Hi! I'm the immigrant in the story. For what it's worth I'm permanent resident, not allowed to vote. Furthermore, it's seen as an in-kind contribution, just like when you help building a stage for the campaign, only in online-terms. It's explained more in http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/us/politics/bernie-sanders...
I understand that it's a non-monetary contribution; my confusion is just on why we should treat them differently from monetary and why people think of them differently, even when they accomplish the same thing (deliver $X worth of value to a campaign), especially given that, for a foreigner to contribute money is a serious crime.
(Less of an issue in your case since you're not some random Chinese government official but an actual US resident with legal status who can stay.)
That's a great thing to think about. IMHO, it's about worth and intent - as with any. And as with any software development, it's all relative. For me - personally - coding the map was a way for me to practice leaflet, which I've always been interested in learning, and at the same time D3. I never really thought about or even expected the campaign reaching out to me. The original map which is in bernie2016events.org used to take events from meetup.com and facebook.com, which I have scraped and manually curated. The campaign's open API for the events happened later.
So for me, the map was a practice exercise, which is essentially like a more convoluted Hello World. The value was perceived by others, and the campaign. The value for me was, "Ok, there's cluttered events all around the wild, I'd like to make sense of it and help out while I practice D3 and Leaflet."
The value as perceived by others was beyond me, and I was really just happy that it had bigger value that I originally intended.
This is different with foreign governments contributing online assets or money to the campaign, because the intent is different, and the worth is different. The intent is influence/leverage, and worth is tools/dollars. And as you have predicated below as well, corporate money is very different if you look deeper, compared to an individual who's just practicing.
Yes, I understand. But I thought I'd put my 2cents on the difference between what I did if I didn't have a green card. And how it differs with a corporation/big donors/super PACs or a foreign gov't giving assistance to a campaign.
Except for actually voting and running for elected office themselves, the laws for permanent residents in the political process are the same as for citizens. So in this case, it's not a question of non-monetary versus monetary contributions—Rapi can also legally write a check to the Sanders campaign because he is legally an American national. Getting the green card is the point when someone is no longer considered a foreign national.
I personally participated in the 2008 Democratic caucus as a permanent resident. I could take part in the political discussions, but I just couldn't vote (which is a party rule, not a law). I also lobbied state legislators on behalf of the school I was attending.
I'm not anyone's attorney, but yes, you can legally volunteer.
> The Commission has concluded herein that because uncompensated volunteer services are not
considered to be a contribution under the Act, any individual, including a foreign national, may
volunteer his or her uncompensated services to a candidate without making a contribution to that
candidate.
If anyone in Google is interested, you guys might want to check out Jure Leskovec's works on blog influence. I think it has the capability to solve the junk-farming issue.
I don't think that in this situation the Streisand effect is relevant. Google did not enter into this to prevent this incident from being heard about, they entered into this to prevent an overly broad ruling from becoming a legal precedent.
This is the exact same thing i am planning to do. i am currently in a lavish tech consultancy firm, but the whole idea of being a "resource" is really stagnating my brain, and also objectivizes humanity. I still can't stand being called a resource.
Im planning on quitting soon, and doing independent research while creating non-startup apps. Posts like this (and the link above) really motivate me. :)
I somewhat hate the fact that websites had to spoonfeed almost everything to the user. Quora does look rudimentary, but it gets the job done. i think the simplicity is not ugly, but rather clean.
I would love to see a site whose part of the user experience is actually experiencing the site first hand on one's own, like the smart people that they are. (or is it a user-filtering system)
I think BAs and PMs are for the management side of the industry. Currently with big payout, however plateaued.
While programmers are on the innovation path, who will eventually (co-)create a really great startup. In the longrun, a really huge payout.
Though most programmers I know tend to jump from one company to the next, they target small tech-companies as the churning is acceptably high without the usual non-compete clause, and ask for higher salaries in each company. It is, apparently, a very good strategy, albeit opportunistic(?).
If we go with the fact that Anonymous is infact a true distributed environment, then the replacement mechanism will be very easy. I think Anonymous is a kind of humanized group-comm architecture sans a coordinator.
You're overestimating the uniqueness of Anon. Most communities nowadays don't have coordinators. And Anon doesn't have limitless communication channels, only about a dozen. For a site/software to be a good choice, it has to be already in the "hivemind". Ask 10 Anon tot tell them 10 places where they hang, and the most common choices are the (only) ones that are viable.
There is a unique feature though - the anonymity. This could really make a difference if things get serious.
