I don’t think anybody questions the fact that the “elite” (i.e the wealthy) are conservative. The 1% generally are. But the rest of the population of Silicon Valley generally aren’t.
A lot of that is I believe because they tend to come from upper-middle class families or relatively more stable upbringings. It can make discussing some of the various social issues difficult because they've been in a well-insulated bubble most of their life and they're not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am.
To me, this sounds like a shared opinion based on personal experience.
I’m from a working class background and arrived at a different conclusion in my own experience. But I get lumped in with people raised upper middle class just because I couldn’t possibly have such opinions. Granted, this is why I try not to be defensive about it: who I am doesn’t really matter (nor should it for anyone else) when we’re discussing ideas.
He didn't say they must come from there.
I’d love to see some data.
Of course if you work at the kind of companies that only hire people with a top CS degree then you might be led to believe that.
In my experience though it’s not the case. The majority of people in my office grew up lower middle class.
My parents were cleaners and although we were often tight on money we were miles away from extreme poverty.
Can you confirm whether you grew up in an environment of extreme poverty?
As I bring up often, my parents were fishermen. They could hardly afford a home and hardly afford to put food on the table or the immense medical bills we were saddled with.
Bringing up my past and my opinions was enough to get them riled up because they simply could not understand where I came from or the things I had to deal with due to poverty. I don't know how else you think I should explain this other than the fact that we had two very different circumstances growing up.
If you can convince people that their long-term self-interest must include the broader community, you may be more likely to get somewhere than pointing out the challenges experienced by other people. In any case, you're unlikely to make any headway against people who are buying private islands and have "escape plans" to get them out of the country. (These people already understand the risk and believe they have factored that into their decisions.)
That doesn't match what the study claimed. At the very least, they found SV "elites" and students to be for liberal taxation policies.
Do it for all CS majors and I’ll be more interested.
That's what liberal actually means. To be liberal in both areas it to be a progressive.
No it isn't, and in the era of social justice warriors, it's relevance is on the rise.
So you're actually agreeing vigorously with the guy to whom you're responding.
They are under the American meaning of the word liberal, you just don't understand what liberal means in America. You are agreeing with me whether you understand it or not. What you mean by liberal, we call conservative or "classical liberal".
Liberal here doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world.
> In India and Pakistan, for example, "conservative" just means holding on to traditional religious values.
That's not what it means here.
> Liberal economics means fewer regulations, less federal planning, etc.
Not in America, here we call that conservative. In America, liberal economics mean more central planning and government control and more regulations.
Too bad the party is so weird and dysfunctional (and subject to a first-past-the-post voting system in the US), it could have a lot of support.
So have many governments.
Even well intentioned regulations have unintended side effects.
You really couldn't find a worse time to defend the government caring about morality or greater good under current administration.
The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire...
>According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups.
>In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups.
From: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23...
Another relevant source: https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to...
You can read Dark Money by Jane Meyer if you are actually interested in this.