I could probably be more specific than "developer" but their user interface blows. It seems like some of that is intentional though.

Facebook created React which has revolutionized the web, maybe one day 2+2 will join in.

This isn't an honest question, honest debate in ****ing anathema to you.

But for the rest of the crew Twilight of the Elites is good and directly on point to this discussion.


What I want is not for you to buy a book you'll never read. What I want is you to stop trying to sarcastically score points, or constantly try to prove how Logical and Smart you are. What I want is you to display some ****ing selfawareness and realize that everyone who yelled at you about Thiel was right, and you were wrong, and you should think about WHY you were wrong so you don't make the same mistake in the future. If we're so dumb, if we're so impotent, if our critiques lacked logic rigor and had far too many fedora-offending social proofing personal attacks:

How come we were right?

Omg I'm so disappointed in myself. I nearly added, "I've already worked a line¹ from Twilight of the Elites into a speech I did on inequality, btw." (The speech was at a Toastmasters contest. The transparent Trump voters in the judging panel were not entertained. I did not win.)



Open to a second recommendation, however.

What point of fact was Thiel obviously wrong about? Here is the text of his speech to the National Press Club. Doubtless there are some mistakes of some kind, but he mostly just recited statistics such as, "64% of people over 55 have less than a year of savings to their name."

In his mind,

I don't think that's obviously wrong. It may not be consistent with your best intuitions about the world, but that's hardly surprising since he has a very different set of values and life experiences than you do.

Honestly, all I remember is a bunch of posters calling Thiel stupid because (I guess?) he didn't get that Supreme Court clerkship coming out of Stanford Law and had to settle for founding PayPal.

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¹ "The playing field may be level, but certain kids get to spend nights and weekends practicing on it in advance of the competition." (pg 40)

"Literally but not seriously", for ****'s sake. I asked you repeatedly to address that, you kept dodging it. It was like last page?

Let's pump the breaks on books until you master "forum posts", ok, champ?

"I guess"

Maybe try reading instead of just devoting new ways to weaponize autism. Your alt-right buddies want to put you in a ****ing oven, you know that, right?

You might have been too busy prepping for Toastmasters to hear the news, but apparently he endorsed Donald Trump.

Knowing how vigilant Subfallen is when it comes to any hint of anti-antisemitism, he's gonna flip his **** when he hears that there was a literal Neo-Nazi in the President's cabinet thanks in small part to people like Thiel.

Yeah there's this weird thing where Subfallen is pretending the issue people had with Thiel was one speech he gave ABOUT the Trump movement like he's a pundit, instead of a guy who gave a ****ing speech at the RNC. Thiel(and by extension, Subfallen) was a full throated supporter of Trump. And now Subfallen will obviously try to distance himself from this thing Trump did or that thing, but Thiel hasn't ****ing recanted, he hasn't criticized Trump at all so far.

So again, Subfallen, why were we right? How'd we pull that off? If your answer is "no but if I pretend that I don't remember what the issue was then I won't have to address any points", well, there we go.

The left likes her. Establishment democrats, not so much

We are not communicating. Let me try to explain my thoughts more clearly.

Everyone agrees there are serious problems in America. (I think factory farming is by far the worst, but let's restrict to problems that are experienced immediately by humans.)

We could make a very long and diverse list of problems.

However, since there are so few ideologies with real mindshare---just capitalism, liberal humanism, and some vestiges of nationalism---the problems on the list would almost all fit into one of these categories:

1. Scarcity.
2. Inequality.
3. Stagnation.
4. Attacks on freedom.

You, and most of the posters ITT, are extremely and predominantly concerned with problems in Category #2. (If I may speculate: because you have largely avoided the problems in the other categories.)

However, some people are predominantly concerned with problems in other categories, such as---in Thiel's case---Category #3.

I believe you would accept a large risk of exacerbating problems in Category #3 if you felt that it would help with progress on Category #2. I also believe Thiel has the opposite inclination, and I do not think that he is "wrong" to measure value in this way.

I hope this clarifies things. In particular: If you think I should be SHOCKED that Thiel would roll the dice for possible progress in Category #3, even though Trump clearly represents a threat to Category #2---then I simply disagree with you.

Fwiw, Toastmasters is a great place to meet people who trend lower class and are not-so-abundantly endowed with youth, money, good looks, social skills, or the common sense to speak English as their first language.

People with problems in all categories, that is.

In classical economics (Adam Smith anyway) stagnation causes inequality.

But, w/e. Anyone who picked Trump to move any of those four items in the right direction is an idiot.

This is either veering wildly off on a tangent or is the crux of the whole thing, but:

https://gigaom.com/2010/08/04/facebo...tents-for-40m/

It's like, you can name your car Tesla but it doesn't mean you're a bunch ****ing Teslas.

I think Facebook sucks as a product and much of their attitude towards users sucks, but building a big organization does deserve some credit if it's a good organization. Amazon is supposedly hell. I haven't heard much about what it's like inside Facebook.

Also I'm not sure how gutting education is supposed to help with stagnation.

Nitpicking but I don't think anyone on the left really thinks Warren is ideal (e.g., to avoid No True Leftist debates, let's assume the left is something like the editors of Jacobin magazine or something like that). If we mean 'the left' as like Chris Hayes or Matt Yglesias or something like that, then sure.

She's obviously roughly ~the best you can expect right now, relative to what the dominant political parties offer. But she is, in the end, a member of the established elite and a professional Democrat. As Autocratic said, the issues she champions are not quite stridently leftist but more good governance and consumer protection and market oversight, rather than a strict critic of capitalism or someone who really wants to upend the status quo. She was even a Republican until the mid 90s. No great sin, people can evolve, but I think it speaks fundamentally to her character as someone who was comfortable with the GOP far into her adult and professional life, at least before it evolved into a formal ethno fascist party run by idiots like Trump. I would hardly consider her the best approximation of the leftist ideal. Sanders is probably closer.

Obviously she's far better than HRC, 90% of other established Democrats, etc. but that's faint praise.

I didn't claim they did. You're inventing nits to pick.

It's a simple ****ing question. Answer it.

We aren't "communicating" because you're still trying to show off how ****ing smart you are, but homie, TED talks aren't textbooks. You aren't trying to communicate. You want a ****ing headpat for having grownup opinions? Get some of them, then. This ****?

[written word vomit deleted]

This was all absolutely ****ing gibberish, Subfallen. The world is a very real place with very real problems, not a ****ing thought experiment. Real people's lives have already been made worse under Trump. Thiel wanted that. That says something about Thiel, and that says something about you. That you're still dissembling about it instead of honestly grappling with the fact that hated non-STEM normies used their dirty Jew trick "empirical knowledge about the world" instead of "assuming self-congratulatory premises and deducing" says even more.

You're so ****ing used to traveling in the internet circle of clueless white dudes you can't even CONCEIVE that some of us actually know what the **** we're talking about.


But just to embarrass you,

1) What stagnation-related policies did Clinton propose compared to Trump to make her worse for that?

2) 100some days in, what steps has Trump made?

You think this **** is just a game, but you confused Reddit posts by 37 year old virgins who work in mall video game shops with cutting edge academic scholarship.

Thiel is a racist, Thiel is anti-egalitarian, Trump explicitly gave Thiel what he wanted on those fronts, and they shared a common kinship over being petty dumb****s. This has always been very simple and easy to understand.

Well sure, but I'm really getting at how in the tech industry the worker<->boss relationship gets extremely blurred, mainly because the workers are paid very well. Which to some people I suppose would be enough. But with Facebook it's just another case of a Great Man hiring another Great Man who in turn hires a bunch of random nobody engineers who actually solve the problems and ensure the smooth running of the operation.

My Tesla example is probably a bit unfair but it's the same concept. Eberhard and Musk et al aren't actually creating the ****ing cars.

I'm guessing Thiel's thoughts are strongly informed by Margo and Goldin's work on "the Great Compression" of relative wages caused by World War II. They initially focused on the structural effects of the war: A sharp increase in demand for unskilled labor, followed by a large increase in the relative supply of educated labor.

Later, they moved on to the factors that kept wage growth equal across top and bottom incomes from 1945 to 1975. They identified three factors:

1. The rise of unionization;
2. The decline of trade;
3. The decline of immigration.

Let's consider (2) and (3).

(2) In a sharp departure from the Great Compression era, the share of imports in U.S. GDP grew from 5.4% in 1970 to 16.5% in 2014. Labor embodied in the imports must be understood as a substitute for domestic labor; hence directly undermining the demand for unskilled labor that supported the Great Compression. (As a case study see Autor, et al., who calculated that Chinese imports from 1990 and 2007 accounted for about a quarter of the decline in manufacturing employment during that period---while also lowering wages, reducing the labor force participation rate, and raising publicly financed transfer payments.)

Also note that the inroads of imports go beyond final goods, because global trade encourages both firms and countries to increasingly specialize in different stages of production. (E.g. increases of automobile parts more than doubled between 2001 and 20014, causing many U.S. parts manufacturers to move their domestic factories abroad, especially to Mexico; c.f. "How the Vise on U.S. Wages Tightened").

Taken together, increased import penetration and outsourcing represent the combined effect of global free trade on domestic employment and wages; and this effect is substantial.

(3) By the 1990's, immigration had accelerated to the point that it accounted for more than half of total labor force growth in the United States between 1995 and 2005. More broadly, the share of foreign-born workers in the labor force steadily grew from 5.3 percent in 1970 to 14.7 percent by 2005.

Immigrants have a hugely disproportionate negative effect on the wages of low-skilled workers as compared to the general work force. (Again, directly undermining the conditions of the Great Compression era.)

So in particular, if you care about broad-based domestic wage growth---as Thiel most certainly does---there is a solid, empirical case to be made that open borders and free trade are disastrously bad policy.

======
[Edit -- These comments are drawn heavily from Chapter 18 of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which I believe I've recommended to you before.]
======

All that said, I doubt Thiel was optimistic that a President Trump would actually do something about any of this. But President Clinton would have certainly increased free trade and open borders; so, given his values, she was not really a possible choice.

This would also be a good time to REPEAT that I am a strongly avowed globalist, and don't give a **** if American citizens suffer at the expense of Bangladeshi textile workers, Indian technologists, or Chinese industrial engineers.

I do not share Thiel's values; I simply don't think he is somehow "wrong" for that reason alone.

I would like to point out, again, that you treat social proof as a guide to objective moral truth.

If you were aspirational middle-class in China or India, the idea that non-STEM is "normal" would never occur to you.

"Normal" in those countries is to put in very long, hard hours learning STEM, because empirically these skills and habits of mind are the most important in the modern world.

Thiel has a BA and a law degree. Zuckerberg, Gates, and Woz were dropouts.