neworbit

The US has surveilled political factions that they've considered potentially subversive or corrupt machine politics - right and left wing - for ages. RICO prosecutions against politically motivated corruption are long overdue, and should definitely land on both parties because the grift seems to be the order of the day. But that doesn't happen without actual investigation of the political machine - and incidental local low level conspirators are mostly patsies for the people calling the shots. I applaud the protestors for wanting to change things, but shake my head at the naivete of thinking that being a martyr for the Instagram cameras is the way to do it.

Nikki Krishnamurthy - the center of this scandal - came there from Washington Mutual, one of the most famous implosions from the 2008 Big Crash along with Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers. How she's employable at all is beyond me.

When the Chinese banned opium the British went to war to reopen that market because it was so profitable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

It seems like many drugs are banned in various societies today, so I don't quite follow you.

The abstract would seem to suggest methamphetamine is one correlation; you might also reasonably suggest toxoplasmosis and I have heard a naturopath suggest that it can be treated nutritionally(!) I'm certain there's other valid explanations

Bret Devereaux's writing is often cited here for his writing about warfare, logistics, and the like. But he occasionally writes also about his own profession and the difficulties in getting there, c.f. https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...

He also laments the difficulty in getting a full professorship (an opportunity recently denied to him) and finds universities increasingly focused on "paycheck degrees" such as STEM, which seems to rankle him. But it seems a likely outcome from the demographic and economic changes laid out in this article. I wish him all the best, I enjoy his writings, but I confess that my tech career seems more stable even with recent layoffs shaking the market.

I'm reminded of "Red Dwarf"

How many of us saw this and thought "anti-drone lasers can't come soon enough"?

Would anyone be interested in organizing a class action lawsuit against Ross Teixeira and Princeton?

They bought it for data gathering and market/competitor research. I was with Amazon at the time. Was great for keeping track of what products were drawing most traction on eBay (Longaberger baskets and Beanie babies, says my vague memory)

That's Mike Daisey, he did a tour called "Doing Time At Amazon.com"

Not generally, but maybe as "Borat In The Wild West"

Your username suggests an option, but I shall hope you are focused on solar at the moment

That doesn't seem to be the case per NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...

As a man who is safely out of the closet for quite a while now, has seen the scourge of AIDS amongst my circles of friends, and has spent a great deal of time effort and money educating and promoting safer sex... this is disheartening.

And I realize we're pretty safe from violent gay-bashing here in SF, but this would be a terrifying map to see in less tolerant regions. Even as it is I fear that it'll be immediately passed about amongst religious zealots as the Map of Depravity.

We've got a long way to go. :-/

I'm somewhat astounded to hear they have 972 employees. I would have guesstimated somewhere below 200. Even with a huge marketing push, I'm a little at a loss for what they all do.

I'm so glad I live in Palo Alto

I pay more like $200 a month for a significantly more expensive car in Palo Alto. I have a clean driving record and a mainstream insurance policy. You should get competitive bids!

I dunno, I think a lot of us love LISP :)

Walmart has circa 2.1M employees, but they are the only exception that comes to mind

Surely you don't mean "ever been"? I don't know how long it took them to get to ten million players in the first place but I'm imagining it wasn't on day one :)

And semantic point aside, ten million users is still mighty impressive!

As I write this it's circa $7000 from goal and I'm tempted to put it over myself. I loved that game back in the day, and it's being produced by the same guys who made the original.

I am very impressed with the prospect of how much Kickstarter could change the startup scene if you've already got a reputation to build on.

People are fussing because the guys are homeless. If the mobile hotspot-wearers had been the usual crowd of imported booth babes, no one would have blinked an eye.

For better or worse, you're likely to get better results to your work requests by putting these same devices in chosen offshore locations; you're arbitraging median-skill median-lifestyle foreigners in lower cost of living areas versus lower-quartile lifestyle and limited-skill Americans.

Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break.

If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.

I don't think I have as much screen real estate as this was designed for, and I don't tend to browse in full-screen mode. You should consider letting people use scrollbars. I can't even read the entire splash message.

I am definitely going to write a "THEY LIVE" plugin

This is the most irritating design I've seen in a while. Please link to something descriptive, not a deliberately text-blurred/obfuscated page that requires you to select between various languages that I don't actually want to use.

As an aside, I'm not sure why I would use this instead of dropbox or a cloud-accessible version control system. However, given that I can't actually read the explanatory text, I will never find out.

There's a period of time which is beneficial. It's not about being secretive, it's about putting your head down and getting things done without interruption.

Five years is (in virtually any case) way longer than that should be. But three months? Great! Even a year, if you're really on to something. But after that you need viable interaction with your customers/users/prospects

Maybe I'm a grumpy old codger these days, but it seems like the thesis is "increased incarceration has lowered the crime rate outside of prisons, however inmate-on-inmate violence is appalling, therefore we should reduce incarceration". My knee-jerk reaction is "we have improved the first order problem of lower crime in society in general, creating the second-order problem where those inclined towards assault and rape are confined with others of similar mindset and continue this pattern of crime therein... shouldn't we look to preserve the desired result and simultaneously improve law and order within prisons?"

Agreed in advance that a phenomenal rate of incarceration is not the only means of reducing crime (or, as the thesis would have it, of shifting it into the inmate population) - but I'd find it hard to buy that we should turn our back on a working solution without a better one. As the article points out, 70% of released prisoners are rearrested within three years - we are largely not rehabilitating the prison population today, and fixing that would be the means I'd advocate - which would seem to also have the effect of lowering inmate-on-inmate assaults, rapes, and other violence.

I'm a bit at a loss as to why the answer would instead be a vast reduction in prison sentences (without some other substantive change making this viable)...

Why wouldn't they then lease it, or have it owned by some foreign entity not subject to local/national taxes, or have an exemption lobbied into existence for this particular yacht? Cargo ships get flagged Panama or Liberia for roughly this sort of tax-dodge reason, I would think luxury craft would fare the same...

To take a slightly more balanced view on it, acquiring the team and the early fruits of their research but not a market-dominating position was Cisco's growth strategy for a long long time - cherry-picking startups that had built an amazing new next-gen router or other critical appliance, or even just built the core of what would one day be one, and acquiring the team and what they'd built. Cisco then excelled at taking that from "great prototype" to "market ubiquity". You could do a lot worse.

And talent acquisitions alone aren't terrible either, at least for the founding team. They're never the home run investors hope for but they have been known to return a profit on "sunk costs" cash.

That's not dirty so much as it is awesome. Go start something! Make a name for yourself! Acquire some real experience and notoriety and some great stories to tell down the road.

But do make sure you've got the connections to be acquired... most of us don't the first time out, but networking your way into that is a critical part of the process.