I don’t think these are ad hominem attacks. The article seems to just state the (perhaps biased) facts: people are calling it a clown show, Prasad was ousted, Prasad did gain popularity on social media as a COVID-skeptic. It doesn’t become an ad hominem just because you don’t like the way the facts are stated or the inferences your own brain makes.
Not "people" -- a single, unnamed, VC. It's right there in the article. Read it.
> Prasad was ousted
No, he wasn't. He voluntarily resigned pre-emptively after the WSJ editorials, then he was re-hired almost immediately. You are just misinformed. You'd know this if you read a better source.
>> Instead of just reporting the facts of the case (as was done by the Stat piece, which they're ripping off) they spend multiple paragraphs making ad hominem attacks about the CDC, Prasad, etc. Almost unbelievably, they put those things first.
Touché. I shouldn't have said "ad hominem attacks", because, while these arguments are certainly specious, and completely unrelated to the subject of the article, they're not strictly ad hominem.
I agree with your comment that my criticism is (and was) biased reporting.
There is nowhere in America where $260k/year is “barely middle class.” 260k/yr is a top 10% income nationally. Calling it anything other than upper class is ludicrous, especially since the payment requires no geographic tie like a salaried job would.
$260k is absolutely middle class, nowhere near "upper class", by any reasonable consideration of lifestyle, freedom, power or day to day experience.
The median home price in SF is $1.3. Using the calculator at zillow (https://www.zillow.com/homeloans/buyability/) with an income of $260k, looking to buy a $1.3MM house, you'd need a down payment of over $300k.
So suppose you get your $260k payout and want to live in SF... you have to rent for what... 5 or 10 years to save up the $300k down payment (while living modestly to save tens of thousands per year). Then finally you can buy your average home, watch half your income disappear to taxes and another third to mortgage, and then you'll still have enough to live a comfortable, middle-class life.
You're not buying yachts, getting meetings with senators or buying your kids into elite schools. You're not flying private, hiring personal assistants or buying a vacation home in Aspen. You're not making dozens of angel investments or being courted as a limited partner by VCs or PE funds.
"Upper class" probably starts at around $10-15 million in liquid assets, to be able to really have the freedom, flexibility and power to live a life that's distinct from middle class existence. If you can't give your son a "small loan of $1 million" to start his business (and be able to shrug off a complete loss as a learning experience) then you're not upper class.
You are conflating upper class income with being wealthy in the Bay Area (and not just wealthy, uber wealthy; I know plenty of comfortable wealthy people who aren’t meeting congresscritters and making VC/PE calls). They’re different metrics. GP said $260k/yr was BARELY middle class. That statement is farcical: 260k/yr is a top 10% income in America. It is upper class income under all but the most ludicrous of definitions.
By the way, the solution to your “I want to buy a house in SF” problem isn’t to move to SF and pay an insane amount of rent for 5-10 years, it’s to keep living like you did and doing your normal job that you were doing before you won 260k/yr for 2 years while you save.
I won’t even bother digging into how warped your view of what it means to be upper class is, I’ll just say stay on that hamster wheel and keep chasing that dream dude.
260k/yr at an effective tax rate of about 50%, so actual spendable/saveable money is only $130k in free cash; people wildly overestimate their spending / saving risk decisions based on pre-tax gross salary versus what they actually receive and can use, and at 11k/mo it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending it every month because it’ll be there next month too. The Bay Area is especially egregious about using up that post-tax amount but I stand by my advice to save 10x annual income before playing margin investor with interest rates.
Great! They’ll be able to save a nest egg in as little as twelve years, then, if my brief mental napkin math works out — unless they make the mistake of buying a house whose payment triples that time.
This is just your gambling addiction showing itself. There may not be any potential gains in value after the transaction. In fact, most take privates result in massive up front losses for the new owners.
And anyways, shareholders are paid a premium on today’s stock price (which theoretically reflects the current value of future profits, or at least the market’s view on it) in order to compensate for the exact loss you mention.
Apple has a vested interest in maintaining a presence in the Chinese market because that is where a large portion of its supply chain exists. It isn’t appeasing the CCP because Chinese users, it is because of Chinese manufacturers.
Google flights actually has an option for Economy (exclude Basic) now. I’m not sure when this was rolled out. Previously, you could accomplish the same functionality by adding a single carryon bag in the drop down to force non-Basic.
Thanks! I didn't notice it because it's invisible when you initiate the search, you have to search first and then go back and change the cabin class. I wouldn't say this option is hidden exactly, but it certainly isn't made particularly easy for users to find.
This is a wild hypothetical that tries to blame a tool for the problem of a user. Won’t anyone think of the children?
Let’s modify your post to highlight the absurdity:
Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit in their car and when they write up their last ticket, the stalker gets in their car and follows the officer back to the station and then to their home. The next day they pull up to the warden’s house and follow them to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...
See where I'm going with this?
Anything which allows someone to follow a person in a vehicle who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
For anyone else looking for which of these 200 words are actually different, this second post follows the person home instead of using the tracking website method
There's a gigantic difference in the ability of the surveilled person to protect themselves in the scenario you sketch versus the one that I sketch. In your scenario the surveilled person has a chance of noticing the fact that somebody is physically following them. And when they have eyes on the stalker, they can call the police to come and address the situation when they predict the stalker might escalate.
In the scenario that I sketch, the stalker runs zero risk while obtaining the information. Hell, they don't even have to log in to this tool, so there's zero record of who accessed location information for which parking warden.
And yes, it is absolutely incumbent upon the creators of tools to take into account how they might be misused. To pretend that all humans are of right mind and incapable of doing harm and only design for the case of ethical use is laughably naive.
What a strange line to draw when in both hypothetical scenarios the stalker actively engages in a creepy conversation with the target before “you see where I’m going with this?” happens.
For example, Florida Bar Rule 4-1.5(a) prohibits "clearly excessive" attorney's fees, while 4-1.5(f)(4)(B) sets several criteria for contingency fees (typically the sort of fees a plaintiff's firm would charge) that, if not met, renders a fee presumptively "clearly excessive".
In this HN subthread: users slowly converge on the conversion formula for Celsius to Fahrenheit (32+9C/5) in greater and greater precision while calling it an “approximation.”
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