Did we read that right? Why is the military debating whether it needs to do a Jaime Lannister on the President??
There is nothing even remotely ok with this. We should NEVER elect a president who we have to watch this closely. The person running one of the greatest nuclear arsenals in the world should be trustworthy, smart and wise.
From what I understand from Greg, one of our commenters who knows a little about background checks, working with nuclear material has the most comprehensive and strictest government background check around. The president of the US should be able to pass that background check while he’s campaigning. Anyone who can’t, shouldn’t be elected.
We can’t leave dangerous weapons around for man children to use in a fit of pique over a personal insult.
That’s where we are, people. Trump is no John F Kennedy.
He’s not even Kruschev.
This is a big problem. It goes beyond tribalism. I’m the bad scenario, both Clinton supporters and Trumpers are toast.
But there was one account of how things have changed in Silicon Valley that sounds sickeningly familiar. It’s from Ellen Pao, the venture capitalist who sued her firm for discrimination and lost. Where have we heard this before:
On a recent evening, I met Pao at the restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown San Francisco. It was early, around six, and the restaurant, a favored spot among investors and tech-company founders, was still mostly empty. Pao was dressed conservatively, in khaki pants and a navy T-shirt, and as we talked she sat perfectly upright, her hands folded in her lap. She told me that when she entered the industry, in the late nineteen-nineties, women were vastly outnumbered by men, but the atmosphere was not as aggressive or money-obsessed as it is today. She described many of the early investors and entrepreneurs as “dorks,” united by the fact that they “were all interested in technology.” The environment changed, she said, after the early venture-capital firms started investing in tech. “They happened to all be white guys who had graduated from the same handful of élite colleges,” she said. “And they tended to make investments in new firms started by people they knew, or by people who were like them.” This created a model of hiring and investing that some refer to as the “Gates, Bezos, Andreessen, or Google model,” which Melinda Gates recently characterized as, “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.” Little has improved over the years: two recent studies found that, in 2016, only seven per cent of the partners in venture-capital firms were women and just two per cent of venture-capital funding went to female founders.
Pao said that the change was reinforced by another event, in 2012: the initial public offering of Facebook, at well above a hundred billion dollars, which cemented Silicon Valley’s reputation as the place to make a quick fortune. Tech companies increasingly began competing with banks and hedge funds for the most ambitious college graduates. “Now you had the frat boys coming in, and that changed the culture,” Pao said. “It was just a different vibe. People were talking more about the cool things they had done than the products they were building.”
In Pao’s recent book, “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” she satirizes the over-the-top money culture that resulted. At Kleiner Perkins, “managing partners were always competing for more—more board seats, more houses, more land, and, always, more jets,” she writes. They coveted professional basketball teams, Hollywood movie-producer credits, and “private-jet escape routes to New Zealand” (in case of rising water levels, plague, or a proletarian revolt). In this environment, Pao argues, there was little awareness of the ways in which the industry’s gatekeepers had made it difficult, or even impossible, for outsiders to break in. “It’s just this reinforcing cycle, and everyone has built a culture around it. How do you break that cycle, in a way that’s meaningful?” Pao said. “Adding a few women to the mix is not going to fix this.”
I swear these are the same guys from The Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, and The Big Short, the book about the financial disaster of 2008, and all the merger mania of the last 20 years in Pharma and all of those aggressive guys on steroids that Karen Ho profiles in Liquidated.
They just keep hopping from industry to industry to get into startups, or manipulate oil markets, or force poor researchers to sign away their patent rights for pennies. And Pao is right that adding more women will not fix this “money at all costs” aggression. Guys usually start off with money, they’re more likely to form networks where money can be made and they support each other from the time they are in prep school together.
There’s a lot of crap coming out of Silicon Valley from the billionaire libertarians who think the rest of us love the “freedom” that the gig economy gives us. Yes, that’s the economy that makes you unemployable as soon as you decide you want to marry, own a house and stay in one place for awhile, at about the age of 35. Then all of the sudden, your desire for permanence clashes with their desire to be free of any obligation. I get these guys. They’re assholes of a different variety. They’re not really concerned with what happens in the cube farm.
But the guys from the fraternities and the ivies who will stop at nothing to get what they want and see women as beings not of their kind who can be discouraged from competing for the best jobs and positions and rewards and incentives and capital? Yeah, those guys are wrecking havoc in every company they land in. They’re ruining careers and paradoxically crushing innovation.
It’s time we had a talk with the schools where these jerks came from. Get to the root of the problem and yank it out by the junk.
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Two great tastes that taste great together, Robert Plant and Allison Krause.
The Confluence 