And here's why:

- It's simply conjecture, as far as I can tell. It even goes so far as to say "invariably", which is a pretty strong word for something with no data to back it up.

- It's not particularly well thought out, if I may say so respectfully. The reason the US has two parties is partly because of how the electoral system works - first past the post causes people to glom together in the center, as per the hotelling effect. This has advantages (lessens extremism in some ways) and disadvantages (less representative than a broader range of parties).

- I would expect a serious article on this topic to delve into other voting systems and their effects on parties, and representation of the spectrum of views held by the electorate.

So, this is what we get from someone who is without doubt a smart guy, who has been a member of our community for some time, and if his "karma" is anything to go by, is generally respected in his views on startups due to interesting and insightful comments.

Just imagine what happens when you start fiddling with those variables - more people who haven't taken part of the community, for instance, and the possibility for low-quality content becomes very high.

Whether or not this is the appropriate forum for this particular post, it's high time that hackers became politically aware. Existing power structures are set on criminalizing possession and usage of information in order to enforce artificial scarcity to maintain profits: Germany just passed a law declaring "hacker tools" illegal; the RIAA is now arguing that "making files available", even without copying, is infringement; there are provisions of the DMCA that make decrypting information you have legal access to illegal (DeCSS); Comcast is stopping BitTorrent transfers; patents threaten everyone; even your home Internet connection is severely throttled upstream to make you more of a consumer. The list could go on and on (Skype and new Federal eavesdropping-on-citizens-without-warrants "laws"; possible capital gains/income tax on virtual goods you've never sold; suing entire college student bodies at once in a fishing expedition for mp3 trading, etc., etc.)

There is an enormous amount of money to be made in the near term by plutocratic information restriction. Unfortunately the severe clampdowns threaten to change the model from wealth creation to wealth stagnation, and everyone loses as money transfer moves closer to zero-sum.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. ... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." -- Bill Gates

Very depressing. I initially thought the change was going to be a good thing, but it has taken all of 2 days for the site to turn into Reddit. There seems to be much evidence (reddit, digg, slashdot) that social news just doesn't work.

Admins: please kill this political thread.