comrade_ogilvy

>Maybe it's just a matter of opinion, but I'm very comfortable characterizing this reply as "discounting because it's just metadata."

Perhaps. But keep in the mind the context: "nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls"

The president spells out a specific concern that people are saying out loud. Is it "discounting" to disprove a specific concern by accurately characterizing the activity as something other than "listening to the content of people’s phone calls"? That he so happens to use "metadata" does not make his argument wrong or misleading. What word should he use?

That is the most ominous scenario, which is likely complete fiction (so far).

Finding the high value targets requires good detective work. Blowing up acquaintances is destroying good leads. The metadata creates leads, and helps narrow them down to a more promising and manageable subset.

Right. Once upon a time, the physical control over our bodies and our personal property was an adequate definition of privacy. Yes, there were many corner cases, even two centuries ago, but it was "good enough" approximately always. Why make messy legislation over small problems? The Constitution never even tried to touch these issues.

Over time the importance of all those corner cases has expanded, and the increased rate of growth of that importance is downright dizzying in the last decade or two.

In today's world we have our old fashioned physical privacy (for the most part), and HIPAA to cover some narrow issues. That is it.

In our brave new world, we do not really own our financial transaction records. For the most part those are privately owned records in the hands of various profit-driven corporations, and some of them happen to send us a copy of a subset of those records every month.

rayiner (above) discusses this topic rather well. But I want to emphasize a different point: we can have privacy but we need to recognize we are basically starting from scratch. Trying to bemoan that the laws have been broken is counterproductive -- the spies have good lawyers and they have correctly identified gigantic legal loopholes. Even if privacy advocates win a few battles, the spies are still going to win the war, until we change the basic rules of the game with new legislation.

No, his art is not being misunderstood in the least. That would have required an iota of effort on the part of the mindless haters.

No, they (and apparently you) think that forming harsh judgment about the person based on a few superficial details, without any regard for the attempt at art whatsoever, is somehow okay. That the person is attempting art is just being used as an excuse for indefensible behavior.

I suppose there is a kind of self-contradiction is trying to be "fashionably unfashionable" which seems ripe for mockery.

But, in practice, the mockery boils down to an exercise in More Authentic Than Thou based on guesses from superficial details. Isn't making judgements about authenticity based on a few superficial details an even more loathsome exercise in hypocrisy?

I do like EvanKelly's point here: "What is there to be genuine to."?

What the heck is someone supposed to wear that is neither an overt exercise in conformity or a contrived exercise in non-conformity? What would in between or opting out of the pretense look like?

In fact, it might look a lot like Mr. Hermelin, whose clothes look functional and cheap, without any visible labels, without any apparent in-factory distressing of the fabric.

It boils down to jobs. Texas is a fine place to live if you work in certain sectors. California is great place to live for other kinds of work.

The other way to look at this is apartment rental prices are merely "correcting" upwards to be less out of line with the housing prices.

A $1 million SF home has to charge $6000 in rent each month to break even, to cover cost of capital, taxes, and maintenance. Apartment rents cover utilities to varying degrees, as well.

A nice three bedroom apartment is the equivalent of a $600k or $800k condo, which "should" charge $4000+ per month. What is the going price for that rental? Across the bay area, the median is $2500. That makes sense in San Jose, but in other areas, not so much....

So is the issue that house prices are unsustainably high? Or is it the renters have gotten used to prices that lingered unsustainably low for a surprisingly long time?

IMO it is a bit of both. But we have probably under built rental units in some markets.

Agreed. One has to prove that individual arguable mistakes are a purposeful pattern of fraud.

As the system exists, if I were to make, say, an incorrect bill or make some other factually incorrect assertion that you owe me money, it is assumed to not be a crime or even a civil offense. You would have to prove it.

The advantage of RICO is that it makes the pattern of behavior and therefore all my legal records a matter of possible interest to the judge. There is still a lot of work for you to do, and I can try to hide behind client-attorney privilege.

A mafia organization is a certain kind of acquaintances that formed a "social group" and did not necessarily work for a single employer (or small set of employers), thus the paper trail did not exist. The FBI had to do a lot of careful investigation to document "business" relationships that were ongoing.

A law firm pursuing patent claims has to leave a paper trail. The more convoluted, the more likely jurors will be inclined to see fraud.

Bernie is an interesting example for a number of reasons.

The likelihood of being caught is probably a bigger factor in deterrence than the severity of the punishment itself. White collar criminals probably get away with a lot of small crimes (I am guessing).

Madoff is a very extreme example because he was doomed to eventually be caught. But we can look at it the other direction and consider how many hundreds(?!?) of small and large crimes did he get away with before it all collapsed on him?

But the tax base did not collapse. It drifted downs to ~60% of peak, while the populace drifted down to ~40% of peak.

Shrinking is always going to be a painful and not easy process, but the raw numbers suggest that it was doable.

In the short run, maybe. In the long run, no, no, no.

It is hopeless to expect the gov't to not do whatever corporations commonly get away with.

Once the corporations do it, the information in question becomes private property. Now all the gov't has to do is persuade the corporation to hand over or "sell" some little nuggets of their private property. As it is private property that is not yours, it is none of your business in the eyes of the law whether these nuggets of private property are dizzyingly complete records about you.

Tan, cotan, sec, cosec have practical value in calculus.

It might be a little unfair to expect your trig teacher to prove that to you.

Smoke jumpers are taking on a job that offers a boon to others, so I politely give them the benefit of the doubt. Thus it is an exercise in adult behavior, even if the details of their personal motives are more ambiguous.

I do recognize a degree of courage in a young man going into the wild to heal the angst and alienation plaguing his soul. Yet I bristle at the suggestion such is automatically heroic or independent thinking, and (implicitly or explicitly) the less wounded amongst us can be dismissed as "sheep", as some admirers have done in this discussion.

I am sorry, but I see no evidence that McCandless ever had a single original thought in his head. He never completed the "hero's journey" in either the literary or practical sense -- he failed to achieve enlightenment and return with his boon, to help himself and/or others. He failed. He may have had some courage to admire, but he ultimately failed when it came to the big important stuff.

McCandless was an adolescent in a man's body -- he was not proven capable of handling adult responsibilities. That is not necessarily a negative in itself -- we are where we are in life, and being honest about it and doing something about it is a fine thing. But I am not going to be patient with people lecturing genuine adults about how this adolescent has deep insights into life. Sorry, but that is just wishful thinking by people who mistake ignorance and low intellectual standards for originality.

To counter whining about sheep with a literal defense of flocking behavior is going to be hard to top.

People die on Everest, regardless of how well they were prepared physically, mentally, or materially. Not taking oxygen is not the worst way to be unprepared, it likely only means you will give up sooner. The sooner you give up on the attempt on the peak, the more likely you are to survive it.

They may be stronger, or maybe not. They certainly will learn to inflate the price to include lawyers fees.

Are you hiring a contractor to get work done? Or are you allowing the head of your legal department to pad his resume, while your department is paying for many in house lawyer hours plus (via the contract) many out of house lawyer hours?

Right. An honest, competent, and communicative contractor will not prompt a revenge lawsuit, because even if things go wrong, they will not blow up into 100k+ problems without the client knowing the risks of continuing down that road.

Unless you cause an egregious 50k+ of damage, suing is probably idiotic. And how can that even happen? The client would/should refuse to make the last payment if the work sucks. ("So sue me" works in both directions.) So it has to be a nearly complete fail for suing to make much sense.

It could be possible to run across a very incompetent executive who is desperate for a scapegoat...but that is probably rare. Such a suit is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom, because it is a delaying tactic of an executive whose career is probably already circling the drain.

The other problem is if your lawyer spends 20 hours, the many requested amendments are likely to prompt my lawyer to bill another 20 hours.

What happens then? Your lawyer has even more work to do.

The cycle can easily spiral.

Even for a 400k contract, it is not fun to feel nickeled and dimed with multiple 5k bills from my law firm before any work gets done.

I would rather work with someone willing to sign an imperfect contract. Unless you work very hard to tick me off, you have to do 50k worth of completely egregious stupidity before it is likely to be worthwhile to see the inside of a courtroom.

How likely is that? It is never going to happen. If I hate the work you are doing, I am going cancel the contract and never pay the final 100k or 200k you bill. Then you can effin' sue me. (More likely, we will end up negotiating a compromise...if we are not stupid buffoons.)

LOL. That may not be a coincidence.

I hear that the VCs are flummoxed -- they have pots of money but they are not finding good prospects. The latest fad is to sprinkle little amounts of money around and hope they can pluck a promising seedling.

The important point is that there are VCs out there willing to write little 5 and 6 figure checks, for the hope of a real deal in the future. That has attracted professional deal makers, and this career looks especially attractive to people with weak technical chops for this industry but fancy they can make up for it with schmoozing.

Deal makers have a chicken and egg problem. They cannot get non-small checks without eggs in the basket. They cannot show any person with real money the eggs in the basket without promising future non-small checks to the future chicks. And sometimes people with money decide to not write the big checks until they see pretty chicks. Oops.

You were an egg. The deal maker here cajoled you to rolled into their basket with small amounts of money. And you were never given enough money to crack out of your shell.

I would point out that the deal maker is not screwing you over on purpose. But they may be telling you wildly overoptimistic things, while they are scrambling to see if any of a dozen different people will write a real check. When they refuse to explain, it is because they do not want to own up to making promises which they were not sure they could deliver.

As for Los Angeles, I may not have the best ear to the ground, but it does not sound like a top 5 location for recruiting tech talent. (I know you moved there, but the point still stands.) I would guess that those are third string deal makers who happen to believe they can rub elbows with unsophisticated money in the Hollywood area. (If they were really good, they would in SF Bay, Boston, Austin, NY, where the real VC connections can be found.)

In times of rapid economic change, the risk of doing nothing is often far worse than a grand project that is merely less than fully successful. Chicago feared it would become a big flat toilet, for many good reasons.

When things work pretty well, it can be more difficult to allocated resources for bigger projects, I suppose.

If we were talking about a young aspiring writer-director moving to Hollywood and similar shenanigans happened, we would not be surprised would we?

Based on the OP and your story, I guess tech start ups have truly "arrived".

You might be correct about the reasoning. But those records are likely to work against if a suit ever hit full speed, because those scores could easily support the plaintiffs. "Gee, everyone over 55 ever hired has a 75%+ score. But your 25-54s range wildly from 56% and up."

Once the company asserts this defense, the plaintiffs ask for demographic details on every employee in the company, and what the scores were at time of hiring.

My experience as a human driver is that most accidents can be avoided by either (A) slowing down in ambiguous situations, or (B) aborting that lane change (usually because two cars are attempting to go into the same space).

Those behaviors are easily improved upon by software. Dealing with lane changes is something software is likely to be vastly better at, because they can point sensors in all directions -- I only have one set of eyes.

Furthermore, a lot of horrific accidents are because of bizarre unexpected things that the human does not react to in a timely fashion precisely they are so far out of the normal scope of traffic flow.

For example, what if a car coming the other direction drifts in front of you on a rainy night? This is an unfortunately common and very lethal kind of accident in rural areas. It will take you 1 to 3 seconds to interpret the scenarios and react appropriately. (You only get 3-4 seconds before your are killed.) A computer can instantly recognize that car 100 yards away is maneuvering in a potentially lethal manner and begin slowing down right now. That buys more time for everyone.

The auto industry works in cycles on the scale of approximately 5-6 years. So technology that is not practical right now is 6+ years out.

They are basically promising to sell this as soon as possible. They have 1-3 years for the go or no go decision.

I would hypothesize that it is a very rare police officer who walks around intending to break the law before they know the facts. They break the law because it turns out to be very convenient given how the situation unfolds (e.g. add a few extra baloney charges because the suspect pissed the officer off during minor misbehavior).

The cameras are very convenient, too. It makes defendants cave when they see what the jury will see.

If the convenience of the cameras is sufficient great (I bet honest officers will love it), the habit will be to always turn them on. Thus even the slightly wobbly officers will behave better, simply because it usually makes their job easier.

What do you think will happen to police officers who both have an unusual number of gaps in their electronic record, and a lot of citizen complaints? Police chiefs want fewer headaches...

I think "Rodney King 2.0" angle is being terribly unfair to the police, even though I so happen to find the police actions there deplorable.

Those police officers were making a proper stop of a fleeing suspect. But they lost control of the situation, both the suspect and their own emotions, and could not think of anything better than to keep increasing the level of force applied when their previous application of force failed.

IMO, their failure is we expect police officers to behave more like human beings and less like automatons. But they did not intend to put anyone in the hospital/morgue when they stepped out of their squad cars.

Cameras might have saved Rodney King such a severe beating precisely because those officers would have turned on their cameras, since their initial intentions were proper. What the cameras would have done is put every officer on notice that their actions would be closely scrutinized, after the fact. They probably would have behaved better, if that were the case.

I am sure that is true, even if it is just their voice on the tape, with the camera pointed forward.

Any potential prosecution will involve someone from the DA's office reviewing all evidence. How many officers want to be seen as an overt bully by even a (probably) friendly suit in the DA's office?

Who wants the first thing the jury notices about the tape is how very rude the officer is?

A long time ago, police whined and whined and whined about how the Miranda Rule got in the way of getting convictions. The real result is that police forces are more professional now, and it raises credibility in the eyes of juries. Yes, police officers have crafty workarounds to trick people in confessions while they are "not quite yet" suspects. But that is a big step forward. Officers are working from a standard set of procedures that have been reviewed by attorneys and the court system.

Police raised their game.

The same will happen here. Citizens will be more compliant. Officers will be more polite and more professional. Police will raise their game.

It depends on your business model.

If your business model does not include strong growth, you have the option to organically growing your dev team from smart and less experienced people over the course of many years.

If your business model includes VERY strong growth, paying top dollar to hire experienced people may be a necessity. Large numbers of experienced people can (more or less) only be found in SF/SV. It might cost 4X as much, but it can offer a potential payoff 10X or 20X or 40X as great. (At least that is what the VCs are looking for.)

And many businesses live in between these extremes, where the optimal choice is unclear. Choose wisely.

And a correlation between citizen complaints and a particular officer having mysteriously incomplete records is going to look bad in front of a jury.

What will happen is that police chiefs will simply tell problem officers that if they are going to "forget" to turn on cameras when interacting with citizens, they best "forget" to show up to work that day.