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Silicon Valley's Love-Hate Relationship With President Obama
theodp writes: "Covering President Obama's visit to Silicon Valley, the AP reports that the relationship between the White House, Silicon Valley and its money is complicated. Less than a year after David Kirkpatrick asked, "Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?", and just two months after Mark Zuckerberg gave the President a call complaining about NSA spying, Silicon Valley execs hosted two high-stakes Democratic Party fundraisers for the President. The White House declined to identify the 20 high-rollers who paid $32,400 per head to sit at the Tech Roundtable. The President also attended an event hosted by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, where the 250 or so guests paid $1,000 to $32,400 a head for bar service that featured wine, beer and cognac. The following day, Obama celebrated solar power at a Mountain View Walmart before jetting out of NASA's Moffett Field."
... to complain about NSA spying... HAHAHA. That's just fucking hilarious.
They're a pack of nouveau riche kids that are still young enough to be swayed by a skilled orator. They can't articulate what they want beyond general grunting about infinite copyright and more H-1Bs, and they're too dumb to realize they're being played. It's a geyser of money to get while the getting is good.
Learn how parentheses work. He clarified his position. Republicans are anti-small-business and anti-entrepreneur, they're pro-oligarch.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Think? I'd say know is more like it.
Look at how ACTA was ratified. This was in the wake of SOPA where strong public reaction killed it while it was in the house. If ACTA had gone through the senate as SOPA had, those lobbying for it knew full well it would die like it already had in Europe.
I'm the last person to make conspiracy theories, but I really, really, really doubt that ACTA would have bypassed the constitutional provisions required for ratifying treaties had it not been for what happened with SOPA. Technically it's an illegal treaty, but President Obama claims that he's allowed to sign it if he wants to, constitution be damned. I mean shit, nobody except for the president himself was even allowed to see it before it was ratified.
Seriously, Republicans used to pro-business. Consider they're pissed pissed that the big three got bailed out after Wall Street sank the economy.
They're all about rent collection. They hate real business, technology (too disruptive), education (ditto), etc etc.
Big problem right now for Small Businesses and the ACA is that it prevent small businesses from using the exchanges until next year. This is so the the insurance companies could stick the fork in small shops offering insurance. ($$$). My company offers insurance, it's gone up 30% per year for the last three years. Next year that will drop back to what our insurance cost three years ago.
So now who do you suppose was instrumental in getting that put into the law? Obama, Reid and Pelosi had to throw every bone they could to get the thing passed. If the Republicans were willing to participate at all, we could have had a seriously better law passed. But they didn't. You know why the democrats wanted the law passed because anything to contain the rising share of the economy consumed by the health care industry. They had to do it or we were going to get totally hosed.
tl;dr You got no standing to complain, eat your moldy rat turds like everyone else.
Well, here is the distinction between your regular Joe-Shmo Republican, and your elected official Republican: The guy on the street is all for business. The guys in office are for whatever makes them richer. There is a similar gap on the Democrat side, too. Your regular Democrat on the street wants the type of socialism that gives a hand up to the poor. The Democrats in office want the type of socialism that gives the guys in power more money. This is why this whole left-right thing is stupid- the guys on the street both want to see their fellow man prosper. The guys in office want to further themselves. But they tell you it's right vs left so that you fight amongst yourself instead of stopping them from passing selfish laws.
The per-head fee should have been $32,767 ... whoever heard of a number like $32,400?
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
I thought that most liberal-leaning people have a love-hate relationship with Obama.
He was supposed to be their progressive knight in shining armor, but keeps doing all the usual political sell-outs to big business, big media, the security apparatus. No Wall Street guys did time, he kept fighting in Afghanistan, no real mea culpa on NSA monitoring. The only big liberal achievement was ACA, but even that seems a little compromised in many ways and I think hard-core progressives don't find it went far enough.
Of course Silicon Valley is also myopic on the subject of its own pet issues and I'm sure a lot of the love-hate is just self-centered -- he's not doing enough for my business/industry.
I can kinda understand why somebody who only reads a couple articles a year would think ACTA is illegal, but it's not. Here''s why:
Any treaty is legally binding on the US in the term of the guy who signed. However that doesn't mean much. It just means that, to the extent the President has the ability to order things, his orders complying with the Treaty are fine. So if Obama signed a treaty that said "Justin Bieber shall be fed to the badgers, and the Ambassador Bridge international crossing will be closed every May," the Treaty would be legally valid for Obama's term. Since Obama can't order people to be fed to badgers Bieber would be fine. Since he can order his border patrol to not let anyone you ain't using the Ambassador Bridge in May. If he wanted to close the Bridge in 2017 he'd have to get the Treaty ratified by the Senate, or convince his successor to sign the treaty, or just convince his successor to write an Executive Order. Since the government doesn't have the Constitutional authority to feed people to badger's, the Bieber bit of the treaty would never be valid no matter how often the Senate voted on it.
If the Treaty involves some change to US Law it's valid in the sense that it's binding on the US when the Senate ratifies it. It's not valid in the sense that you have to obey the damn thing until Congress passes a law complying with the Treaty. So if some treaty insisted we ban cigarettes you could still smoke until the House and Senate pass a bill banning cigarettes. In a lot of ways ratification is actually be a waste of time, because you'd need 67 Senators, whereas passing the statute only requires 50 (assuming the VP agrees with the Treaty). If the President signs the treaty on Monday, 35 Senators say "fuck you, we smoke" on Tuesday, and 50 Senators, the VP, and the House ban by statute the damn things on Wednesday, then cigarettes still get banned.
The enforcement mechanism in most treaties is other countries bitching when they're not complied with. Obama knows he's gonna comply with ACTA because our laws already comply with ACTA. He can sign it, which makes it binding on the US, but he doesn't need to have it ratified.
Are you kidding? I help run a small business and I am starting one myself. I am an independent, but it is recent policy changes from the current administration that has been strangling us. We have had to lay-off employees in preparation for the ACA changes. This admin has done more to strengthen big business and make life harder for entrepreneurs than I have ever seen. I have voted for both liberals and conservatives, but I will be very hard-pressed to vote for a liberal again after so many lies and broken promises.
And how would you have gotten insurance as an entrepreneur before the ACA's Exchange?
The answer is pretty simple. There are two possibilities:
1) You're young, with no kids, no expensive females in the household, and can convince the agent you have no pre-existing medical conditions. You will get insurance.
2) You wouldn't have insurance.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who says they "had to lay off" employees due to the ACA. IRL I've seen companies blame the ACA because they fired people and they thought they could make Obama look like a bad guy, and I've seen them hire more part-timers so they could get their 33-hour guys down to 29. I have never seen a company that actually fired people. The Act simply does not increase your per-employee cost that way.
Obama has been to Silicon Valley 14 times since he has been President, and the only time he ever made a public appearance was at Wallmart on Friday. Every other visit has been only for fund raising for the Democratic Party, not his reelection campaign. Of course when he was running he got a portion of that money since he is obviously _in_ the Democratic Party.
A few of the local talk radio station call us "Obama's Piggy Bank" because that's what he uses the area for. I personally find his behavior appalling. The least he could do is hold a few town hall meetings for the area that gets blockaded while he collects millions of dollars from various CEOs. Yeah, traffic in this area is already horrible and blocking roads for him makes things much worse. I'd enjoy being able to ask him a few questions myself, like "What about Transparency?" and "Why is TPP being classified?".
The majority of people I talk to in this area don't think highly of him either.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Both parties are anti-business, it just depends on the business. Anyone that claims otherwise is just a partisan or willfully blind.
You took the words right out of my hands. Each party celebrates the corporations which pay its bills, and part of that is attacking their respective competition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And this is exactly the kind of BS I was talking about.
I said nothing about who should care one way or the other about the debt. I said that the people who aren't in the very top tenth of the country don't give a shit about it. And they don't. I challenge you to find one poll in the past 50 years where the number one issue for most Americans has been the national debt. A real poll, not a push-poll from some activist outfit with an anti-government agenda. Good luck. It doesn't even make the top two economic issues very often (jobs always beat it, and if there's a recession on growth also beats it).
As for the debt in policy terms. I'm 33. I cannot remember a year in which anyone I knew said their top problem was inflation, because Reagan and Volcker licked stagflation back when I was a toddler. It seems to me that giving up something I want (and if you support the VA, the DoD, Social Security, and medicare you want the vast majority of Federal spending) to stop a problem that has not actually been a problem since I was four is probably not a wise use of government resources. In fact it seems to me that a lack of inflation is the major current economic problem, because if Apple's $160 Billion cash hoard was shrinking by 7% a year due to inflation they'd probably find something productive for it to do, rather then sitting on it.
It further seems to me that the logical way to prevent inflation caused by deficits, in the middle of a recession; is not gut programs that allow people to survive the recession, but to raise taxes on the masters of the universe who caused the damn thing.
Total US Health Spending is $8,895 per person. If your insurer charges you less either they think you won't cost that much, or they're idiots who will go bankrupt real soon now.
In your case the former is more likely. The fine art of figuring out how much an insuree will cost is called "Underwriting," and if you only paid $100 a month your state probably lets it's insurers do a hell of a lot of that shit. They don;t tell you they're giving you a discount for being male, and young; because they figure you might not like finding out they'd charge your sister/girlfriend/crush loads more in case she gets pregnant. They're definitely not telling you about any youth discount, because you know that in 10 years you ain't getting that discount. You know all those horror stories about people who got cancer and their rates tripled, or the insurer refused to pay their bill because they hadn't mentioned a mole on their application? Those mostly come from plans like yours.
Under ObamaCare a lot of that underwriting is illegal. They can do some age-based discrimination, pardon me under-writing, but a lot less then before. They also can't charge women extra to cover pregnancy costs. Which means that they have to get the money from somebody, and currently that somebody is you. Most people in your situation get substantial subsidies to cover the difference, but there are people who are self-employed, young, male, and make too much to get the subsidy.
So, in the short term ObamaCare screwed you and people like you. But in the long-term it's probably gonna be good for you. I guarantee you that at some point in your life you will be 50, and only a fool charges a 50-year-old man $100 a month for insurance that actually pays for medical care. Adding your wife to your old $100 a month plan would probably have increased the cost a lot because she's a woman of childbearing age, and wives have a much higher pregnancy risk then girlfriends.
As for your wife's new insurance, keep in mind that your wife can always switch jobs. If they go for the fine they'll save money, but they'll also have very pissed off people, a lot will probably leave, and it'll mostly be their top people who do leave because idiots who've been over-promoted have trouble finding work at the same level in other companies. So if they do go for the fine they'll almost have to give her a substantial raise to cover the insurance premium or lose lots of their employees.
And, for the record, if God had come down from Heaven in March of 2010 and made me Dictator I would not have passed ObamaCare. I would have passed a universal MediCare bill. One of the things I hate about the current system for paying medical bills is that it's so fucking complicated that you can't understand why one person would get charged very little money for insurance without putting literally weeks into researching the damn issue. Which in turn means that if somebody changes the system it's very difficult to tell any individual American what this will do to his bills, because odds are that even if he knows the technical vocabulary to describe his policy he isn't using the words right. You can say "In general most people will see reduced bills because the subsidy will cover some of it," but you can't get much more specific. It would be so much easier if Obama'd just fire the entire insurance industry, and the medical Billing Specialists, and all the other finance weenie parasites that have managed to get themselves good jobs in health care without doing anything that actually involves medical care.
But that couldn't have gotten through the Senate IRL, so we're stuck with a half-assed compromise that simplifies some things, complicates others, and is generally a pain in the ass.
Something just occurred to me about your wife's company dropping her insurance. Under the employer health exclusion her health insurance premiums aren't taxable. Anything else she gets as part of her job -- company car, life insurance, etc. -- is taxable. Here's how the math works. I'll use typical-ish numbers because I don't have the real ones. This is just to show why it's better for a company to spend money on health insurance then salaries.
Let's say your wife stayed single, made $40k, and had insurance of $10k. The company spent $50k on her, and she paid taxes on precisely $30k (the exemption this year was $3,900 and standard deduction was $6,100, she uses her exemption so she doesn't pay income tax on precisely $10k, most years the math isn't that neat). Checking out the tax table, she would have owed $4,058. In other words the company spent $50k on her, and she only got $45,942 of value out of it after federal taxes.
The penalty is $2k, and the company eats that and gives the other $8k as salary. Now we have $48k in income, minus $10k, is $38k taxable income. That's $5,435 in taxes. So the company spent the exact same amount, but your wife only gets $42,565 value.
In other words they didn't cut their expenses by a single penny, but your wife's take-home earnings went down $3,377. To make up a) the hike in taxes from earning the insurance premium as cash, and the $2k penalty they'd have to spend thousands more on your wife.
And they have to make it up to your wife or she'll quit, because very few people take a $3,377 pay cut and stays.