[alsetmusic]

I strive to live in a version of the USA half as nice as the one you think we live in. We definitely didn't overthrow legitimate governments in the name of big business in South America, the Middle East, or even Hawaii. /s

I remember when I found out that a highly intelligent friend believed the earth was six-thousand years old. But at least he had the excuse that his idiotic religion was pushed on him since birth. Intelligent people on this site are sometime incapable of basic media literacy and I find it wholly depressing.

Keep voting against your interests while others of us fight you tooth and nail to try to make the world better for everyone (rather than just our own teams), even including you.

[tt24]

Sorry but voting in favor of the 1% is very much in my interest. A good chunk of HN will be able to relate to this as SWEs in the SF bay area.

[alsetmusic]

> Sorry but voting in favor of the 1% is very much in my interest.

Which is why people like me have to fight people like you tooth and nail. Despite having a very privileged life, probably similar to yours, I still want the best for everyone, not just my team. I pointed this out in my prior comment. You've now confirmed that you're too selfish to vote against your interests for the betterment of humanity. And you apparently have no sense of shame about it. Have a great holiday.

[tt24]

Correct. I have zero shame for voting in favor of the interests of myself and the people that matter to me.

Have a good holiday as well!

[pksebben]

Seeing this thread again scrolling through my comments, and after the holidays feeling perhaps calmer than when it was current. I'd like to make a case, invite you to look at things from a different angle, because I think we might have more common ground than it appears otherwise.

> I have zero shame for voting in favor of the interests of myself and the people that matter to me.

...and you shouldn't. It's better than fine to do so and you ought to work towards things that benefit you. This is something a lot of people seem to misunderstand when I talk about anything political, and it's likely a failing in how I communicate. I don't think that people should sacrifice themselves for the common good just because "it's the right thing to do". It isn't and that's never what I'm driving at.

When I (and perhaps others who share part of my worldview) talk about governance and lobbying and similar stuff, it's not out of a sense of pure morals or ethics - these are issues of ecosystems. Some shapes of systems are healthy and robust and others are self-destructive. Mesh networks are strong, centralized (and unreplicated) control systems are fragile - as an SWE you know this to be true.

What I'm arguing here is that it's in your interest to exist in an environment that:

- prevents an accumulation of power or control too tightly, to avoid single points of failure in decision and governance

- avoids recursive loops which have a habit of wastefully consuming resources and starving critical systems

- maintains flexible responsiveness to environmental conditions due to being reactive to the state of all constituent stakeholders / subsystems / individuals

The issue with the top 1% of the top 1% having too much power is that it breaks all those safeties, and is actually bad for those people too. What will happen in this kind of a situation is that the excessively empowered will desiccate the environment for everyone - including themselves.

You already see it playing out in the form of crumbling infrastructure, ballooning homelessness, economic shocks, and the empowerment of bad actors who take advantage of the disenfranchised masses. This is bad for you, too.