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The current system of down-voting and flagging is (evidently) insufficient to discourage comments like these. michaelochurch's comment is tantamount to trolling - it is spawned a acrimonious chain of vile and meta-vile. Nobody comes to HN for this. Nothing has been gained by engaging him. I'd go so far as to say nothing would be lost if the entire thread starting with OP's comment were removed. Perhaps HN could implement this feature?

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I actually opened this thread just to ctrl-F "michaelochurch". I find him consistently interesting, and I strongly agree with him that Silicon Valley culture has weakened, though I strongly disagree with him on the root cause.

(He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is "government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one of their biggest inspirations).

I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you, particularly on the 'conformism' part. There is a certain sameness to the "failure" and "disruption" these days.

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