[nightwing]

Rich vs poor is even less meaningful divide than right vs left. For instance i am not rich but my goals are much better aligned with goals of rich people like Elon Musk and Aubrey de Grey, than with any of poor people.

The solution is not to take money from the rich, but to make the government more transparent and more inclusive. Now we only can vote for unknown bundles of policies in the form of people, and rich people can pay to change the bundle after it is voted in. The solution to that is to use e-voting to be able to change your vote for separate issues when you do not agree with the vote of your representative.

[surak]

In principal e-voting to increase transparency is a nice ideology, but how would you engage the people over time? I'm afraid this would rather cause an increase in fake news and the likes. The obvious case is the Brexit vote, that gave the people two options: a remain (no change) and leave (open ended in terms of how).

[nightwing]

With e-voting can keep mostly the same system we have now, but augment that with two small changes. 1) you can change your representative at any time, which changes the weight of his vote, 2) you can overrule your representatives vote on issues you care about.

In this way there won't be a situation like Brexit because after initial open ended vote people can participate in subsequent votes too, and can eventually decide that they don't want Brexit or want it even without any trade agreements.

Fake news, (or rather people not smart enough to distinguish fake news), will remain a problem, but democracy uses assumption that most people are smart enough, if this assumption is not true then oligarchs buying politicians is actually useful to the society, but i don't think this is very likely.

[Sharlin]

> Rich vs poor is even less meaningful divide than right vs left.

Which is why the author is careful to not use those words to describe the situation. Someone like Aubrey de Grey (who isn't even "rich" in this context) is as far from the oligarchy as can be.

[makomk]

If you look at the author's other writings, Aubrey de Grey is precisely the kind of wealthy person he thinks is looting the country at the expense of everyone else by not paying much higher taxes, though. Framing the discussion in terms of "the oligarchy" and "puppet masters" just makes for better rhetoric than telling us that he wants to turn the rest of the populace against the top few percent whilst leaving the handful of ultra-wealthy people relatively untouched (which is what his actual policies seem to do).

[agumonkey]

Does Aubrey talk about this topic ? I only read on his work and SENS.

[traderjane]

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I feel you’re talking about rich individuals and not rich people when you talk about Elon Musk.

[nightwing]

There are other rich people that are pretty cool and whose goals align with mine: Gates finances target malaria, Bezos works on Blue Origin, Thiel founded seasteading institute, etc. My point is not that all rich people are good, but that there is no poor people team vs rich people team. We can't team up with class of people, only with individuals.

[luckylion]

> For instance i am not rich but my goals are much better aligned with goals of rich people like Elon Musk and Aubrey de Grey, than with any of poor people.

I wonder what those goals are, or whether you just have a morphed idea of what goals poor people have.

[nightwing]

My main goal is to increase the number of people in the world, and to increase the opportunities they have. Because that also increases my opportunities too: living longer, having better computers, learning new physics, etc. will be possible only if other people work on this problems.

I did not mean that non-rich do not share this goal, (in fact most people contribute to this merely by their existence willingly or not). What i wanted to say is that being rich or poor is not a good criterion for division.

[PaulAJ]

Elon Musk's goal is to persuade you to give as much money as possible to him while paying as little as possible in taxes. If your goals are aligned then I expect you to be writing a cheque to him now.

Thought not.

On your second paragraph, the fundamental problem with democracy is that voters cannot have informed opinions about everything: there are simply not enough hours in the day. Without informed voters any vote is little better than a coin toss. Read https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-... and then think again.

[nightwing]

The method Elon uses for the persuasion is building rockets and taking money in exchange of services, i'll happily buy starlink internet when it is available. I have donated money to SENS foundation https://www.sens.org/.

> there are simply not enough hours in the day

Sure, that's why i do not propose to take referendums for everything, people give their votes to representatives who work hard to have informed opinions. The difference is that the vote can be changed anytime, and that on specific issues about which voter cares, the representatives vote can be overruled. Even if this overruling doesn't happen very often, the possibility of that will help the elected individual to keep voters interests at heart.

[mclightning]

Hmm I wouldnt consider Aubrey de Grey, rich in same basket as Elon Musk. I wish he was though.

[nightwing]

Yes, sadly he only had 10s of millions instead of billions, and i agree it would be amazing if he had billion.

But in the context of articles proposal of "coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class" even millionaires end up outside of "good forces".