Will that be in FORTRAN or COBOL?

Mr. Priebus did propose some genuinely new approaches to campaign mechanics, including more fully integrating digital operations with the strategy and fund-raising divisions of the party. He said he would open a field office in San Francisco to connect with the technology community and hold “hackathons” in tech centers like Austin and New York to develop new campaign tools.

(link)


Not really the Republican way, though.  Arbitrarily narrowing the labor pool works fine in most systems - dicatorship, oligarchy, class system, whatever - you promote your son-in-law or some chump to an important job, and as long as he looks right and sounds right, it will mostly be ok.

The one place where it doesn't work, however is one in which actual skills are needed for success.  You can't put your pal's son in charge of heart surgery at Mt. Sinai without exposing the corruption and idiocy of your core beliefs.  This is especially true when the necessary skills are evolving too quickly to allow rigid classification.  In that kind of world, your customary policies of segregation by race and class, overt or covert, by any means necessary, will be outcompeted by less stupidly rigid belief systems, such as the one that posits that we are all created equal.

But don't give up.  You could send a nationally recognized Republican out here periodically to get the Party's message across (we don't get many).  Maybe Haley Barbour, or possibly that guy from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who has noticed that we messed up our business climate and people can barely do business here.  It was all we could do, in this hostile socialist regulatory environment, to invent the personal computer, the Internet router, iPhone, iPad, the entire semiconductor industry, Internet search, and 87 flavors of social networking, not to mention some of the most successful cancer drugs in the history of the world.  And you know what else?  Some of the people doing the inventing were gay.  Some were from foreign countries.  Some were ethnic.

So please, bring your hackathons to the Bay Area, and bring along your message of authoritarianism and intolerance, too.  That will help us all remember why we moved here.