It's about time Y Combinator has executives who aren't so busy with politics. It gives the whole incubator, startup scene, etc, a bad name.
The good ol' days are over. I still have in my mind Y Combinator of Paul Graham (a man wise with his words), but given that we've already had even Sam Altman in control of it.
I'm guessing YC nowadays is not that different from private equity/VCs like A16z, which enjoy having their fingers on everything. Typically, it is stuff they don't know much about and look plain stupid.
I hope PG can bring the good ol' days back someday, when it was about entrepreneurship, having people laser-focused on building disruptive companies.
> COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.
> GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.
> Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.
He even goes as far to call this "broken" — it's literally democracy.
I guess it is the formal definition.
In Australia we have a slightly different version. We don't prevent the crazies from voting. Instead we insist everyone must vote, including the crazies. Turns out when you do that the non-crazy voters outnumber the rest by a considerable margin.
A weird thing happens when you make voting compulsory. Another bunch, which I now regard as crazy, insists they should be free to not vote. They get fined. (I have a vision of what would happen in the USA if someone proposed compulsory voting. It's far left and far right politicians who would be thrown out if the centre voted, inciting their following to riot in the streets, shouting "Freedom!")
It's kinda funny, because they are allowed to not vote. The actual requirement isn't to vote because it's impossible to police. The requirement is to turn up at the polling place and have your name recorded. You can write whatever you damned well please on the voting slip. After most elections the country gets to have a laugh at the insults and pornographic images that have been inscribed on those slips.
It's also funny because these crazies are insisting they have a right to not participate in the democracy. And they don't. Those that do participate then pass rules to fine them, and the non-participants get pissed off about that and demonstrate their now white hot anger by not voting again.
And I bet you thought I was being harsh for calling them crazy. It's like watching someone put their hand in a fire, and not remove it because it hurts.
And that is an excellent example of why compulsory voting works. The voices of the crazies literally get drowned out by the people who would otherwise be too lazy to vote. Or perhaps they just figure they are in the centre, know stuff all about the candidates, and most other people are reasonable like them so they won't change the outcome. But it turns out if most normal, reasonable, uninformed people remove themselves from machinery of democracy, what you get left with is crazies voting for crazies.