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Comment by misiti3780

5 hours ago

more info please!

He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income.

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-...

  • If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.

    • That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class.

      Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights.

      3 replies →

    • Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight. Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth.

      8 replies →

  • Maybe worth mentioning that the founding fathers in the US believed only property owners should vote.

    • The founding fathers, the framers (a different and later group, though the two overlap and are often conflated) and original states had a variety of (and evolving in some cases between the Founding and the Constitution) opinions on the issue; some (Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, notably, the latter also the primary author of PA’s 1776 Constitution which also adopted this position at the state level) were in favor of universal male suffrage.

I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy

> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.

but if we go as far as to say

> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.

does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...

  • Ladybird contributors have their own controversies that make the project hard to stomach

    • That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.

      Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now

Some people believe that anyone who does not maintain 100% ideological purity and goodness, which can be measured by if they align 100% with the persons own and therefore morally good political ideas, which also coincidentally matches the status quo of Brooklyn based journalists, that the heretic must be ostracized from all of society and it is impossible to work with them. Since Tobi Lutke made a mortal sin of disagreeing on suffrage requirements, they should be cast into fire and ostracized.

  • When people who are rich and/or influential loudly and publicly share their political stances, and especially when they put their money toward those ends, it is not unreasonable to expect that to influence the opinions others have of those people, even to the point of saying "I would like to not be associated with them."

    I get the impression that you are among the "stop bringing politics into these non-political places" crowd who believe that this stance is (a) exclusively taken by the left and (b) something that's only happened in the last ten years; I assure you neither of those things are true.

  • I don't think "citizens have a right to vote" is anywhere near the realm of ideological purity or "Brooklyn based journalist" thinking. It's literally just democracy.

    Freedom of speech seems like something Lutke would pretend to like, and him getting torched for his anti-human opinions is a great demonstration of that principle.

  • > Lutke made a mortal sin of disagreeing on suffrage requirements

    I think this is a very tame and apologetic and dishonest way to put it. Suffrage and voting is how people have a voice in the future of their democracy. He advocates for a policy that materially removes that right, that say in the future, from those who already have little power. I don’t know how else to emphasize that it’s more than “they disagree a bit with him and now he’s an impure sinner”, it’s more akin to “this rich dude wants to rewrite the rules to give himself more power and us less”, which is a sober assessment of his policy. I think people actively trying to avoid giving him any more money or power is a very understandable reaction to that

    I think ultimately some parts of ideology are bound to and by the reality we live in, and acknowledging that reality gives a good answer here for when _it seems like_ people freaking out at an “impure idea” - is there a documented harm that we can look at?

    Many people boycott Elon and his products. Do you raise this same “moral purity” complaint about them? Does it ever go in the other direction?

    I think technology and how we build it is deeply tied to us as social, communal beings. Tech can be a reflection of our capabilities, our values. Tech shapes our reality in turn. It’s worth thinking about, being critical of, and believing people when they say what they believe