Slashdot Mirror
145 Tech Leaders Say 'Trump Would Be A Disaster For Innovation' (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNN: "We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation," wrote 145 technology leaders in an open letter Medium post published Thursday. Some of the leaders are from tech giants like Google, Facebook and Apple, others from small startups, venture capital firms, nonprofits and universities. "We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not," reads the letter, which was signed by well-known names like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, IAC's Barry Diller, Reddit's Alexis Ohanian and Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. "His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation," reads the letter, published by chief marketing officer at Color Genomics and former VP at Twitter Katie Jacobs Stanton. Moreover, Trump has shown "poor judgment and ignorance about how technology works," they wrote, citing his proposal to "shut down" parts of the Internet and the fact that he has revoked reporters' press credentials. "We stand against Donald Trump's divisive candidacy," the letter concludes. "We embrace an optimistic vision for a more inclusive country, where American innovation continues to fuel opportunity, prosperity and leadership." Meanwhile, Jon Swartz writes from USA Today that "If there was any lingering doubt as to tech's favored presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton put an end to that Tuesday with a tech plan that reads like a Silicon Valley wish list."
Translation: Trump would do something about importing cheap H-1B workers while Her Majesty wouldn't.
I'm not a Trump fan but I get the impression that many who like him believe he isn't bought and paid for like Hillary probably is. If they are right, it makes sense that these guys wouldn't want to lose their investment and have someone elected that isn't beholden to them.
Well now, I'm beginning to see him in a different light.
Remember, those are all the same tech giants who lied and said Americans don't have the qualifications so they need more H1-bs and they need to offshore to India. And some of them said that programmers over 30 don't get it.
So, they are just trying to protect their billions by convincing us peons that our interests are the same as theirs. Fuck'em - all of them!
And the word 'innovation' coming out their mouths is just insulting. Most of them are just goddamn advertising companies and makers of shiny toys. Gimme a fucking break. The last innovation that came out of Silicon Valley was routers/Cisco. Yep, everything since then has been consumer grade crap and just the reinvention of the wheel.
Those people need to get a dictionary and look at Hewlett and Packard's history - THOSE guys were innovators and THEY are MY benchmark.
Anyway, all the Silicon Valley people are just arrogant dicks with huge amount of self-importance and entitlement.
>> We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity
Translation: We prefer a corrupt government so we can get an endless supply of H1B visas to replace all our US workers with cheap foreign labor.
You'd knowingly support an insane person, just so you wouldn't get your feelings hurt. That's smart.
It's amazing how I wasn't even fooled for a fraction of a second about what they really meant.
As a tech worker who lives on paychecks rather than dividends, I couldn't give half a fuck about their huge margins or their eternally climbing share price. I'm sure that a lot of the C-levels will weep and gnash their teeth if they have to pay me an extra 10 20 or even 50 percent salary but how in a million years does this hurt me?
And no, I know it won't result in unemployment because I know that my work generates millions of dollars a year in ROI (summarizing here but I automate the jobs of insurance adjusters, call center employees and the like). My salary is a tiny fraction of the value I provide. There's an enormous amount of money on the table here. We're talking about companies employing thousands of employees and generating billions in profit. All the unlimited visa abuse does is put more of it in the pockets of C-levels, shareholders and the banks.
And frankly, fuck them. I have never wanted to vote republican so much in my life. All the right people are recoiling in horror at Trump. Know someone by their enemies indeed.
If it were only 4 years ... The next president will get to nominate a minimum of 2 judges to the Supreme Court. Probably 3. This will influence life in the USA for decades.
While I don't think that Clinton is a good candidate, I think that Trump will be far, far worse. He is already beholden to wealthy people (his campaign hasn't been self-funded for a long time now), his statements show that he has an utter lack of concern for the liberties that the Framers wanted people to have. His real policies may not be for the benefit of tech billionaires, instead, it is for the benefit of billionaires. Trump is a proven liar. He used charity money to buy himself a vacation (now he has paid, but only after being called out on the issue).
What's in his tax returns that he is hiding? It's obviously something that shows him in a bad light. My guess is that it shows that his income and net assets are actually far lower than he would like people to know. In other words, his claim to be such a great businessman are in part smoke and mirrors.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What Trump says and what will actually happen are obviously two different things. There are still checks and balances to keep him from running roughshod over human rights by himself. The H1B travesty is real, happening, and can only get worse under Clinton. I'd rather have a redfaced blowhard spouting off nonsense than this slippery bitch plunging the knife in even deeper than it already is. They're both clearly unfit for the job, but Trump entertains me while Clinton makes my blood run cold for multiple reasons.
Simple, the government redefines high-speed Internet as 56Kbps. Problem solved.
"You have to vote for one of them"
You absolutely do not have to and shame on you for saying that.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
What about all the foreigners trump will deliberately torture, maim and kill. And yes, he has stated he wants to target family members of terrorists (i.e., not just the terrorists themselves). This is no big deal to
you?
It's 1860 all over again.
Filthy rich racist plantation owners are outraged that a Republican is going to deprive them of their cheap labor force.
Watch out. In 1860, the plantation owners went crazy and declared an actual war after the Republican was elected. They conned all the poor southern whites into thinking that the enslavement of blacks was in thier best interests and that the fight was about "states' rights" (which IS a legitimate constitutional principle) but the only "State's Right" the plantation owners were concerned with was the one that was not a right: the right to own cheap slaves. Poor southern whites were concerned with their actual rights, but were so completely propagandized by the plantation owners and their newspapers that even to this day 150 years later thier descendants still stupidly think their ancestors were fighting for their own personal rights. Tradgic and Sad really. The new plantation owners are using Asians and Hispanics instead of Blacks, but they are still as racist as ever (oh, lots of WORDS about "tolerance", but still ACTUAL cheap labor of poor ethinc groups), and our society will pay for this evil for many decades to come, just as we've been paying for the earlier slavery.
The super-rich who get richer on the backs of slaves will generally stop at nothing to get richer, owning slaves after all is proof that, all pretenses aside, they have no morals. They also tend to be very good at convincing stupid poor free men to support them with vague promises that they too are getting some sort of spill-over benefit from the slavery. These silicon valley snakes will, no doubt, convince a bunch of stupid hicks that they will lose something if Apple has to bring work back to the USA. iPhone addicts will probably be most-easily convinved to help Tim Cook and his buddies make billions more for themselves while evading taxes. They'll even convice morons that Apple is on "their side" with a bunch of left-wing talk about "fair share" and "income inequality" - as Apple takes maximum advantage of cheap foreign labor, thus maximizing wage inequality and stuffing wads of cash into the pockets of all the liberal politicians who've been given Apple stock...
Just wondering. To the extent I know their political orientation, they are all quite partisan Democrats.
One tech person who was interviewed on Leo Laporte's "Triangulation" podcast a few weeks ago had an interesting perspective. Basically, there's a lot of very bad stuff entrenched in Washington DC that needs to get broken. The candidate most likely to break stuff is Trump; hopefully, he'll break more stuff that needs breaking than stuff that needs to not be broken.
Me, I'm probably going to vote Libertarian; I won't vote for either of the D or R <obscene characterization redacted>."
What Trump says and what will actually happen are obviously two different things.
"What he says he'll do is so insane he can't actually do it", is a frighteningly bad argument for supporting a candidate for the most powerful office in the world.
They're both clearly unfit for the job, but Trump entertains me while Clinton makes my blood run cold for multiple reasons.
Clinton will be another four years of the status quo, basically, but Trump's brand of insanity could well start WWIII.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.