About F%$#ing Time

It appears that the hagiography of brogrammers and Silicon Valley "Unicorns" has hit its expiration date:

When Danny Greg first moved to San Francisco to work at Github in 2012, he used to get high-fives in the street from strangers when he wore his company hoodie.

These days, unless he’s at an investor event, he’s cautious about wearing branded clothing that might indicate he’s a techie. He’s worried about the message it sends.

Greg is one of many people working in tech who are increasingly self-conscious about how the industry – represented by consumer-facing tech titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter and Uber – is perceived: as underregulated, overly powerful companies filled with wealthy tech bros and “brilliant assholes” with little regard for the local communities they occupy. Silicon Valley has taken over from Wall Street as the political bogeyman of choice, turning tech workers – like it or not – into public ambassadors for the 1%.

“I would never say I worked at Facebook,” said one 30-year-old software engineer who left the company last year to pursue an alternative career. Instead, at dinner parties he would give purposefully vague responses and change the subject. “There’s this song and dance you learn to play because people are quick to judge.”

Like Wall Street before, the tech industry is a justifiable punchbag. “MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”

Gee, my heart bleeds for these guys.

Tweet of the Day

Another week, another round of #Brexit negotiations. Here's a handy guide for EU officials struggling to understand their UK counterparts. 😉 pic.twitter.com/1WVD2Ccxjc

— 🇪🇺Martin Mycielski (@mycielski) October 30, 2017

I've been told about similar cultural issues with various cultures.

H/T Links 10/31/17 | naked capitalism

You Ever Notice What Happens When the Silicon Valley Mindset Meets the Real World?

First Theranos, and now Juicero.

In all fairness, Theranos has a harder job, they were actually in the healthcare business, which involved deceiving regulators, which is hard, while Juicero was just a f%$#ing juice machine:

It sounds like America’s favorite $400 juice machine will be no longer.

“After selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” reads the company blog post.

Juicero will also be giving people money back. “For the next 90 days, we are offering refunds for your purchase of the Juicero Press,” according to the note.

Founded by Doug Evans, San Francisco-based Juicero had raised more than $118 million in funding from prominent VCs like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Carmelo Anthony also invested through his Melo7 Tech venture fund. Even The Campbell Soup Company threw money at it. Juicero started raising funding in 2013 and launched 16 months ago.

The company was subject to mockery, particularly after a Bloomberg piece showed that the juice packets could be squeezed by hand and did not require a fancy machine.

The emperor has no clothes.

If regulators and prosecutors did a deep dive on Silicon Valley, those that weren't in prison would be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

Baltimore Just Got Smaller

It's alt-weekly, The Baltimore City Paper, will be closed down by the end of the year:

The Baltimore Sun Media Group plans to close City Paper later this year. No official end date has been announced for the alt-weekly, now in its 40th year.

"Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge," BSMG's director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, said in a statement. "It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017. Details about the closing date are still being discussed. This is a difficult decision and we are mindful of how it affects our employees, the readers and advertisers."

Editorial staffers found out about the news in June during a meeting with senior vice president Tim Thomas, who cited declining ad revenues and future projections for those numbers as reasons for the closure.

City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg offered the following: "This is Brandon Soderberg, City Paper editor reporting live from the deck of the Titanic. Yes, we're being closed by BSMG/Tronc/and so on. We were told this news last month and there isn't a clear date but what we've been told is no later than the end of the year. We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it's very sad, but also because I'm not sure about how this is all going to play out and I'm half-convinced this won't be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us."

The Sun bought the paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the paper for more than two dozen years, in early 2014. In an announcement of the purchase, BSMG's then-publisher, president, and CEO Tim Ryan praised City Paper's independent streak. 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit, about The Sun is the most important bit: The fate of the City Paper was sealed when The Sun bought it.

As A. J. Liebling noted in his seminal book The Press, the only way to make money by buying a newspaper is to be a competitor in the market, and the profit comes from shutting it down, which allows the survivor to increase its own advertising revenue.

Even if only 10% of the ads in The City Paper go to The Sun, they will get a non trivial amount of revenue from this.

I think that Baltimore is too large and too dynamic not to have an alt-weekly.

I'm considering starting a crowd funding effort to buy them from the Tribune Company.

Any advice/aid would be appreciated.

You're an Imbecile

There are not a whole bunch of discussions where I think that the only response is to immediately dismiss its proponents as stupid and engage in no further dialog.

It's not that my don't quickly judge others' intelligence, it's that generally I like to argue.

But sometimes, something is so f%$#ing stupid that I just wash my hands.

Pretty much any argument that includes the phrase, "Cultural appropriation," and not only do I stop listening, and simply go all Drax the Destroyer and walk away.

And now the forces of evil have captured Canada, and there is an international effort to criminalize "Cultural Appropriation" which originates from the Great White North:

Indigenous advocates from around the world are calling on a UN committee to ban the appropriation of Indigenous cultures — and to do it quickly.

Delegates from 189 countries, including Canada, are in Geneva this week as part of a specialized international committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency.

Since it began in 2001, the committee has been working on creating and finishing three pieces of international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines.

The meeting takes place as concern grows worldwide about the rights of cultures to control their own materials. In the U.S. this week, designer Tory Burch agreed to change the description of one of her coats for women after Romanians protested that it had been described as African-inspired when it actually appropriated a traditional Romanian garment.

The only cultures that do not incorporate the characteristics of of other cultures over time are dead cultures.

What's more, this whole thing runs counter to the very concept of a cultural commons, which is essential for a living society.  (Of course, it is coming from WIPO, which makes the US Patent Court look like Karl Marx.)

I would also add that the cultures in question are in no way harmed by this.  They still have their, "Designs, dances, words and traditional medicines," even if, for example, Richard Simmons decides to do an aerobics video using the traditional dances of the Masai.

My apologies for the image of a Richard Simmons doing an aerobics video using the traditional dances of the Masai.

It isn't pretty, but it needed to be said.

H/t Angry Bear, who is just as disgusted as I am.

You Heard about What Happened in Portland?

I'm not referring to the white supremacist terrorism, I am referring to the giant hissy fit over burritos.

A couple of chefs went down to Mexico to review and recreate their cuisine, and once they did, the Social Justice Warriors immediately started screaming "Cultural Appropriation" and said chefs closed down their food stand.

This is complete crap.

Restaurants steal from each other, both within and across cuisines, and have from time immemorial, and to suggest that there is something wrong with that is to infantilize the surveyors Mexican cuisine:

My thoughts on cultural appropriation of food changed forever in the research for my 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. One of my personal highlights was discovering the restaurant that Glenn Bell of Taco Bell infamy had cited in his autobiography as being the source of "inspiration" for him deciding to get into the taco business. How did he get inspired? He'd eat tacos the restaurant every night, then go across the street to his hot dog stand to try and recreate them.

Bell freely admitted to the story, but never revealed the name of the restaurant. I did: Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, which is the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire. I was excited to interview the owner, Irene Montaño, who confirmed Bell's story. I was upset for the Montaños, and when I asked Montaño how she felt that Bell had ripped off her family's recipes to create a multibillion-dollar empire, I expected bitterness, anger, maybe even plans for a lawsuit in an attempt to get at least some of the billions of dollars that Taco Bell has earned over the past 50-plus years.

Instead, Montaño responded with grace: "Good for him!" She pointed out that Mitla had never suffered a drop in business because of Taco Bell, that her restaurant had been in business longer than his, and "our tacos were better."

It's an anecdote I always keep in mind whenever stories of cultural appropriation of food by white people get the Left riled up and rock the food world. The latest skirmish is going on in Portland, where two white girls decided to open up what the estimable Willamette Week called "a concept that fits twee Portland": a breakfast burrito pop-up located within a hipster taco cart. The grand sin the gabachos committed, according to the haters, was the admission that they quizzed women in Baja California about how to make the perfect flour tortilla.

For their enthusiasm, the women have received all sorts of shade and have closed down their pop-up. To which I say: laughable. The gabachas knew exactly what they were doing, so didn't they stand by it? Real gumption there, pendejas.

But also laughable is the idea that white people aren't supposed to—pick your word—rip off or appropriate or get "inspired" by Mexican food, that comida mexicana is a sacrosanct tradition only Mexicans and the white girls we marry can participate in. That cultural appropriation is a one-way street where the evil gabacho steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again. 

………

What these culture warriors who proclaim to defend Mexicans don't realize is that we're talking about the food industry, one of the most rapacious businesses ever created. It's the human condition at its most Darwinian, where EVERYONE rips EVERYONE off. The only limit to an entrepreneur's chicanery isn't resources, race, or class status, but how fast can you rip someone off, how smart you can be to spot trends years before anyone else, and how much money you can make before you have to rip off another idea again.

When Oberlin (where else?) students accused food services of cultural appropriation for serving allegedly crappy sushi, the REAL issue was not cultural appropriation, it was bad food.

When a friend was saying that dreadlocks were cultural appropriation, because white people could wear them, and black people were told that it was unprofessional, I said, "That's not cultural appropriation, that's racism."

The only cultures that don't appropriate from others are dead ones.

Cultural borrowing is a fact of life, and it more prevalent in cuisine than almost anywhere else.

I don't like crappy mass-market bagels, a food of my people, but my problem is not cultural appropriation, it's that the mass market bagels are complete sh%$.

If you are ranting about cultural appropriation, you are an imbecile.

If you are ranting about how outsiders have gotten a cherished aspect of your culture wrong, you are just like the rest of us.

Quote of the Day

In various times and regions, Jews have belonged to conservative parties like the UK tories or French Gaullist parties, for instance. But they are virtually absent from rightist politics. The reason is clear enough. Anti-semitism is almost inevitably and almost always part of rightist political movements. It is a natural feature. This is not always explicitly so. It is not always that way at first, but eventually it is always there.

—Josh Marshall

The right hearkens back to, and attempts to resurrect, a past that never existed, and this past is largely Judenrein.

Jews, and most other minorities, do not exist as human beings with agency in this idealized vision of the past. 

They are either absent, or meek stereotypes.

In Some Ways, India Is Very Much Like the Us

It appears that in response to advance notice of speeches by Indian PM Narendra Modi bars are scrambling to come up with drinking games:

India’s teetotaler Prime Minister Narendra Modi almost fueled a booze binge on New Year’s eve in the nation’s cities.

As his scheduled speech drew nearer, pubs announced Modi-themed drinking games while Indians sought solace through social media humor. The last time Modi had addressed the nation, on Nov. 8, it had ended with him canceling 86 percent of currency in circulation and unleashing chaos in a country where almost all consumer payments are made in cash.

Modi had likened the move to a bitter medicine to help cure tax evasion and graft. Many saw it differently.

"Come get a drink on us," pub chain Social, which has 15 outlets across the nation, announced on Facebook. "If we’re going down, we’re going down together."

‘Mitron’

Social offered a pint of beer or an alcohol shot for 31 rupees ($0.5) each time Modi uttered “mitron,” which means friends in Hindi. That compares with 85 rupees for a pint of Kingfisher beer it normally charges customers. Mobile wallet company Mobikwik -- backed by Sequoia Capital -- promised lucky users a 100 percent cashback.

I think that Donald Trump, another teetotaler, will be a similar inspiration for bars in the United States.

On the other hand the recent ruling by India's Supreme Court banning overtures to religion and caste by political candidates is something unimaginable in the us.

Hell, such a ruling would effectively outlaw the Republican Party:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that politicians cannot seek votes on the grounds of caste, creed or religion.

The landmark judgment came while the court revisited earlier judgments, including one from 1995 that equated Hindutva with Hinduism and called it a “way of life” and said a candidate was not necessarily violating the law if votes were sought on this plank.

Several petitions filed over the years have challenged the consequences of that verdict. “It is a fallacy and an error of law to proceed on the assumption that any reference to Hindutva or Hinduism in a speech makes it automatically a speech based on Hindu religion as opposed to other religions … (Hindutva and Hinduism) are used in a speech to emphasise the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian cultural ethos,” the 1995 judgment authored by Justice J.S. Verma had said.

In its decision on Monday, a seven-judge constitution bench of the court ruled that the relationship between man and God is an ‘individual choice’ and the state cannot interfere in it, Economic Times reported. It added that an election is a secular exercise, and that should be reflected in the process that is followed.

Four judges of the seven-judge bench headed by Chief Justice T.S. Thakur (who retires on Tuesday) ruled that “the constitution forbids state from mixing religion with politics”, Livemint reported. While Thakur and justices Madan B. Lokur, S.A. Bobde, and L. Nageswara Rao formed the majority and hence gave the ruling, the other three judges – Adarsh Kumar Goel, U.U. Lalit and D.Y. Chandrachud – dissented and said that the matter must be left to parliament.

I have mixed emotions on this one, I tend to be absolutist on free speech issues, but the fact that this kneecaps the Indian Fascist party (BJP) is a positive outcome.

Not ISIS/ISIL/IS/Whatever

After the shootings in Munich, everyone seemed intent on claiming that it was ISIS/ISIL/IS/Whatever.

I was dubious because the shooter was of Iranian extraction, and thus probably Shia rather than Sunni, and because it was reported that he was shouting anti-Turkish slurs.

Well, police now think that was inspired by Anders Behring Breivik's shooting spree in Norway:

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich was obsessed with mass shootings but had no known links to the Islamic State group, German police say.

Written material on such attacks was found in his room, and Munich's police chief spoke of links to the massacre by Norway's Anders Behring Breivik.

The gunman, who had dual German-Iranian nationality, later killed himself.

His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Ali Sonboly.

………

Friday evening's attack at the Olympia shopping mall also left 27 people injured, including children. Ten of them are critically ill, including a 13-year-old boy, police say.

Seven of the dead were teenagers. Three victims were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.

Police say the Munich-born gunman had been in psychiatric care, receiving treatment for depression.

Authorities are also checking reports that he may have been bullied by his peers, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

………

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said there was an "obvious" link between the attack and Friday's fifth anniversary of Breivik's attacks in Norway, when he murdered 77 people.

The killer reportedly shouted anti-foreigner slurs during the rampage and yelled "I'm German" at one man who challenged him.

Literature about mass killings was found at his home including a German-language translation of the book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.

Mr De Maiziere said the suspect had researched a 2009 school shooting in Germany as well as the Breivik attack.

So it appears not to be terrorism, but what qualifies as run of the mill white male American type violence.

That last sentence is so f%$#ing depressing.

Thanks Duncan.

Ever since the Reagan administration, the "Very Serious People" VSPs in Washington, DC have tried to find a way to cut/privatize Social Security.

For the first time in recent political memory, expansion of Social Security has become a top of serious discussion, and the impetus for this came from one person, Duncan "Atrios" Black:

In May 2012, ABC broke into its daytime coverage to show President Obama endorsing same-sex marriage, the culmination of years of activist work to take the idea from the radical fringe into the mainstream. We saw an economic version of that this week, and while none of the networks fired up their “Breaking News” graphics for it, the impact on society could be just as large, and the people who helped make it happen should be just as lauded.

“It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous,” said the president in Elkhart, Indiana, to applause, “and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.” This was totally unexpected: We knew the Elkhart speech was about the economy, but we didn’t know Obama would concur with a rallying cry on the left for several years now: Expand Social Security.

This movement crystallized from research into the looming retirement crisis. Too many Americans are headed into their golden years without nearly the kind of savings needed to maintain their standard of living. And their defined-benefit pensions have gradually transitioned into defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which have rewarded Wall Street with hidden and excessive fees while eating away at individual gains. The change also shifted market risks from employers onto employees, who must hope to avoid a drop in stocks as they hit retirement age.

………

Despite all this, the initial impulse from the Obama administration was to use Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a larger deal with Republicans. Grand bargain talks from 2011 to 2013 repeatedly invoked a different way to calculate the consumer price index (known as “chained CPI”), which would have resulted in $1,000 less a year for the average 85-year-old. Obama put chained CPI in his fiscal year 2014 budget.

Contrary to some after-the-fact snickering, this was a very credible threat, and it allowed Republicans to point to a Democratic president favoring entitlement cuts. Only the Tea Party’s unwillingness to consider anything resembling a compromise saved retirees from cuts.

At first, liberal groups played defense on chained CPI, accustomed to mobilizing in opposition rather than staking out a bolder claim. But the expansion movement can really be traced back to one blogger: Duncan Black, popularly known as “Atrios,” who waged an initially lonely crusade in a series of 2012 columns in USA Today, explaining why the retirement crisis was coming and how expanding Social Security represented the cleanest solution.

………

Lawmakers followed the rank and file consensus. Elizabeth Warren jumped aboard the Harkin bill in late 2013. A House bill quickly got dozens of co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who holds down the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, endorsed an expansion amendment. Bernie Sanders made it a campaign plank, one that Hillary Clinton eventually had to endorse, albeit in a more targeted fashion.

Now President Obama, who started this all by embracing the opposite position years ago, has explicitly endorsed the expansion of Social Security. This victory is a great credit to Duncan Black and everyone who moved a minority opinion in the corridors of power in the Democratic Party into the mainstream.

(emphasis mine)

Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into this.  So is Hillary Clinton.

He has seen cutting Social Security as a major legacy goal since he entered office in 2009: He thought could show himself reaching across the aisle if he could ground the proverbial "3^rd rail" of American politics.

Thankfully, he was foiled by the Teabaggers in Congress, just as Bill Clinton effort to privatize Social Security was foiled by Gingrich's impeachment efforts in the late 1990s.

Duncan Black has done this country a service by short-circuiting the efforts of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party to divert money from retirees unto the the pockets of the banksters.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley

Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.

I refer to this mindset as "Michael Kinsley Disease".

And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent:

Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described “foreign policy elites”? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post’s print edition on Saturday, under the headline “Foreign policy elites indecisive on Trump.” The Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But “foreign policy elites” have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all.

………

If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of “foreign policy elites” — or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite.

What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to “foreign policy elites” has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That’s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That’s how long we’ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and naïve to use the Vietnam-era term “quagmire” to describe the United States’ situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore.

………

Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.

 I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Yes

Booman asks the following about the incoherence Conservative ideology which has been limned by the current Republican contest, "Has it always been more a matter of tribalism and a team mentality?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

H/t Atrios.

No Butts About It

I am not referring to the tuchas. I am referring to the archery practice, which for many centuries was mandatory for English yeomen.

And now an English vicar has invoked this ancient law:

A vicar has revived an ancient law to call members of her parish together for archery practice.

The Reverend Mary Edwards, of Collingbourne Ducis, near Marlborough, called residents to the village recreation ground on Friday.

Residents were rewarded for complying with the law with a bar, a barbecue and live music.

Church warden Mike Cox said: "It seems she's still entitled to do that."

"I've been checking on the web and most archery experts and clergy seem to agree she is," Mr Cox added.

………

"We are celebrating the building of a new loo [bathroom] in the church. After all these years we have at long last brought running water to the church."

It's a wonderful story, but it appears that their understanding of the law is not accurate:

……… And, in fact, it appears that the archery requirement was repealed quite a while ago.

While I would have preferred to fly to England and go rummaging through the Parliamentary Archives to confirm this personally, I had a deadline to meet, plus I am not especially welcome there anymore because of what I see as a simple misunderstanding as to whether their reading rooms are clothing-optional. So I have relied on the Internet, which is less authoritative but also less judgmental.

It is clear that there were laws requiring archery practice dating back to at least the 13th century. The motive was to make sure England had enough men trained to use the longbow, which for centuries was a crucial weapon for the English. (The most famous example is Agincourt, a battle that Henry V won in 1415 and is still going on about.)

The training requirement was usually combined with prohibitions on other kinds of games and sports so that people would focus on archery instead of, for example, “tennis, football, [quoits], dice” and other “games inappropriate.” The point was not so much to condemn games as to make sure they did not get in the way of longbow training. In other words, they saw nothing morally wrong with tennis, it’s just that it is hard to kill a French knight with a tennis ball, no matter how good your serve is.

In 1511 the requirement was expanded by “An Act concerning Shooting in Long Bows,” even though by then the importance of the bow was declining. This law provided that “All sorts of men under the age of 40 Years shall have bows and arrows” and practice using them. The playing of games continued, however, and in 1541 the law was expanded yet again by “An Act for the Maintenance of Artillery, and debarring unlawful Games,” the preamble to which declares that said games were believed to be the “Cause of the Decay of Archery” skills in England (There was another very important cause by then, namely guns–or, more specifically, bullets–but games always seem to get blamed for social problems.)

The archery requirement was extended to all men under age 60, and the list of banned games was expanded. As before, though, these restrictions did not apply to the aristocracy. They tended to become knights, not archers, plus they had the God-given right to play games if they liked. According to them, that is, not God.

At least some of this was still on the books well into the 19th century, but was probably repealed during the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1845, “An Act to Amend the Law concerning Games and Wagers” repealed any part of King Henry’s 1541 law making any “Game of Skill” unlawful or “which enacts any penalty for lacking bows or arrows … or which regulates the making, selling or using of bows and arrows.” If any of the older stuff survived, it was most likely repealed by more recent acts intended to get some of the ancient stuff off the books.

Seeing as how the good vicar did not threaten any sanctions against those who declined to practice archery, I won't spoil her fun, but it appears that she does not have the law on her side.

H/t Jill Junkala on Facebook.

Headline of the Day

As Sanders Slams Wall Street Elite, Clinton Ditches Iowa To Fetch Their Checks

—Common Dreams

The issue is not whether Clinton is corrupt, she isn't in any conventional sense.

It is rather that she, like Barack Obama, is one of them.

Entitled Idiots Who Should Not Have Your Money

Pretty much the whole management and venture capitalist class in Silicon Valley:

Nobody likes to be questioned.

But lately, some of Silicon Valley's big tech investors seem to be particularly upset that journalists are questioning some of the valley's hottest startups.

There's a fundamental difference in point of view here. The funders see first-hand how hard it is to build something and sympathize with the struggle. The journalists are supposed to be as objective and careful as possible and report what they find — even if some people don't like it.

The latest example is Theranos, whose science was called into question by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was quick to defend her company, as you'd expect from a CEO.

But some VCs also seemed genuinely upset. Not at the substance of the allegations, but for not giving founders the benefit of the doubt when it comes to building something.

………

Startup founders have a really hard job. They are trying to do something new and drive society forward. The tech press doesn't know all the facts so you should give them a break.

The first sentence is indisputably true — it's hard (and lonesome) to found a tech startup.

………

The second sentence is where things get sticky.

A lot of tech founders are trying to do something new and drive society forward. But some of them are not.

………

The third sentence is where they completely miss the point.

Journalists don't set out to write takedowns of companies. But when a journalist begins investigating a company and finds something is amiss, and the story is well vetted and fairly reported, the venture community should welcome that reporting.

I'm beginning to think that of all the problems facing the business culture of the United States , it is the Ayn Rand inspired corrosive narcissism which is worst of all.

If you look at Theranos, for example, the facts are fairly clear.

The company has misrepresented the scope of its technology, and there have been repeated reports that the at least some of the tests are significantly less accurate.

This technology may, or may not, be successful at a later date, but it is clear that its valuation, one which makes its CEO a billionaire is Silicon Valley "Unicorn" bullsh%$.

What Happens When Your Intelligence Service Thinks Itself a Breed Apart………

It turns out that the CIA's unwillingness to play nicely with other US Agencies left a trail of bread crumbs that the KGB used to identify covert operatives:

As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles.

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed and CIA personnel compromised or, indeed, had their lives thrown into jeopardy.

………How could these disasters have happened with such regularity if the agency had not been penetrated by Soviet moles?

The problem with this line of thought was that it did not so much overestimate CIA security as underestimate the brainpower of their Russian counterparts.

A name soon emerged from the KGB undergrowth: that of Yuri Totrov, a veritable legend who soon became known with grim humor as the shadow director of personnel at CIA.

The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his “memoirs.” Totrov’s retort was typically blunt. “Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, ‘Not to be Pitched.'”

………

So how, exactly, did Totrov reconstitute CIA personnel listings without access to the files themselves or those who put them together?

………

What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Other indicators of a more trivial nature could be detected in the field by a vigilant foreign counterintelligence operative but not uniformly so: the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

The invariable indicators took further research, however, based on U.S. government practices long established as a result of the ambivalence with which the State Department treated its cousins in intelligence.

Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.

It is very interesting to see that many of the CIA's failures during the cold war appear not to be the result of treason, or of individual incompetence.

They are the result of a toxic and dysfunctional organizational culture, and the events since then, torture, spying on congressional staffers investigating them, etc. has indicated that if anything, the problem has gotten worse.

Tweet of the Day

By the way, why WOULD you want the confederate flag on your car? Its like telling the police "The meth is HERE"

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) June 20, 2015

This is brilliant

This Is Unbelievably Full of Win

In a discussion at the Stellar Parthenon BBS about the FIFA prosecutions, the discussion digressed, as it often does, into a discussion of how much of what is on cable (Sports "Journalism", Fox News, Reality TV, etc.) is not just useless, but it is like fingernails on the chalk board.

At this point, Greg Muir (his blog is here), notes:

I have taken to straight out unplugging televisions in waiting rooms.

There is so much win in doing this.

Quote of the Day

The markets want money for cocaine and prostitutes. I am deadly serious.

Most people don’t realize that “the markets” are in reality 22-27 year old business school graduates, furiously concocting chaotic trading strategies on excel sheets and reporting to bosses perhaps 5 years senior to them. In addition, they generally possess the mentality and probably intelligence of junior cycle secondary school students. Without knowladge of these basic facts, nothing about the markets makes any sense—and with knowladge, everything does.

—ObsessiveMathsFreak in the comments section of a post on the blog The Irish Economy

H/t Paul Krugman

This is Significant

Donald Trump spoke at CPAC, and he was booed when he called for ground troops in Iraq to fight ISIS:

In the same question and answer period with Sean Hannity, he [Trump] embarrassed himself yet again when he outlined his strategy to fight ISIS, which was nothing more than "he'd hit them really hard." With what? We don't know, but when he supported sending ground troops against ISIS, the crowd turned on him.

Hannity: A, to stop Iran's nuclear program and B, to defeat ISIS, cause I don't hear say degrade them, I hear you say defeat them.

Trump: Defeat. Well, with ISIS, I'd just hit them really hard and that would probably and a year ago you wouldn't have said it and nobody wouldn't have likes it, you may have to have some boots on the ground for a period of time until you're rid of the cancer. (boos) That's number one, you may have to have it Look, they're cutting off the heads of people, they're burning at the stake, It's like we're living in medieval times.

(emphasis original)

Unfortunately, the video has been deleted by the user, but the fact that the crowd at CPAC, who have pretty much defined themselves as the wingnuts of wingnuts, have come to the conclusion that the John McCain school of foreign policy is without merit is significant.

If the war forever has lost the CPAC crowd, they have lost the nation.