Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

Funding and profit motive are different things and optimize for different results.

Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.

The real effective argument/consideration IMO is the question of whether the technology MARKET is more prosperous /because/ of the centralization, and therefore leading to higher demand/wages, or vice versa.

Just look at the recent IPOs. We had one go sour and it highlights how rare those occurrences are.

Personally none of that stuff mattered once I earned more than like, twice minimum wage. Nowhere near $200K.

Maybe that's a US thing, since you guys have so much tied up in work (health insurance etc).

I just think about having enough money to get by and help people around me, employment fits around that, not the other way around.

Sure, people who are actually earning biscuits as a wage are basically slaves. So it goes.

FWIW I don't work in adtech, I think it's bollocks and that everyone doing it should stop.

if anything, all IT salaries need to come back to earth. i assume via massive taxation from the likes of warren and sanders.

that is one interest that we can pursue but we can also have value interests that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Is Apple trying 100 things out or are they hoarding insane amounts of cash in Ireland?

Also, if you need the best database developer, they might find their own lucrative vertical and/or disruptive passion project. It makes great sense to counter the potentially hypertensive corporate rigamarole with a fat paycheck. Similarly, if it would have convinced Elon Musk to forget about this EV thing and take a well funded engineering department at Daimler, well that might've felt like winning the hiring lottery.

Or compete on a level playing field with Vimeo, Fastmail and so on. Everyone wins if Google is split up. Even Google shareholders, who will finally get some nice dividends when the ad business money isn't being diverted to prop up the rest of it.

I don't think this is correct at all. What's called right libertarianism or laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid 20th century (e.g. Ayn Rand). It stole the term which had historically been a left term and simply cleansed it of its critique of corporate power.

Corporations are authoritarian, anti-democratic organizations that exercise a great deal of control over our economic lives. Laissez-faire capitalists saw an opportunity to use Left anti-authoritarian concepts to attack democratic state controls and regulations on corporate power. Often they will employ some mental gymnastics to redefine corporations as extensions of individual rights, hence the John Galt cult of personality stuff. This is akin to calling feudalism "liberty" because, think of the rights of kings. As such we have entered an era of unparalleled corporate power, control and concentration of wealth.

What exposes the sheer fraud of "right libertarianism" in Silicon Valley is that much of SV was created by the state and continues to be subsidized to the tune of billions annually. Look up DARPA.[1] So they're not even against state capitalism.

[1] https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...

The rage induced by that event got directed at Facebook initially and has now broadened to include all the big tech companies that profit from data collection.

If Hillary had won or in a theoretical world where Obama was still president then talk of breaking up Facebook/Google would still be a niche murmur.

In this way, Libertarians (of which I once was) are "useful idiots" for the ruling class-- it's always your fault for not serving the upper classes well enough.

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

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

How often does a self-confessed sexual abuser get elected president?

And the sad thing is that comment of mine is not even slander - it’s a statement of fact, since the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” comment === admitting to being sexually abusive.

If I was a woman, and an exec, I would certainly be tearing up regardless of my political views.

Why the activism against hate speech then?

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

So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;)

I’m a bit tongue-in cheek here, but, couldn’t resist :)

I think that pay has very little to do with effort of the worker. As you mentioned, lot of people work harder and put more effort while making less money than others. IMO the argument that effort should be used as a measure for pay can easily be invalidated with this reductio ad absurdum: If you pay me for the effort I put on my work I would make more money by carrying a heavy rock back and forth all day than to work on most of the jobs available today.

As economy theory goes, labor is a commodity and, as such, subject to the law of supply and demand. That's really it, there is no other way at the moment to assign salaries. Yes you can reduce inequality with taxation. But there is an inverse correlation between taxation an economic growth, even though there are some exceptions.

My thoughts on automation are that, yes, automation displaces jobs, but it also reduce prices (not just of the final products but those of capital goods used to produce them too), so, while I don't know how a close-to fully automated society will look like I'm sure resources will still need be allocated based on demand from consumers and the economic output will be limited, hence there will still be a concept of markets and currencies. My guess is that Capitalism will be partially automated itself. We will probably need some limited redistribution for those that initially own no shares in automated companies, allowing them to live and invest in these, or to buy automation capital goods to create new automated companies.

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

Maybe instead of depending on the sporadic largesse of billionaires and all the awful political and economic consequences that come along with that kind of wealth concentration, we can have a functioning safety net, like the rest of the developed world.

This is some weird ideological bullshit. There is plenty of evidence that capital hurts markets and therefore society with those lacking capital ending up competitive and beneficial for society providing cheap high quality products and services, and those influenced by capital ending up monopolistic rent seeking monsters used against society to protect wealth.

This doesn't really follow at all, and is directly in contradiction with your desire to get rid of Prop 13. Property taxes are the most common wealth tax!

> get rid of assorted insanity such as Prop 13 in CA

Aren't these slightly contradictory views?

Property tax is a form of wealth tax (in that it's a tax on assets rather than income) and Prop 13 puts a cap on it.

Also, capital is not a scarce resource in the US today. For firms that would be worth investing in but don't have access to capital on reasonable terms, the reason for their lack of access is a combination of incentive problems and inefficiency on the part of e.g. VC firms, not because the capital isn't out there. It's true that a wealth tax would increase the cost of equity, but the Finance 101 strategy of "only initiate a project if the IRR of the expected cashflows is greater than the cost of equity" isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.

If by "those who need capital the most" you mean charities and not startups, a wealth tax would just incentivize giving more to charities and doing it sooner.

As a Classical Liberal/Libertarian myself I find these people to be absolutely repugnant. They are selling the masses on ideas that will cause incredible damage. I mean, Bernie himself is on video during a debate talking about creating, if I remember correctly, 40 million government jobs. We know EXACTLY how something like that would end, because it has been done in many nations at different scales. The short answer is: Not well at all.

This discussion isn't a matter of opinion, this is a matter of historical fact across nations and time. Nobody who pushes these ideologies can name a single nation on any continent in the last hundred years that has experienced good outcomes from their adoption. And by this I mean, to include raising people out of poverty and generating economic growth at a minimum.

These conversations are like the people who promote coffee enemas to cure cancer, or the flat-earth-ers. Lot's of passion and even followers, but not one of them can back up what they are saying with any semblance of a reality that approaches confirmation of their promises in any way that would not caused them to be laughed out of the room.

The fact that a society like that of the US doesn't laugh these people right out of the political sphere is of great concern. It means, at a minimum, that our educational system is severely damaged. No educated society would elevate these ideas.

Most developing nations in the world aspire to be like the United States of America, and here we have a bunch of politicians and their followers wanting the US to be like most failed nations of the world. This is a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to say the least.

For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive?

Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck.

When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did.

This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else.

Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point.

It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently.

The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance.

The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes.

What are the cost drivers?

The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens.

I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems.

Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare).

That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued.

This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process.

In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive.

There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers.

Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans.

The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one.

It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should.

And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost.

[0] "10 charts that show why the NHS is in trouble" https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110

All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.

That's the wrong question or perspective. What they are trying to do is cause enough damage that the only option left will be for people to depend on government support, jobs, etc. That grows government large and ultimately fundamentally changes this nation to the core.

You can't say "let's replace capitalism"...because you just can't do it that way. California is a perfect example of the kind of planned manipulation I am talking about. We are paying incredible amounts of money for our fuel. Much more than in other parts of the nation. There's an agenda here to push everything related to climate change and "green", whether it makes sense or not. So our roads are not maintained, our fuel taxes go through the roof and politicians ignore cries for help. Their objective is to force everyone onto some mythical form of public transportation that can never work in CA, but that's not going to stop them. They close entire road lanes to create space for a few bikes and create massive traffic jams in the process. So it isn't about coming right out and saying "we want to replace capitalism", it's about having that as a plan and then plotting a series of measures that will cause so much damage that, over time, that will be the result.

Let's forget the socialist label for a moment.

Here's reality: Not one of the people proposing these extreme ideas has ever lived, and much less managed, anything even remotely close to what they are proposing to do.

Let's assume for a moment that they sincerely believe --not know, but believe-- these ideas are good. People like AOC have been indoctrinated by schooling into pretty much that world view. She and the others have never actually lived in the kind of society they so enthusiastically champion.

It stands to reason that, if one is going to push for certain ideas the sensible thing to do is look at history and try to understand if these ideas, when applied, produced results at least equivalent to and ideally superior to the status quo.

Well, we have history on these ideas. Lots of it. Across multiple continents, cultures, nations and time. And there isn't a single success story anyone can float to the surface. Quite to the contrary, the common denominator is that the result of adopting these ideologies is disastrous. Poverty and misery increase. Economic development collapses. Social inequality increases. Government grows large. Populations grow dependent. And darkness takes hold.

We have people pushing for the equivalent of coffee enemas to cure cancer. It might sound interesting, but there isn't one single bit of evidence that it does as promised and lots of evidence showing it causes harm. To make things even more interesting, those pushing for coffee enemas have never had one themselves and, instead, are the beneficiaries of everything they say is bad in our current system.

As I have said many times: This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of history. These people are dangerous.