The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
Can you elaborate on "basic competency issues", either in the case of Boudin's office and/or other high profile reformist prosecutors? Is that just a polite way of calling them dumb, à la what the kids are calling a 'skill issue' nowadays?
The main HIPAA claim seems to be that the victim didn’t provide (or consent to the publication of) that X-ray, and neither did their only family member known to possess it. I don’t know who released it, but if it was someone in the medical office, that is a genuine HIPAA violation.
It could be a violation at the medical office, but Lim isn't a covered entity, and the document accuses her directly.
How does it seem that Radley is talking past Gary?
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
> The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian.
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
> At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...
That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking. I really think you have to kind of slant your head and squint to come away with the impression that that section isn't about Lim, but rather the unnamed medical office.
A. That's how I read it too. B. You can be criminally liable for HIPAA violations, if you induce someone covered by them to violate them. See for example https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/media/1254226/dl (indictment of KEITH RITSON)
"COUNT 2
(Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose
Individually Identifiable Health Information)
19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are
hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein.
20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information:
a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
(“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful
disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient
confidentiality.
b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of
Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’
medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health
information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law
and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical
doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by
the law and privacy regulations.
c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to
Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health
care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the
District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant
KEITH RITSON
did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to
commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without
authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health
information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose
individually identifiable health information and protected health information
maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United
States Code, Section 1320d-6."
As i said, neither of us is lawyers. Neither of us are experts in what a DA's office has written, and what that writing should be interpreted as under the law. Perhaps a more charitable reading is what is called for, given we're not experts in the domain.
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
The question you're raising isn't a legal one, at least as I understand it. I read you to be saying "the reasonable take on this document is that they are saying SOMEONE violated HIPAA, but not Lim".
That's a question about messaging, not the law.
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I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.
I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".
>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.
To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost.
To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.
He took a course on how to use your laugh as a domination tactic.
Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.
This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.
Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.
It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.
This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
> It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
This isn't great reporting. It's politics.
Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.
It’s weirder than that. Even the idea of an apolitical journalism is ahistorical.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
Yikes. Vastly outweighed by the ruination of journalism by politics.
There's abusive intersections of politics and journalism just like there are abusive intersections of all sorts of other things and journalism. The idea of a truly neutral reporter though is a fiction.
This article isn't that -- nothing excellent is achieved. It's pure intra-party squabbling between leftist and centrist factions of California Dems. Balko is just trying to score points for his faction.
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Everything is politics.
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
Maybe I just want to eat what tastes good, and not have to worry about how what I chose on the menu is going to support a politician, political party, businessperson, etc.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
Just because you choose to ignore the externalities of your choices doesn't mean they no longer exist. It just means that you value your personal well being and comfort more than being informed about the results of your actions.
It's a poltical act to eat food that tastes good, in defiance of the activists who think that the food yiu find tasty is immoral and want to make it illegal for you to do so. Something is a poltical act if other people want you not to do it and want to enforce this through law, which you have no control over.
Sure, you can. But don't pretend that's not a political choice.
This is so tired. Give me a topic about personal food preferences and I can spin is 6 ways from Sunday towards whatever (or against) political bias you want.
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an opinion that is judgmental, aggressive, frames the speaker as a bully with self-appointed moral superiority.
It’s not nice to tell people “you’re selfish and part of the problem if you just want to live a quite life away from all the crazy people who link politics to their self worth” and calling it “not nice” is a wild understatement. I see it as harassment. “Care because I think you should!”
Fuck that haha
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an argument that you completely made up.
You don't like to be called selfish for not considering how your actions might affect others, but others are supposed to care about how their actions might affect you? Seems like a pretty self centered attitude to have.
You're almost there and then you give up on original thought at the last minute.
>“Care because I think you should!”
Welcome to politics. Not only do I demand that you care because I think you should, but I will smash you with the full force of the law if you don't.
Now, if you decide to do nothing, well, you're getting your ass smashed by the full force of the law and whining like a little bitch saying "I'm not political, why did this happen to me".
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".
And "There are no neutrals in the reality, entropy forbids it".
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood my point.
I never said “If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil”.
My point is that there is no not participating in politics. The lack of participation is a political choice in itself.
That's a pretty depressing worldview. Children playing in the park aren't being political. It's possible to just exist sometimes.
>Children playing in the park aren't being political
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
But that park was probably created as a result of a vote or other political process.
The children playing in a park aren't being political, and are largely insulated from the politics of playing in a park... but those circumstances are surrounded by all kinds of political process. As another commenter said, the park's existence is probably due to politics; as are the rules the children need to follow, what activities are permitted, the safety and maintenance of park equipment and facilities, curfews, etc. It is also a choice on the part of the parents to let their kids play in a park, and which parks their kids play in, and those choices aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the perspective of the adult should not be to view children in the park as apolitical, but to be cognizant of the processes that influence their children and try to ensure that they work for the children's benefit.
[deleted]
Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?
[flagged]
It shouldn't be any big surprise that a guy like Garry Tan is power-hungry and manipulative. He's got his hands in all kinds stuff like influencing elections. https://garrysguide.org/elections
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[flagged]
This Tan guy is a real douche and in full support of the author but...
"Usually it's the latter, because, who wouldn't want the needle to move even a little bit in the right direction?"
Which direction? The one you think is right or the other one, other people think is right?
[deleted]
Surely there’s a skill in G-Stack for this.
yes just ask claude to add quick-silence-dissension to your project
Ahh yes the [ Removed by Reddit ] function
leave gstack alone!
It's just text files Garry!
No problem - if I want a slow poke blog site powered by slop ;).
An acknowledgement, let alone an apology is highly unlikely.
Garry just comes across as a deeply unsavory figure deeply stuck in the far right radicalization pipeline.
He regularly calls out "Marxists" on Twitter and rails against leftists, all while supporting mass surveillance and building a dystopia.
What a yucky person.
And Paul G has defended him on X as a centrist. Weird blind spot.
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He's also a non-white immigrant. The amount of brown skinned nutjobs try to cosplay as white so they'll be accepted as "one of the good ones" is too high.
Hey brown or yellow immigrants - the conservatives will gladly accept your vote, but the second you walk away they won't even refer to you by name in conversation, they'll refer you to with every slur in the book. I grew up with some very far-right types who had money...nice to "the help" in person, but soon as earshot is out of range, you hear the n-word like it's as common as the word "the". And just because you're not black, doesn't mean they don't hate you too. I've heard some horrid things said to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc.
Anyone remember the young republicans club at Florida International University scandal? Lots of young male Cuban immigrants (or kids of immigrants) desperate to be seen as white. Problem is, you pull any one of those kids out of Dade county, they'll be called a Mexican and told to go make tacos.
Garry's actions on social media remind me of those kids, albeit someone with a bit more money, and a little less perspective on things.
The cult of Thiel - is he also the shitty vibe coder ?.
He's so far right that he endorsed Scott Weiner! That's pretty far, all right!
why is YC worshipping this guy who pretends like he's the only guy who knows how to use cc?
Is there a YC school that folks like Garry and Sam went through to learn how to be unethical?
It's a requirement to reach the levels they have reached. Someone with empathy would get enough money to take care of their family (maybe even for multiple generations) and then be satisfied and focus on reducing the suffering of others instead of running up the score on net worth
I mean, after I racked up a two digit number of milions of dollars I believe I'd find myself thinking "why the fuck do I need more, it's time to go fuck off and do anything else".
Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
They are not connected to the same world we are.
Why are there so many stories that are older AND have less points higher on frontpage?
That’s always true of almost any story. There are many signals that influence a story’s rank: votes, flags, vouches, age, site, software penalties, and moderator intervention (usually to override flags and automatic penalties).
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
User flags can weigh stories down. If you'd prefer a different sort, try https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ("active" is popular, though not my taste really)
Well, to be fair, Garry's article was clearly 100% AI-generated. So perhaps he didn't even really post it; maybe it was just a rogue agent. Or, y'know, an assistant who posted without his authorization. Or perhaps Ambien was involved. Or, it was an Ambien-addled assistant who misconfigured an agent to post the article. Clearly not Garry's fault.
Then he shouldn’t be posting under his real name? Or specifically call that out.
The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
Can you elaborate on "basic competency issues", either in the case of Boudin's office and/or other high profile reformist prosecutors? Is that just a polite way of calling them dumb, à la what the kids are calling a 'skill issue' nowadays?
The main HIPAA claim seems to be that the victim didn’t provide (or consent to the publication of) that X-ray, and neither did their only family member known to possess it. I don’t know who released it, but if it was someone in the medical office, that is a genuine HIPAA violation.
It could be a violation at the medical office, but Lim isn't a covered entity, and the document accuses her directly.
How does it seem that Radley is talking past Gary?
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
> The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian.
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
Direct gdrive link for those who don't want to go back and scroll through the article again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZKYxe0oGq7HeC5Kj2lxf-X55r4...
edit:
> At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...
That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking. I really think you have to kind of slant your head and squint to come away with the impression that that section isn't about Lim, but rather the unnamed medical office.
A. That's how I read it too. B. You can be criminally liable for HIPAA violations, if you induce someone covered by them to violate them. See for example https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/media/1254226/dl (indictment of KEITH RITSON)
"COUNT 2 (Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose Individually Identifiable Health Information) 19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein. 20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information: a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient confidentiality. b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’ medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by the law and privacy regulations. c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant KEITH RITSON did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose individually identifiable health information and protected health information maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United States Code, Section 1320d-6."
As i said, neither of us is lawyers. Neither of us are experts in what a DA's office has written, and what that writing should be interpreted as under the law. Perhaps a more charitable reading is what is called for, given we're not experts in the domain.
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
The question you're raising isn't a legal one, at least as I understand it. I read you to be saying "the reasonable take on this document is that they are saying SOMEONE violated HIPAA, but not Lim".
That's a question about messaging, not the law.
I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.
I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".
>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.
To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost.
To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.
He took a course on how to use your laugh as a domination tactic.
Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.
This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.
Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.
It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.
This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
> It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
This isn't great reporting. It's politics.
Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.
It’s weirder than that. Even the idea of an apolitical journalism is ahistorical.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
Yikes. Vastly outweighed by the ruination of journalism by politics.
There's abusive intersections of politics and journalism just like there are abusive intersections of all sorts of other things and journalism. The idea of a truly neutral reporter though is a fiction.
This article isn't that -- nothing excellent is achieved. It's pure intra-party squabbling between leftist and centrist factions of California Dems. Balko is just trying to score points for his faction.
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Everything is politics.
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
Maybe I just want to eat what tastes good, and not have to worry about how what I chose on the menu is going to support a politician, political party, businessperson, etc.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
Just because you choose to ignore the externalities of your choices doesn't mean they no longer exist. It just means that you value your personal well being and comfort more than being informed about the results of your actions.
It's a poltical act to eat food that tastes good, in defiance of the activists who think that the food yiu find tasty is immoral and want to make it illegal for you to do so. Something is a poltical act if other people want you not to do it and want to enforce this through law, which you have no control over.
Sure, you can. But don't pretend that's not a political choice.
This is so tired. Give me a topic about personal food preferences and I can spin is 6 ways from Sunday towards whatever (or against) political bias you want.
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an opinion that is judgmental, aggressive, frames the speaker as a bully with self-appointed moral superiority.
It’s not nice to tell people “you’re selfish and part of the problem if you just want to live a quite life away from all the crazy people who link politics to their self worth” and calling it “not nice” is a wild understatement. I see it as harassment. “Care because I think you should!”
Fuck that haha
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an argument that you completely made up.
You don't like to be called selfish for not considering how your actions might affect others, but others are supposed to care about how their actions might affect you? Seems like a pretty self centered attitude to have.
You're almost there and then you give up on original thought at the last minute.
>“Care because I think you should!”
Welcome to politics. Not only do I demand that you care because I think you should, but I will smash you with the full force of the law if you don't.
Now, if you decide to do nothing, well, you're getting your ass smashed by the full force of the law and whining like a little bitch saying "I'm not political, why did this happen to me".
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".
And "There are no neutrals in the reality, entropy forbids it".
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood my point.
I never said “If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil”.
My point is that there is no not participating in politics. The lack of participation is a political choice in itself.
That's a pretty depressing worldview. Children playing in the park aren't being political. It's possible to just exist sometimes.
>Children playing in the park aren't being political
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
But that park was probably created as a result of a vote or other political process.
The children playing in a park aren't being political, and are largely insulated from the politics of playing in a park... but those circumstances are surrounded by all kinds of political process. As another commenter said, the park's existence is probably due to politics; as are the rules the children need to follow, what activities are permitted, the safety and maintenance of park equipment and facilities, curfews, etc. It is also a choice on the part of the parents to let their kids play in a park, and which parks their kids play in, and those choices aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the perspective of the adult should not be to view children in the park as apolitical, but to be cognizant of the processes that influence their children and try to ensure that they work for the children's benefit.
Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?
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It shouldn't be any big surprise that a guy like Garry Tan is power-hungry and manipulative. He's got his hands in all kinds stuff like influencing elections. https://garrysguide.org/elections
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This Tan guy is a real douche and in full support of the author but...
"Usually it's the latter, because, who wouldn't want the needle to move even a little bit in the right direction?"
Which direction? The one you think is right or the other one, other people think is right?
Surely there’s a skill in G-Stack for this.
yes just ask claude to add quick-silence-dissension to your project
Ahh yes the [ Removed by Reddit ] function
leave gstack alone!
It's just text files Garry!
No problem - if I want a slow poke blog site powered by slop ;).
An acknowledgement, let alone an apology is highly unlikely.
Garry just comes across as a deeply unsavory figure deeply stuck in the far right radicalization pipeline.
He regularly calls out "Marxists" on Twitter and rails against leftists, all while supporting mass surveillance and building a dystopia.
What a yucky person.
And Paul G has defended him on X as a centrist. Weird blind spot.
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He's also a non-white immigrant. The amount of brown skinned nutjobs try to cosplay as white so they'll be accepted as "one of the good ones" is too high.
Hey brown or yellow immigrants - the conservatives will gladly accept your vote, but the second you walk away they won't even refer to you by name in conversation, they'll refer you to with every slur in the book. I grew up with some very far-right types who had money...nice to "the help" in person, but soon as earshot is out of range, you hear the n-word like it's as common as the word "the". And just because you're not black, doesn't mean they don't hate you too. I've heard some horrid things said to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc.
Anyone remember the young republicans club at Florida International University scandal? Lots of young male Cuban immigrants (or kids of immigrants) desperate to be seen as white. Problem is, you pull any one of those kids out of Dade county, they'll be called a Mexican and told to go make tacos.
Garry's actions on social media remind me of those kids, albeit someone with a bit more money, and a little less perspective on things.
The cult of Thiel - is he also the shitty vibe coder ?.
He's so far right that he endorsed Scott Weiner! That's pretty far, all right!
why is YC worshipping this guy who pretends like he's the only guy who knows how to use cc?
Is there a YC school that folks like Garry and Sam went through to learn how to be unethical?
It's a requirement to reach the levels they have reached. Someone with empathy would get enough money to take care of their family (maybe even for multiple generations) and then be satisfied and focus on reducing the suffering of others instead of running up the score on net worth
I mean, after I racked up a two digit number of milions of dollars I believe I'd find myself thinking "why the fuck do I need more, it's time to go fuck off and do anything else".
Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
They are not connected to the same world we are.
Why are there so many stories that are older AND have less points higher on frontpage?
That’s always true of almost any story. There are many signals that influence a story’s rank: votes, flags, vouches, age, site, software penalties, and moderator intervention (usually to override flags and automatic penalties).
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
User flags can weigh stories down. If you'd prefer a different sort, try https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ("active" is popular, though not my taste really)
Well, to be fair, Garry's article was clearly 100% AI-generated. So perhaps he didn't even really post it; maybe it was just a rogue agent. Or, y'know, an assistant who posted without his authorization. Or perhaps Ambien was involved. Or, it was an Ambien-addled assistant who misconfigured an agent to post the article. Clearly not Garry's fault.
Then he shouldn’t be posting under his real name? Or specifically call that out.
When people tell you who they are, listen to