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Comment by vanagandr | Hacker News Reader

If its got Mitchell, I’m in.

To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this.

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more info please!

He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income.

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-...

Taxes paid was actually what was said.

I may be going astray, but I can see a way to degenerate "taxes paid" to "taxes before deductions" to "income since it relates to taxes anyways"

It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just absolute terms could have the desired effect.

- 1% tax of 10 million = 100k

- 20% tax of 100k = 20k

Hence, the rich pays more tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump "Trump paid no net federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years of the past two decades. After the refund, Trump had an average tax bill of $1.4 million per year over the 18 years.[52][176] In 2016, Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax, and in 2017, he paid another $750 in federal income tax."

If there was an unequal vote, I am pretty sure rich people would want votes as heavy as possible.

If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.

That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class.

Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights.

> which is a rounding error to his income class.

Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again?

> He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember

You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to?

Lutke's own post was about pension = no votes, which I identify as the thing he decided to actually spent time on. His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?

I don't think memory fails me on the main points. If you think ranking the same read facts differently from you means faulty reading, I don't really owe you the labor of explaining where that fails.

> His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?

Yes, that is the one we are talking about. The pension comment was posted earlier and isn't directly applicable to the discussion taking place.

The other comment did happen, to be sure. I guess we can change the subject if you want to. The comment that came prior to it asserted that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to take the power away from those who most participate in local government (i.e. retired people). To which Tobi suggested that one way to address that is to allow one to choose power or a pension, but not both, suggesting that pensioners have become dependents and thus no longer have any real stake in the future of a locality.

Which certainly isn't a novel idea. I've heard the same thing many times from people who are ostensibly poor. Many honestly believe that retirees (a.k.a. boomers) who "got theirs" are why housing is out of their reach. You could make a good case that Tobi was trying to play up "I'm just like the little guy" when he isn't actually, but if that is the case, what is our takeaway from that?

Step one means fuck-all nothing with a cap of $800K. Its not as if billionaires truly pay $0 in tax. $800K is approximately $0 to a billionaire so they'd all just pay that.

> Its not as if billionaires truly pay $0 in tax.

Exactly. Which means the plan is automatically invalidated by its own design. It literally states that it exists only to appease those who believe that the wealthy don't pay tax, which is unnecessary as the wealthy already do pay tax. I guess that's what makes it a good plan. It is already in effect!

Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight. Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth.

Maybe worth mentioning that the founding fathers in the US believed only property owners should vote.

Not the most important(IMO) of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine.

Let's make everyone a property owner by default at birth

Franklin also practiced air bathing instead of hygiene.

Franklin also supported universal male suffrage, wrote Pennsulvania’s 1776 constitution which adopted universal male suffrage, and condemned property requirements for the franchise, reportedly arguing:

“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars, and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass.”

They also didn't forbid slavery. It doesn't mean they were right.

“Didn’t forbid”, if referring to the framers of the Constitution, is a bit of an understatement, given that they created multiple layers of protection to prevent dismantling slavery at the federal level into the future.

The founding fathers, the framers (a different and later group, though the two overlap and are often conflated) and original states had a variety of (and evolving in some cases between the Founding and the Constitution) opinions on the issue; some (Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, notably, the latter also the primary author of PA’s 1776 Constitution which also adopted this position at the state level) were in favor of universal male suffrage.

It's important to consider context when talking about people's moral positions over time.

We don't judge the founding fathers' morals by the same metrics we judge our contemporaries. That much should be obvious.

https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/shopify-ceo-voting-rights-str...

Along with a myriad of different controversies. Just searching his name will bring up many articles about his chronically online Elon Musk wannabe takes.

I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy

> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.

but if we go as far as to say

> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.

does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...

Ladybird contributors have their own controversies that make the project hard to stomach

Ok, what is the new drama this time around?

It is a good thing you can use Google chrome instead which has zero contributors with stances you disagree with... I guess.

That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.

Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now

Seems to have gone full on right-wing fash, similar to DHH.

Related post on Reddit from this week which discusses DHH's journey from left to right - https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1v95spw/what_the_hel...

Yep, a lot of toxic investors in this. Not touching it with a ten foot pole and lost a lot of respect for Mitchell. A couple of the other investors:

* https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031

* https://x.com/search?q=from:lennypruss%20israel&src=typed_qu...

Yuck.

Just linking to a login nag.

Thanks for surfacing this. As another user says below, Mitchell had more leeway in choosing his investors than most anyone. His is a dispiriting choice.

VCs tend to be a toxic bunch. Hard to avoid that in our business

in this case mitchell is an exited founder with a net worth of over $1B so he can be choosier than almost anyone in this regard. Deeply disappointing he is taking money from Guillermo

things look different from Billionaire Island than they do to us plebs down here. it's crazy to expect such people to do the "right" thing, they're too far gone.

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