That's too bad. Out of the other $1T US companies (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) Google seems by far the most user hostile. I would say Microsoft once held this position but lost their edge to be truly damaging. On the other hand Google:
* Sells ads for a living
* Pushes AMP
* Removes features from Chrome that allow you to block ads
* Android littered with spyware
* Kills products randomly
* Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)
* Horrible hiring culture cargo-culted by lesser Googles
AMP may tie publishers into their standard, but as a user I'd much prefer an AMP page to a dog slow publisher page on mobile.
Despite all the hype and FUD, ad blockers still work just fine in Chrome.
iOS has plenty of hidden spy apps, masque attacks, and iCloud backup attacks.
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
Plenty of privacy concerns with Amazon and Microsoft. Remains to be seen if Apple caves on the Pensacola iPhones.
Not sure how workplace politics or culture affects the user experience at all, sounds like you might be confusing your own prejudices with users at large.
Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
Apple refuses to interoperate with industry standards, Google does not.
> AMP may tie publishers into their standard, but as a user I'd much prefer an AMP page to a dog slow publisher page on mobile.
As a user I couldn't disagree more. When I go to a URL I want the content behind that URL. I don't read bloated garbage sites anyway, but even there I'd prefer the real site to the AMP Google-ware.
> iOS has plenty of hidden spy apps, masque attacks, and iCloud backup attacks.
Hidden spy apps? Would love to hear your source on that. None of these compare to the absolutely toxic Android ecosystem.
> Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
Nothing these companies has done rivals Google here. How many Google chat products have there been?
> Plenty of privacy concerns with Amazon and Microsoft. Remains to be seen if Apple caves on the Pensacola iPhones.
Google's business model is removing privacy.
> Not sure how workplace politics or culture affects the user experience at all, sounds like you might be confusing your own prejudices with users at large.
What prejudices would those be? I didn't even state a position other than they inject politics everywhere, which is undeniable.
> Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
Irrelevant.
> Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
Amazon sells physical products, Google sells ads.
> Apple refuses to interoperate with industry standards, Google does not.
This is true about Apple but it's also true about Google. RSS anyone? Gmail's embrace/extend/extinguish of email protocols. AMP.
I also think it's funny that my post went from +8 to flagged overnight. How many Google employees does it take to flag a popular post? Only you offered any sort of rebuttal to my statements but obviously many agree.
While you may be technically right in many of these points, what you say misses or purposefully deflects points from the parent. For example:
> [Google] Sells ads for a living
>> Microsoft, Amazon and Apple also sell ads.
Parent is not stating that the companies do not sell ads, parent is stating that Google primarily makes its money by selling ads. Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple do not.
> [Google] Kills products randomly
> [Google] Kills platforms randomly (leaving developers high and dry)
>> Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all routinely deprecate products.
There is a difference between deprecating and "killing" as the parent puts it, and unlike Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, Google has a website dedicated to its many killed products [1], primarily because Google has a pretty bad reputation for killing a product randomly without much notice.
Beyond those, you're being disingenuous with at least these two points:
> Microsoft censors their products in China, Google does not.
> Amazon sells counterfeit products, Google does not.
You're technically correct but that's because 1) Google products aren't accessible in China, and 2) Google doesn't really sell physical products like Amazon does (if you don't count some devices like phones). That's like saying, assuming Elmer's Glue isn't in China, that "Microsoft censors their products in China, Elmer's Glue does not."
I don't know enough about chemistry to say, but does steaming milk (like for a latte) have any effect on its health properties? I ask because for milk based coffee drinks you really want to be using whole milk. There are no taste and texture options that get anywhere near it.
> There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?” If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”
It think it's fair to say anyone who was on his island, home or jet should be questioned by authorities about what they saw there. He was a child sex trafficker operating out of his homes and private jet. Those are crime scenes.
Not everyone who went there is guilty, but given everything we now know it's not unfair to question their presence in Epstein's orbit.
so elementary teachers are all pedophiles since they're around underage girls all the time?
A pedophile is a very specific thing. It's someone who is sexually aroused by underage children. More specifically, it's someone who acts on those desires.
that's it. That's the end. There are no other possible ways to get into that club.
If someone goes to lunch with a pedophile, knowing they're a pedophile, to try and get $60,000, they're morally corrupt. They're a shitty person. But until they start abusing these underage girls, they're not pedophiles themselves.
This is not a hard concept. There are 5 categories of people who went to that island.
1. unaware of his predilections
2. aware, and morally corrupt
3. pedophiles who were unaware of his predilections
4. pedophiles who were AWARE of his predilections
5. pedophiles who went to have sex with underage children.
The argument here is that the only reason you would ever go to that island is if you were 5. This is unreasonable, and it makes you kind of dumb.
> A pedophile is a very specific thing. It's someone who is sexually aroused by underage children.
Specifically, it's someone aroused by prepubescent children.
> More specifically, it's someone who acts on those desires.
No, someone who acts on those desires (for underage children, whether a pedophile in the strict sense or not) is a child sex abuser. A pedophile is a pedophile whether or not they act on their desires, and it's possible to act on sex desires that make you a child sex abuser without being a pedophile at all.
> If someone goes to lunch with a pedophile, knowing they're a pedophile, to try and get $60,000, they're morally corrupt.
I disagree, whether using either the actual definition or yours of “pedophile”.
Now, if you know that he's a child sex trafficker (and thus that in some way the funds would originated from the sexual abuse of children), then, sure, there's a good argument.
Lets not, sex with a 13 year old post-pubescent child will get the same laws slammed at you. The technical definition is irrelevant for this conversation.
> Lets not, sex with a 13 year old post-pubescent child will get the same laws slammed at you.
In many jurisdictions and details of the other corcumstancesthat's not true, it will get a subset of the same laws slammed at you, because their are additional offenses defined for crimes against younger children. But, in any case, I'm not the one who started the terminological games (“a pedophile is a very specific thing...”), just the one who insisted that if you are going to insist on the “very specific” meaning of terminology, you do it right. If you want to say “child sex abuser”, do that; don't use “pedophile” and insist that it has a very specific meaning which is both broader (by targeted age) and narrower (including only active offenders) than “pedophile” actually is, and exactly matching what “child sex abuser” is.
So your accusation is that Epstein blackmailed Seth Lloyd or converted him into an Israeli spy/consultant on quantum computing?
Many engineering professors consult with private companies for a fee. So it seems odd that a country would need to take a roundabout and scandalous approach like this to pick a professor's brain, when they could just work though a legitimate-seeming company as an intermediary.
We don't know what Epstein and his backers were after. Maybe Seth Lloyd had influence over someone or some other leverage they wanted. It definitely warrants further investigation though.
You're correct about this but sadly getting downvoted. People have a hard time processing that their heroes very likely knew about Epstein's activities and at the very least looked the other way (some definitely participated themselves). Gates, Hawking, Groenig... all have their fans that will defend them to the death.
The evidence is there though for those that care to look. As you say, Epstein couldn't not talk about sex and young women, they were around constantly, everyone knew it was weird or they enjoyed the prospect of it.
I love that the charitable interpretation of Minksy's behavior is "an underaged girl propositioned him for sex on Epstein's island and he said 'no,' but then continued to associate and organize symposia with Epstein even after his 2008 conviction."
Wow, let's not go overboard with the guilt-by-association here!
There were definitely young women around when Hawking was there. I don't know if they were underage, but it I don't think it's safe to say Hawking knew nothing. By all accounts the island was full of girls and decorated with photographs of nude photos of them (some underage).
You can see Hawking surrounded by women on the island here:
> You can see Hawking surrounded by women on the island here:
I assumed from the description this was going to look like Stephen Hawking at the Playboy Mansion, but instead it's him at a bbq with two middle aged men and two middle aged women, and him in a submarine with a woman whose back is to the camera so you can't tell her age apart from not being gray-haired.
It's an interesting Rorschach test. I can see all kinds of things going on here, or nothing at all. The expression on the face of the nearest woman has a serious "not amused" vibe to it no matter how I try to look at the situation though.
She's got the same kind of name tag on as the guy to her right. I'd guess that they are both attendees of the conference that was going on at the neighboring island.
That could well be her "I'm a theoretical physicist presenting at an important conference, and the only reason that news photographer is including me in the photo is because I'm sitting at the same table as Stephen Hawking" look.
Why would a billionaire being surrounded by young woman be a red flag? Being a billionaire is enough to explain their presence without any hint of coercion.
Because it was supposed to be a professional event and that's not even remotely professional? There's a second hand account in this thread by someone who knows people who went to the island and were propositioned for sex there.
It's unprofessional at best but as we know know, many of these girls were sex trafficking victims and underage.
It's also known that Epstein's island residence was decorated with pictures of underage nude girls and a giant nude painting of Ghlisaine Maxwell. So yeah, I'd say there are quite a few red flags there.
I think the concept of "professional event" has changed considerably in the last few decades. So judging what should or shouldn't have been known by the guests based on modern standards is a mistake.
As far as nude pictures and paintings, were they clearly underage and non artistic? There's a lot of post hoc reasoning by those who want to spread blame around that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
You're going to have to put the (many) pieces together yourself. The people who would normally be responsible for doing this (the media, the government) are the same people working to suppress the story. And yes, there is plenty of evidence for this (Amy Robach hot mic, Acosta's "intelligence owns him" quote, destroyed video tapes, the plea deal Epstein got...),
> Giuffre also alleges Epstein and Maxwell told her to have sex with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell; the late MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky; and MC2 model agency cofounder Jean Luc Brunel, as well as an unnamed “prince,” “foreign president,” and owner of “a French hotel chain.” Giuffre previously alleged she had been forced by Epstein and Maxwell to have sex with lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
I know several people who were at that island and have discussed this event; one even told me that he remembered it because Marvin came over to him and said "this woman just offered to have sex with me." Also Gloria, his wife, was there, though I haven't asked her about it (and wouldn't). This seems believable to me.
OTOH I did read Giuffre's deposition and she says not just that she was told by Epstein to proposition various people but that it happened. I find that very hard to believe having known him so long, but she made that statement under oath. Also I'm not sure Marvin was famous enough to be worth making up a story about (as opposed to, say, a famous heir to a throne).
I don't think it's correct that the deposition says that sex happened -- I'd greatly appreciate a reference to that if you have one.
The deposition contains questions like "Where were you and where was Ms. Maxwell when she directed you to go have sex with Marvin Minsky?", which seem to focus entirely on Maxwell's behavior rather than telling us what Minsky's response was.
(For the record I think Minsky's conduct -- in continuing to associate with Epstein after being offered sex by a young woman on Epstein's private island and then continuing to host conferences there after Epstein's conviction -- is terrible either way, but agreeing on which facts are actually known seems important.)
Could you check the page? Neither 204 of the PDF nor 204 in red at the top seems to be a deposition text page.
I'm not imagining that Giuffre made anything up. I'm just trying to work out whether, after she propositioned Minsky as she was directed to by Maxwell (from the deposition, as well as Minsky's own account to other attendees), he accepted.
Thanks, that looks like the one I was quoting. I'm surprised you say "she says not just that she was told by Epstein to proposition various people but that it happened" from that text, unless maybe by "it" you just mean the proposition..?
I'd agree that Minsky agreeing to the proposition would be implied by those sentences in normal conversation, but depositions have carefully constructed and precise questions and answers, so that leaves me unsure.
(Again, I'm not trying to offer a strong defense of Minsky here or claim that any part of the deposition isn't true.)
Did any of the people you know regret going there? I know I would be able to do it. Even if they didn't participate, I would think being in an environment like that would make most people really uncomfortable.
Why does that say "Epstein and Maxwell told her to have sex with" and not "had sex with, as ordered by Epstein and Maxwell" ? Did Giuffre say that the sex happened?
> In the lawsuit, Giuffre claimed she was forced to have sex with a “large amount of people,” some of whom had not previously been named, including former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, Hyatt hotels magnate Tom Pritzker, hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, the late Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Marvin Minsky, modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, another unnamed prince, plus “a well-known Prime Minister.”
That's the Miami Herald misunderstanding the deposition, I believe. The actual deposition talks about her being directed to offer sex to these people, but doesn't say explicitly whether they accepted it.
Example quote from the deposition: "Where were you and where was Ms. Maxwell when she directed you to go have sex with Marvin Minsky?"
> After meeting Epstein in February 2013, Ito conducted what he described as “due diligence” into Epstein. Ito told us that he performed a Google search of Epstein and also spoke with certain individuals to learn more. According to Ito, the “influential” people with whom he spoke included Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab co-founder and Professor Post-Tenure of Media Arts and Sciences; members of the Media Lab Advisory Council; tech billionaires, including a former LinkedIn senior executive and co-founder; and a well-known Harvard Law School professor. Ito also met other influential individuals at meetings with Epstein, including Woody Allen, a senior executive at the Hyatt Corporation, and a former prime minister of Israel. Ito explained that these meetings and discussions influenced his view of Epstein.
> To the contrary, members of MIT’s Senior Team were wary of Epstein and nearly returned his May 2013 donation, the first donation of which they became aware
I love the institute but I agree they really need to think hard about how it runs.
The past 30 years have been a continuous project in weaning the institute off being merely a very large government research lab.* IMHO this process has not been successful.
* with a small school bolted onto the side: the educational side of the institute is only 16% of the budget and is run at a small loss. This might explain their interest in Epstein.
The Institute doesn't deserve your love. It has a habit of not protecting young people in its own community. Now it's under fire for turning a blind eye to the abuse of young people by its donors.
Let the Institute burn. It brought this upon itself.
I must agree that the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff) mostly consider students a nuisance unless they are interested in research. But I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet. And if most students HTFP (or claim to) there's a solid group -- even a majority? -- who love it.
I admit I was one of the lucky ones for whom it was an almost perfect environment. But even as an undergraduate I had no illusion that I was there to "attend school". I was there to learn AND do.
I am really soory if it screwed you. I have friends who had that experience.
Your comment suggests you believe those screwed by MIT are somehow naive about how the Institute works. You use the word "illusion."
I can tell you're not trying to insult anyone but you have to understand how that's kind of insulting.
If your point were correct and the issue were a simple question of being mentally prepared for the research slant of the school, Professor Tonegawa's son would not have killed himself in his freshman year.
Don't blame the students for what the system itself is structured to encourage. I was there to "learn and do" (to use your words), and I was still horrified by my experience there.
>I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet.
Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? From where I'm sitting, it has worked on a lot of trendy bullshit which never amounted to anything, but got curiously good press.
For example, that ridiculously twee and obviously fraudulent claim to have built "personal food computers" is a recent nothingburger that comes to mind.
> Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? F
MIT graduates, faculty and staff have earned quite a few Nobel and Turing prizes; half a dozen graduates have walked on the moon; the lead professor in my Unified class left to become secretary of the Air Force; she was replaced by the former head of NASA. Almost every or every department has contributed in fundamental ways to its respective field.
From Chemistry to Electronics to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Economics to Physics...I think the modern world would be unrecognizable without MIT.
Everyone knows that MIT the school, as opposed to Negroponte's pedo-blackmailer funded wank fest, has historically done some important things. If you were originally saying MIT the school is a net positive for humanity, that's not what I am asking for clarification on at all.
Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute.
Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large.
Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered.
I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example.
I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.
The Media Lab is sort of an odd duck. They did some "cool" forward looking work way back when (in the 90s as you say) but not a lot concrete ever came out of it and it felt like they were largely eclipsed by the "real world" during the dot-com era.
They did eventually get enough money to build a second building. (Which has a really nice event space--so there's that.) And I assume if I went through their research I'd find some interesting things. But I certainly don't know of anything particularly world-changing off the top of my head.
I’ll admit that doppler radar, noise canceling headphones, RSA cryptography and GPS might all be “trendy”, but they’re only a few of the many, many inventions that came out of MIT, mostly bankrolled by military funding.
You'll have to give Gumby the courtesy of responding to what he wrote, first. He is clearly talking about "the institute". In the sentence you quoted, "I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet", the pronoun "it" refers to "the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff)" in the previous sentence, consistent with "The Institute doesn't deserve your love" in the parent posting and "I love the institute" in the grandparent posting. It's 100% unambiguous that "the institute" he's talking about is "MIT" (that's what the middle "I" stands for: "institute"), not Media Lab, which didn't even exist when he joined MIT in 1982.
I am quite amused by MIT having to make some kind of apology for Jeffrey Epstein, but: the Rad Lab series, unless you count that as curiously good press.
Also don't forget that Rafael Reif was responsible for orchestrating the massive coverup of fraud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory regarding Ted Postol's allegations of fraudulent missile defense tests:
If the Department of Defense had not punted on the investigation, then provost Rafael Reif and his supervisor president Susan Hockfield would be serving time in a federal penitentiary with former dean of MIT Sloan School of Management Gabriel Bitran
Not just hand signed paper thank-you notes, but also Neri Oxman's artistically illuminated 3D-printed glass marble, sent as a thank-you gift for a $125,000 donation to her design lab.
>The newspaper also reported that her lab produced "a grapefruit-sized, 3-D printed marble with a base that lit up", as a personal gift for Epstein that was delivered to his Manhattan apartment.
>This form must be competed in its entirety by any graduate or undergraduate student wishing to end the biological process of his or her life. Postdoctorates and faculty members should not complete this form; instead, these individuals should complete alternate Form 27B-9.
Voo Doo also published a biting spot-on parody of "Hunter S Negroponte" and Media Lab (including a reference to his brother John Negroponte's war crimes and lies to Congress):
Tales of shame and degradation in the Big Idea Lab
by Hunter S. Negroponte
Too Many Bits
The other day I was thanking my good friend Former President Bush (or ``George'' as I call him) for pulling some strings to get my brother out of that Iran-Contra mess, and he asked me if I knew any hot technologies he could sink his Presidential Pension into. In my opinion, the smart money is on filters. It's getting so you can't read Usenet without seeing that ``Dave Jordan'' Ponzi letter followed by forty replies from dickless wannabes threatening to mail-bomb the poster's sysadmin for the ``innapropriate post.'' Of course, I personally have my staff of Elegant British Women pre-edit my .newsrc for me (God how I envy the British), but that option is not open to the unwired masses outside the Media Lab.
One way to eliminate the blather while keeping the First Amendment intact is to create active ``Filter Agents,'' as I like to call them, that presort my Netnews articles and eliminate the tiresome pseudo-commercial posts. Can you imagine what the net's raw content will look like when all the half-literate morons in the U.S. can publish any text that their tiny minds ooze? The very thought makes me want to refill my glass with the '56 Chateau Lafite. America's Intelligentsia will need some serious Digital Butlers guarding our Offramp on the Digital Highway's Mailing Lists (damn metaphors) when this comes to pass.
The Big Lie
Media Lab critics (there have been a few) have occasionally questioned the practical application of our work. Well, have you heard about the Holographic Television? No longer a device found only in the back of comic books, we've actually made this sucker work. An honest-to-god motion-picture hologram, produced in the Media Lab basement on a 2000 pound holography table by computers, lasers and mirrors spinning at 30,000 RPM. It's real! It works! Life Magazine even came in to photograph it in action (of course, they had to fill the room with smoke so the lasers would show up on film). Practical application? Sure, it requires a 2000 pound air-suspended rock table and a Connection Machine II to run, but hell, everyone knows the price of computing power and 2000 pound rock tables is cut in half every year. My point, however, is more mundane: we have created a demo literally from smoke and mirrors, and the Corporate World bought it. Even my good friend Penn (or ``Penn,'' as I call him) Jillette would be proud.
In fact, I'm a few points up on Penn. You may have heard of the Interactive Narrative work that is proceeding in the lab. Folks, I'll be honest with you for a moment. I know as well as you do that it's a stinking load of horseshit. Roger Ebert said ``Six thousand years ago sitting around a campfire a storyteller could have stopped at any time and asked his audience how they wanted the story to come out. But he didn't because that would have ruined the story.'' You think Hollywood would have learned this lesson from the monster ``success'' that Clue, the Movie enjoyed several years ago. But no! I've repackaged the ``Choose your own Adventure'' novels of childhood as Digital Information SuperHighway Yadda Yadda crap, and again, they bought it! Sony right this minute is building an interactive movie theater, with buttons the audience can push to amuse themselves as the story progresses. Dance for me, Corporate America! I'm SHIT-HOT!
Why, just the other day I listened to a member of my staff explain to potential sponsors that we had spent \$US 4,000,000 of Japanese sponsor dollars to construct a widescreen version of ``I Love Lucy'' from the original source. And HE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE! CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THAT? Boy, I bet those Nips wish they had their money back now! Earthquake? No, we can't do much to rebuild your city, but we SURE AS HELL can give you a 1.66:1 cut of Lucy to fit all those busted HDTVs of yours! HA HA HA!
A Sucker Born
Last week I was off the coast of Greece on my yacht ``Nippo-bux'' (I put the ``raft'' in ``graft,'' as I always say) with my close personal friend Al (``Al'') Gore. He asked me ``Nick--er, Hunter, how do you do it? You maintain a research staff of, in the words of Albert Meyer [an underfunded Course VI professor], `Science Fiction Charlatans,' yet you never fail to rake in monster sponsor bucks? I could fund Hillary's socialized medicine boondoggle in an instant if I had that kind of fiscal pull.''
I told him that it's merely a matter of understanding our sponsor's needs. Our sponsors are represented by middle-aged middle-managers who need three things: Booze, good hotels, and hookers. Keep 'em busy with free trips and the slick dog and pony shows, provide them with pre-written notes for their upper-managment, and the money will keep rolling in.
Do I worry that one day some sponsor will wake up and say ``Wait a minute--what the hell did I do last night? Did I shell out a million bucks to fund a LEGO Chair in the Media Lab? Tequila!'' Over the years I've learned not to care. I could pull the cigar out of W.C. Field's mouth and sell it back to him at a profit. And he'd thank me for the deal. I'm that goddamn good.
Obligatory Plug
By the way, if you enjoyed this article, you can read it again in my upcoming book: Being Gonzo -- Life on the Digital Information SuperHighway Fast Lane. Buy one now.
I replied "this is an excellent analogy" and it was voted down. On the assumption that I was too brief, I'll try again.
From the early 40s through the early 90s MIT was essentially entirely (> 80%) funded by various organs of the US government (I used to read the budget when I was a student, and nowadays the development office sends me the budget). With the end of the Cold War that era came to an end. Interestingly Nicholas Negroponte was one of the few who really recognized this and he set up the media lab on a different structure.*
MIT really struggled to make a transition, which it has only partially made progress on. And what I like about this analogy is that it is trading on someone else's judgement and reputation. The landing page and pitch deck that uses other peoples' logos (typically without permission which I think, in the pitch deck case at least, is just fine, as long as the usage is true). "Trust us! Our B2B solution is trusted by Coca-Cola, Airbus and Lyft!"
A lot of schools name buildings and courses after people. One thing I liked about the old MIT is that they didn't really: Building 2 actually has a name but who really knows it? There were a few exceptions, but they were few. One element of the "new" MIT is that they essentially sell their own credibility ("Steven Schwartzman school of computing is merely the most notorious" and also try to trade it in reverse "Steven Schwarzmann may be a scumbag but he thought we were worth giving money to". Harvard (from its very name) Stanford, etc have all been in on this game for decades and centuries; MIT is just trying to catch up.
* I have mixed feelings about his by that's an unrelated matter
> Building 2 actually has a name but who really knows it?
It helps that rooms are numbered with the building number up front (e.g., 2-351 is building 2 floor 3 room 51), so the number is much more informative than the name.
Also, it's only been the Simons building for 4-5 years or so; before that it was just building 2.
Not too approximately: Even numbered buildings are to the east of the central grassy plaza (Killian Court), and odd numbered buildings to the west; the numbers tend to increase moving away from the river.
Additionally, buildings outside the main cluster have a cardinal direction prefix (W/NW/N/NE/E) that helps locate them.
>In addition to his own donations, Epstein claimed to have arranged for donations to MIT from other wealthy individuals. In 2014, Epstein claimed to have arranged for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to provide an anonymous $2 million donation to the Media Lab.
In fact, Epstein left his entire estate to Boris Nikolic (guy on the far right on that NYT picture). Nikolic worked for Gates for many years.
This is Gates emailing co-workers after visiting Epstein:
> After the meeting, Epstein emailed friends and associates to boast, writing "Bill's great" in one email reviewed by The Times. In an email Gates sent to his own colleagues the next day, he wrote, "A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late."
The revelations about Epstein directing the $2M Gates donation to MIT first came out in Ronan Farrow The New Yorker piece on Joi Ito and MIT. Gates has denied it but given all the facts it seems very believable that Epstein did have something to do with that donation.
That's an extreme exaggeration that borders on character assassination - your linked article disagrees with your setup at every step (it notes repeatedly the limited nature of his interaction with Epstein). Gates met with Epstein a few times on the premise that he claimed he could raise billions of dollars for charitable causes Gates was associated with and otherwise did not have ties to him, did not do business with him or know him on a personal level.
Yes, and the LinkedIn co-founder is obviously Reid Hoffman. Here's a series of Tweets from Aanand Giridharadas talking about discovering some of this information and how they reacted to it:
Reid Hoffman arranged a 2015 dinner where he invited Epstein, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Epstein would later tell a New York Times reporter that he knew intimate & embarrassing details of the sex lives of numerous tech luminaries. I'm sure it's all nothing though. Hoffman says he regrets it so he's in the clear. Even still has his podcast on NPR!
> almost certainly Alan Dershowitz, who is up to his eyeballs in epstein dirt.
My guess is Lawrence Lessig, since he himself wrote about this ("Our conversations then were about his diligence to determine whether Epstein remained an abuser"), see
The the former Israeli Prime Minister probably being Barak; Israeli media has uncovered that Epstein gave him use of his NY apartment, and millions in investments.
Ah yes, Woody Allen, the well-known judge of character when it comes to matters of child sexual abuse.
The "former prime minister of Israel" was probably Ehud Barak, who solicited $1 million in seed money from Epstein for his startup Carbyne, received large political donations from Epstein's benefactor Les Wexner, and was a frequent guest at Epstein's NYC mansion.
Honestly I wouldn’t recommend Patlabor to someone who only likes the GITS movie and Cowboy Bebop. It’s going to feel too slow and cheezy (in a way many anime fans including myself enjoy).
I’d probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.
I think the aesthetic/pacing/art of particularly the first two Patlabor movies would probably be appreciated by somebody who's a fan of the first GITS movie specifically. There is a common cyberpunk thread running through both those Patlabor movies and GITS. Patlabor 1 has a plot that easily could have been a GITS plot and spends a lot of time dwelling on the ways apparent progress leaves many people feeling abandoned and worthless.
The Patlabor TV show is definitely much lighter material, a lot more accessible to children.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely check them out. Maybe it's my age, but a lot of what I have seen like Deathnote or even the GITS SAC didn't click with me. Cowboy Bebop was just fun, and I forgot I was watching an anime.
I think maybe it's the high-concept, almost frightening, aspects of GITS that resonated with me. But I understand why it's not popular with most people.
There's also the Patlabor OVA series that came before the show and movies, and takes place in the same universe as the movies. I feel it's tone is in between the movies and TV show.
Patlabor is slow, sure, and purposefully so (it has and deserves the reputation as being the "boring" mecha show), but cheezy? I haven't seen the TV show which I hear is a lot more comic, but I wouldn't call the original OVA/first 2 movies cheezy.
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