By itself this is not that big of an issue. A much bigger issue is the gender imbalance that you find in certain localities due to local governments, universities and companies not taking this gender imbalance into account. But I’m glad that you brought up this issue.

There is the same kind of special snowflake attitude on here that ruined Reddit. You people only want to have your exclusive social bubble where you can sniff each other’s farts. I’m not interested in that.

Actually the whole of left-wing ideologies is based on the concept of fighting human hierarchies i.e. it literally predisposes the existence of an elite class. Capitalism/Socialism is only a subset of that. I’m not sure how you can be a human adult (?) with and kind of lived experience and claim that it all boils down to the economic system. Have you never interacted with other humans irl?

Can we agree that so far humanity has not manage to create an anti-fragile governing system? We engineer ever more complex governing systems, but humans keep figuring out ways to corrupt them. I cannot envision a system that would be anti-fragile, hence the need for periodic resets. Even my local council ruling over a village of a couple of thousand souls has been embroiled in corruption scandals.

Going back to the original topic, I don’t think it is the priority of the electorate to change the system. First they want to change the people in charge, which is a per-requisite to changing the system anyway.

My work got me an Macbook M3. After two weeks of dicking around with it, I went back to my Thinkpad. I don’t get it at all. I thought at least the hardware would be great, but I hate the hardware too. Too heavy, aluminum case feels fucking cold to the touch, screen still isn’t bright enough to work outside, keyboard has that fucked up layout. And although the M-series sets a nice trend, it currently cannot run GNU/Linux without lots of reverse engineering, so fuck that. My 2014 gen Thinkpad is a far better experience. I’m now even more convinced than ever that Apple is just a marketing cult.

With regards to the voting system, look at Germany. They have 6 parties and the AfD, but really only two choices. Having multiple parties doesn’t really make as much of a difference as you think it does. Political parties are formed from the same class of elites so they tend to converge on all political topics that matter. There is only divergence when you have another class of wanna-be elites trying to dethrone them. That would be the AfD or MAGA.

I think this is the crux of the problem: no matter the government and electoral system, you still end up with a government formed out of a narrow subset of the population, the elites of the day. This is inevitable because each political environment will select for some select few traits. And the only time you get disruption is when a new set of elites tries to dethrone them.

Now you can conjure some kind of system by which the government is explicitly not formed out of some elite class. Like worker councils or some such idea. However, you then run into a problems such as lack of continuity (governing terms being too short) and lack of expertise. There are also some advantages to having a government run by a (competent) elite class. So you see, it’s not so simple.

But overall the electorate feels excluded when you have a government that is run by people who are so alien to them and who are clearly completely disconnected from the everyday man. And unfortunately the only protest the electorate has is to vote for another set of wanna-be elites in the hope that the resulting political disruption will unset some of the most harmful of the current crop. It’s generally good when the elites are in-fighting.

He’s right though. One of the reasons the US is so technologically dominant is because of the brain drain. Of course there are also employers and employees who abuse and try to game the VISA system. That is also true.

I feel like people are talking over each other. The top 0.1% of talent goes to the US because the US has better growth opportunities and better prospects than any other place on earth. It’s not just about sourcing talent. It’s also about denying competitors that same talent.

It helped liberals pinkwash their crimes. Reminds me of that meme of the B-54 on a bombing raid with the pride flag on its side.

Left/Right does it actually matter?

Whether you have a more capitalist or more socialist system, you will still have an establishment, an elite class*. People are disillusioned with that class of people and want to kick them out. If we had a more socialist system we could still be in this same situation, so what does it actually solve? People just want to hit the reset button every so often when the elite become too greedy. That’s really all there is to it.

*Spare me your anarchist fantasies.