> The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless ..
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
We already do this between states in the US and in the EU, so clearly it can work in practice. We don't normally look at it that way, but that is precisely how we structured things.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
That age discrimination post VC infection is real. Back when I started in 90 we had senior engineers with white hair. I distinctly remember brushing aside my father's advice when he cautioned me about such things. "No, not in software. It is a pure meritocracy". Hah. (Implicit lesson: listen to your elders /g)
Second lesson then was that engineering as a career is for chumps; young ones: start your own business.
Age discrimination is real, of course, just about everywhere.
My experience though is different to yours. I joined a bootstraped company in 1992 as emp number 1. Basically me and the founder. We were both in our 20s.
In those years everyone in computers was young. We had no "adults in the room". We did a lot right, and a bunch wrong. I grew a beard to look older. When we had programmer user-group meetups everyone was our age.
That hasn't really changed, except now we are the grey beards :)
Of course we had young workers, I was one of them. Except we also had actual grey beards and -no one- ever said silly things such as "anyone over 30 is over the hills" as was the norm (here on HN) in the 21st post "internet". It was very much a different field, and yes, my first two jobs were with startups, as a matter of fact.
I am 50. Been in software development since 1996 and found it easier to get jobs post 45 than ever. I did my first stint at BigTech at 46 and found what most would consider good paying jobs within 3 weeks both in 2023 and last year.
The time window you indicate here is too narrow for the topic under discussion, and thinking in partisan terms about the dysfunction of this republic an error, in my opinion. At the foundational (practical not ideological) level, the complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US. It is possible they did not foresee the black swan of Trumpism and now a faction of the ruling elite is being excised through mechanisms of their own making. But that would not absolve them of the responsibility for where we are today.
No, pjc50 is right. Republican politicians are scared of their leader because their primary elections are completely at his mercy. The reason for Congress's dysfunction today is 100% a partisan issue. No need to blame "elite power centers".
Eh, there's something in "complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US": in that all of them backed an increasingly dysfunctional Republican party, as a means of avoiding problems they didn't want to have solved (post industrial areas, police violence, fake news, money politics and so on)
The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.
Even before Trump Congress was at a standstill because R would just say "no" to absolutely everything. Doesn't matter what it was, it was "no". They fight tooth and nail for any kind of solution to anything.
The only time Congress gets anything done is with a blue majority.
The core plank of the Repub strategy has been to eschew bi-partisanship. It is the home of the Tea party movement, because it kept feeding its base red meat, and then never actually delivering. Trump is lauded by his base, because he treats the political theater as reality.
Please remember, during Trump 1, liberals and centrists reached out constantly to the Republican rank and file, and never made progress. You cannot overcome a media and political machine built to prevent such progress and dialogue.
Typically, empires attracted the top 10% of the peripheral/vassal nations. Look at Rome, for example. It is a sign of global standing that premier educational institutions of country X are flooded with the top performers of the other nations. Most importantly (and this is the reason this has been practiced by world powers throughout history) having the elite of a nation be educated in one's institutions guarantees a sizable cadre of influential men and women who go back home and create an 'Atlanticist' front.
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
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