[anigbrowl]

A lot of people on HN do know something about it, both as techies and as residents of the area. Listening to their opinions or not is your prerogative, but if you live in California I wonder what criteria you feel she should be evaluated on besides her history running a tech giant.

[hugh3]

but if you live in California I wonder what criteria you feel she should be evaluated on besides her history running a tech giant

Indeed, taking her experience into account, and comparing it to that of Barbara Boxer, is a good idea when you're deciding for whom to vote (unless you're just going to vote on ideology as most people do anyway). But the subject then is still "politics" rather than "tech news".

[anigbrowl]

This has never stopped you before :)

Incidentally, I do think she has a chance of victory. And I also think she and boxer share the same weakness - lack of answers for the underlying problem. Fiorina and other CEOs didn't outsource thousands of jobs to Asia because regulatory compliance was tedious, they did so because the skill level required for a great many jobs is available at a fraction of the price elsewhere. Even if we cut the price of doing business in the USA by 25% in the morning and made administration, regulation and healthcare cheap and easy for all, low-tech manufacturing and services would still be a lot more expensive in the USA than in China or India, and within a few years we'd be back to where we are now.

We need internal reforms, and there are some valid proposals for what to reform and how from both the left and the right. But the big question, to which neither party has proposed any good answers, is how to productively employ the least skilled members of the workforce so that they can have a reasonable level of economic security. People often talk about reviving US manufacturing; that sounds like a fine idea, but first we must identify what we can make that everyone will prefer to buy. In other words, what comparative advantage do we have in manufacturing over the developing world? If no such advantage exists, how can we redeploy that part of our labor force?

I like the green jobs idea, but wind turbines and solar panels can't make up 5% of the economy for the long term.