Billionaire Peter Thiel makes fortune after sweetheart deal with [NZ] government
nzherald.co.nz
nzherald.co.nz
That's kind of like how Chinese investors could game the system and get permanent residency in Canada by "investing" the minimum amount of $1,000,000 into the Vancouver property market (a.k.a. buying a house). And as an added bonus, they'd leave the house empty, messing up the rental market and making it harder for Canadians to find somewhere to live.
I have absolutely nothing against residency in return for bona fide business investments, but there's gotta be some element of risk involved for the investor. Getting a sweetheart deal from the government and then investing in the public sharemarket is in no way a benefit to the country.
It'd be a very different story had Thiel actually continued to make investments in the local startup community after getting his citizenship. But it sure looks to me like he made a few "investments" for show, got his citizenship (without even setting foot in the country!) and then promptly put his NZ passport into his bug-out bag and moved on to other things.
Many countries do this. For example in the UK the British Business Bank will become an LP in a VC fund acting as a multiplier on capital raised.
You may not agree with the government's decision, but you can hardly blame Thiel for making use of it.
I do wish we could eject people who actively want to destroy America from the country, but rather we seem to have endless tolerance for Peter Thiel (German) and Milo Yiannopoulos (British) to come here and spread hate speech, plot ways to recreate slavery, etc.
I mean this has to be the trolliest trollmobile that has ever trolled: http://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/09/img_4893_1024-640x4...
People need to learn to not feed the troll. The worst possible thing you can do to Milo is ignore him.
Peter is a slice of bread with honey on one side and some sort of putrid matter on the other.
Milo does not have the honey-tinged side.
Milo, on the other hand, acts as if he aspires to be the Ernst Roehm of the internet age and I have little tolerance for him.
I actually agree on that one. But he has tremendous amounts of money and power.
In the current small, interdependent world, callous indifference can do a heck of a lot of damage.
How so?
In a nutshell, Milo argues that queers should go back in the closet, women should get back in the kitchen, and colored people should go back where they came from. He consistently delegitimizes and intimidates people he dislikes (which seems to be most of them), thereby creating a 'chilling effect' that dissuades them from exercising their own rights - 'chilling effect' is a legal term of art that's worth looking up if you're not familiar.
Moving on to the affiliates, by which I mean those who identify with him or subscribe to his views, my argument is simpler: some of his supporters shoot people. Just over a week ago a protester against his appearance at the University of Washington was critically shot in the stomach. The shooter turned himself in to police, claiming that he thought he was being attacked by a white supremacist, but a review of his Facebook revealed him to be a right-winger who had messaged Milo to request an autographed hat an hour before the shooting. He's still walking free AFAIK. Likewise I'd point to the deaths of 6 people at the hands of a gunman in a mosque in Quebec city last week, and to the deaths of 9 people in Charleston last summer at the hands of a right-winger whose avowed intention (restated at trial) was to provoke a race war.
I could go on an on. Violent protest by anti-fascist groups and the like should always be questioned and examined, given the variety of motivations claimed - I don't lose much sleep when I see property damage take place, but that's cause it's not my property or business. It's not a form of discourse* that should be resorted to lightly or enthusiastically - we have sports for people who just need to blow off steam. However, where there is abundant evidence of violence being systematically deployed against persons - even if it's on a distributed ad-hoc basis rather than the product of a hierarchical command structure then I absolutely believe that it's appropriate to employ it in return in defense of self or others.
I reject the argument that some people make that people are never allowed to act violently until they've already suffered an injury (at which time it might well be too late to adequately defend oneself), Where a credible fear of violence exists, so does a right to defend against it. From a American legal standpoint, you might want to look into the concepts of 'fighting words' and the technical definitions of assault. If I brandish a hammer and say I'm gonna get you, happyrock!' you're generally not obliged to wait for me to actually hit you with the hammer before punching me in the nose.
Obviously I'm treating several complex subjects very superficially in a short internet comment, but I hope you can agree that these are things I've thought carefully about rather than just expressing a momentary emotional outburst.
* No doubt someone will say that violence is antithetical to discourse, but I agree with Clausewitz that 'war is the continuation of politics by other means.'
I could go on an on
http://q13fox.com/2017/01/24/shooter-sent-facebook-message-t...
Here's an OK summary of trends in extremism within the US, including both Islamic and far-right varieties. The SPLC documents such issues pretty comprehensively and is a good place to start learning about the subject.
https://www.splcenter.org/20150212/lone-wolf-report
Oh and here's something about the wonderful folks over at Stormfront:
I'm not actually familiar with the content of Milo's speeches, but I don't need to be to determine that they are not fighting words. Unless he says, "that guy in the green jacket looks like a fag, beat him up", it's probably protected speech, and your only legal recourse in the US is to say "hey, you shouldn't listen to this hate-filled jerk". Or, perhaps, "I'm not going to associate with you if you forward one more of his blog posts."
Now, I'm not going say that you have an inconsistent viewpoint. The attitude of "everyone who disagrees with me should be silenced by force" has been quite popular throughout history. It's even effective from time to time.
But your views would be illegal to implement in the US (as would Milo's views, as I understand them).
In addition, unless you have knowledge of threats of legal action from M.Y., nothing he is doing can have "chilling effects". I suggest you look it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect and pay attention to the part about "law or threat of legal action".
In summary, the standard of free speech in the US is that you cannot use force to silence someone for the content of their speech unless it rises to the level of actual threats against specific people or an immediate incitement to riot right then and there.
An utterly false representation of my position. Enjoy fighting with your straw man.
No - they fail 95% of the time because government administrators have no clue how to be running VC investment vehicles in the first place, which is why they have to hire people like Thiel.
I don't think it turned out so badly.
'Bad' would have meant all the companies went bust.
A public/private 'investment vehicle' that actually funds successful startups is a huge win - because it's rare.
Not to be too defensive of Thiel - but one could argue that it was Thiel's participation that made the fund successful.
Most of these government VC things fail badly, and it's one of the things that is way, way out of their competency.
It's possible that the structure of the org could have been done a little bit better, but then possibly it would have been hard to attract someone like him.
The governments goal was more along the lines of trying to spur entrepreneurial activity - they got that + a little bit of profit.
That they didn't get more is not a bad thing. In the vast majority of cases - they would have failed to spur activity - and lost a pile of money.
So, the situation should be characterized as a 'win' just not as good as people would have liked.
Virtually all the fund's investment went into one company (Xero). If Thiel had already decided to invest in that company anyway (a plausible scenario), then his deal with the NZ govt is equivalent to receiving a free call option (if I remember my Options Theory correctly). And no entrepreneurial activity would have been spurred.
But more so the general case: Governments do some things well - but not VC. And that if it requires collaboration with more aggressive VC's to spurn activity, well, then that's not so bad because it's very hard to do.
Personally, I'm tired of all this neoliberal bullshit and would rather just figure out a way to make our public institutions run extremely well.