I don't include Peter Thiel as equally culpable. As far as I know, Thiel failed to invent a state-free currency with Max Levchin, and over decades, he witnessed the defeat of uncompromising humanity over unconditional growth, and now Peter Thiel probably understands himself as like the Adrian Veidt character from the Watchmen.
That is my best hypothesis. Who has obsessed more about the cancers of human behaviors than Thiel and his circle? He seems like a person who would feed cancer now if he projected his culpability as minimizing E(cancer).
Oh, I mean that I don't agree that Peter Thiel and his investment group is "equally responsible" for the decay of ethics online because I don't think Peter Thiel believes in money. I'm sure Peter believes YOU believe in money, but he himself probably would prefer a world with some better way of storing and moving wealth ---even if to get that world, he must sponsor companies he himself does not like.
I don't know Peter Thiel; this is what I think from his writing and his past history. PayPal was originally the "new world currency." There is an old PayPal sticker on the pool table that says "PayPal: New World Currency" in Molly's Tavern in Mountain View. I think Peter Thiel and Max Levchin meant that literally... but, then their investors intervened to secure a safer cash exit.
What do you do with your life when almost succeed to make an actual New World Currency... but then people you trusted, they sell you out for millions of the currency that you convinced yourself was a corrupt illusion?
Degenerate diseases don't kill you before you can have children.
"Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by something as simple as a new school-lunch program."
Stupid. African nations have both the highest birth rates and the worst nutrition. If anything, expected good health after reproductive age negatively correlates with fecundity.
"Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is in our minds, in our society, and not in our evolution."
If Steve Jones knows of some supernatural force that excludes the operation of the human body from physical reality, he should describe that force and submit it to a physics journal. Otherwise, yes, minds are minds, but minds are not magic: they're meat.
People will look like the people who most have children.
Do you have children? If not, then the people of the future will probably look less like you and more like the people who compounded faster than you did.
Agreed, human evolution will be determined less by selection pressures and more by breeding pressures. Those who breed early and often will dominate the future as late pregnancies (35+) typically bring higher complications, earlier births and typically less healthy offspring.
However society will play its pressures too. Access to adequate and nutritious food can be more important than healthy genes (after all you need proper nutrition for your genes to express themselves correctly during your development) so a 22 year old mother on welfare with 5 kids and no child support is going to have a problem raising healthy children.
In the US, access to healthcare will certainly play a huge part in the future (presuming it doesn't change vastly over a long time). An imbalance in access can give an unnatural advantage to the unhealthy.
The potential for the future of evolution in our species is amazing. We have so many more variables in play that will be tweaking us, instead of standard variables for hunter-prey relationships. It raises a lot of questions about what our species will be like in a few hundred-thousand years.
"The bastard science of eugenics, [Jones] says, will haunt humanity as long as people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement."
"confuse evolution with improvement" I agree.
"bastard science of eugenics" What an appropriate slur: "bastard". Well, whoever parented that bastard wins this debate ---whatever that debate might be--- when you and the children you didn't have all die. You can go sit in the ground with the Quakers and the Spartans.
Don't need to be celibate to go extinct. Remember Nixon? Hoover? They used to run America from colonial times until... well, know any Quakers?
"Although official Quakerism may not have abided the activities of many of these feminists, the Quaker belief that "in souls there is no sex," and the opportunities provided Quaker women to preach, hold meetings, and write epistles, gave rise to the high percentage of Quakers among the "mothers of feminism," including Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul."
> I worked at McDonald's. It helped make me the man I am
A lot of people say this. How can you be sure you are not just kidding yourself into thinking the time you spent doing something actually quite unproductive was useful?
If you were a man of titles and wealth from a family of the same, and you overheard a lean stranger say to a man of some skilled employ to you: "The best servants burned down estate once..." how would that make you feel?
I remember asking engineers at deCODE about building server centers in Iceland. They said it was too expensive to build and staff a server center and that there was no surplus bandwidth to depress costs. They said that limiting constraints for computing in Iceland were personnel, then logistics, then bandwidth ---not energy and cooling.
"And, in an irony not lost on a country brought to its knees by finance, one early customer rumoured to have signed a deal to move servers here is - well who else - one of America's biggest investment banks. "
This "server farm to save the world" story smells like spin for a dish-washing debt service ---probably because Iceland hates aluminum smelting and fears the imported masses who'd work there.
OP did tell the truth. Your interpretation adds judgment.
The relevant facts to the listener (prospective customer) are:
- "This is a picture of software to buy"
- "This software to buy will solve your problems."
Here is what you added:
- "These are just..." we ourselves do not believe that this software to buy is valuable despite we are here to convince you that this is software to buy is valuable
- "figure out..." we ourselves do not believe that this software to buy will solve your problems despite that we are here to convince you that this software to buy will solve your problems
Development of the codebase might not have been but development of the product clearly was.
And the use cases. And the commercial viability of the market so their company had a chance to be around to support their customers. And the business understanding needed to support those customers properly.
Development of the codebase might not have been but development of the product clearly was.
The hair-splitting begins. The phrase "software development" in my book, and I suspect in most people's, implies code. If you just mean any old development, well, sure, the customer development was proceeding quite nicely. Maybe that was what they meant?
Try a simple thought experiment. If the customers learned that there was no code and the product consisted of nothing more than the printed "screenshots" they'd been shown, would they care? I'd guess that one's answer to that is pretty correlated with whether or not one thinks deception was involved here. My answer - not about these particular customers, but in general - is yes, they would care. As a customer, I certainly would. (Not, of course, because of any objection to paper prototyping as such, but because a critical piece of the situation had been hidden from me.)
I'm with mst. It's not lying when you fail to point out the flaws in your own pitch. If the prospect asks, "do these screen shots actually exist in code" and you say "yes", you're a liar; if they don't ask at all, they don't care.
I got a little skeeved out at "development is coming along nicely", just like you, but the solution to that is just to choose better words. They could simply have said "design is coming along nicely", nobody would have cared, and they'd have the exact same outcome. So while you're right that those were unfortunate words, it's hard for me to get too bent out of shape about them.
There isn't enough information in the story to know what was really going on. Some possible contexts are a lot more venial than others. I think what irritated me was just the gloating tone of "we sure put one over on them"... but perhaps they didn't mean it that way.
Deciding which facts are "relevant" to the customer is a pretty dicey proposition: why do you assume that the fact that no code has been written is irrelevant to the customer? Just because the sales guy wants it to be irrelevant doesn't mean that the customer shouldn't have the right to make their decisions based on the actual facts, rather than what's convenient for the seller.
No, if the facts are important to the prospect, the prospect asks about them. I didn't read anything in this post about them supplying false answers to direct questions.
You are not obligated to provide SEC disclosures along with your pitches. I do that, and it's a horrible habit and something I've been trying hard to break. It communicates nervousness and lack of confidence.
Again: you can't just make stuff up. If the prospect asks, "how much of this stuff actually works", you need to be clear --- "we're still in the design phase". But if the prospect doesn't ask, the prospect doesn't care, and you let it go.
Fair enough; you're not obligated to disclose everything up front if they don't ask. But that's a world different from making a deliberately misleading statement.
If someone says "We're actively developing this" I'm not going to just assume I'm being mislead and say, "Sure, but do you have code?" The statement implies an answer to the question, so I'll feel like I already have an answer to the question, and I'd be wrong.
So no, it's not a direct answer to a question, but it's meant to imply an answer to the question so people don't ask anything further. Deliberately attempting to mislead people is just as bad as outright lying in my book, and I can't see the way that statement is worded as anything less than an attempt to mislead the potential customer.
Calling them "screenshots" and using the word "development" both in the present tense when talking to potential customers is telling them implicitly that not only do you have the skills and competency to deliver this functional piece of software, but that you are already in the process of doing so. Unfortunately none of that is actually proven explicitly by what you're showing, as all of the functional coding implied doesn't actually exist.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, if all you've done is paid a designer to give you some visual and functional mockups, well, that means absolutely nothing about your ability to actually code and deliver the product.
Also the fact that they could write the code to support the designs isn't the issue. The issue is that they didn't, and didn't say so. It's giving the impression that they are operating at what seems to be an amazing speed supporting what presumably appears to be a fully fleshed out user experience, etc, when all that exists might be a design/pitch doc and some jpegs. Programmingprowess is implied. Frontend to backend functionality is implied. Progress is implied. When you leave things implied, then blame your customer for not catching the fact that you weren't explicit about details and therefore you weren't lying to them after all, you're doing it wrong.
It's like that episode of Arrested Development where they go to show clients a model home, only to have one of the walls fall down to reveal nothing inside but a bunch of air, and two people who thought they were hiding inside making out.
They may not be lying with this approach -- they do have screenshots, the same way the guys in that sitcom really did have four walls and a roof -- but they're also setting themselves up for a pretty killer "I don't think you've been entirely honest with me" conversation with a client if one of those walls happens to fall over a bit and reveal what's inside.
That is: if it were true that expected talent/dollars is greater in women than in men, and this is widely known public knowledge, then why do no tech companies select for women over men in their own self interest?
Possible answers could include:
1) They do, but you realize it.
2) They do, but you don't know about it.
3) They don't, because the premise is false, because women are not undervalued.
3) They don't, because the premise is true, because women are not selected over men despite having a higher talent/dollar value.
4) They don't, because organizations of people are not rational economic decision machines, or values like "talent / dollar" are too vague to be pre-test predictive of individual productivity, or "self interest" is not necessarily defined by maximizing economic exchanges, or that men already in tech simply know other men better and so tend to work with other men.
If 4) is true, it's not equally true for every company. Meritocracy varies from one organization to another. And the more meritocratic organizations will tend to be more successful. So choice four is just choices one through three, delayed.
I know the primary care outpatient business, and I support "Walmart medical care." (We call them "counter clinics.")
People who don't want expert medical advice go to the counter clinic, we don't have to serve resentful patients, and we can spend our time thinking about medicine with patients who appreciate our service.
Further, patients sometimes visit a counter clinic, but they have issues beyond what the counter clinic can handle. So, the counter clinic will refer the patient to us ---the medical doctors. One of our most regular patient referrals is corner CVS because the local medical doctors introduced themselves respectfully to the CVS clinic staff.
However, don't be fooled by the "cost cutting" nonsense. My estimation is that counter clinics increase total medical spending in the same way that shopping at Wal-Mart increases total consumer spending. Yes, each individual purchase of "health care" is moderately cheaper. However, given the lower prices, omnipresent availability, and cross-marketing of other products in the store, people do not simply buy the same things at a lower cost, they impulsively buy many smaller purchases of dubious value.
So, rather than visit an outpatient medical doctor for an hour for $500 (that is what we bill, though we usually only collect about $300 of that from insurance), one visits the Wal-Mart counter clinic for $70. That's a savings of $430, right? Maybe. Assume the counter clinic treated your sore throat, but you also had another issue, and later visited the medical doctor. Both issues could have been treated by the medical doctor for $500 now rather than $570 over several weeks. Oh, and you also bought "health supplements." Add another $30 recurring cost. Well, actually, you don't go to the doctor at all because you only have $500 for health care, and the doctor costs $500, but you only have $400 because you've already spend $100 on the counter clinic and supplements ---oops, actually, that $400 is already spent by your employer for health insurance.
So, you still pay, but you never visit a doctor, chronic heath conditions continue to exasperate, and in addition to suffering from chronic health problems, you eventually get very sick, progressively lose your ability to function, and are hospitalized sooner at a much higher cost.
Even a single day of missed work at $5 minimum wage due to illness not addressed by a counter clinic is quantitatively worth more than the $37 best case savings at the counter clinic. Primary and preventative care alternatives are almost never "cost savings" unless you know precisely otherwise.
By the way: there is some ludicrous cultural myth that exasperated health problems can be "fixed," or if you can just avoid "having a a serious problem" and "keep natural," you will be OK ---or at least, you can "fix" health "issues" "later."
No, you don't. You die.
Also, jeez, you spend so much time and money making your face and buying clothes, but when you have a disease, you're thinking about saving a few dozen dollars? Bleh.
The problem is that doctors charge ridiculous amounts even for simple treatments. If I have Bronchitis I know exactly what I need and the doctor knows it too. Yet he will charge a shitload for a 10 minute appointment.
The same with medical tests – the doctors draw blood and send it to a pathologist. They then charge you a 400% mark-up on that and make pure profit. Then it is the unnecessary x-rays (if the doctor happens to have a digital x-ray machine that he is itching to use).
If a doctor prescribes anything he will prescribe the most expensive antibiotics ever – even though a much cheaper run of the mill one will work as well (I don’t know why they do that).
Why do they want routine appointments (once a month) for chronic medicines?
No offence, but I think modern day doctors focus on ripping off medical schemes because there is no apparent victim.
> The problem is that doctors charge ridiculous amounts even for simple treatments.
Assuming you are a programmer, why should I pay to use your software? I would prefer to pay nothing because it doesn't "cost anything" to copy it. Oh, well, ok, I'll pay for my 10 minute share of your time at $40 / hour. You have to eat, too.
> If I have Bronchitis I know exactly what I need and the doctor knows it too.
Great. Go visit a counter clinic and get exactly what you need ---though I'm sure you know that you have acute viral bronchitis and you only needs some over-the-counter drugs to treat symptoms. Then, you can go reinvest your "shitload" in something more intelligent like car insurance or a new graphics card. Like, your lungs are fine. I'm pretty sure all lungs have been fine forever for everybody, and if not, well, you can buy a new lung from the lung store and swap it in for all those shitloads you saved in ten minutes years ago. It will probably even be a better lung than your old obsolete one.
"The same with medical tests – the doctors draw blood and send it to a pathologist. They then charge you a 400% mark-up on that and make pure profit."
You're right. Health care should be like sex. Free only, illegal otherwise, immoral regardless. There should be laws to enforce this.
"Then it is the unnecessary x-rays (if the doctor happens to have a digital x-ray machine that he is itching to use)."
Say no.
"If a doctor prescribes anything he will prescribe the most expensive antibiotics ever – even though a much cheaper run of the mill one will work as well (I don’t know why they do that)."
Did you ask?
Also, doctors prescribe generally prescribe what will be most likely to work the fastest because ---if you remember from a century ago--- bacterial infections kill you and then spread to your friends and family to kill them. They don't care that you can save $30 with some similar drug they don't know much about.
"Why do they want routine appointments (once a month) for chronic medicines?"
Because
"No offence, but I think modern day doctors focus on ripping off medical schemes because there is no apparent victim."
If you know some rip off scheme perpetuated by licensed medical doctors, write it down and submit it to a medical journal. I think modern day people focus on engorging distractions while they mindlessly spawn and decay because there is no apparent victim. No offense.
> Go visit a counter clinic and get exactly what you need ---though I'm sure you know that you have acute viral bronchitis and you only needs some over-the-counter drugs to treat symptoms. Then, you can go reinvest your "shitload" in something more intelligent like car insurance or a new graphics card.
The problem is that in my country you cannot get a prescription without a doctor’s appointment. What happens (at least with me) is that I wait to see if I get better by myself.
> You're right. Health care should be like sex. Free only, illegal otherwise, immoral regardless. There should be laws to enforce this.
Nowhere did I claim that. What I meant was that doctors have a conflict of interest. On the one hand they should care for your health and on the other hand they should make as much money as possible. That causes a lot of doctors to prescribe unnecessary tests and perform unnecessary x-rays. In my country there was a law that allowed doctors to sell medicine (usually a pharmacy had to be owned by a pharmacist). This caused a lot of doctors to give out overly expensive medicine that people do not need.
> Say no.
And the doctor will tell you that it is really necessary. Since most people do not know the field they will believe the doctor with blind trust.
> Also, doctors prescribe generally prescribe what will be most likely to work the fastest because ---if you remember from a century ago--- bacterial infections kill you and then spread to your friends and family to kill them.
They actually do that to make money (see above).
> They don't care that you can save $30 with some similar drug they don't know much about.
Those “similar drugs” are run of the mill anti-biotics that have been on the market for 20+ years.
"They actually do that to make money (see above)."
In the USA, doctors do not make money from drugs directly, though they may indirectly benefit from pharmaceutical "good-will." However, that's more common for new drugs that patients would take chronically, like psych drugs, not antibiotics to treat common, acute issues.
"And the doctor will tell you that it is really necessary. Since most people do not know the field they will believe the doctor with blind trust."
Well, do you really know the field enough to know that it's _not_ necessary? And if so, then why would this be relevant to you?
"Those “similar drugs” are run of the mill anti-biotics that have been on the market for 20+ years."
The standard of care evolves ---as do the "biotics."
I had shingles in 2000. I had to go to a hospital emergency room to get a prescription for painkillers, since the extortionists (aka medical professionals) require permission before we serfs are allowed to buy many drugs. It cost me over $300 for what should have been about $1 worth of oxycodon.
You are paying for $299 worth of emergency room, not $1 of oxycodon.
However, I do agree that distribution of drugs in the USA has become a franchised back office sales game of all rent and no responsibility. I don't like that.
That is my best hypothesis. Who has obsessed more about the cancers of human behaviors than Thiel and his circle? He seems like a person who would feed cancer now if he projected his culpability as minimizing E(cancer).