Internal trade barriers are a real problem, Canada is a country with a small population and vast resource wealth, so its odd that there are barriers between provinces.
Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
This makes for nice political slogans but Hank Asher had the entire state of Florida DMV records in the early 90s and we did nothing.
Then we did nothing after 9/11 and the patriot act. We did nothing between 9/11 and Snowden.
We did nothing after Snowden. We have literally done nothing in 35 years but now is the time to start?
Snowden is probably in political office in a society that had the will to do something about this.
At a deeper level, I think people would need to care more about the outcomes and higher order effects of political decisions and not just the emotional weight of political slogans. The fundamental problem is that is not the society we live in.
> how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?
You're mixing the places of horse and cart here - the ruling class is ruling because it's organized. Organization comes first, the presence of other organizations, be them ruling or not, has little bearing on the process.
> we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
That's what you do without organization. It still helps though, getting to the truth isn't easy these days.
The writing doesn't feel particularly out of character for Yegge, who has always been at least a bit like this. (Though I don't know if that's just him, or drugs as well.)
New Deal-era regulations on financial flows made it painful tax-wise to remove cash from a company. So you either had to pay it as dividends, or you invest it in R&D, wages, or benefits for employees (this is why companies used to have very plush benefits even for lower level managers). When combined with pretty aggressive anti-trust, it also funneled cash into business expansion via conglomerates.
Companies were asset rich (which is the seam of valuable companies that private equity has been strip mining for 40 years, but even those are running out now).
Share buybacks are more symbolic that the Reagan era made it easy to take cash out of companies, which led to a race to the bottom of extracting as much cash as possible while leaving little for operations, wages, or expansion.
In the U.S. context this impacts agencies that regulate industry and offer beneficial state services (healthcare, food inspection, pollution monitoring) and not services that impact state control (DHS, the military, or domestic secret police (FBI)).
The longstanding goal has been to undo the new deal