zlacker

>>etc-ho+(OP)
Y... ikes!

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.

>>thiago+r8
> GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

> 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.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/paul-graham/

>>amadeu+Hb
the sage wisdom of "the problem with politics is that the people who get the most votes win"

>>microm+ec
I get you are being sarcastic, but the real problem is people don't vote and you see this at every level of government office. Other than the president, it's hard to engage people (which I don't really fault them for) and so you end up with politicians - all across the field - who do nothing but pander to the most extreme voters.

>>nemoth+Tg
Compulsory voting is an option.

>>Affric+JE1
The issue is voters are uneducated. You get compulsory voting you get the same issue with the california prop system scaled out: where people are given a choice and vote on what feels right from the proposition name and two sentence description alone. Research and looking into bias be damned.

>>kjkjad+LR1
No, it's not.

Compulsory voting drives engagement. Representative democracy saves the public from themselves.

The vast majority of people vote for who they trust.

>>Affric+KX1
Look at Australia. They have compulsory voting and a government that sells off natural resources to the highest bidder same as many others. Many Australians just get drunk on election day and write in “banana.” You can’t force people to care about something using the law that they don’t already care about.

>>kjkjad+z34
To be fair Australia doesn't really have a choice in the matter due to forces outside of the country. Any political leader who tries this doesn't remain leader for very long.

Most of the public is aware of this, and will probably continue to accept it as long as the general standard of living doesn't fall to much.