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Comment by anonAndOn | Hacker News Reader

What a fascinating choice between two New York billionaires. A populist carnival barker vs. a man who built his own personal tech/media empire.

I'd bet dollars to donuts Mike's got a tech team in place right now that is running rings around the DNC's haphazard patronage party.

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> What a fascinating choice between two New York billionaires.

Sounds more like a lack of choice.

https://i.imgur.com/w9vZ8lz.png

We keep pulling from the same small pool of rich, connected household names and expect different results.

Why is this comment downvoted?

Maybe because "Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army" ;-)

Linking to an external image and then making a conclusion here isn't profitable to discussion here. It'd been better if the op had said, and here's Bloomberg with Trump and Clinton (I forget the 4th guys name: I'm oz)... all of them clearly golf buddies.

Also a supposed Democrat that run as a Republican and Republican that's running as a Democrat.

>supposed Democrat

Trump was a registered democrat.

Party registration is not an immutable property.

I was pointing out that it was not "supposed" at all. Trump is a former democrat in exactly the same way that Bloomberg is a former republican. There was no reason to weasel word it

Bloomberg was elected two times as mayor on the Republican ticket. Trump was never elected as a Democrat.

Fair enough. I think the more important thing is that Bloomberg registered as a Republican and then ran (and won) as a Republican for elected office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayoralty_of_Michael_Bloomberg

You can register whatever party you want as a regular citizen, but it doesn't dictate who you vote for or what you believe in or actually do.

Exactly, also Bloomberg only changed his party affiliation in 2018, when we had record number of voters during non presidential election, and Democrats winning large number of seats.

Given other information about him, and even last debate he is the absolute weakest candidate, almost feels like he is there to spoil the election to help the incumbent.

Bernie -- an Independent running as a Democrat.

Trump - a former Democrat, now the Republican president

Bloomberg - a former Republican, turned Independent, now running as a Democrat

Parties used to have the power, but now it seems like popular politicians are picking the party they think provides them with the easiest path to power, realigning their policy views accordingly.

At the very least I wish the parties would split themselves.

The Democrats seems to have both a socdem wing and a more neoliberal wing and the Republicans a growing right wing populist wing and the standard neocons. Maybe this is oversimplified, but I feel like these should be different parties

Yes. But they're kind of stuck to each other. Really I agree that we have 4 major constituencies stuck within 2 parties. First past the post and single member districts kind of force it to be that way.

This is the sad truth. Try being a person who leans conservative, having the absolute racists of society be on your team. I imagine it's not much different than a liberal leaning person getting all the crazies on their side. I wish there were distinct parties for reasonable people...

Bernie's "independent" label means very little. Look at how he votes. He's a Democrat. It's a weird attempted knock against him considering how consistent he's always been.

I mean, is there a way to vote Yes/No but "indpendently" on bills?

That's how it's done: https://www.multichannel.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_au...

There's no Yay or Nay with independent.

Bernie tried to primary Obama...he's independent

git merge first-party instead of git init or git merge 3rd-party

That's the strategy being used because 3rd parties have no chance in our system. The only thing you can do is merge into one of the 2, become the new repo owner and reshape it going forward.

> a man who built his own personal tech/media empire.

Well, him and the three other people with the skills to actually built it.. he just provided the seed capital and then put his name on it. Secunda, MacMillan and Zegar are all billionaires.

I have friends that work[ed] at Bloomberg. I doubt they're that good.

They're building it, and seem to be recruiting heavily from Google/Facebook/Amazon etc.

From a political science and historical perspective it's absolutely astonishing. Mike has a lot of baggage but a lot of cash and talent behind him, including ~100 pretty excellent TV and online ads.

And 2016 was also a NY-based choice. Combination of money and control of media narrative.

Weird definition of "choice."

Sorry, who's the billionaire other than Bloomberg?

Tom Steyer (Hedge fund manager from NY)

Emoluments Clause be damned, he's cashing in more than just a book deal after this. Private dinners with the POTUS at Mar A Lago don't come cheap.

Emoluments case got thrown out the courts plus he donates 100% of his salary each year. His company’s net worth has dropped by at least 700 million when he became president. Meanwhile the previous president is now worth over 120 million and bought a $15 million mansion recently. Pelosi is worth $140 million while being a life time politician. Won’t comment further as I don’t want HN to turn into political flame war but I had to set the record straight because it sounds a lot like accuse opposition of what you are doing.

>Emoluments case got thrown out the courts plus he donates 100% of his salary each year.

This isn't correct. It was thrown out because the Democrats lacked standing. It wasn't ruled on the merits: a standing argument means you are not eligible to bring a case yourself.

It's not even a sensible argument: salary is a nominal sum the government pays the president. Emoluments are gifts from foreigners. There's no logical relationship between salary and gifts.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/politics/emoluments-lawsuit-t...

$450k per year is not a nominal sum by any means. He doesn't need to donate his salary but he does. No previous president has ever done this. If a democrat president had done this, they would be all over the news. But since it's Trump, most people don't even know about it. Also if he was really trying to rich himself, why have his company's net worth dropped by 700 million over 3 years? And how about the previous presidents and Pelosi who are worth hundreds of millions after serving while being life time politicians?

I think people are letting their disdain for him cloud their judgement. Also innocent until proven guilty.

Nominal relative to the sums alleged re: emoluments and other intakes of money such as secret service lodging snd not paying city security bills for police at his rallies. Those are in the millions.

You focussed on that and not the central point that your interpretation for dismissal of the court case was incorrect. It has nothing to do with his salary.

Like I said - innocent until proven guilty.

What exactly is secret service lodging? not paying city security bills for police? Are you being serious? A President and even ex presidents get secret service. How exactly is he lodging? These are absolutely absurd claims.

Have you looked into what the Bidens were up to? Where was everyone when Obama came out of office being worth over 120 million and Nancy Pelosi worth 140 million?

Like I said, I think your disdain for him is clouding your judgement.

Trump is highly unlikely to be a billionaire. The only source for this claim was Trump himself. He took on an alter ego and lied to Forbes to get on the Forbes list.

Other than Forbes, I know of no source that claimed Trump was a billionaire. I think it all goes back to the original lie.

Further, most of his charity scams have been strictly small time. Amounts ranging from $10,000 to a few hundred thousand. No billionaire needs to bother scamming figures so low. If you have, say, $5 billion in net worth and it grows at 5% per year, that’s $250 million per year.

$100,000 is strictly beneath the notice of someone with that much income. But it was not below Trump’s notice. Ergo, it seems unlikely he has the income. Again, the only source on his wealth was himself.

I should note, against my own argument, that Forbes presently thinks Trump is worth $4.4 billion. I could be wrong, but the charity behaviour seems so contrary to actually having wealth. We also know no banks other than Deutsche Bank would lend Trump money. If he truly has billions in assets not encumbered by debt....why? There seems little risk.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2019/05/08/why-we-...

Forbes and other magazines just sum up assets associated with wealthy individuals and don't do any real work to track debt or real owners.

In many properties with Trump's name on them Trump is minority owner with small stake and these companies have huge loans. Bank Trump’s Empire: A Maze of Debts and Opaque Ties https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/donald-trump-...

Actual net worth is very hard to estimate because he is hiding his financial status as much as possible. The fact that American banks don't do business with him anymore indicates that his financial situation is not good.

Most of us have until Super Tuesday (March 3rd) to choose literally any other option.

Look up your state to find the rules that apply to you:

https://voteforbernie.org/

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