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by sahila 795 days ago
Your comment does make me think that really the only acceptable voice to voice in a company like Google is to be a democrat. But I bet a bunch are actually Republican and want lower taxes for the wealthy (of which Googlers benefit some) but won’t say it aloud.
1 comments
seanmcdirmid 795 days ago
Hardly any of my coworkers (I work at Google) are American-born, many are not citizens, they have way different political cultures than the classical American ones. We rarely discuss politics at work, not because no one is interested, but because political ideas are so diverse, it would be super awkward to talk about Biden or Trump, it might make more sense to talk about Xi or Modi, but that is way out of my comfort zone. Maybe if I knew more about Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern politics I could...chat about something? Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.

Many techies are also "liberal libertarian": they want the government to stay out of a lot of things. They want..low taxes, but also want the government to stay out of their bedroom, not dictate their life saving medical decisions, they want to wear whatever they want regardless of biological gender, they just don't fit in with the current Republican party which has thrown off libertarian values in favor of going deeper into the culture wars.

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skissane 795 days ago
> Yes, no one likes Trump, but if that is only 50% true in the USA, it is 99% true in the rest of the world outside of maybe Russia.

Pew did a survey on this in Spring 2019, [0] found that confidence in Trump was only 20% in Russia, compared to 28% in Brazil and Canada, 32% in the UK, 35% in Australia, 36% in Japan, 42% in South Africa, 46% in South Korea, 51% in Poland, 58% in Nigeria, 65% in Kenya, 71% in Israel, 77% in the Philippines. Now, of course, a lot has happened since then, and no doubt if you ran the same survey today, you'd get different results. But there's a lot more pro-Trump sentiment in the world than you think, and it isn't always the countries you'd expect.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

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seanmcdirmid 795 days ago
That survey is old. He used to be more popular for sure, but then he had a bad track record internationally as president. I remember before leaving China in 2016 many Chinese at work (so all techies, but not American) telling me they liked Trump. Today you wouldn’t hear that.
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skissane 795 days ago
Lacking newer survey data, it is hard to say. I would totally believe his overall global popularity has fallen since 2019, but unlikely to 1%.

A poll last month in Israel found 44% of Israelis preferred Trump to Biden, versus 30% the other way around. [0] Of course, Israelis have some rather specific reasons for feeling this way, but they may not be the only country for which that is true.

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-44-of-israelis-pref...

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