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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.
The tech executives just want to keep the gravy train of cheap, captive H-1B visa holders. I have been a Democrat all my life, donated many times to President Obama--and would vote for him again in a heartbeat. Hillary Clinton is the first Democratic presidential candidate in my life that I cannot support. I am senior enough in my field to have never had my personal job touched by an H-1B visa holder. (They are dishonest morons.) The way it's run, the entire H-1B visa program is a scam. So, I will be voting for Dr. Jill Stein. I will be damned if I will vote for Clinton. I've done that enough. She supports rich tech billionaires--not me--and I will return the favor. I would rather suffer through 4 years of Donald Trump instead of allowing Hillary Clinton to screw us.
What about the distaste trump would be for human rights?
Trump openly supports torturing non-citizens without even a trial to make sure they are guilty of anything.
Trump supports killing the innocent family members of terrorists (this while claiming to be Christian even though the bible specifically forbids killing family members of criminals).
Knowing these two facts, which Trump has proclaimed and stated repeatedly .. How can anyone support Trump? You would have to be evil.
>> 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.
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.
He'll run the fiber and make AT&T pay for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Simple, the government redefines high-speed Internet as 56Kbps. Problem solved.
I don't get the hate on Trump.
Really? Despite the fact that he clearly and deliberately goes out of his way to spew as much controversial vitriol as he possibly can?
The President does not control H-1B. Congress does.
The President DOES control the INTERPRETATION and the ENFORCEMENT of the rules - including choosing to avoid enforcing them.
When the laws are not enforced, businessmen who follow the law are at a severe competitive disadvantage to those who violate them. In a highly competitive market this quickly shakes out so that there are two categories of businessmen:
- Those who violate the law and get all the contracts.
- Those who don't violate the law, don't win any contracts, and are now out of business.
We saw that up close and personally when we did some home improvement a few years back. We couldn't find ANY contractors whose line workers weren't illegal aliens.
(We discovered this in the case of, and had it explained by, our siding contractor,. We went to take photographs of the added wiring in the walls when the siding was off, and all his workers became very upset that cameras were in use.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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...
"Trump would be a disaster for innovation," wrote 145 technology leaders in an open letter
In the UK, Michael Gove, an Oxford graduate, Times journalist, Cabinet minister and leading campaigner to leave the EU, said recently, âoepeople in this country have had enough of expertsâ.
His side of course won (though he personally hasn't, now being out of government) and that is the constituency Trump appeals to, one which no longer trusts rationality and expertise and is often, sad to say, receptive to any old rubbish as long as it's simple, appealing and delivered with conviction.
Who can blame them? They're told each time, "Experts say vote for me and everything will be great", only to find that decades on, they're no better off, their town has become slightly more crappy and their kids can't find jobs.
It's hard to say what Trump himself believes in; so far it looks like Trump and money.
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>."
The Brexit "leave" voters, like Trump voters and many Sanders voters, aren't so much irrational as dissatisfied. They do not perceive that the system is working for them, and therefore they intensely distrust people who are tied up with the system. They'll listen to people who claim to want to break up the system as it exists, in the hope that they'll be better off when everything settles again. When the "elites" promise them more of the same if they vote the right way, they vote some other way.
The problem here is that the American Dream is simply not working for a lot of people. Many people graduate from college with large student debts and few good job prospects, and there's at least the perception that more jobs than ever require college degrees. In the 1950s, any reasonably able white man could get a factory job that paid enough to support a family in a small house (or at least that's the myth), and get a decent if limited lifestyle and retirement pension off nothing but hard work. Currently, minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, and many employers cap hours at 30 a week to avoid having to provide any benefits, meaning that many of the working poor have to work two jobs. Pensions have largely gone away, and many of the ones that did exist were underfunded or looted and didn't pay out what they were supposed to.
Talk to these people and tell them about how life is better, and they don't believe you. Tell them that voting one way will bring a collapse of the system, and they don't care. What these people need is fundamentally an opportunity to work hard forty hours a week for a halfway decent lifestyle, and a certain amount of security. One thing that would help greatly is some sort of health care system that would be separate from employment and prevent medical issues from turning into bankruptcies. Also, these people are not going to be sympathetic to other people, because of their own problems they can't escape.
As long as there's a large number of quietly desperate people, candidates like Trump will have drawing power. We're not talking about intellectual giants with a nuanced appreciation of the political landscape here, for the most part, and tactics like blaming people's problems on scapegoats has a lot of appeal. That's a tactic that has been tested time and again.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes