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Pinatubo

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No, but it's funny how many people are ignoring the main point of the article to get angry about the hypothetical example.

Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer.

Meanwhile on Tumblr:

"Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers."

This sounds like an urban legend designed to humiliate an enemy. Japanese records give a different reason for the attack:

>"An ad hoc pow-wow is convened in officers' quarters to choose a suitable target, using a list of West Coast locations drafted prior to the aborted Christmas Eve shelling last year. The waterfront of San Francisco and the town of Castroville are among the rejected objectives. Lt Yamazaki Atsuo, engineering officer of I-17, finally suggests they bombard Ellwood's oilfields off Santa Barbara. His suggestion is approved, since it provides an easy access and escape route."<<

http://www.combinedfleet.com/I-17.htm

Edit: I also found this:

>"Local legends, according to Hough, maintain that Nashino targeted Goleta because oil workers mocked him after he allegedly tripped and fell into a patch of cactuses in front of an off-duty working crew. After this humiliation and mockery, Nashino, an oil tanker captain at the time, swore revenge.

Hough said he disputes this legend entirely.

“He was a career naval officer and, thus, had never worked as a farmhand in Goleta,” Ken said. “The story of him being a captain of an oil tanker that stopped at Ellwood where he came ashore and fell into a cactus patch is not true. It’s a long told Santa Barbara legend, which may have happened to someone, but not to Captain Nishino.”"<<

http://dailynexus.com/2013-02-28/goleta-remembers-oil-field-...

The "flat structure" at Valve reminds me of the"unlimited vacation" policy at Netflix. It sounds liberating, but also offers the potential for employees to be judged by rules that are no longer clearly spelled out.

If you read his story about his SF arrest you'll see he and his friend were drunkenly interfering with paramedics trying to treat an accident victim, even after the police told them to stop. He then threatened to commit suicide while in jail and got put on psychiatric hold.

And somehow he turns that into a story of injustice. So yes, he likes storytelling.

But people's names do in fact reflect the level of education of their families, and in an extreme case they can choose a new name if they want.

Good point -- I hadn't thought of that. But wouldn't the resume reflect the actual education of the applicant? Maybe the discrimination against names you describe is cultural, which could also be of interest in the tech world ("this guy wouldn't fit in with us").

I did see a study on the success rates of people that had changed their names to be less "ethnic," and it was high, but of course there's a self-selection problem, since someone would have to be a very motivated person to change their name to get ahead.

One disadvantage of using pictures is that it makes race immediately apparent, and people might deliberately change their behavior to not appear racist. Maybe they offer an interview to the black candidate to check off a box on the HR form, even if they'd never hire him/her.

Anyway, just some thoughts -- I'd love to see the results of the study here on HN if you manage to pull it off!

Taking large cases on contingency is exactly the business model of many law firms. They don't charge the client directly, and take about 50% of the payout, plus legal fees if the court awards it. The firms take on multiple cases at once so they can afford to lose some.

Accepting funding from an outside party reduces the risk of making nothing, but eliminates the big payoff. Most serious law firms wouldn't take that deal.

Was the firm in this case very small? That's the only way this rumor would make sense. Even then, why wouldn't Thiel just point the Hulkster to a big law firm that could handle the case without help?

Why would Thiel need to fund this lawsuit in the first place? Don't lawyers usually take cases with the potential for a multi-million dollar payoff on a contingency basis?

Edit: Apparently there's another rumor that the Hulkster refused a generous settlement from Gawker in favor of taking his chances at trial. If true, the Thiel rumor would make more sense.

Oh yeah? Back in MY day we walked 10 miles to school! Uphill! Both ways!

Back then a "little snowflake" was what we called our classmates who froze to death walking home from school in a blizzard!

We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are absentee owners. They're rich enough and the cost to maintain is so low that they don't even need or want to rent those units out.

Another possible cause is that being a landlord in San Francisco is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Last year friends of mine rented out their condo to someone that turned out to be a problem tenant. They had to hire a lawyer and pay the tenant off in order to get him to move. Rather than making money as landlords, they lost almost $50,000 on the deal.

The apartment now sits vacant, and they have no plans to rent it out again.

The reason California in particular has such a large population of mentally ill homeless people is thanks to a few extra years of Reagan

Reagan was the governor of California 40 years ago, and has been dead for 12 years. Why hasn't anyone undone what he did 40 years ago?

In reality this is an example of the law of unintended consequences, not a case of "Reagan did it." I think the best way to view our current homelessness problem is as a vast failed social experiment, not a case of partisan politics. Everyone thought deinstitutionalization was a good idea at the time.

Deinstitutionalization was pushed for by mental health professionals, who believed that treating mentally ill people in the community with newly developed drugs would be more effective than mental hospitals. Patients were being pushed out of the mental hospitals before Reagan even took office, and Reagan was happy to go along with the recommendations of the mental health professionals since the state saved money. Win-win, right?

In California there was also the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act (written by two Democrats and a Republican, signed by Reagan), which limited the ability of the state to involuntarily confine people to mental hospitals. This act was hailed by the ACLU as a positive step forward, and again Republicans were also willing to sign on for the cause of smaller government.

The policy of deinstitutionalization continued under Reagan's successor, Pat Brown (a Democrat and father of current governor Jerry Brown).