Peter Thiel’s Bet on Donald Trump Pays Off
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is a true example of don't count your chickens before they're hatched.
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de....
And here is the original comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
Here is a teaser:
"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.
If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."
It would be something if the end result of Thiel backing Trump is that Silicon Valley ceases to be part of the United States.
With what army? Without the might of the United States military, the Mexican drug cartel would quickly take over California. After a few years under cartel rule, Californians will be seen crossing the border illegally back into United States.
These kinds of people don't ever think about the implications and consequences of their actions.
Revisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.
The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.
I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.
No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.
Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.
They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the other.
I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).
I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?
A couple hundred thousand votes difference is a tie. It's bad weather in Texas or California turning off a quarter million voters and ending up with the same result.
There is an essential asymmetry when you value passion over knowledge of the issues, intelligence, and education.
This is actually categorically false, see the book Peak by Anders Ericsson for more information on this: https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...
people who are passionate are MUCH more intelligent and knowledgeable about issues and it's been proven.
I hope, this is taken note. The job of a representative democracy is to get a representative. We could just use the concept of sortition - randomly sampled voters.
If you can't do basic arithmetic, you should lose your career in this field, imo.
He might not be my first choice, but I won't discredit all of his supporters over it.
59,938,290 < 59,704,886 + 4,072,835 + 1,218,065 + 804,228