Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes

Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by a-dub on Sunday May 13, 2018 @10:44AM (#17059143)

The Drapers are weird. I guess the family has been rich for a long time and they've made a lot of investments, but I don't really see a clear track record of being particularly good at picking winners.

I was at a Bitcoin trade show a few years ago and his son was there pumping his Bitcoin specific venture fund. Quite honestly, he struck me as an enormous asshole. He was on a few panels with people who actually knew how that stuff works and he would just talk right over them again and again in an almost derogatory capacity. It was like zany high school shit.

Also these are the crazy people that want to split California up, well you know, just 'cause.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by perl4ever on Sunday May 13, 2018 @10:55AM (#17059201)

According to the BBC, Russia has been funding and promoting the California secessionists, among other similar movements.

See: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41853131

Edit: This is a direct explanation of why "just 'cause" is misleading or incomplete, based on public information from mainstream media.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by sanderjd on Sunday May 13, 2018 @01:23PM (#17059929)

I don't know anything about this or about who the Draper family is or what they're involved in, but my reading of your parent's comment was that they were talking about splitting California into multiple states ("want to split California up"), not about California seceding from the union. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but these seem like very different things to me. One of them is about re-drawing very arbitrary lines, which are based on no clear principle I can suss out (maybe the strongest being that 50 is a nice round number?). The other violates a very clear principle ("Our Union shall not sever!") that the country's most widely respected leader fought a civil war to protect.

I personally have no strongly developed opinions on splitting states up; I'm interested in arguments in either direction. But the idea of splitting up a state with (at least) two portions that are quite far apart geographically and culturally doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. But I'm also not sure where that argument ends. I'm from another state - Illinois - that spans quite a few latitudes and has at least two quite different cultural zones. When I lived there, it always seemed to me that you could quite reasonably split the state into three: Chicagoland, the agricultural midlands, and the south. So if it makes sense to split up California, does it make sense for Illinois too? Are there other states that the same argument applies to? I dunno, I'm curious about it. But of course it is a non-starter politically, so it's just an intellectual exercise.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by zasz on Sunday May 13, 2018 @12:02PM (#17059580)

Dunno why you're getting downvoted. It's true, and it only adds to the Drapers being enormous assholes; it doesn't contradict that. The leader of the #calexit campaign was an American who was living in Russia. Plus Russia's been funding far-right parties in Europe.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by icebraining on Sunday May 13, 2018 @01:52PM (#17060060)

Dunno why you're getting downvoted

Because splitting up into multiple states is not the same as seceding.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by perl4ever on Sunday May 13, 2018 @06:37PM (#17061393)

This is true. On the other hand, just because it is well publicized the Russians are promoting one movement to disrupt California is not a definitive argument that they aren't involved in another. The pattern has been to promote multiple sides of any possible conflict. Draper was reportedly going to get some assistance[1] from Nigel Farage, of Brexit fame, and Farage has been denying[2] Russian connections recently.

[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russia-jewish-farage-brexit-69...

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by zasz on Sunday May 13, 2018 @10:43PM (#17062309)

Oops, you are right, I misread that.

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Re:Tim Draper defends Theranos and its disgraced founder and... by cafard on Monday May 14, 2018 @10:13AM (#17065679)

The notion of splitting California has been around for long time. Jerry Brown's father Pat Brown advocated it in a book written about fifty years ago. (Having been the governor, he lost to Ronald Reagan, then wrote the book.)

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