It's unclear if Gurley actually wants to leave the board. Part of me thinks that he knows something really bad is coming down the pipes (e.g. potential criminal liability re: Otto, etc) and he wants to distance himself now. It's half a conspiracy theory, but makes you think ...
It's got to be the Otto lawsuit, that's obviously coming, after Levandowski dropped the ball with that "plead the Fifth" stuff.
Even the Google network forensics team have him bang to rights[1] taking data while on-site at the campus, Google would be mental to not launch a volley and destroy a potential competitor in the process.
And you don't drop $680m on an acquisition without going through board approval first, surely? Somebody's definitely complicit.
This was the same thing that popped my mind when I read this news.
Also: if he leaves before something really bad happens to the company, he might claim he left because the unethical behaviour of the company didn't align with his ideals, perhaps not hurting his future prospects at the boards of other companies.
It would be great if you could add city as a form field and allow searching by city. I'd love to pay for this/contribute as well. I was just about to build something similar (but less pretty)
This has been sort of done with Charter schools that use a lottery based acceptance system.
The problem with even random systems is that parents that are willing to fill out the many forms required are usually more involved in their children's life then the median in poor communities.
Also - many charter schools don't provide federally funded free lunches which means that the poorest students who rely on these lunches are unable to attend these schools.
The page I cited actually breaks down lifetime earnings by age (a.k.a. "annual income"). It's true that non-college graduates get an earlier start on savings, but the overall trend is that their annual income starts to decline as they get closer to retirement age (they peak in their mid to late 40's).
You have to assume totally unrealistic investment gains in the first four years to make up for the $500k less total income.
At that point, the state (who is ultimately paying for most of this) would be competing unfairly with private companies (in particular, it would not be paying minimum wage). This is probably not a good idea.
In Ireland we have a scheme where an unemployed person can get an extra 50 euro a week on their unemployment benefit, in return for which they do an internship for a private company, which must at least in principle be training-oriented. In practice, this can cause a problem where these 'internships' displace the need to create real jobs.
The UK has a nastier version of this: you can be compelled to do unpaid work or lose your unemployment benefit. Some of this is displacing real jobs in the low-paid retail sector. Some of it results in people standing around in hi-viz jackets doing nothing for 35 hours a week. https://welfaretales.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/workfare-force...
The (rather idealised sounding, by the NYT's description) European version is about keeping people engaged with society by giving them things that feel like work so they have colleagues, a familiarity with working practices, and a feeling of usefulness.
The British version seems to regard sitting at home while unemployed as an outrageous privilege; drudgery must be imposed on those people otherwise they're better off than the 'hardworking' people who must suffer commuting and not seeing their family. A previous version was declared illegal, so the government enacted "emergency" legislation to retroactively legalise it. http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/03/19/ids-emergency-jobs...
Yep, Workfare is definitely far worse than Jobbridge (the Irish scheme); in particular Jobbridge is not mandatory (or even particularly common) and the internship has to provide useful experience and training (though there has been abuse of this; a major supermarket chain was advertising shelf-stacking jobs as Jobbridge internships for a while before getting caught).
It's a free lunch for all is it? Someone pays (if not the descendants yet to be conceived who will be making interest payments on current debts) so it's certainly drudgery on the folk who have to pay for those sitting at home.
I suppose that's how you keep the chain of economic coercion through threat of starvation going.
"We are giving you this free lunch, because we're uncomfortable with people starving to death in a first world country, but in order to maintain the strict ranking that citizens are only allowed happiness in proportion to their income, we're going to inflict useless activity on you. Don't have a nice day or it'll come out of your benefits."
(Current debt is being issued at 0.5% interest rates, a historic low)
Though you are correct that interest rates are very low, I believe it is disingenuous to quote the rate of a gilt with a maturity under 10 years. (You have mentioned the 2-year gilt.)
This system also likely works without making changes to wage laws etc, and makes clear that it is temporary and to help people get a job and not a source of cheap labor (which quickly would take over "real", normally paid jobs, which would mean more people are unemployed, ...)
You could do things that are not in competition with any company (or in minimal competition). For example visiting and having a chat with lonely elderly.
