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nobodyandproudtoday at 11:39 AM2 repliesview on HN

Jesus. As an American I can do my part, but it’s not much.

$70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.


Replies

trymastoday at 4:09 PM

Time and time again it amazes me how incredibly cheap lobbied politicians are. They may be earning big sums for an individual, but if you go full corruption[1] to sell out a state or a country - sell it for a fair price.

I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $200k, when median values were much much lower.

Politicians are selling tens of billions of dollars (if not hundreds of billions) worth of revenue to ISPs for couple or dozen million. Literally 1000x return on investment (if successful).

I remember local politician (I am not from US) got caught taking 100k bribe from a company for helping with alleged highway construction procurement. Project was valued ~1B - 10 000x return on investment (if they wouldn't have been caught).

[1] I am sorry, not "corruption", but "lobbying".

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mrtesthahtoday at 3:15 PM

We should ask ourselves why we continue to participate and perpetuate economic systems that result in levels of inequality so vast that they threaten control of our democracy.