5 ms·

I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you wen

by rnk 3y ago

I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you went to follow him! And give him a billion dollars.

Keegs 3y ago
To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials. Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good. Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lisper 3y ago
    This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."
    - noisy_boy 3y ago
      That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".
- darkerside 3y ago
  Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.
  - throw__away7391 3y ago
    You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling
- rchaud 3y ago
  That's the public-facing reason. The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.
hotpotamus 3y ago
The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god). > because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it
- paul_grisham 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dmurray 3y ago
    So was the Messiah!
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Judaism is a religion so, not a ethinicity. The last time enough people thought it was the latter, it didn't end well.
    - _dain_ 3y ago
      Ashkenazi jews are a distinct ethnic group. You can easily distinguish them from other Euro and Levantine populations with whole-genome sequencing.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        You can also distinguish Chinese Catholics from Caucasian ones genetically, doesn't make a religion a genetic trait. This casual form of anti-semitism displayed here, is somewhat bothering me. Edit: Out of curiosity, since you seem very knowledgable, what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? Honestly, I really thought actual genetics would be the end of that stupid eugenics crap, and not be used to sell the same shitty ideas in new disguise.
        _dain_ 3y ago
        > doesn't make a religion a genetic trait Yeah and I never said the religion was a genetic trait. There are ethnic Jews who don't practice the Jewish religion, and there are practicing Jews who aren't part of the "classical" Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and so on). "Who is a Jew" is a big and complicated enough question that it has its own Wikipedia article. "Jewish" does not just mean religion. I don't see how knowing these basic things has anything to do with "antisemitism". > what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? There's no exact gene that is dispositive. Human ethnic groups aren't genetically divergent enough for that. But there are alleles that are more or less common across groups. You might have some SNP that's 70% prevalent in group A, and 40% prevalent in group B, and 10% prevalent in group C. That SNP alone isn't enough to tell you what group someone belongs to. But there are millions of SNPs, each of which has its own frequency distribution. There is structure within all that variation. When you aggregate that information you get a pretty strong signal, enough to reliably cluster the genotypes, and those clusters correspond with identifiable ethnic groups. You can estimate how much Jewish ancestry someone has, or indeed how much ancestry from any ethnic group that we have enough data for. So, there is no "Jewish gene" (or "Chinese gene" or "Scottish gene"), but ethnic Jews are nevertheless genetically identifiable, from having higher or lower probabilities of having many different genetic variants. And this is not some academic matter, it is very important for human health. There are a few genetic disorders that, while not exclusively found in Jews, are unusually common among them. For example, Tay-Sachs disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease For decades now, there have been Tay-Sachs genetic screening programmes among Jewish communities. This reduces the probability of two recessive carriers marrying one another. It has been very successful: >Screening for Tay–Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of the emerging field of genetic counseling and diagnosis. Proactive testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.[13] In 2000, Michael Kaback reported that in the United States and Canada, the incidence of TSD in the Jewish population had declined by more than 90% since the advent of genetic screening.[14] On January 18, 2005, the Israeli English language daily Haaretz reported that as a "Jewish disease" Tay–Sachs had almost been eradicated. Of the 10 babies born with Tay–Sachs in North America in 2003, none had been born to Jewish families. In Israel, only one child was born with Tay–Sachs in 2003, and preliminary results from early 2005 indicated that none were born with the disease in 2004.[15] Would you describe this as "stupid eugenics crap"?

by rnk 3y ago

Keegs 3y ago

To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.

steveBK123 3y ago
Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials. Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good. Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lisper 3y ago
  This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."
  - noisy_boy 3y ago
    That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".
darkerside 3y ago
Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling
rchaud 3y ago
That's the public-facing reason. The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.

hotpotamus 3y ago

The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god). > because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it

paul_grisham 3y ago
[flagged]
- dmurray 3y ago
  So was the Messiah!
- hef19898 3y ago
  Judaism is a religion so, not a ethinicity. The last time enough people thought it was the latter, it didn't end well.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    Ashkenazi jews are a distinct ethnic group. You can easily distinguish them from other Euro and Levantine populations with whole-genome sequencing.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      You can also distinguish Chinese Catholics from Caucasian ones genetically, doesn't make a religion a genetic trait. This casual form of anti-semitism displayed here, is somewhat bothering me. Edit: Out of curiosity, since you seem very knowledgable, what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? Honestly, I really thought actual genetics would be the end of that stupid eugenics crap, and not be used to sell the same shitty ideas in new disguise.
      - _dain_ 3y ago
        > doesn't make a religion a genetic trait Yeah and I never said the religion was a genetic trait. There are ethnic Jews who don't practice the Jewish religion, and there are practicing Jews who aren't part of the "classical" Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and so on). "Who is a Jew" is a big and complicated enough question that it has its own Wikipedia article. "Jewish" does not just mean religion. I don't see how knowing these basic things has anything to do with "antisemitism". > what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? There's no exact gene that is dispositive. Human ethnic groups aren't genetically divergent enough for that. But there are alleles that are more or less common across groups. You might have some SNP that's 70% prevalent in group A, and 40% prevalent in group B, and 10% prevalent in group C. That SNP alone isn't enough to tell you what group someone belongs to. But there are millions of SNPs, each of which has its own frequency distribution. There is structure within all that variation. When you aggregate that information you get a pretty strong signal, enough to reliably cluster the genotypes, and those clusters correspond with identifiable ethnic groups. You can estimate how much Jewish ancestry someone has, or indeed how much ancestry from any ethnic group that we have enough data for. So, there is no "Jewish gene" (or "Chinese gene" or "Scottish gene"), but ethnic Jews are nevertheless genetically identifiable, from having higher or lower probabilities of having many different genetic variants. And this is not some academic matter, it is very important for human health. There are a few genetic disorders that, while not exclusively found in Jews, are unusually common among them. For example, Tay-Sachs disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease For decades now, there have been Tay-Sachs genetic screening programmes among Jewish communities. This reduces the probability of two recessive carriers marrying one another. It has been very successful: >Screening for Tay–Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of the emerging field of genetic counseling and diagnosis. Proactive testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.[13] In 2000, Michael Kaback reported that in the United States and Canada, the incidence of TSD in the Jewish population had declined by more than 90% since the advent of genetic screening.[14] On January 18, 2005, the Israeli English language daily Haaretz reported that as a "Jewish disease" Tay–Sachs had almost been eradicated. Of the 10 babies born with Tay–Sachs in North America in 2003, none had been born to Jewish families. In Israel, only one child was born with Tay–Sachs in 2003, and preliminary results from early 2005 indicated that none were born with the disease in 2004.[15] Would you describe this as "stupid eugenics crap"?