No one chooses insurance, it chooses them. Joined a management consulting firm out of school, got assigned to a bunch of insurance cases. Escaped to Oracle. 1998, got a call from a friend of a friend: I hear you know a lot about insurance...I just got a million dollars to start an online version of GEICO...are you in? 17 years later, my career is insurance.
Please don't. Lots of horrible things were said there behind a wall of anonymity. Think Secret + 4chan for failed startups. For those of us that tried to do the right thing by our employees, it was very hurtful.
The commentors on fuckedcompany were the kind of people that like to rubberneck around accidents and disasters. Some people get off on other people's misery. That doesn't mean that the site itself served a purpose, and a FC sans comments would already be plenty useful.
Great reply. I'm reminded of a recent New Yorker article about the poverty bureaucracy in NYC. Can't remember the exact details, but one of the recipients talks about how much they could do with the amount the city spends on them per month to put their family in some gov't run hell-hole.
I'll add that many free-market economists are strong supporters of the basic income, especially vs. a minimum wage (Milton Friedman supported a negative income tax). The advantage of the basic income is that it's very simple and there are no mathematical gymnastics needed to neither discourage work or produce a very high marginal income tax rate as you leave the NIT. Lastly, the basic income makes it easier to abandon the income tax entirely and move to consumption based taxation.
Family photos are the only items I don't think should be stored on the cloud as they are too important and too large. About a year ago I bought 2 external drives and we back up our MacBook at home and in another location. You can get 2 multi-terabyte drives for a little over $200. Sounds like a lot more trouble than it is and provides a great sense of security that our pix are secure.
PG offered a clear underlying model in this essay. His model is that a) founders need to sell well to succeed and that b) it's hard to sell well if you can't be easily understood. You have a "guess" that mundane traits are more important for success. He has a theory and data that support his theory.
That's fine just as long as what he did wasn't the following:
see some small number of founders with a fairly strong accent, say < 30 or < 50 or < 60, then observe that those startups happened to do poorly and then extrapolate a theory from those observations to explain what is happening. I am not necessarily disagreeing with his thesis, but in statistical data analysis you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions from small samples when the underlying distribution is non-normal, with fat tails
This is an epidemiological observation, and those rarely indicate a particular mechanism. Even with giant populations and teams of scientists we have only tentative and shifting theories for why, for example, Americans are fatter than Europeans.
Controlled studies of startup founders are not practical.
I'm also surprised by how often this issue comes up. To use an example other than buses -- many ski lifts and gondolas are designed to take 10-15 minutes, but it's not unusual to be on one for over 30 minutes when there's heavy wind or a mechanical problem. They are also quite difficult to evacuate.
In the late 90's, the CEO of our startup told us about a raid on his Palo Alto home. His daughter was away at camp for the summer and his wife had mailed her a care package that included laundry detergent. As they later found out, detergent can be used as a masking agent for drugs.
A few days after the package was sent, Law Enforcement (DEA & local police, IIRC) surrounded the house. Luckily, back in the good old days, they didn't break the door down and start shooting, at least not in Palo Alto. They knocked, were let in, and asked the CEO's wife to open the package that the police had intercepted, upon which the laundry detergent was discovered.
The point I want to make about this whole category of problems, that seem to mock the 4th Amendment (NSA surveillance, civil asset forfeiture, militarization of police, etc.) is that we should be far more worried about incompetence than malice. We keep getting warned that these things are a pathway to tyranny but frankly, that may or may not happen. Horrific incompetence that ruins people's lives is with us today, at scale, and the problems grow with the power, money and technology given to those that wield them. We now have no-recourse no-fly lists, police raids on wrong houses that kill homeowners (so often it's no longer newsworthy), and sick elderly parents fighting for their house because their kid sold $20 worth of weed from the front porch (the latter from Sarah Stillman's other excellent New Yorker article).
Back in Palo Alto, it would have taken almost zero competent police work to determine that the care package containing laundry soap, sent to a summer camp from the home of two working professionals was almost certainly not masking drugs. But instead, complete careless incompetence.
We've talked a lot lately about the danger that we are on the road to 1984 or Brave New World. Right now, I'm much more concerned that many of our fellow citizens are already living in the movie Brazil.
One of the characteristics of a police state is the police can get away with most anything. Nor do they have to be very careful about getting and convicting the right suspect.
The key thing to remember is that a police state is not necessarily a source of evil. It's merely a condition that can easily allow evil to happen. If you do not clean your room, it will get messy because the corrective mechanism has been switched off. In a police state, the authorities can do evil things because mechanisms of accountability have been switched off. The authorities can be good or evil, but either way, they will get away with bad things.
This explains how police states can come about incrementally, through numerous incremental changes that erode freedoms and checks and balances.
Sorry, but I'm with Lord Acton, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." You're welcome to point out examples of kind and gentle police states, I'd try Japan first, but I don't think you're going to get very far.
You may have a point in your last sentence, but I don't see how it derives from the previous paragraph.
The full quote is: "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The police and the public both deserve an appropriate level of power; to lack power is to lack agency. Occasionally that power will be abused by either party. But as power becomes unbalanced towards any person or group, corruption becomes nearly guaranteed, whether through malice, indifference, or incompetence.
You're right in all counts, and I'm ashamed I forgot the correct version of the quote. Thanks for the correction.
Continuing this line, right now the casualties are so one sided because the public is understandably very reluctant to shoot the police, even when that results in their immediate death. If that changes....
I've found myself thinking a lot about this recently: the asymmetry of self-defense.
In a civilized society, we outsource our violence to police and other agencies, with mostly net-positive results. If the police are wrong, our self-defense moves instead into the realm of courts and law (setting aside the flaws with those systems).
However, extreme abuses of police power change the equation. While there are obviously reasonable circumstances for a cop to execute you without trial (when you are posing an immediate danger), there are effectively zero circumstances where you are allowed to physically defend yourself against the police.
I'm not necessarily advocating that there should be a circumstance when it's okay to shoot a cop; rather, that there are behavioral and social side effects from that intrinsic asymmetry, which affects the relationship between the necesseties of state violence, the legal system that supports them, and the civilians caught in the middle, innocent or otherwise.
I've also been thinking about it in the context of drones and anti-insurgent warfare. In conventional war, the enemy is dehumanized generally, but no one is demonized for shooting back: it's expected behavior. But in the context of quasi-occupation, civilians have neither legal nor physical recourses for defense. Picking up a weapon automatically marks you as the enemy; your only defense is to do nothing and hope that your drone pilot is accurate and merciful. The typical rhetoric is that terrorists are the worst of the worst because they are willing to kill civilians, which I would agree with; yet wielding a gun against a uniformed soldier or even a drone effectively marks you as a terrorist all the same.
I don't own guns, and never plan to; while I'm not a knee-jerk pacifist, it's very important to me never to take a life, a pledge I would only break in the most extreme of circumstances. But I certainly hold a great deal of empathy for those who feel the need to take personal defense into their own hands, and I believe there is a solid case for seeing self-defense as an inalienable human right.
(At this point, I wonder if the best self-defense at home or abroad might be to capture or stream video 24 hours a day...)
"In a civilized society, we outsource our violence to police and other agencies...."
I suspect you'll not be surprised that I strongly disagree. Honest police (I gather most of them, in fact) know they can't be everywhere, e.g. "When seconds count, the police are minutes away." Worse, it's well established in the courts that police have absolutely no duty to protect anyone in particular; the most recent case is particularly stark, on a subway Joseph Lozito subdued a knife wielding assailant taking quite a few injuries while the NYPD officers there cowered and locked themselves away.
Hmmm, have you ever lived in an area where concealed carry is shall issue and self-defense was encouraged by the local authorities? In my home town, which I've retired to, they went so far as to say a woman had an "absolute right" to use lethal force against some home invaders, and the staff of the required concealed carry class I and my father took were all active duty police officers who were entirely supportive of citizen self-defense.
I wonder if your take on drone warfare is a bit off. Haven't followed Afghanistan that closely, but I know during our occupation of Iraq we allowed people to retain an AK-47 for self-defense, "picking up a weapon" was not an automatic mark of an enemy. Context mattered, and I strongly expect does in Afghanistan. Pick up a weapon and move towards an allied unit, likely enemy. Outside of that context, isn't so clear, especially in such an well armed society.
And you at least in part recognize that, "wielding a gun against a uniformed soldier or even a drone effectively marks you as a terrorist", although I'd substitute enemy for "terrorist", and enemy is quite enough to allow for a violent response.
> have you ever lived in an area where concealed carry is shall issue and self-defense was encouraged by the local authorities?
I have not, I have talked to several Texans for whom this is the case, given that police help was 45 minutes away. It enriched my perspective on gun culture quite a bit.
> I wonder if your take on drone warfare is a bit off.
Yeah, I'll admit that I'm not exactly extrapolating from intimate knowledge of details. And you're right that "enemy combatant" is the term generally used. I do still think that is an imbalance in that is effectively impossible for us to see those combatants as legitimate in the same way as the social construct of "soldier", because they fight for a sect or tribe rather than a nation-state. But then, past wars have often involved pre-emptively describing the enemy as sub-human, so perhaps it's just more of the same, if not a slight improvement.
I'd be very curious to learn if there has been any attempt to "sharp-shoot" or otherwise physically defend against drones. Or do they simply strike from too far away for this to be feasible?
Also, I'd wager ten-to-one that in the next decade, we'll see a Supreme Court ruling on whether personal defense drones are covered by the 2nd amendment.
Well, there's the concept of unlawful combatant per the Geneva Convention, which allows most any fate including summary execution on the battlefield. To not be an unlawful combatant is not that difficult, e.g. it requires things like a command structure and identifying clothing on the field, an armband will do. Fighting for a nation-state is not required.
According to Wikipedia, the standard Hellfire II missiles the Predator and Reaper drones use have a long range, 546 yd – 5 mi/500 m – 8 km, although these models can't operate farther than the laser designator can reach. No "sharpshooter", that is individual rifleman shooting a battle rifle cartridge has no practical chance. Maybe someone using a general purpose machine gun or better with plenty of tracer rounds in the belt, but of course that's going to be rather obvious to the operators and invite getting out of range and firing a Hellfire back. Hmmm, looking at heaver USSR/Russian stuff, these drones would be able to easily keep out of range of even the famous ZSU-23-4 4 cannon mobile AA weapon system, SAMs are going to be required.
I don't expect a Supreme Court decision, unless unfavorable, they're very reluctant to take up 2nd amendment cases. E.g. only one 20th Century case in 1939, then Heller in 2008 and *McDonald 2010. Since then I believe they've denied cert to every case that's come to them, although in terms of "clean" cases (e.g. not a criminal trying a Hail Mary appeal he's going to lose) as I recall only a concealed carry one in New York state, despite there being a circuit split with the one covering Illinois. We'll see, but I at least am not that hopeful. They will get more opportunities on concealed carry, e.g. from the circuit covering Maryland, and I think another.
Additional thought, promoted by Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds (http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/017469/): "The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous."
I believe the point was that a police state may not seem inherently evil as it gradually comes about, which is why it's so easy for it to happen without anyone noticing.
Therefore, the overall larger point is: the populace has an even greater need for vigilance and paying attention, and to do everything they can to keep the powers-that-be in check while they can.
> You're welcome to point out examples of kind and gentle police states
Again, we have people making assumptions and coming out with stupid readings. Where do I say that there are kind and gentle police states?
The likelihood of a kind and gentle police state is the same as the likelihood of someone's house staying neat if they never clean, or a machine never breaking down even if preventive maintenance is neglected. Entropy is not on your side.
> You may have a point in your last sentence, but I don't see how it derives from the previous paragraph.
There are a lot of people who think of themselves as "clever" but who don't create little trees or clouds of implications and converse on this basis. You are currently operating on one meta-level too low for this conversation.
Exactly -- the police screw up and the judges let them off the hook, while if a citizen makes an equivalent error he's convicted of murder and sent away for life.
Yep. A cop in Chicago or Detroit would be given much more leniency when making the same mistake as, say, a neighborhood watch captain in suburban Florida.
"I'm much more concerned that many of our fellow citizens are already living in the movie Brazil."
I might start sticking to that as a general premise, given the news.
Look for independent plumbers, if approached by Central Services, ask for a 27b/6, however whatever you do, try to avoid Information Retrieval and Gir if he has red eyes.
Incompetence explains more things than conspiracy theories. I agree with your points. Incompetent cops are more likely to shoot people than a random cabal.
Exactly, the "Mark Burnett problem" (producer of Survivor). I heard him claim in an interview that with enough footage he could create any perception of a person that he wanted (hero, jerk, brilliant, idiot, etc.). It seemed obvious after hearing it, but not something I had considered.
I'd say the biggest issue is that they provide a perverse incentive to the local government -- reduce the duration of the yellow light to generate more red-light revenue. I couldn't easily find a link but I believe this happened in Denver (and that they later re-instated longer yellows after public outcry). My understanding is that lengthening yellow-light times and adding a delay between red & green are the proven ways to prevent accidents.
I've seen the camera supporters argue that even if cameras cause more rear-end accidents those are preferable to t-bone crashes from red light runners, but that's a false choice. Longer yellows and red-green delays prevent both types of crashes.
Beyond this, I think there is legitimate opposition to the lack of discretion by the cameras. In places with snow & ice, there are plenty of times when it is impossible to stop at a red light even when travelling well below posted limits.
"Denver, Colorado was caught this week attempting to add red light cameras at intersections with short yellow times. Rocky Mountain News reporters videotaped the city's four proposed ticketing locations and discovered that each had a yellow signal time set at 3.0 seconds -- a figure below recommended standards."
If you increase the yellow light duration and red-green delay, won't the risk-taking drivers eventually adjust their behaviour to the same level of risk, by running the lights even later?
Exactly. You don't get a bigger fine if you run a red light after it's been red for 50ms v. 2s, and the fine isn't bigger if the other road has a green.
People are just so important that they have to get to the next red light 10 seconds faster than everyone else.
I've seen others mention the yellow-light timing issue and I hadn't heard this counterpoint before.
As for the discretion, at least in my jurisdiction all automated violations (currently only red light cameras in certain parts of the state I believe, nothing in my immediate area) are reviewed by a police officer who has final say. Presumably they'd be able to tell if a vehicle just slid a few inches into the intersection v. ran the light 2 seconds after it turned red.
I'm not sure Denver is a very good city to base this on. I've lived in Denver now for 3 years and I've never seen so many people run red lights in my life! It's absolutely considered "normal" here.
