
Peter Thiel’s Bet on Donald Trump Pays Off - CapitalistCartr
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/peter-thiel-bet-donald-trump-wins-big.html
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sgnelson
It's two days after the election and the NYT is proclaiming that Thiel's bet
has paid off. It's way too early to say this. For whatever political pull
Theil has gained, I believe he has (at least potentially) lost a lot of
respect in other areas. Does that matter? maybe, maybe not. But my point is,
it's a bit too early to tell in either case.

This is a true example of don't count your chickens before they're hatched.

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harscoat
"against Senator Bernie Sanders,..., it “would have been much tougher for
Trump to win, and a healthier race for the country."

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M_Grey
Lets wait a few years, and see how the economy fares (not to mention rights
for gay people) before we declare a payoff for Thiel.

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internaut
I wrote this essay (from my HN comments) about Peter Thiel before Trump got
into power.

[https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-
wolfe-b8de...](https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-
wolfe-b8de..).

And here is the original comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413)

Here is a teaser:

"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that
they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even
a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of
a strange mad billionaire.

If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see
something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours
or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is
going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel,
with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained
(100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second:
he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to
their tribe.

This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very
difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."

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amyjess
...and now every other executive in SV is pushing for Calexit.

It would be something if the end result of Thiel backing Trump is that Silicon
Valley ceases to be part of the United States.

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sodafountan
LOL, Silicon Valley thrives on Wallstreet's dollars, they'd leave and the
whole ship would sink within the first hour.

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ewood
Well, they're not "Wallstreet's dollars", it is international capital and it
is happy to invest anywhere so long as it believes it will get a return.
Possibly even happier to invest in an independent California if the government
is likely to be beholden to its needs.

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nickthemagicman
Why does Theil want a candidate against net neutrality?

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k__
Maybe he wants to make money with charging people twice?

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TorKlingberg
It would be unfortunate for the tech industry if Thiel gets to act as their
representative in Washington.

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sitkack
But ultimately what they want.

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draw_down
Yes, hard to deny it's been a good year for him. Unfortunately.

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ythl
I remember the last Thiel thread was a holy war filled with people who thought
outspoken Trump supporters should lose their careers on grounds of bigotry and
hate speech propagation (citing
[https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/) among other things).

Revisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump
supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.

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M_Grey
Look at the numbers; they're still a vocal minority, they're just ones who
vote as a bloc and have the geographic advantage. Trump got less than Romney
after all.

The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the
voting process, the winner is _always_ going to be decided by a "vocal
minority".

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mrep
> The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the
> voting process

Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours
researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting
dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an
election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money,
multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then
multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your
personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.

I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.

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muninn_
"multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then
multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your
personal economic outlook"

No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the
polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay
to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I
extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote.
Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy
where we get to vote to choose our representatives.

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mrep
> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a
> democracy

Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it
would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having
everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the
population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.

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M_Grey
You'd need _perfect_ security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially
easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a
process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be
lost on you.

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mrep
True, but our current system is more like security through size in that we
hope the sheer number of votes drowns out voter fraud.

They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the
other.

