Two big problems with just moving people into shelters:
1. Homeless shelters are horribly funded and have long waiting lists for beds. This proposal provides no additional funding. My guess is most people will be forced to take the bus ticket option.
2. Shelter beds themselves are poorly maintained, unsanitary, and often have bed bugs. It sounds counter-intuitive but a lot of homeless people are _choosing_ the streets over homeless shelters.
To be honest, I think the people bankrolling this bid know that moving people into shelters is unfeasible, and they're cynically hoping to just bus the homeless out of San Francisco.
Many shelters also have rules that nobody can adhere to like curfew hours or being forced to stand in line everyday to get a spot first come first served. Often you can't book more than one night at a time so you have to spend a significant part of your day, everyday, securing your temporary bed and storage for that night so if you have a job you can't stay at a shelter.
It's much better to just live out of a tent. Problem is people in squatter tents tend to get ridiculously drunk every night, light their tent on fire accidentally or spend all night screaming and fighting with each other thus police get called and their tent city dismantled.
The Salvation Army from what I've seen has the best system going. You can book 3 months, and they help you with employment. You get your own room and there's not a lot of rules besides no alcohol or drugs allowed in the building. This is where most of the homeless go who fell through the social safety net for whatever reasons, and they can save 3 months of income to get back on their feet whereas the addicts, chronic homeless by choice, and mentally ill are the ones in tent cities.
Y: "There are too many homeless here, it feels unsafe."
A: "How dare you! Those are human beings!"
Y: "Why can't they stay in shelters?"
A: "They feel unsafe, there are too many homeless there."
What's tragic is that you think warehousing people who are overwhelmingly addicts, or mentally ill would be workable. The term, 'Bedlam' springs to mind.
Besides, it's almost like different homeless people are... different... people.
It does suck, but safety on the streets is highly variable depending on your experience and what you're trying to be safe from. If your bad experiences are getting groped every night, the risk of death from exposure or someone hassling you on the streets may seem more desirable.
Daily survival is not a game theory problem. If I were homeless and expected sexual assault at shelters I would probably feel so insecure there that I would end up trying to live on the street instead, even at the risk of freezing.
It's not a rational choice but sexual assault does not often result in (or come from) rational decisions.
Theres a number of initiatives to end homelessness and how much of the public cost and burden is lowered by ending homelessness first.
The housing first principle is an interesting thing to look into -- has been successful in some areas at greatly reducing issues and helping people improve their position in life.
Worth reading about the Invisible Institute (http://invisible.institute/) which is the journalistic company Jamie Kalven, the author of this article, started. They've been the driving force behind most of the public oversight of the Chicago Police Department in recent years. In addition to calling for the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video, they've published a database of over 56,000 misconduct complaint records against Chicago police officers.
I feel bad for those 340 employees. I can't imagine what it would feel like to have years of your work be exposed as (basically) a farce. I can barely stand working a week without getting results much less x years of my professional life.
I wonder, would one have legal recourse in such a case? Is it conceivable, in principle, to seek remedy for damages arising from your stunted career?
Any litigation experts care to weigh in? What would need to be established beyond the obvious (e.g. that damages were committed)? Has anything of this sort occurred in the past?
It's not likely that any of these employees can reasonably claim a tort or breach of contract here. The company messed up, but luckily it's not illegal to disappoint your employees.
Not that I think Theranos should not face some consequences, I just think drawing the line would be highly fraught.
Well my reasoning was that Theranos' criminal fraud might taint a given employee's CV. It seems like prima facie it might be possible to argue that this translates into monetary damages.
If you hung around for too long at the place that might signal the capacity to put up with institutional corruption. It's a character trait viewed positively in some places.
It's your choice to continue working at the company during hints of fraud. Anyone concerned about it tainting their future should have left 6 months ago.
Thank god this is not possible. Every employee that joined a failed company would have the potential for litigation.
Also, I think the fundamental premise that working for a failed or even fraudulent company would taint your resume is false, unless you were at a level where you were responsible for some of those fraudulent decisions. If some company is looking for a lab tech they would be stupid to write someone off just because they worked for Theranos.
No, it's too bad it isn't possible. This isn't about a "failed company", this is about outright fraud. Having Theranos on your resume now is going to be a huge resume stain, and probably prevent you from getting any kind of decent job. It's completely normal for hiring managers to discriminate based on odd factors like this: what school you went to, what other companies you worked for, etc.
These employees absolutely should be able to sue for damages. They aren't responsible for their executives' fraudulent actions, but they're harmed by them.
> Having Theranos on your resume now is going to be a huge resume stain, and probably prevent you from getting any kind of decent job.
From my own history I've seen this to be false. I was previously at a place that had a lot of ex-Enron employees (after Enron imploded). I think most smart employers understand the vast majority of people at places like Enron or Theranos are not "tainted" by their employment and just had the misfortune of working for a company with ethically challenged management.
"seek remedy for damages arising from your stunted career"
Stunted career? As adults I'm sure they would have been capable of leaving any time they wanted from legal point of view. It's not goverments job to protect people from partaking in risky ventures. Who would want to create a startup after litigating "too risky product that turned out to be bogus".
Only it doesn't really work like that. A lot of the employees would have been innocent. Secretaries, lab workers, mechanics, janitors, scientists. These weren't risky ventures, they were a job. While they might have been able to leave at any time from a legal point of view, not all of them would have known that it was that risky. You know, because it is a job. It is a bit different if you are investing money in it, getting paid less, and so on.
And lets not forget this wasn't really a small operation: Over 300 employees. Multiple cities.
And the government does do some things to protect workers - such as unemployment and labor laws. But again, this is different than protecting risky investments. I'd even argue that this is partly the governments job by requiring disclosure of known risks and by prosecuting folks taking advantage of others - the rest is the discretion of the money holder.
Yeah. Having the big "T" on the resume might be one of the few red flags signalling fraud and corruption worse than a few years at SAC capital after a internship at Enron and Lehman Bros. Maybe the employees themselves will sue the company for fraud and damage to their careers. Crazy situation.
SAC Capital is a much bigger stain for former employees than the others, in my opinion. SAC allegedly had a deeply ingrained culture of finding and exploiting insider knowledge that permeated multiple levels. Basically, Cohen had employees do his dirty work, while he maintained plausible deniability.
At Theranos, by contrast, Holmes intentionally kept employees in the dark. If I were interviewing an ex-employee, especially one at a lab outside of California, I would certainly press the candidate on the issue, but I would be willing to believe that they were honestly trying to build and deploy a novel technology that never ended up working. It is not the case that the entire endeavor was a scam. They thought that they could develop this technology, and then the leadership covered it up as they were failing to do so.
Also, do you have any sources that document employment at Lehman Brothers as being a stain on the majority of their employees? Thousands of the employees immediately moved to Barclays and Nomura when they bought parts of Lehman Brothers. That doesn't sound like a horrible stain to me.
I don't know about ryporter, but I sure would. I'm looking for people who are both smart and of good character. Working for what is apparently a giant fraud suggests that they may lack one or both of those attributes. I'd definitely have them talk about their experience there and what they learned, and I'd be looking both for their emotional reactions and the actions they took.
I appreciate the comment, though I think the situation is often more nuanced - a junior employee may simply not have all the facts, and a more senior one may either have a 'gag order' on exit or worried that saying anything negative will affect their chances with future employers. Whistleblowers can end up harming their careers despite doing the right thing, and a halo doesn't pay the mortgage or buy the kids Christmas presents.
But onto Theranos - I just posted something on this at my blog. More than the employees, look at the Board of Directors and ask why they didn't do their jobs and enforce change. If they can't alter the ridiculous plans of the Founder/CEO due to the voting structure then they should resign. It's not their full time job, they won't go hungry if they leave, so what is their excuse for not speaking out?
Oh, yeah, I'd expect a junior employee to not figure it out right away. I'd just be looking to see what they noticed in retrospect. And senior employees can have their own legitimate reasons for saying. I'm not saying I wouldn't hire them. I'm just saying I'd ask.
For me it's similar to having worked for a failed startup. I have no problem with it, but I'm definitely going to ask. The difference between a bad failure and a good one is how much you learn.
How do you mean? Both of those are functioning businesses that build products that actually work. I'd have different concerns about people at those companies, but I wouldn't be asking them, "So when exactly did you realize it was a fraud and what did you do then?"
I am serious, and I didn't say that. I would press them on what they knew and when, and I'd be willing to believe that they didn't know much more than readers of the WSJ did.
Working at SAC Capital is only a black mark on your name to those outside of finance. Within the world of hedge funds SAC alumni are doing extremely well:
That's very interesting, and it makes some sense now that you mention it. After all, SAC made it clear to investors that that would cover all of the legal expenses and fines, so they were just left with returns from the fund itself, and insider trading works.
I disagree. 5,300 low level employees actively chose to create fictional bank accounts in order to meet their goals. Even if some middle management tier recommended that they do it, I think it says something about the moral fiber of every one of those employees to be complicit in that.
We happily hired people from Lehman after the financial crisis. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and it is tragic that the good people frequently overestimate their role in one-off events.
I work in IT so I'm used to weeks without results.
But yeah this is going to be a huge black mark on people's resumes and how the hell do you hide 3 years with a company that was basically all about committing fraud?
"I didn't know and I was doing good work," probably isn't going to fly.
I do too, but having met several people who worked there briefly and left, I wonder how many of those 340 have even been there for years. Seems like they have a lot of writing-on-the-wall related churn.
It's great that they're making these available, but I hope people don't use this as a substitute for actually going to the museum. Art is something best experienced in person. While a Jackson Pollock seems ridiculous on a computer screen, its scale and grandeur are something else in person.
Also I hope people who go to museum would refrain from photographing and actually enjoy the art experience while there. MoMa especially was very bad in this regard and it was very difficult to look at anything and not be asked to move out of way. Some museums ban photography and I think it makes them much more enjoyable.
I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.
If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an explicit Bayesian reasoner.
It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an acceptably low impact on your priors.
I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too much."
"Yet Mr. Fraser-Jenkins has a point. Index funds don’t set prices; they only accept the prices that active investors have already set. If everyone owned index funds, he says, “no one would be doing” the job of figuring out what securities are worth."
The situation described is clearly not a Nash equilibrium. If you have special, accurate information on the price of a security, then you're going to act on it. Why would no one be doing the work of pricing something if it's profitable? Sounds like actively managed mutual funds are getting antsy because people are starting to realize that they're getting screwed not going with index funds.
If everyone invested exclusively in index funds, and no one works to establish a market price for each individual component, the obvious thing to do would be to adjust indices to manage the portfolio based upon actual dividends.
All companies converge on the same P/E ratio, and the ratio of the index depends on how much investor money is chasing the overall productive activity of every [investable] company in the economy.
It wouldn't be the end of the world, by far.
But it is doubtful this will ever get even close to happening, because some investors will always be gamblers at heart, and if they learn that Coca-Cola is releasing a new beverage flavor, they will use the financial markets to make bets on whether it will be insanely popular or a colossal failure.
If one company's earnings are growing quickly, and another's is slowly shrinking, and they have the same P/E ratio, I'm likely to skip the index and buy the high-growth company directly.
If a company can reinvest earnings at a high rate of return, it's to the advantage of stockholders if it doesn't pay dividends. How much should the index weight it?
...illustrating why the price system will always be available to value things.
If there is no market trade price for a stock, the only way investors can realize value from owning shares is through dividends. Increasing the value of the company does nothing for the owners individually if shares for a specific company have no individually identifiable price. Everybody is buying and selling through the automated index funds, remember? The only way to get higher capitalization in the opinion of the fund robots is to issue better dividends. There's no one to sell to at a higher price, except the other robots, who all have similar valuation algorithms, and will need to sell the same amount as your fund robot in order to realize any gains.
But that is all absurd and moot, because there will always be a price, as long as two individuals are willing to move differently from the herd. As we are mostly humans in our market, that behavior is practically guaranteed. The outlier who thinks the stock is outperforming the whole market will buy from the outlier who thinks that the stock is underperforming. And their combined beliefs and opinions will create a price for it.
Ergo, index funds are not eating the world.
The fewer people there are that are willing to try to beat the funds or game their algorithms, the easier it will be for any one of them to succeed. So there will always be at least one.
An economist and a reporter were walking down the street when a $20 bill blows into their path on the sidewalk. The economist looks at it, smiles knowingly, then steps over it and continues walking. The reporter says, "Why didn't you pick up that $20 bill?" The economist replies, "If it was really a $20 bill, someone would have picked it up already."
By the economist's reasoning, someone already has a strategy to take advantage of index funds. Actually, a lot of someones already have every possible strategy to take advantage of index funds. So none of them really make significant returns, because the dead whale is eaten by a million scuttling isopods, each taking one or two bites before it's all gone. So the real money is in taking advantage of those guys, perhaps with fees or paid reports or little boxes that light up and go "ping".
Of course, just because all the free money is already being picked up, doesn't mean you will never catch a flying $20 bill if you decide to make a grab for it. No market is perfect, and there's always an opportunity to grab some free money somewhere.
Yep I read Random Walk on Wall Street too, a while back. More recently I read a stack of books on quantitative investing strategies, which referenced a lot of academic work. Turns out quite a few academics don't really believe in the EMH anymore; it's just not holding up to historical evidence. There are all sorts of factors that can make markets less efficient.
If Google and Apple were only participating to throw their around their weight as lobbyists to pass a new law -- similar to what Arkansas legislature tried to do, it might be a First Amendment debate.
However, a key sentence from the article was:
"concrete plans to accelerate the development and adoption of new tools and solutions,"
The "new tools" doesn't sound like crafting a law for a court to strike down but new technology to empower users to block the nuisance calls.
Nice.