Bingbong
8d ago
I've seen a bunch of posting on social media indicating that a recording of the sex act exists and shows her conscious and enthusiastically participating, though might just be garbled twitter stuff.
Bingbong
8d ago
Wouldn't say explicitly Christian Coded, but 'Drunk College Escapades with Frat brothers go too far' is a massive cultural lynchpin and has been for decades.
Bingbong
8d ago
Silicon Valley tends to ignore Hardware as much as possible since it's too expensive, tricky and prone to falsification. YC's kicked out a bunch of companies over the year for straight-up fraud, though.
Bingbong
9d ago
Tech VCs regularly yeet money into far dumber stuff than Theranos. Theranos definitely skewed East Coast due to the Healthcare aspect, which is something that Tech generally historically hasn't had that great a taste for and has its own crazy infrastructure of tiny explorer companies and acquisitions.
Bingbong
10d ago
If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.
I mean plenty of elite professional traders get blindsided by big macro happenings since they're overfocused on the stock price as a signal. Theranos did never go public (partly due to the fraud involved making it hard to get through audit), though, so limited scope to be traded as well. My professional background is essentially VIP services for Online Casino so I meet a lot of crazy, crazy rich people and I do 100% believe that sheer aggression and compulsive all-inness is probably the most required trait to be superduper rich. It's very hard to snowball into that level of money out of sheer smarts if you have reasonable bankroll management.
Bingbong
10d ago
I played a couple seasons of American Football as a late-life convert and never really enjoyed playing OL. I get that there's a lot of artistry and sophistication to it if you're playing at a high level, but I enjoyed DL more since you got to be largely proactive (despite being on defense) and success felt more determined by your own abilities. OL felt way too much like a job to justify the effort as an amateur player.
Bingbong
10d ago
Also your ability to profit is based on market sentiment not the actual reality of these projects. A fully rational investor is going to miss out on a lot of hypebubble money.
Bingbong
11d ago
Yeah plenty of stories like that with elements of faking it till you make it plus these days hard to have a genuine moat in most SAAS vaporware startups so being crazy and willing to push the envelope is a ton of how one of 500 fairly-identical companies comes out of the melee.
Bingbong
11d ago
Yeah. Plus when times are good there's massive laudatory portraits of 'how weird our misunderstood genius is but we managed to look past it and made money with SBF'
Bingbong
11d ago
Yeah but if you manage to completely sniff out everything that's fraudulent you're probably costing yourself since there's sufficient businesses that start fraudulent/have intervening periods of insolvency that they make it through via bloodymindedness, nobody calling their bluff and market exuberance. Plus however you want to diagnose companies that lurch around from an original okay-but-not-great idea and end up landing on something that works later on. If you were smart enough to not invest in the original idea, you may have missed out on the second iteration.
Also sufficient 'regulatory arbitrage' cases in business where it's just a fight to the death between regulators and spurious crazy people. Uber seems to have worked. Maybe Kalshi/Polymarket work or don't work out in the end but the fraudulence ratio has swung around wildly throughout the whole enterprise.
Bingbong
11d ago
One of my old co-workers was an early FTX employee and I got a lot of proxy exposure to a network of huge-money Crypto and Tech people as a result.
A lot of them are kinda nuts to be honest. Becoming a Billionaire is more about aggression and tenacity than brilliance, since way better to either have a pretty-good idea and charge like a bull or just be a serial idea-haver and hope for the best instead of being a perfectionist. Plus in Holmes case the whole impending judgement, cameras being present, small child sleep deprivation stuff is likely compounding her inherent nature.
Bingbong
12d ago
Major topline political markets are pretty liquid and you do get interest on deposits on most PMs even if it's weak. Do agree with the back 4 points though.
Bingbong
13d ago
I mean sure you can work around them, but you're still at peril of likeminded people reaching a certain critical mass and/or making a bad play then you're forever trapped into the Ableism Prison. Also good faith operations are going to be more vulnerable to this due to a certain naivety from the people operating them.
Bingbong
13d ago
If you're a passing observer and don't do anything to enrage the hivemind they're probably perfectly fine
Bingbong
13d ago
Disability (especially vague untreatable mental ones) just being the forever Trump card in this kind of social arena has to be a large part of it, too. It's very hard to cajole somebody who can just claim you're spiking their anxiety all day.
This should just be the natural impact of Affirmative Action, though? Cementing the most functional people in the desired boosted population, even if most of the time it's going to be some combination of the absolute aristocracy of that population and 'people who don't really share the disadvantages but technically count'. Tons of jokes in Australia about the output of most 'Aboriginal Programs' being a bunch of blondes with at most 10% Indigenous blood.
Hell it's even funnier when the shape of the people succeeding in these programs is frequently so similar. Australia's been culture warring about Nyadol Nyuon lately, a woman who has experienced every boost possible due to being an African Woman, is a consistent complainer and her father is apparently a UN-sanctioned Warlord. Somehow Australia found their own Ilhan Omar at home. It seems to be impossible to construct some form of 'advancing historically underprivileged African voices' without somehow ending up with the progeny of slave traders and warlords in the program.
Bingbong
16d ago
Plausible though em-dashes going from vanishingly rare in online comments and marketing materials to everpresent is pretty major.
Bingbong
16d ago
Em dashes are huge. They barely showed up in most writing before the advent of AI and are now massively overrepresented. The 'slam sentence' and 'it's not x, it's y' come up a ton as well. Also lack of typos.
Bingbong
29d ago
Yeah. Classically used for the 'Far-Right Terrorism is the greatest threat' headlines which bulk themselves out with Neonazi prison crimes and 'Radical islamists are against Womens' rights making them far-right' logic.
Let them try to fix their demographic problems by blaming the immigrants. Let's see how their two (or so) universities will fare under their stewardship. Let's see how the AfD will influence the availability of medical services, after all, not only are a significant fraction of physicians in Germany foreign-born (and may feel slightly unwelcome), but a decent fraction of the German-born doctors would likely want to avoid their kids going to schools where the AfD sets the curriculum.
Plenty of scope to still have high skilled immigrants (especially as a EU nation) without letting in massive family reunification et al. People acting like this kind of rhetoric is a binary on/off where a vanishingly small chunk of useful immigrants with immediate productive application in jobs with actual functions (Largely medicine these days) make up a small percentage, especially when you start carving out administrative health positions and other absurdities that get pulled in to bulk out the numbers.
I live in a country where obtaining a passport as a foreign adult is essentially impossible unless you do an act of significant national service (AFAIK like 200 get granted a year and there's approximately 3-5 million foreigners currently residing in Malaysia) plus there's essentially no social safety net, and there's still a gigantic population of foreign workers who are drawn in by wage arbitrage. Governments vastly overrate how many carrots are required to draw overseas talent into the country or how nice you have to be to them. I've got a friend in Dubai who's scion of a very wealthy Indian family who've been in the gulf since 1930 or so and he doesn't have a Emirati passport nor any expectation of it. Western governments massively undervalue access to their own economic systems as a draw factor.
Yeah. Big enough target and sensitive enough topic you don't need a ton of merit to have a decent chance at getting a settlement off somebody to shut up and go away
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