anothercomment

People date in the workplace all the time, so I don't think your rules about "professional situations" are generally accepted.

I also reject the notion of "position of power" just because he is a VC. Nobody is forced to take his money. You could just as well say the applying women are in a position of power because the VC desperately needs somebody to invest in. I guess a startup should avoid seeking investments where the investor is "in a position of power", anyway.

I am also not justifying his behavior, obviously he made mistakes. But I reject the immediate interpretation of "man abusing his power to pressure women into sex".

The "boundaries" talk is also not really helpful - at some point, somebody has to make a move. If their estimate of the situation is correct, they are not "crossing boundaries". Otherwise they are crossing boundaries and need to withdraw.

Grabbing a knee under the table is of course not a good first move, but we might be missing context.

The accusations can be true, and at the same time it seems possible that the VC didn't take advantage of his "position of power", but genuinely believed the women liked him for his looks and personality, not because they needed his money.

Maybe it is not even that interesting - a guy overstepped his boundaries? Few readers are probably deep enough in Startup Culture to have heard of him or Binary Capital, so why is it relevant?

I still can't approve of the article because of all the allusions and unwarranted generalizations it makes ("this is why there are so few female founders" and the like). A favorite is cases like Ellen Pao who lose in court but in certain circles her claims continue to be believed.

Obviously, men will always be attracted to women (and sometimes vice versa), and not all men know how to deal with it in an appropriate way. But as in this case, if called out, the bad apples also get eliminated. Also YMMV - for some an unwanted SMS in the middle of the night is a nightmare, others simply shrug it off.

Even assuming women avoid becoming founders because of sleazy VCs - what do they do instead? Men are everywhere, making advances.

I don't see the relevancy to today's Bitcoin price? Presumably MtGox was able to execute the fake trades because they didn't have to provide the money for it? It was simply a number in the database, if the dollars couldn't actually be withdrawn?

Sure, another market could try to pull the same stunt, but do they even have the same scale nowadays? There are many more markets than at the time of MtGox.

I didn't think the "someone inferior" was elementary to it - the point to me always seemed to be to kill somebody innocent.

It sounds as if people were fired, investigated and so on. I don't understand the part about the medical records. Surely merely wanting to double check the story isn't the issue? Illegally holding the record would, but it seems the responsible person was also fired?

I mean, given their business practices, I am not surprised if their culture turns out to be toxic. I just don't see the reasoning behind blaming him for sexist men in the company, if he never supported such actions.

Is it? Were steps not taken to remove the harassers, once the incidents came to light? How can the CEO watch over every social interaction?

Did he sexual harass anybody, or what is the point of his resignation? Another case of scapegoating?

The shovel makers win.

Thank you for that story, it really cracks me up. The whole cryptocoin trading thing is fun because it is so crazy.

I love this chart of Newton's involvement in the South Sea Bubble: https://cdn.sovereignman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013...

Think I'll print it and stick it to the wall somewhere.

I went to an Ethereum Hackathon and wasn't convinced at the time, that is why I passed. Hopefully/probably their technology has matured since then, but I stopped following their progress.

You miss out on countless opportunities every second.

Back then I evaluated Ethereum and decided against it. That is all there is to it. I don't know how justified the current hype is.

How rich would you have been - 3000%, so 30 times - would you have invested 100000$ in Ethereum, yielding 3 Million $? Or more likely just 1000$, yielding 30000 - nice money, but not really rich?

"Most privatization efforts come about as an attempt to inject corruption"

Huh - citation needed? I've never heard that claim before. Corruption pretty much needs governments, who else are you going to bribe?

To me competition seems the only surefire way to keep prices fair/low. Yes, motivated governments in theory could do everything. A supercomputer could theoretically compute the perfect prices and allocations for everything. But no such computer exists, and markets are the only approximation available. You can not rely on governments to be motivated to be selfless and good. Even if perhaps some individuals are, in the long run the incentives are just not aligned, and it takes just a few bad apples to ruin the system.

That is their selling point, though.

How is the network in a foreign country being picked? Here in Germany, we have (at least?) three competing networks, O2, Telekom and Vodafone. Their coverage differs, but afaik I don't get to automatically use another network if my network doesn't cover my location.

So what happens in another country? Free roaming won't be much use if no network covers my location? If on the other hand, I will be allowed any network for the price of my home network, I wonder if it would make sense to get a contract in another country, so that I can use all networks in Germany for free?

They will reject you as long as they have enough other patients who don't care about the price. Somewhere the systemic error is injected into the system. There has to be a way to fix it or improve it.

Sorry, I heard it many years ago and didn't double check. Nevertheless for sure there are caps on health care expenses.

Speaking of kidneys - don't they prioritize recipients of organs somehow? If age based discrimination is forbidden, an 85 year old person would be as eligible as an 8 year old to receive a new kidney?

Not saying it would be wrong, just curious.

Sorry about that - I heard it a long time ago. Nevertheless, health insurance will always be capped at some point, you can not guarantee arbitrarily high expenses for everybody.

I am actually from Germany and heard the story about NHS dialysis many years ago, so it has nothing to do with US right wing propaganda or whatever. My apologies, though, if it isn't correct.

Nevertheless I think there will always be procedures that won't be paid for, in any health care system, because it would always be possible to incur arbitrarily high costs. As an extreme example, you could assemble a team of 1000 scientists to try to cure one person.

But lots of insurance companies operate on the risks you mention, floods, earthquakes. There are insurance companies that insure other insurance companies against outliers, for example.

Sure, there is no guarantee that the whole network can not go broke. But that goes for governments, too.

Also I think health care will always have to be capped at some point, because with arbitrarily high investments, you could presumably keep people alive indefinitely (heart fails - attach heart machine. Lung fails - attach lung machine...). That is why in the UK afaik they don't pay for dialysis once you reach a certain age.

OK, but people choose their employers, to some extent. Would more transparency help them to demand the right health insurance from their employers?

A) For example Germany (where I live). B) Why do the billing practices have to be opaque? In Germany, patients often don't even see the bills. It all goes directly to the insurance company. For public insurance, that is. For private insurance, the patient pays and then asks the insurance company for their money back.

But the doctors decide what procedures are necessary.

But then how can it be solved? With the blockchain? (that was sarcasm, although, perhaps worth thinking about - transparency, at least)

Sure, governments/councils spending other people's money is always a fertile ground for corruption.

But why can't they be disrupted? For example some people could be pissed off that they don't get information, and companies providing information could win them over as customers.

Obviously, things are not working out in the US. I am just not yet convinced that the market/capitalism is to blame, or if it is essentially corruption (including lobbyists bribing politicians to set up a system that allows the bad insurers to stay in operation).

I am not yet convinced it is not amenable. For example who gets to serve a city with emergency services? I guess there could be bidders to the city council, offering services for a certain price. That would lead to competition.

Likewise, insurances would negotiate rates for certain procedures. Of course it is not the task of the patient during cardiac arrest to do so. But the patient would choose the insurance provider.

why would the money coming from one pocket incentivize economic optimal treatment? By what mechanism? Why wouldn't hospitals try to fleece the government (spoiler: they do, in the countries with public health care)?

In theory, competition should take care of the escalating costs, though?