Some big names in Silicon Valley have a simple message after Donald Trump's victory: We want out.
Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor and cofounder of Hyperloop, posted a series of tweetsTuesday night announcing his plans to fund "a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation."
And no, he's not joking.
"Yes it's serious," Pishevar told CNNMoney in an e-mail. "It's the most patriotic thing I can do. The country is [at] a serious crossroads."
Within hours, several other tech founders offered their support for the plan.
"I was literally just going to tweet this. I'm in and will partner with you on it," Dave Morin, an investor and founder of private social networking tool Path, tweeted in response to Pishevar.Fine; go ahead and ban everything but Nerf guns, and take the 9th Circus of Clowns with you, but you can't whine when half the counties in California (including the ones that grow your food) secede from California to get away from your progressive idiocy. Remember what happened when Virginia seceded; West Virginia left Virginia.
This is what happened the last time Democrats who were obscenely rich had a fit over a Republican President. And how did that work out? By the end they were poor and their slaves were free. To satirize Horace Greely's response to Southern secession: "Erring perverts, depart in peace."
UPDATE: JN Gibson has some useful and interesting thoughts on the madness of CalExit. I confess that I have given some thought for a prequel to the sci-fi novel that I am slowly writing where both the U.S. and Canada break up because of the fundamental fascism of Ottawa and DC. (And yes, many Canadians in the prairie provinces have the same warm feelings for their national government that many Americans have: largely driven by gun control, energy, and traditional values.) In this prequel, the newly independent prairie provinces and many Western states (but not the coastal ones) including Alaska and Texas unite into a truly federal government, with a revised largely U.S. Constitution (because of our dominant population and overbearing nature), with some federalism teeth to it.
With Alaskan, prairie province, Wyoming, and Texas oil and Wyoming coal, a modest electronics and software industry, Great Slave Lake's uranium deposits and the nuclear missiles turned over by sympathetic officers, the new Northwest States of America uses its blockage of California food to the East Coast (not practical to ship and no air routes across our air space, they force accommodation on shipping to the Pacific as a trade for transport to the East. As a novel, it might be tendentious, but written as a future history book about the breakup of Canada and the U.S., it might be entertaining.
My own take on CalEXit: http://www.jngibson.com/blog
ReplyDeleteAt some point, somehow, voting needs to be restricted to only those with skin in the game, and knowledge of history, both national and international.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, I'd like to see it return to the original format, by household, to limit the women from voting for socialism. That appears to be what happened when they got the vote early in the 20th. They were acknowledged by FDR to be his power base, and enabled him to pursue his progressive goals.
I think it was Heinlein who had a story about a space power USA that had a military revolt, and one of the changes they instituted was a comprehensive test that was required to be allowed to vote. The more popular story was Starship Troopers, and the public service required to acquire voting rights. The current method of allowing anybody, warm or cold(!) to vote is incredibly stupid. The majority seem to end up simply relying on emotion to make voting decisions, and that is a guaranteed disaster.
All I have to say is "Take off"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSb_VHmfgVk
Let them go. They get a significant amount of their energy and drinking water from out of state, their shuttered (or are in the process of shuttering) their nuclear power plant, they have import natural gas to make their "renewable" Ivanpah solar plant work, and the main source of their electricity, hydroelectric plants, are very sensitive to droughts, which are not unusual in Cali.
ReplyDeleteThey've chased away a significant portion of their businesses already, even movie filming goes elsewhere for cheaper and less restrictive locales, and who is going to buy all their smart phone?
The only thing that makes their ports useful is sending things to the rest of America, and given their inclinations they will try to tax that, which just means the shippers will move destinations to northern ports or thru the Panama Canal to east and gulf coasts.
But I'm sure President Trump - yannow, the guy who wants to renegotiate our foreign trade deals to better favor the US - will be happy to cut them some great USofA-First trade deals...
Also this will insulate the rest of the 49 states of the US from their pension debt bombs, which are just now starting to detonate, and they won't have Uncle Suger to call on for a bailout.
I say give the People's Republic of Californication a chance!