Fuck white people" "Don't hang out w/ white ppl". Because of built up resentment.
if you're a minority learn the differences between white people and what they believe, you will quickly learn anglo's(Moms) say the love you, but love the "bad kids" the most. Germans(dads) love the good kids the most.
Mom(Livingston/Altman/Graham/Warren Buffet) vs Dad(Andreesan/Trump/Charlie Munger)
Has it occurred to you that Indians being good hasn't stopped the police from treating them like the bad kids, to expose one limit of your horrible creaking analogy?
rofl. White men just take asian and indian women and think there isn't an exploitative relationship. Because 'our'(Sikh people are more masculine so we suffer little to no issue). men are too weak to advocate their views.
I can have an extensive conversation with you, or even preferably the leadership in this community(Sam Altman, PG,JL).
762 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadEdit: In case you don't think that's relevant, go read this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...
From the article: "If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand."
Do you really think that Thiel's advice has no effect on Mr. Altman's decisions?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...
Hacker News has a very, very, very well-established history of political pieces. Everything from EU politics, tax policy, candidate elections, and law enforcement practices.
Of course, there's an old adage about the ubiquity and quality of opinions
I would like to know what Peter Thiel's solution to our broken economy is.
His solution has been to advocate increased immigration. Yep, wages are flat, lets bring more people so more people can compete for fewer jobs.
Which doesn't square with his candidate's rigidly anti-immigrant policy proposals.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/09/07/trump_c...
That isn't true. Peter Thiel has opposed low skill immigration.
Edit: we've turned the flags back on since the discussion has gone well beyond civility.
Note that the flamewar detector may not have been turned off and is possibly punishing the submission otherwise.
Or do we just put this in the "expensive new hobby" section and leave it at that.
----
Update: I want to hijack my own comment to ponder something.
As someone with no money and no influence, I find it hard to think about how to use money to buy influence as part of a grand plan, like many of the comments here are suggesting.
As a layman, I think in simple terms like discrimination, racism, sexism, etc... and my belief in fighting against all those things.
Am I short-sighted? Is there some greater human social structure that I am not aware of that can only be achieved by making such calculated investments? Despite all the immediately negative rhetoric.
The real problem with being a true check is partisanship on the court. By now, it seems to be essentially accepted that there are "liberal judges" and "conservative judges", and that they will rule accordingly. I cringe every time I hear that, because SCOTUS, like any other court, is supposed to rule on what the law is, not on what it should be; and one's political affiliation should not affect the former. In practice, of course, it does matter these days, and it is a really bad thing, especially in an institution that is 1) so small, and 2) not providing any mechanism to hold them responsible.
And there is no evidence that electoral fraud is likely to decide the election. In fact it's looking like efforts to prevent it e.g. in Indiana are far more likely to influence the election.
He is down by on average 7 points nationally for a reason.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/for-many-gop-women-party...
Other types of fraud (ballot stuffing, voting multiple times, voting when you're not allowed to etc.) are exceedingly rare, and it would have to happen at a massive scale for it to make an actual impact.
That's just not going to happen, especially with it being a felony.
Polls are objective not subjective.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36648769
I get what you're trying to say, and most polling seems to be pretty objective, but you can absolutely do subjective polling. You just have to target the right demo and you can make any poll say anything you want.
Just say you were going to vote for Trump. Someone stops you on the street, or call you up; would you admit it?
I wouldn't.
The guy is an absolute joke of a person on so many levels. He's stupid. He's just aweful.
But there's a tiny bit of Trump in a lot of us buried deep in that ID.
Personally, I do think we need to get much more vigilant on immigration, even though Obama has sent more illegials home than any other president. Would I admit this in public--hell no.
And I have never believed in Globilization. Would I admit this at work--hell no.
I really think a lot of people will vote for Trump in the privacy of that booth.
I won't because I won't vote for a president this year, or will I?
Where can I find the source for this? I may need it when arguing with people...
Of course, I'm more than open to being wrong; certain classes of illegal immigrants have been given defacto amnesty, and Obama's spoken in their favor, but no doubt others continue to be persecuted.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-deportation-machine-ob...
I think so too. There is an interesting phenomenon there. Just guessing but suspect on the surface it is a very accepting, liberal place, perhaps one which encourages and celebrates diversity.
Sorry to tell you, data is in, and it's helping to pull billions out of abject poverty around the globe.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-23/bookies-pl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
Seems to not support that claim.
Yes, this poll is an outlier because their methodology is very different than most other polls.
Yes, Nate Silver has a very different outlook on the election, but Nate Silver was also not very reliable during the primary season (although that is, by his admission, because primaries don't have very good polling).
If I had to make a[n extremely uneducated guess], it's because most polling is done over the phone, and I don't think "people who answer their phone when they don't recognize the number" is a very good random sampling of voters in the US.
I don't think this race is nearly as over as most people seem to believe, which is why, if you want to beat Trump, it is REALLY IMPORTANT (all caps!) that you get out and vote!
I say so because of its polling methodology, which is unique.
If you're a politics/polling nerd, this poll is interesting. If you're not, then yes, you are probably better off either just reading 538, or looking at the RCP polling average.
https://news.usc.edu/109339/why-the-usc-dornsifel-a-times-pr...
But this poll performed well in 2012[1] with the same methodology. As a polling nerd, wouldn't you be interested in why it is producing unusual results this year and what implications that might have for polling in general?
[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-poll-faq-20161006-...
Where they eliminated that one 19 year old, and saw very little effect on the poll.
How is that a compelling answer?
It's like if a news investigation found that a company had poor quality control and features a photo of a defective product in their writeup and the company's response was "we issued a refund for the product the news team purchased."
All I can say is that you sound an awful lot like the 2012 talking heads who were convinced Romney would win despite all the polling pointing to the contrary. For the record, Nate Silver's biggest mistake in the primaries was not listening to the polls enough. For him (and every other data-driven forecaster) to be getting the general wrong they'd have to be making the exact opposite mistake as before.
I'd be happy to give you 10:1 odds on Trump losing. And I'm biased here: a few months ago, I was convinced Trump would win.
1 responder should not move a 2500 person poll by 1%
That seems highly disingenuous a response.
Now I can't sleep...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old...
There are plenty of aggregation sites which are far better at smoothing out any issues:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-...
They all show Trump losing in a landslide with Clinton getting around 330 EC votes.
We don't know who is right/wrong until after the election so it is better to assume that a range of different polls taken at different times with different methodologies is likely to be more accurate.
It's, of course, very possible that "this time it's different" as they say every time. He is certainly an unconventional candidate. However, I'll throw my lot in every time with the MANY polls who are trying to account for this, and the MANY poll aggregators who are trying to make sense out of this madness.
I think 538 was actually quite reliable during the primary season. Pretty much bang on, in fact.
Everything they said anti-trump was basically opinion and they have been roundly chastised (as deserved) for treating punditry as fact.
The reasoning is that pollsters have herd behaviours - they believe publishing an outlier they will lose them credibility so they suppress inconvenient results and will rework methodologies and weightings to avoid it. For many, election polling is a loss leader - its publicity to get their name out there for commercial services. The credibility of the outlier is increased because it has escaped the herd pressure despite the incentives.
To extract information we need to carefully revise methodology behind outlier predictions, and such an activity is a complex task for skilled data analyst.
Is it not (in absence of any evidence) equally plausible that the type of voter that will vote for Trump is more predisposed to attend a campaign event than other voters?
You can find signs that people in the establishment personally favored the establishment candidate – the least surprising revelation in political history – but there's no evidence that lead to any concrete action. That's why the only claims of rigging have been intentional misrepresentation based on the knowledge that some people like you would repeat those claims without checking the sources.
Hint: it's the same reason why the alleged victim is going around telling his supporters to vote for Hillary. If you trusted his judgement enough to think he should be president, why not trust his analysis now?
And that reason is elementary game theory. The only people with incentives to claim that the Democratic primaries were rigged are those who will be left with no political influence if the Democrats fare poorly.
When the Republicans do well, it's because they value party unity over literally everything else. One of HRC's strengths is that she brings the same thinking to the Democrats. For anyone within the party, working against her carries no conceivable upside. And as we've seen in DWS's case, working for HRC means you'll be well taken care of, no matter what.
Basically, if Sanders or anyone else on the left has beef with the DNC, they will be much better off if they wait to bring it up until after the election. And maybe not even then.
1. They're the best data we have
2. We have no reason to believe they're incorrect
3. There is REALLY no reason to believe they're dishonest
Is 100% intellectually dishonest.
This is exactly what happened 4 years ago, and apparently some people have not learned from their tremendous mistake.
If you want to know why "turnout at a campaign event" is a crappier metric than "real actual scientific data", I don't know how else to help, other than to point to other instances in which it has failed:
"Mitt drawing larger crowds" http://www.politico.com/story/2012/10/mitt-drawing-larger-cr...
"Donald Trump continues to draw YUGE crowds. That matters less than he thinks." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/28/do...
"Trump brags about crowd size but will it turn into votes?" http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d74fbd472f7a420a90737e55cfb20...
I do not know or care who you support in the Presidential election. However, I suggest you get realistic about your metrics, as you're way off in fantasyland at the moment, as far as I can tell.
If you turn out to be incorrect, I hope you learn from this experience. I know I will, if the data turns out to be wrong.
When the polls show him to be ahead, it's evidence that the voters love him. When he's behind, it's evidence that the polling is rigged.
Campaigns also conduct their own internal polling which may or may not have biases, but they're not released; they're used for the campaign. So it only benefits them to know what's actually going on. Trump's is one of the few campaigns that seems only interested in good news, and in not learning from what their internal polling tells them.
That said, of course all campaigns will selectively brag about the polls that make them look good, and quietly ignore those that don't.
Again, the polls are extremely reliable in this country. If you can't see that, you're unlikely to be swayed by yet another data point when this election is complete.
This feels a lot like the atmosphere over here (in Britain) just before the Brexit vote.
Many people thought it was a guaranteed Remain vote, and woke up to a terrible fright on that Friday morning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
If you look at states that are contested, things look bad for Trump, even in the ones where demographics favor him he is not getting polling results that point to a win (an example would be Pennsylvania).
Supporting Trump fits perfectly into this: if he loses, he gets egg on his face (which most people will forget fairly soon) and may lose out on a little startup dealflow, but if he wins, he becomes the sole connection between the Presidential Administration and Silicon Valley. That's worth a lot more than $12.5M.
Agreed. (Though FWIW $1.25M is the amount he invested)
[1] http://election.princeton.edu/
I hesitate to be explicit about what I think is actually going on but if you've read my posts on the Stagnation Hypothesis or watched Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube (low view counts, so I know you're not watching them!) you'll know there is a rather disturbing big picture which most people are oblivious to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII
It's not something that can be both summarized and understood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII
Look this isn't really a temporary interest for me, I'm something of a 'Thiel-logist'. You know how there exist Kremlinlogists? Same thing as that. I watch every video and read every book he writes or reads. This is not some celebrity fetish, but to do with the rich vein of ideas.
This is because I am convinced something very very important is going on and I want to understand more. I think I understand about half of it and I had a holy fuck mind blown moment a few years ago. Remember how Thiel took out Gawker nearly a decade later. This is as nothing in comparison, this is the grand-daddy of all long games.
Ah, so it's not real then.
I have considered this in wondering why he would support Trump.
RenTec is not supporting Trump.
Mercer is.
Simons, for what it's worth, is supporting Clinton. As, I'm almost sure, does the majority of employees. Mercer is the outlier.
The worst thing to happen to a famous brand is not bad press but rather becoming irrelevant and falling out of discussion.
Even if the Trump political brand crashes and burns, the broader trump brand of success and money just gets stronger...
This election was the ultimate win win for Trump.
This is why he can take all the risks he is taking, he has nothing to lose...which is the ultimate trump card!
Edit: spelling correction
No doubt starting a cable network is a good fallback position, but I don't buy the idea that this is all according to plan.
More likely, some in his campaign know he's going to lose and are looking for an out, while others (maybe including the candidate) still think he may win.
His brand recognition is way up throughout the world and my experience tells me that the negative view will not translate into his business brands once his political brand is not front and center.
I've studied branding extensively and I think, if he loses, his presidential run will still be a net win for him and his brand once the political fallout falls out of the news cycle.
edit: changes nothing to little
You have the personalities in Trump and Giuliani etc. You have the news content courtesy of Brietbart. You have lifestyle content courtesy of his real estate assets e.g. golf/travel shows etc. And he already owns a TV production company that made the Apprentice.
And don't forget that Lachlan Murdoch is now firmly in charge of Fox News and has always talked about it being less alt-right and more centre-right. This will leave a massive opening for Trump in the alt-right space. The real question is whether Fox will allow it on their global cable platforms.
Trump isn't conservative. He's a big government populist. Completely different despite him having an 'R' next to his name.
He is about as close to Cruz as Sanders was to Clinton (in terms of policy philosophy.)
By the way, I understand downvotes because I mentioned Cruz in a positive way, however let's keep in mind that we can disagree with economic philosophy and role of government and still be friends!
I want a flat tax and a repeal of FATCA and Cruz was the only candidate that supported that. If some Democrat comes along with that proposal, they'd get my vote too.
FATCA and it's unintended consequences have caused serious harm to many Americans overseas, so that was my primary issue this election.
The only reason I support the RNC this election is because they have FATCA repeal in the platform while the Democrat side both enacted FATCA as wel as expressed support for continuing it.
Here's an article that delves deeper into FATCA if anyone is interested: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21605911...
If a candidate had proposed to switch to only taxing US residents, plus apply some international pressure to close down tax havens, then I could see the point of repealing FATCA.
As bad as Trump is, at least he is not a theocrat.
I think he thinks the country is broken and _someone_ has to fix it. He's supporting Trump and investing in his campaign even at this late, seemingly forgone stage, in order to build credibility with Trump's base and conservatives in general. If he wasn't an immigrant I would think he might be aiming for the presidency himself, but he probably just wants to be an influencer or power broker.
Though I find even that a bit odd. Would people not take a pledge seriously without having seen his demonstrated willingness to lose large sums of money?
This will be opportune world for all kinds of right-wingers whose ideas are too extreme or too kooky to have been taken seriously before, but who are more toughtful than Trump.
In very different ways, Paul Ryan and Peter Thiel are positioning themselves for that world. As are a lot of others.
> Famously, the only reason he went to seek fortune in the Silicon Valley was because he was denied a highly prestigious clerk position for a Supreme Court justice.
> It seems to me that Thiel originally wished to become a politician, and only stopped pursuing that path to seek his fortune in the Silicon Valley when he hit his first setback when applying to clerk for the Supreme Court.
Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Peter-Thiel-supporting-Donald-T...
Others may be reassured to hear Trump has only a 15% chance of winning, but it terrifies me. In Silicon Valley 15% is a good chance.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/786801011830628352
With an election it can usually be summed to important event: the vote. So that's why it doesn't terrify me at all. There's enough evidence now and in previous elections to show me he's not going to win the election. If the situation were say closer to Gore/Bush or even Romney/Obama pre-vote polling numbers, then maybe I'd be scared.
If there are 10 competitors and they all have between 5-10% chance of winning you have 15%. Compared to a 15%/85% split.
And a candidacy that threatens opponents with prison, encourages voter intimidation, enlists foreign powers for cyberwarfare, intimates that any result will be rigged, distroys the norms critical to government functioning and a dozen other things, is the best investment someone who hates public control of policy could make win or loose.
[1] http://www.paddypower.com/bet/politics/other-politics/us-pol...
"Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California until 2013, when it was declared unconstitutional and marriages were allowed to resume. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Gay activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with OkCupid declaring they would block access to the Firefox browser unless he stepped down."
It makes me angry too, but also raises (for me) some interesting political questions around what level of disagreement is "too far." I would never fire someone for being a Republican and personally/privately opposing gay marriage. But I would also immediately fire someone if they were a Nazi. So where is the line if what's an acceptable level of tolerance (and where does Trump fall on it)?
Yes. Please take your Holocaust apologia elsewhere.
Killing millions of people for no other reason than that you don't like their ethnicity is pretty much the baseline of immorality. Heck, killing millions of people for more legitimate reasons (being Nazis) also would be pretty abhorrent.
Also, for the record, "we" are not generally okay with senseless wars. There's a reason that murdering innocent civilians is considered a war crime.
Privately believing someone has done something wrong, or belongs to a bad group, is one thing. Trying to enshrine that belief in law and disenfranchise the targeted person or group is quite another thing, and if you honestly are unable to see the difference between the two I'm unsure how to assist you.
Did I say they were the same thing? I absolutely think that "let's make gay marriage illegal" is categorically worse than "I don't like gay marriage."
As bad a Prop 8 was, the policies Trump advocates are 1,000 times worse, yet I don't see anyone working to boycott or quit his companies.
It's possible you haven't seen such efforts, but that is not identical with "no efforts are occurring".
Would you feel comfortable working at Peter Thiel's company?
Also there are people pressuring, for example, pg to dump his association with Thiel.
Prop 8 would not and did not "nullify" any marriages licensed by the state in the middle of 2008. See
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Prop-8-not-retroactive...
Retroactive or ex-post-facto law is unconstitutional. I am a big fan of this principle. It protects all of us.
> it speaks very poorly
Speaking ill of me based on false information does not reflect well on you. Let's back off and perhaps we'll meet on better terms another day. (FYI, I do not support Trump.)
Your argument that my support was pernicious is based on bogus chronology.
As for "status quo", that was exactly the issue, or one of two big issues. Judges do not make law, they are not our dictators, not even in extremis. It's up to the people and the legislature to correct course, based on judicial review and judicial nullification at the limit, but with new law coming from the legislature and the ballot initiative process (in California, anyway).
A lot of us in California supported Mark Leno's work over more than a decade prior to 2008 to enact CA Domestic Partner law, precisely to address injustices, even as Leno, et al. did not attempt to redefine marriage. That we saw judicial overreach and moved against it does not make us opponents of the status quo.
(Speaking of status quo, Prop 22's definition of marriage is still in the California constitution: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_1 SEC. 7.5.)
If you think courts should rule us, just wait long enough. The "next Trump" may give you the judges you deserve. I sincerely commend rule of law and judicial restraint to your attention, even if you don't agree with me on anything else.
Affirmative action is an attempt to alleviate the impact of prior laws and practices which made people unequal.
I am generally fine with trying to redress previously-enforced inequalities, and suspicious of anyone who isn't (protip: Google "libertarianism, starting right now" for an explanation of why this is important that you're more likely to agree with if a "LOL look how hard I rekt that dude by shoving affirmative action in his face" type sound-bite is the first thing you reach for in this kind of discussion)
"I fundamentally disagree with you about this very important issue, and we should still find a way to cooperate" is a crucial idea, hard won and, as we are seeing, easily lost. It underpins multi-religious societies, working democracies, and in general, any group of people that need to do something. Unfortunately, right now we have groups of people that say the polar oposite: "It is good and moral to shun people who disagree with X".
I totally agree with marriage equality. But I think it can be (and mostly was) won on dialogue, not shunning. And I will always be against the shunners (though I hope not to shun them :P).
btw, all I just said applies just as well to klanspeople/nazis: Are they harming the employees? No? Are they aligned with the mission? Them keep them. And tell them they are stupid over a beer. Talk the shit out, and fight their stupid ideas in the right places. Do not allow political disagreement, even of the most grievous kind, to cut oportunities for dialogue and cooperation.
How far will you take that principal though?
What if you have an employee who consistently comes in and talks about how he'd like to kill all the non-white people? What if he talks about how many guns he has? I think this would make the office an unworkable environment for most of my other employees (particularly any PoC) and I would be very justified in firing them.
I'm not in favor of Brendan Eich's personal choice, but I feel the reaction was far too strong in that case. Here we have something more than a thousand times larger that supports many oppressive things.
I've written at length about Proposition 8 and the fact that it was not simply a matter of opinion or personal belief. It was, shorn of all the attempts to make it sound non-controversial, about taking a basic premise of a free society -- equality of all people under the law -- and putting it up for popular vote. Proposition 8 was literally a ballot measure to say "these people shouldn't be equal to everyone else". I am OK with applying social pressure to people who attempt that sort of thing, to make them feel as alienated from the core principles of society as they actually are.
I don't know you or what you did at Mozilla: if it were up to me, I would rather had you quit than Eich (no offense). Frankly, Mozilla has lost focus and I think it would have done much better under Eich.
Edit: more thoughts on the politics. Eich's opinion was far from controversial- half of Americans held the same belief. I would guess half of Mozilla users in the US also had the same opinion: were those people also disposable?
Supporting prop 8 (to me as a lefty) is more benign than supporting Trump; yet I don't see any calls to boycott or quit companies with executives that support Trump.
Finally, it was a dangerous precedent for left wing politics to adopt, what if the right wing had adopted it and gotten someone fired for affronting beliefs held as strongly as yours?
There have been plenty of people calling to pressure people who support Trump; pg is one of them, and has been getting lit up on Twitter recently for continuing to work with Thiel.
Finally, you seem to think this is something unique to "left wing politics". Which is perhaps true: left-wing movements tend to resort to social pressure, boycotts and similar methods. Right-wing movements tend to attempt to outlaw or in some cases just literally exterminate the people who disagree with them. Which sort of world would you rather live in: the world where people who disagree with you simply refuse to associate with you, or the world where people who disagree with you seek to have your existence made illegal?
(and for the record, I no longer work for Mozilla, but that's unrelated)
Do you have any evidence that those politically aligned to the right are more accepting of, say, murder than those on the left? Because I don't believe it.
Eich and Trump are in very different roles. Eich was CEO of a non-profit: as a non-profit, they depend crucially on his ability to fundraise, and so pissing off big Mozilla donors makes it impossible to do his job. Thiel is an investor of his own capital: pissing off other people is generally neutral to him, as he doesn't depend on anyone else for anything, and being able to piss people off allows him to take risks that are underpriced because other people are too afraid of pissing others off.
Sure, it's true that his upside is greater thanks to Thiel's unitary status. But I don't think that effect is any greater now: Trump enjoyed 0 SV support a month ago, so the investment would have had just as much impact then as now, but the probability is much lower now.
> Eich and Trump are in very different roles.
Absolutely, Thiel and Eich have very different roles. But to think public image is unimportant to Thiel is also naive: I could easily see this having a negative impact on his deal flow, either because founders are personally offended or because they'e afraid of tainting their reputation. There's a reason that VCs have PR and at least pay lip service to things like Women in Tech.
#3 is really what gets me. We've got 3 weeks. Mail-in ballots are out in a bunch of states already. Peoples' minds are made up. The election is basically over. If you believe in extreme polling error, sure, Trump could win -- but, again, it's so late, will this have made the difference?
I almost wonder if he believes Trump will win, and thinks his last-minute donation will merely give the impression of having made the difference, when he was going to win anyway.
But again -- why now?
At this point, it seems very unlikely that Trump will get elected. So Thiel isn't getting access to a future President.
Plus, in addition to the monetary cost of the donation there's definitely a very real reputational cost. A lot of people in SV hate Trump and are completely mystified as to Thiel's support. (Personally, I'm also confused as to how a self-described libertarian would support a candidate who opposes freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and increased government control over the internet.)
That honestly does not seem like a very compelling reason. I think Thiel can easily have a bigger impact on the world outside the Supreme Court.
More precisely it is the high level implications of the Stagnation Hypothesis. You won't know it from HN or a survey of typical developers but the people who really run Silicon Valley have a set of beliefs about the world which are very different to the people who work for them.
Watch this all the way through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII
Lots of top technology leaders have come out vehemently against Trump, [0] including Sam Altman, who I would definitely include in "the people who really run Silicon Valley." [1]
To be clear, I'm not disputing Thiel's politics. I think he's right about a lot of things. They have near-zero overlap with Trump's policies. Trump is easily the least libertarian Republican presidential candidate in recent history.
[0] https://shift.newco.co/an-open-letter-from-technology-sector...
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/trump
It would be helpful if you could provide a rational and concise summary here. I'd genuinely like to learn more.
A source close to [Thiel] says the investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.
The first part I completely get: there are a lot of things that need fixing. It's the second part that has me scraping my jaw off the floor.
Does this clear it up for you?
Libertarians are nothing but outright hypocrites in arguing that government shouldn't be required to pay the economic damages of its coercing people to adhere to policy they favor (eg, maintaining a free-market, private-property based economy with courts enforcing contracts) while preaching about how people shouldn't be coerced.
Even in theory, libertarians are hypocrites because they fundamentally advocate for failing to pay for the externalities of their coercive system, and all supposed benefits of libertarianism can be traced to temporary boosts caused by (inefficient) capitalization of that failure to pay for externalities. Libertarianism enriches a few by creating 0.9 units wealth for every 1.0 units of collective suffering it implements over the current system, but hides this fundamentally externality driven mechanism behind the spread of the suffering (not a lot to everyone) and calling it freedom for many to be allowed to suffer at the hands of others without the instrument of state to implement collective relief.
Libertarianism is nothing but a sham political and economic movement that is wholly and fundamentally dishonest about its benefits and costs, by design, deeply self-inconsistent in its models and policies, and is intended to trick people in to accepting serfdom in a return to feudalism by calling it "freedom".
Libertarians, as a rule, just seem to have not thought very hard about their position or be selling you something (usually that you should be a serf because they fancy that they won't be a serf too in the new system).
However, the dishonesty of American Libertarians stems from something further than that. Namely, American Libertarians are neo-feudalists in practice, but won't own up to being neo-feudalists.
I find this to be dishonest: they, so far as I can tell, have done this purely because they want to advocate neo-feudalism and its benefits without having to justify the benefits in terms of the costs, so they use terminology where it's harder to find the costs in academic literature and deny that any such costs exist. Nothing different than creationism rebranding as "intelligent design" or anti-abortion as "pro-life".
Saying that libertarianism isn't about coercion and constraint is like saying that the GPL or copyleft in general isn't about copyright. Both are equally wrong: the GPL absolutely requires copyright law in order for it to work, and similarly libertarianism absolutely requires coercion and constraint.
It's just that there's this sleight of hand where for some reason, most people are so used to property right that they don't even notice it anymore. Talk about successful framing!
Does that mean I'm not free to do pushups?
That last clause is often overlooked or misunderstood, but it is critical.
It is, however, "do whatever you want" in that it implies no non-negative social duties, ie, it doesn't require you proactively do anything to be part of society or that you seek to help others in society -- merely that your harm to them come through passive actions or side-effects of legally permitted actions.
It might be better to explain libertarianism as "rights over duties", in that it essentially asserts you have no social obligation which is more fundamental than your rights.
Others disagree, obviously.
Any discussion can devolve to reductio-ad-absurdum if one is determined to do so.
Capitalism is of course not an -ism at all. No one invented it. It's that freedom in the context of democratically agreed regulation whereby we can all trade goods and our labor with others and thereby generate value, usually monetary but by no means exclusively. We can even trade kind words and actions - they too contribute value.
Over the last century, billions of people have had the repertoire of 'things they can do' dramatically extended by the extension of an environment which allows people at all levels of income to take part in this productive exchange of items (abstract or physical) of value.
The very idea that people can have exclusive control of some goods and then have to trade for other ones is capitalism. Property is not the default state of the universe, it had to be invented and enforced before it meant anything.
And while it can be called a freedom in a certain sense, property is also a restriction. In order for me to own something, you have be denied the right to use it without my permission.
Which is not to say property rights are not a good thing on the whole, but they should be compared as one economic system, in terms of their outcomes, alongside the alternatives.
The other notion of freedom developed in the late Roman empire which came to mean a lord's right to do whatever he wants with his property, including his slaves. This notion of freedom, indistinguishable from power, lies at the heart of the Neo-Reaction movement.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/david-graeber/two-...
You're conflating laissez-faire or free market capitalism with a plutocracy (society ruled by the wealthiest). They're diametrically opposed systems.
I like Samuel Hammond's analysis. His shorthand for Thiel's political philosophy is "corporate feudalism":
https://medium.com/@hamandcheese/why-peter-thiels-endorsemen...
https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...
Strange to be investing this late in the race though.
He's participating the democratic process, would be interested to hear his rationale rather than a bunch of speculations about what he may or may not believe.
Then there's Palantir. Even if Trump doesn't win, the "law and order" rhetoric is resonating with a lot of americans. Trump wants to ban muslims, put together a deportation force, bring back stop and frisk, more border control, nukes for everyone, boots on the ground to fight ISIS, more surveillance, more military spending. All of these would lead to more government contracts for Palantir.
That's a fair point. Palantir is very well-positioned to be the IBM of Trumpism.
Oh, and the Nazis did try to make them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapon_project
Maybe he's just a racist who holds women in contempt and hates muslims. It's hardly unheard of.
I personally see him more of a cunning guy than just smart because I find his actions disturbing.
He seems like a relatively sincere and smart guy to me, and some of his policies seem to be better for business.
Is it because of tougher immigration laws? Are there other reasons based on his policies, or is it mostly just emotional?
Anyway, have a nice afternoon.
Secondly, this idea that they are great businessman because the regularly bankrupt businesses for a living makes me question their ability to actually run a busines and more so a government.
Mitt Romney has bankrupted loans from governments which makes me seriously question his actual strengths. Trump stiffs people who work for him which makes me question his strengths as it relates to helping people.
They've failed at the helping people level and they mostly used failing businesses as a vehicle to get rich without actually helping the businesses and their stakeholders.
How is a Trump going to balance a budget? He's never been able to with all the resources he's had available to him before. Why would he be able to now?
People don't risk openly supporting Trump unless they have the kind of fuck-you money/assets that allows them to do so. Truth is that the tech industry is probably leaning toward the Democratic party a lot less than it actually seems simply because of the politically motivated discrimination you would face should you endorse the wrong candidate (or embrace the "wrong" opinions in public).
I have seen what happened to a couple folks who told "unappropriate" jokes in a private discussion to their friends while at a public event. They lost their job.
I have seen how tons of progressives (not to say most) are so entrenched in their own bias that they fail to realize that dissenting opinions to their beliefs are not morally reprehensible. And that their cultish attitude with respect to diversity is as stupid as the white nationalistic obsession of homogeneity.
Finally, I have seen how the democrats/progressives systematically demolish the lives of the people who oppose them. That's why I will remain silent. Post anonymously and take action with my vote. And that's why everyone at my workplace believes I am a staunch HRC supporter.
And before you accuse me of paranoia or to have a persecution complex I recommend you try to first figure out why so many people are behaving the exact same way I am: telling one thing in public (or to pollsters) and do another when they are protected by the opacity of a voting cabin.
edit: I posted this comment 4 seconds ago and it is already at -1. You read very fast!
Trump's results in the general election were bang-on with what the polls predicted.
The general could be different. But there's no reason to believe that it will be.
That said, I don't disagree that "polite" coastal society doesn't take kindly to alternative views.
However, telephone polling generally matches actual election results closely enough to assume that people feel a similar level of anonymity in the voting booth as they do in a telephone poll. The dismal polling results for Trump in the Bay Area are not because of secret Trump voters, it's because even conservatives don't want to vote for a candidate whose capability, sanity, behavior, and temperament are so clearly unequal to the job at hand.
This is the result of a direct and honest strategy of courting socially-conservative religious people who believe the country is being dragged "in the wrong direction" by people with "a radical social agenda".
While there are people who disagree with the general mainstream of socially-liberal belief in this country who aren't motivated primarily by religious beliefs, they are rare enough compared to the religious majority to not be worth mentioning most of the time.
Most of the repulsion is due to his tone, his personality, his unpredictability, and how generally erratic he is.
Frankly, to the extent that you ascertain any coherent political principles he has, they're more moderate than the other candidates in the Republican primary.
On top of that, his tax plan, such as it is, would save many of us more money than that of many of the other candidates.
I think the reality is successful people hate uncertainty. If you're not doing well, you're more likely to roll the dice and say "what's the worst that could happen?"
People who have benefited from society as it is today (and, let's admit it, most of us in tech are in the top 5-10%) believe we have the most to lose from an erratic unpredictable leader.
And again, that's nothing to do with politics.
Likewise his views on minority populations.
So yeah, many of us oppose him in political grounds. Because he's a misogynistic white supremacist, and having such a person in the White House would be a disaster for a huge swath of the population.
My best way to describe it is that I was commenting about "politics" as a set of partisan principles; he is far less Republican than the average primary victor; far more moderate in terms of what policy positions he checks the box of. (The usual guns, abortion, marriage, gay, free speech, trade, etc).
That was not meant in any way to say that his views on women and racial minorities are "moderate"; clearly they are not, and clearly his own views denigrate him as a person in ways that no words I could ever summon would.
Sometimes people are just not qualified for a position, even if they can occasionally say some of the right answers at the interview.
If a tech company is considering hiring a CEO or CTO who has ruined several companies, refused to do business with black people until specifically ordered by a court, sexually harassed dozens of subordinates, publicly and verifiable lied about important topics on a regular basis, or bragged about being exploiting his fame to get away with groping women, it doesn't really matter which tech stack they've been praising. Trump has actually done all of those things, if you don't already know.
He actually bought a teenage beauty pageant and then frequently ogled and sexually assaulted (nonconsensually groped and kissed) the contestants backstage. That should tell you everything you need to know about his attitude towards abuses of power and how he'd exploit the Presidency. Please don't dismiss this stuff as 'just emotional'.
And you can hardly tell what his policies are anyway because he contradicts his own statements on most topics.
On the policies that have been clear, the tech industry is opposed to Trump for the same reasons they're opposed to other Republicans. If you're wondering why he's more unpopular in the industry than a generic replacement-level Republican, it's for the same reasons that he's exceptionally unpopular among Republicans themselves.
The Clinton foundation employees 2,000 people for starters. I'm sure there is much more, shes been in politics 30 years. You don't go that long without doing something.
> The left is so hyper-focused on trying to assassinate Trumps character that they can't even talk about her dismal record as a career politician and complete lack of real leadership skills.
Despite the fact she hasn't got the best record it's still shiny compared to Trumps. Nobody is saying shes the best ever, but shes the best compared to Trump in every respect. And by the way it's not "the left", it's everyone but your bubble. It's the world, it's the left and it's most of the right. Who wants a fascist[1] in power?
> Pathetic.
Out of 320 million people it's pathetic that the best you can produce is two old, unhealthy liars. One a serial conman seemingly from another planet and the other a serial politician from somewhere just as bad.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/4teoxl/a_f...
To me he's an obvious off the charts narcissist... so much so that his narcissism actually seems extreme against the backdrop of Washington politics and the media. That's kind of amazing.
IMHO that disqualifies him from the presidency regardless of his policies. It's analogous to why you can't get a pilot's license with bad eyesight. A narcissist is a person with a dangerous addiction to domination, attention, and approval, and giving such a person the power to start wars is just irresponsible.
(Of course IMHO the president should have less power to act unilaterally with the military, but that's another matter.)
I am not much of a fan of his politics either, but he has said some good things. He is the only politician in the lineup who has made an issue out of the collapse of the American interior. That wins points with me and many other people. If he were constitutionally fit to be president I might consider it.
I also wonder if Thiel, being from Cleveland, is perhaps also affected by this last issue. I am also from Ohio and I can relate. You coastal types have no idea. I am not being hyperbolic with "collapse." Huge swaths of the American heartland are essentially de-developing. Maybe Thiel just wants to make some kind of point. He's rich and that's not a lot of money for him. Might just be a costly f-u.
It's a tough complex issue and Trump just has populist drool. That never works. See: Chavez, Hugo. (Populism tends to work out the same regardless of whether it's left or right. This is also why I got cold feet about Bernie pretty early.)
Same goes for narcissism in leadership. Superficially it can seem effective until you hit an issue that makes the narcissist choose between their duties and their fragile ego. Then the life of the party throws up on your shoes.
As for not causing unnecessary military conflicts: "And, by the way, with Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people, that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water."
"Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know much about climate change. ... "
"NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?"
"I don’t believe in climate change."
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
Of course Trump's point was not that nuanced. He said the batty thing as near as I have heard, and I have not heard any substantial proposals on how he might correct the trade imbalance without wrecking the economy by starting a trade war in a fragile economy.
The easiest way to make Trump lose a debate is to make Trump of right now debate the positions of Trump of five (seconds/minutes/months/years) ago.
There is no way you're incapable of making the distinction between Trump and HC. I can get why people would vote for Trump. He's obviously a dangerous idiot, put we all knew there's a market for that (though the size is somewhat scary).
It's simply not possible to be undecided between these two for anyone who has spent more than five minutes on it.
Regarding your question why people hate Trump: he's openly stigmatizing minorities including calls for violence against African-Americans at his rally. He's threatening to use his power as president for criminal persecutions of his opponents. He advocates for laws making it illegal to criticize him in the media. He has a history of ventures peddling get-rich-quick-schemes to barely literate people for tens of thousands of dollars. There are now more women accusing him of sexual assault than Bill Cosby. He has recently spend a week calling some woman nobody knows fat on Twitter. Reading any of his interview transcripts makes me doubt he'd pass a Turing test.
Is this true? I'm not familiar with Trump's policies because it doesn't sound like he talks about them in much detail. Isn't he all for "legal immigration" and was just extremely against illegal immigration? Has he even addressed H1B or T1 Visas?
Although he has mentioned making immigration harder through intensive testing/vetting, which sounds like it could filter out some smart people arbitrarily. Having personally experienced Canada->US secondary screening most of the questions were already very arbitrary. Especially those without great social skills who can't talk their way through immigration will be at risk. That will also hurt business travel if TSA gets even more power and becomes even more aggressive.
The vagueness of it all makes it a risky bet regardless. That being said, I'm not sure what's worse, vague policy positions with just high-level strategy and no details or over-promising everything in detail and not following through on the majority of them. But I'm generally cynical about all of this stuff.
During the primary, however, he wanted to block all Muslims from entering the country, as well as build a wall along the Mexico/US border.
He wanted to temporarily block immigration from countries with islamic terrorism (syria / libya) until our country found a way to better vet them. American Muslims, or any other Muslims are not an issue. He also wants to protect our southern border with a wall to prevent ILLEGAL immigrants from easy access into our country.
> Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.
via https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...
This is one of the few things he's actually been somewhat specific about. His approach to legal immigration is still not clear.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/full-list-dona...
[1] - http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/full-list-dona...
We could talk about Haiti, the gold contracts landed to HRC's brother and the obvious collusion and conflict of interests she was part of during her time as a Secretary of State.
Considering US relations with Qatar and Saudi Arabia have always been good (in the 'he's a monster, but he's our monster' sense), there's just no reason to suspect any influence. Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11 was known early on by the Bush administration as well.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/sep/01/...
So any donation would have gone to aids drugs for kids in Africa. Haven't you ever told anyone "don't get me anything, just donate to charity"?
Like Matt said, there was no benefit to the Saudi's either. They have long been allies of the US and that means visiting the state department is a regular thing.
It looks good as a conspiracy on infowars, but the truth is not particularly scandalous.
It is sad that when a conspiracy theory doesn't stick beyond a fringe group that lack of traction is used to fuel the claim "See! The media is in on it too!". Rather than "oh, multiple Republican led investigations found nothing -- looks like that was wishful thinking"
IMO, Trump will stumble and fall with every step like he already is right now.
9 years before Hitler became president of Germany, he wrote in Mein Kampf: "the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew." and "Aryans were, and are, alone “the carrier of the development of human culture."
He foreshadowed the Holocaust by saying "that the ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas."
12 years later, he killed (among others) over 15 million Jews, gays, Russian civilians, and Roma people.
Trump on the other hand, has said "“total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” He also said "And by the way, many, many, most Muslims are wonderful people."
I challenge you to find a quote of Hitler saying something this nice about Jews.
No doubt the Holocaust was one of the most horrific crimes ever committed -- should we not then be all the more vigilant in preventing such similar hate speech from entering the mainstream?
I would say a more apt comparison to Hitler is the language used in the parent to my comment: "If that's the man Thiel wants to stand with so be it. But I won't forget." An implied long-term threat against someone for voicing political support for the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Now that is a tactic straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Hitler:
Before he even gained power, he said he wanted to gas the devil jews. Before he won power democratically, he tried to seize power in a violent coup that left 15 people dead.
Once he gained power, he quickly imposed a series of laws that made it illegal for jews to work in academia, own property, work as judges, work as doctors, etc.
Trump:
Enforce immigration laws that are already on the books, provide extra scrutiny to Muslims ("most of whom are wonderful people") before they are allowed into the country.
And no, your attempt to turn the tables and characterize the parent comment as Hitlerish is not convincing (it's obviously utter bullshit). But, it does actually undermine your original argument that it's bad to compare things to Hitler. If it's so unfair, then why are you doing it?
if you're a minority learn the differences between white people and what they believe, you will quickly learn anglo's(Moms) say the love you, but love the "bad kids" the most. Germans(dads) love the good kids the most.
Mom(Livingston/Altman/Graham/Warren Buffet) vs Dad(Andreesan/Trump/Charlie Munger)
I can have an extensive conversation with you, or even preferably the leadership in this community(Sam Altman, PG,JL).
I think i'll gun a clean sweep.