The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues
Huh, I went through a similar journey in New York, starting as an advocate of criminal-justice reform and then getting fed up with the incompetence.
And while I wouldn't say ideological inflexibility is ideology per se, one of the contributors to ineffectiveness I saw in New York was a simultaneous inability to tolerate competent people with even slightly-divergent viewpoints (and there were a lot of red lines–I don't know what multidimensional beast could thread them), or, alternatively, an inability to fire or beach clearly-incompetent people because they were part of a priority community. (Read "community" broadly. It might be an identity. It was more often whatever union or local progressive club the person cropped up through.)
Some of the difficulties of criminal-justice reform include: you can't arrest your way out of mental illness. It's easier for society to lock up the mentally ill in with a 1-dollar bond that it is to provide the help that they need. It's probably cheaper to do give them the housing and help, but it's easier to get money for jails and jailers than it is to get money for mental health facilities.
> It's probably cheaper to do give them the housing and help, but it's easier to get money for jails and jailers than it is to get money for mental health facilities.
It’s not really. We are approaching $100k/year in Seattle just to house someone in a tiny home or apartment building as charged to the city/county by local non profits, without any help beyond that (and no guarantee that they wont go out and, for example, shoot a pregnant woman driving a Tesla). Prison/jail is only around $60k/year, in comparison. There must be some corruption going on, but no one in government will even consider it as a possibility.
I agree that this is a major challenge, but (for example) it has basically nothing to do with the carjacking phenomenon. I'm just saying, this stuff is complicated, and anyone with a straightforward solution is wrong.
>but (for example) it has basically nothing to do with the carjacking phenomenon.
Nevermind if this is even a "phenomenon". How about we just pick 2 or 3 issues and actually solve those first? It's very clear that we are at best spreading ourselves thin and at worst being distracted by everything in a malicious attempt to flood the zone. We aren't angry enough at any single issue as a result.
Pick 2-3 main issues, and just spend an entire year tackling those. Easier PR, easier accountability.
What’s interesting is that you take a felon who held a woman at gunpoint while robbing her, and sympathize with him based on his skin color.
I’ve never read a story about “brown” terrorists and felt any connection to the terrorists. Not even based on shared humanity, much less ethnicity. Indeed, I’m sad we got rid of the lady who was mowing them down in Bangladesh.
It’s interesting I said “terrorists” and you translated that to “people I hate.” As if I have some different, unstated motivation. No, I just hate terrorists, obviously.
How does it seem that Radley is talking past Gary?
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
Can you elaborate on "basic competency issues", either in the case of Boudin's office and/or other high profile reformist prosecutors? Is that just a polite way of calling them dumb, à la what the kids are calling a 'skill issue' nowadays?
I can speak at length to the tenure of Kim Foxx, Chicago's former high-profile progressive prosecutor. I know some of the issues rhyme with Boudin's term, but San Franciscans can tell his story better than I can.
So, first, no, I feel like I'm saying the opposite of "they're dumb". I don't think either Foxx or Boudin are dumb. I think they're both interesting people with interesting and valuable views.
When I say "basic competence issues", I'm talking about the kinds of things that would go wrong if, like, you or I took over the CCSAO and started managing all the prosecutions in Cook County. For instance: having huge numbers of line prosecutors resign, in part because you totally fuck up the promotion ladder, in part because you shift staffing priorities away from line prosecution and towards internal policy positions, and in part because you fail to sell your immediate-term vision for how you're going to manage the agency.
The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency. These prosecutor offices were incredibly strained before people like Boudin and Foxx got there. Which means: there was already an extent to which prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
What's more frustrating is that Foxx was doing this at the same time as Illinois was rolling out SAFE-T, which ended cash bail in Illinois. I am wholeheartedly in favor of SAFE-T, and I think by-default cash bail is an idiotic system that unnecessarily amplifies the societal cost of law enforcement. But SAFE-T was ultra-controversial in Chicagoland, and Foxx went through all this stuff while people were freaking out daily about catch-and-release. It didn't help that all of this coincided with a huge regional increase in carjackings, the second most important urban index crime after murder. It further didn't help that she was accused of refusing to prosecute juvenile carjackers, and that when confronted by reporters about that, she didn't have a clear denial.
I hope this reads as I intend it to, which is: not ideological, just an assessment about whether someone is prepared to step in and run the office, most of which is boring and just needs to be done correctly.
(I think you can probably look at Krasner as an example of a prosecutor who has avoided these traps.)
We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
To some degree there simply isn't any plan you can have beyond that in the short term things will suck and hopefully the long term benefits will be worth it. If the existing incumbents are sufficiently ideologically opposed to your goals that they'll refuse to work rather than let you even inch towards them, there's not much you can do beyond try to replace them with people who don't have the relevant experience but are willing to work with you.
"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.
So it's not enough to say that the progressive ideology is a bad plan in that environment? You said it yourself, there isn't any plan. What happens in complicated high risk situations when there is no plan? You end up with bad results, which is a result of the failed ideology.
I mean, you have basically no control over law enforcement if they decide to arbitrarily slow down arrests or protest your leadership. This has been one of the more consistent issues in American politics and you can see it when the police union doesn't get their way they have a huge tantrum and make things worse for everyone involved.
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.
The flip side I've heard is that LE doesn't arbitrarily slow down arrests due to a difference in ideology. It seems more simple than that. Who wants to go through the effort of making arrests if the DA is letting them free. The LEO will see them commit the same event the next day. I don't think anyone would want that in their day to day job, much less law & order.
It's like writing a PR/MR every day [by hand] and having it declined every day, eventually you stop.
Maybe so, but the difference is that my job is my job; if I don't do my job I get fired. If the police don't do their job they get rewarded with more funding because people see the effect and not the cause.
You could make the argument that it discourages them from making the effort, but they're still getting paid and supported by my tax dollars and so should do their damn job.
-- When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! God so many people don't "get" this. Engineering leaders that come in and create and exodus of senior leaders, same thing. I started calling it organizational momentum. The speed at which you get things done, goes up as the organization gets to understand itself. A bunch of key people leave and BAM momentum goes to zero and suddenly all the milestones you are missing are putting all the wrong pressure on the org to get moving again.
> prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
> When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
So, circumstances were making prosecutorial decisions, and the new DA efforts to make fundamental changes did not fix those circumstances, and therefore all changes they made were considered to cause that state.
The office wasn't running. It is not the fault of the new guy that it keeps not running.
If you assume office and things get worse, that is in fact on you! I'm not saying Foxx's predecessor was good; Foxx's predecessor was Anita Alvarez, who was herself a trainwreck in the opposite direction.
A problem I see all the time in these kinds of public policy debates is that people have ideological rooting interests. That isn't going to get you anywhere in a debate about a major metro prosecutor's office. You can't project out "this person was progressive therefore they were good" and you can't do "this person is a law-and-order tough-on-crime prosecutor so they're good" either. It's a very difficult job. Notably: I think you'd have a hard time finding credible people who believe Foxx did a good job in her office.
The office was running. Not in a way the voters wanted but they were competent in accomplishing their goals. Then the new DA was elected and tons of people left and now the office isn’t running.
Yeah people think government is like, you elect people and they get a turn at the wheel. But all the people you could elect aren't equally experienced or competent drivers, and the car doesn't suit them all equally (this is simple systems theory, either your government is highly tailored towards--say--centrists running it and thus is very efficient, or anyone on any part of the political spectrum could run it but it's significantly less efficient).
Or like, in your example (to be clear I defer to you entirely on the facts), not only would Foxx have to be a competent State's Attorney, she'd have to be competent at changing a system that's not ideal for her into one that is, e.g. by persuading existing staff, hiring new staff, etc.
This is by no means impossible--it's called leadership. My hot take, more or less, is that if you get someone into office who shares your values but can't make the office execute those values, not only will you fail but you'll tarnish your political movement for... a good long time, so competence is actually more important than values alignment.
My even hotter take is that people used to know this. When people from minority groups or political persuasions got power (women, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic/religious minorities, ideological/philosophical minorities, etc) they knew they were modeling for everyone in their group. Is it fair? No. Is it reality. Super yes! Is whining about unfairness good politics and/or attractive at all? Super no!
Carjacking is a subset of motor vehicle theft, which is an index crime, but carjacking commands more public attention than anything except for murder; this is a vibes-based assertion but I feel like I could back it up easily.
Importantly: the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault). She was in an incredibly tough position --- she also had to deal with Chicagoland police departments that have not covered themselves in glory over the last 20 years. But she didn't rise to the challenge.
How is carjacking Kia’s fault? Kia had a problem with immobilizer anti-theft devices not being installed plus a well documented trivial way to “Hotwire” certain models. This would simply be car theft. It was a well documented (via social media) technique that lowered the skill level needed to steal a car to basically the ability to sit through a 30s TikTok.
Is it that it’s a “gateway crime” to full on carjacking? You get away with a few joy rides in a Kia and get bold enough to do an armed carjacking of someone’s SUV while they load their kids up in the alley garage?
Carjacking is up there with murder for “scary” urban crime because it’s violent and anyone can imagine being a victim. Having your car stolen off the street overnight doesn’t really elicit the same visceral response.
Add in the CPDs general “no chase” policy (mostly a good thing for harm reduction) plus a bunch of largely juveniles posting on social media the dangerous driving stunts they were pulling on social media to really amp up the fear and outrage. Even if it were mostly for show, no prosecutor is going to survive an election if they come across as soft on that style of crime.
Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off. Carjackers (at least in Chicagoland) don't generally post up in parking lots waiting for victims; they're highly mobile.
(I have two carjackings on camera from behind my old house, where we had a Nest camera. One thing I learned from that: anybody who thinks carrying a firearm is a realistic defense against a carjacking is in fantasyland. You don't get even a split second to react; the encounter begins with a gun in your face.)
No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area. Every once in awhile where I live we get trustee candidates promising to bring chases back, and I have to wonder what they're smoking.
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off
Ah yeah, I forgot about this part. Makes sense. I also happen to have two (well, 1.5 - only caught the drive-away for one of them as the actual carjacking happened down the block) carjackings on my home cameras in the immediate post-COVID era. It happened in a similar manner here in one of the "very safe" neighborhoods of Chicago with burner cars. One of the burners was another stolen Mercedes - so I guess it's likely turtles all the way down until a KIA.
> Drones?
We have giant human-operated ones here in Chicago (helicopters) with at least one in the air seemingly all the time (according to my desktop ADS-B display). These coupled with the various traffic cameras spread all around seem to do a fairly effective job of tracking a stolen car if the police care enough to respond in time. Of course it's limited in the number of "chases" and available manpower.
Not sure why drones haven't made more of an entrance to this space. I think partly police union/labor issues, and partly the size of a drone needed to be useful enough (station keeping and response time) for the task would tend to look at lot like military surveillance drones. I vaguely remember some noise about about CPD trialing something like this, or it could have simply been "partnering" with Federal agencies during various recent protest activity. These are MQ-9 Reapers and similar drones in the class and they have been deployed over the city in recent memory.
I'm not sure giving CPD that capability is a great idea overall. If they end up having one or two drones in the sky 24x7 as a matter of course, surveillance concerns and abuse opportunities multiply. At least with the helicopters there is a large manpower and financial cost involved, and it's usually very obvious when one is deployed in your area due to noise.
I still fail to see how carjacking rates are Kia's fault. I mean, Did carjackings increase everywhere relative to the % of kia's on the road in every area (urban and rural)?
Carjacking increased a lot in Chicago, seriously a huge amount, when TikTok started showing people how to steal Kia’s. It really wasn’t an issue at all until then
> the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault)
I leave my keys in my car and don’t lock my front door. That isn’t because of the local prosecutor. But it’s not to their demerit. If my car were stolen, I’d still expect them to at least do some work.
I think it might be because you live in an area that has created zoning laws that make it impossible for non rich people to sleep anywhere within an hour and a half of you. You live in Jackson hole right?
Carjacking is when somebody opens your door at a stoplight, points a gun at you, and tells you to get out of the car. Are you instead referring to vehicle theft in general? How is this Kia's fault?
O'Neill Burke is no more competent than Kim Foxx, and is a member of an Illinois crime family, but she has the support of the carceral state including the FOP. The reality is that Foxx's tenure coincided with (and partially caused) an effective strike/work stoppage by the police in Chicago.
How do you as an elected official change the culture of a rotten institution, that the public wants reformed but is engaged in vital public service who can simply stop doing the work if you piss them off?
I don't know. I feel like so many of our institutions are rotten these days and attempt at reform are sabotaged and/or cause backlashes.
Make small, incremental changes in the correct direction that will face minimal internal resistance?
A lot of people want everything, immediately, and seem to believe maximalist approaches are no more politically dangerous than more incrementalist ones. They're wrong: prioritization is a thing, and pragmatism and realism about what you can accomplish isn't a sign of selling out but of wanting to be an effective agent of change.
And once you succeed at the first tranche of easier wins, you've built up the trust, skills, and political capital to take on the second tranche. Rinse and repeat.
If you're suggesting she's related to Ed Burke, no, she isn't. But I'm also not here to argue that EOB is doing a great job. I'm telling you why Foxx is widely viewed as a failure, including by reformists.
Lots of organizations are riven with corruption (exhibit A: every fire department). Doesn't mean you can fuck them up, at least not if you want to matter in public policy for long. This is a difference between message boards and reality.
>The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency.
Your whole point is (aside from Chicago and San Francisco being interchangeable to the extent that Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin are functionally the same person) “if you don’t keep your ideological detractors happy and employed then you’re doing a bad job.” That’s just another way of saying that culture change isn’t feasible
It read to me like a post mortem on why she failed [opposite of success]. She failed because she was bad at changing the culture which is a core competency of leadership. It doesn't really matter what the people think one way or another, the job of a leader is to lead, "win hearts and minds"
The main HIPAA claim seems to be that the victim didn’t provide (or consent to the publication of) that X-ray, and neither did their only family member known to possess it. I don’t know who released it, but if it was someone in the medical office, that is a genuine HIPAA violation.
> I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship
Strongly inclined to hire such a prosecutor. Has this model been successfully deployed in any large U.S. cities? My only experience is watching it struggle in a medium one.
On your last point: given the ethical responsibility of a prosecutor, I’d go one step further. If you’re the prosecutor for a jurisdiction where a journalist works, and you make any statement about the legality of the journalists works, you better be substantially likely to secure a conviction, otherwise you should mind your business.
Yes. It is a weird document. Journalists are unfair to prosecutors and police chiefs all the time. Shut up and do the job.
(I have feelings here because we're in a mini-spat between our PD and our terrible local newspaper, which is upset that our chief won't give them an interview after the local police union gave her a no-confidence vote; where I live, that vote is, reasonably, viewed as a sign she's doing the job well. But either way: she's not going to give an interview on this!)
> The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian.
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
That is the 81 page PDF referred to multiple times in the article and is titled "Responsive Records Lim - Balko correspondence_Redacted". I don't see "HIPAA" appear in it anywhere. Toward the end of that document on page 69 is a screenshot of a text that includes a Word attachment titled "Dion Lim Misrepresentati...". After that are screenshots that are excerpts of the gdrive document that you linked, but the HIPAA accusation is not in any of those screenshotted excerpts.
So how did tptacek even come across the HIPAA accusation, and how did you find the document that you linked that contains it?
Edit: ah, it's linked from this sentence "But in the interest of transparency, I’m posting it as well. You can read it here." where "here"[^1] links to the gdrive document.
Sheesh.
[^1]: Pet peeve - you've failed HTML 101 if you use "here" as a link. A few sentences earlier in that paragraph is the text that should've been the link text: 'the “Dion Lim Misrepresentations” document that Tan mentions in his post'.
That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking. I really think you have to kind of slant your head and squint to come away with the impression that that section isn't about Lim, but rather the unnamed medical office.
A. That's how I read it too. B. You can be criminally liable for HIPAA violations, if you induce someone covered by them to violate them. See for example https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/media/1254226/dl (indictment of KEITH RITSON)
"COUNT 2
(Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose
Individually Identifiable Health Information)
19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are
hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein.
20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information:
a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
(“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful
disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient
confidentiality.
b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of
Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’
medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health
information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law
and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical
doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by
the law and privacy regulations.
c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to
Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health
care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the
District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant
KEITH RITSON
did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to
commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without
authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health
information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose
individually identifiable health information and protected health information
maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United
States Code, Section 1320d-6."
Is there a fact pattern where Lim could have bank-shot criminal liability despite not herself being a covered entity? Probably? She could have misrepresented who she was and obtained the records through fraud, for instance. Again, my thing here is, if you're going to put those kinds of accusations on the table, and you're a district attorney, you'd better come correct. The facts presented in the document the DA's office shared are not sufficient to allege wrongdoing by Lim.
If you induce someone to violate HIPAA who is covered by it (like say a nurse at a hospital), you can be criminally liable. There is no carve-out for journalists. BOTH the person who gave the record and the person who induced them to give it could be liable (not in the same way, possibly). In any case, you seemed to think there was a bright line rule of some sort, that "At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters)." when in fact you can be criminally liable for inducement/conspiracy etc if you induce someone who is covered to give you those records, under https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1320d-6
Here is another similar case of a non-medical person violating HIPAA.
No, I don't think I will. Reporters covering public policy matters and obtaining records from covered entities have First Amendment protection arguments that a conspiracy among insiders and external mules to sell health information don't have. But none of this is my point. I'm not arguing that it would be impossible for Boudin's office to allege wrongdoing. I'm arguing that they failed to do so. Like, a really basic thing: where'd she get the X-Rays from? The allegation doesn't say.
I'm commenting on the specific thing Boudin's office (inexplicably) wrote about this particular reporter. I'm not making a grand statement about HIPAA.
(I don't know anything about the reporter other than that they worked for ABC7 in SFBA and not like GatewayPundit).
It would depend on exactly how the records were obtained. If hypothetically she paid a nurse $100 for it (and had done so many times in the past), that could be criminally liable. In practice, no-one would prosecute over a single x-ray. But when a reporter gets legally protected medical information "somehow", an insinuation that a legal violation took place at some point to effect that is not unreasonable.
It's strange to find myself so clearly on the side of tctapek here but yes it is super unreasonable for a district attorneys office to accuse reporters of things without a solid set of facts supporting it. There should be absolutely no abuse of the power of the office and of every official, the lawyers should be most likely to get this right.
A functioning justice system MATTERS and being trustworthy is one of the core requirements for a functioning justice system.
I somewhat agree that the whole document is sloppy, but I also think this conversation overemphasizes what is wrong with it. It is not as if the document simply accuses the journalist and leaves it there; it actually elaborates on what it means by “violated HIPAA” in that context (and please don’t make me start comparing it with current administration behavior).
There is also a broader question of how to properly handle what are, quite honestly, likely bad-faith actors — the journalist in this case. Should the office simply ignore the smearing campaign and the lies? Maybe. But this is already an issue even before accounting for the significant amount of money — pushed by a very small number of people — being spent against the attorney’s office.
As i said, neither of us is lawyers. Neither of us are experts in what a DA's office has written, and what that writing should be interpreted as under the law. Perhaps a more charitable reading is what is called for, given we're not experts in the domain.
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
The question you're raising isn't a legal one, at least as I understand it. I read you to be saying "the reasonable take on this document is that they are saying SOMEONE violated HIPAA, but not Lim".
> † btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking.
you seem to be inferring that the DA has made an allegation of unlawful acts, and that there could be consequences for that allegation. that sort of thing often entails "legal stuff". courts and judges stuff. hence, my spiel on "we are not lawyers".
i believe you stated an *uncharitable* take on the bullet points in the document. my point is that there is another reading. one where the benefit of the doubt is given to the relative experts in law. a sibling in the thread seems to agree that *a* violation occurred, not directly implicating Lim, which implies that they may have read it a similar way to my *charitable* take.
Violating HIPAA rights and “violating HIPAA” aren’t the same thing. The rights granted by HIPAA are universal, everybody’s got them and anybody can violate them, it’s just that healthcare professionals are bound to not do that. You could violate my HIPAA “rights” all day and not get in trouble, because the law around protecting those rights does not apply to you. I could still write in a memo that the associated behavior is a dick move or a troubling issue with your character and ethics though.
Anyway, possibly poorly-worded title aside, it is made clear that Lim was receiving information from someone that clearly was violating HIPAA laws.
Here is the text:
Dion Lim Violates HIPAA Rights of a Victim of Violence & Invades Her Privacy
• Dion Lim released an x-ray of the victim of a stabbing—without the victim’s permission, in a clear violation of the victim’s HIPAA and privacy rights.
o She claimed online that she had her grandson’s permission, but there is no indication he was authorized to grant consent on her behalf—and he was not the one to provide the photo, which she made clear in a tweet explaining she showed the x-ray to him, “and explained the decision to share it” as part of pressure to ensure the case was prosecuted.
▪ This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
• In connection with that same case, Ms. Lim posted video of the brutal stabbing.
o Despite the DA’s Office’s press release referencing the victim’s request for privacy (which was reiterated at the May 7, 2021 press conference in which Ms. Lim was present), she has not taken down this post.
It says that the victim’s HIPAA rights were violated in the process of that information being released, which appears to be objectively true. The second reference goes further to clarify:
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical
records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
The only way to read that sentence as an accusation of Lim violating HIPAA would be to read it and conclude that she was both “an unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA” and also the reporter that the unauthorized source shared the information with (in violation of HIPAA, the law)
Calling the whole document “Trumpian” is kind of extreme when the criticism is “There’s an ambiguous phrase in it and I will not be addressing the clarifying language a couple sentences away from it” or “I think this lawyer meant ‘statutes’ when he wrote ‘rights’ which I imagine makes him wrong”
There's a whole subthread that already covered this ground. The passage obviously implicates Lim --- the subject of the entire document --- a reporter, in lawbreaking, without alleging facts sufficient to establish that liability, and was written by the DA's office. When Trump's DOJ does this sort of thing, we all (rightly) freak the fuck out.
DOJ puts an accusation with clarifying text in semi private document? They don’t do this, they do much worse things (and get, rightly, much worse response).
This document isn’t great, but comparing it to Trump administration actions isn’t great either. As well as focusing on it rather than on a substance of the article in question (which is, about Garry Tan accusations in a first place).
Thank you for your comment though it made me go back and reread the linked text more critically.
> I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies
Political achievement via moral/ethical/legal means does not work. We expect a single person with extremely limited power to assume a relatively minor position in government, then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong? It's nearly impossible. Progressives need to return to the good old days of corruption and coercion if they want to get anything done.
> then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong?
No, we expect them to do like one thing right without bungling the basics. The track record of the pre-pandemic era wave of progressive prosecutors was some combination of doing absolutely jack shit in the first category and/or being asked for table stakes on the latter and swallowing their chips.
In the about page, this author states that they produce "original reporting and commentary on the criminal justice system and civil liberties." I really think it is a mistake to blur that line. These days it feels like you can pretty reliably predict what narrative a journalist will present on any given story based on their individual poltics.
How can you reasonably expect to be viewed as an objective reporter of facts if you also are acting as a commentator trying to shape public opinion?
I used to think that it was possible to “objectively report facts” but the reality is we all have biases. Everyone needs to decide for themselves what is worth mentioning. So even if you state only 100% true facts, you can present a skewed lens on reality. This is how most propaganda works: not by spreading false facts but by selectively spreading true ones.
I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.
I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".
>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
That reply is utterly baffling. We can set aside Bezos and Musk, but the exploitative actions of Zuckerberg and especially Gates are extremely well documented.
I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.
> When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting
He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity. Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet which would indirectly force the decision to leave Amazon onto their drivers. A depreciating stock price means their corporate RSU grants look less attractive, which I speculate would make working at Amazon less attractive, leading to worse talent and declining company performance. If a decline was to happen in this way there would probably be more demands on drivers, potentially decreasing demand for the job as the whole, and leaving the drivers who stay behind in worse conditions.
> He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity.
A distinction without a difference.
> Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…
> One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
Yes, “Another” would. Anyone who has existed in the world could tell you that. “Just get another job” is so incredibly tone deaf. It’s up there with “just sue your employer if they are stealing from you/harassing you/etc”.
> I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet
Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
> It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…
Yes, especially since it would be considered a business minutiae in the grand scheme of things.
> Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
I'm curious as to what you think would happen? If schedules were loosened and drivers were paid more, what do you think would be the long-term impact? Tell me how the way you would change things would improve the world.
To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.
To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If you're in control of a company, and that company is an "orphan crushing machine", it's your responsibility because ultimately someone must be responsible. You could argue the board shares responsibility, and certainly every high level manager endorses it.
You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]
How much money do you think causes it? Additionally, perhaps it's the other way around. Being someone who's predisposed to those tendencies is better at gaining capital. I think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC. Him having a substantial amount of wealth didn't turn him evil, so perhaps either he didn't hit that threshold or got lucky enough to not need the unhealthy and controlling tendencies to make it big
>think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC
You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.
Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.
Has US Christianity always been like this or has it changed? It all feels very manipulative to me now and the morals / virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside.
it isn't, not in his sense anyway. The moderate, central and northern European mainline Protestantism that fostered democracy, education, an egalitarian social contract and temperance you if at all find now only in small pockets.
It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.
You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.
This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.
Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.
It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.
You are actually kinda right. I do think that if you turn as a "really rich" person, you just don't know about anything to trust at a certain point.
Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.
But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.
In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.
Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.
All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.
just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
I read this and had a similar question of why do they all go so far down the right wing rabbit hole? Just noticed that one of the amplifiers was such which got me thinking. It seems like all these extremely wealthy people pick up such destructive and twisted worldviews that all somehow feed on this weird energy of stupidity. I’m just so baffled by it cuz they are surely smart people but so blinded. Sometimes I think it must be a marketing stunt but nope.
I'm always a bit sad that silicon valley just doesn't get free speech. Or rather, their view of free speech is "I can say what I want". The damning part for Tan here isn't the defence that Balko makes of their work. It's this
>The DA’s office, which should have been prosecuting the people attacking Asian Americans, was orchestrating a media hit on the journalist covering those attacks.
A reporter being in contact with the prosecutors office and getting their view is a core part of the reporters job. It would be malpractice for them not to be getting that view on this story. To characterise it as the government "orchestrating a media hit" is just flatly wrong. It's just straight up defaming a journalist for doing their job.
And this is a consistent trend in silicon valley - that reporting they don't like is actually just corruption. This is a fundamentally anti free speech view and it's toxic and you see it all over silicon valley.
Everything makes sense when you see it as an expression of hierarchy. Tan is an anti-liberal. He does not believe everybody should have the same rights. So of course "free speech" means different protections for him and his buddies.
So two different parts of the state use favoured journalists as methods to publicise information that they could not make public directly. When they do this they also get to shape the framing.
It is hilarious that Garry Tan is still talking about Chesa Boudin. I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?
> I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?
I mean, kind of? You can definitely point at certain quantified types of crime falling since Boudin left office in 2022: https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s... . (Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.) And Lurie seems to be taking steps in a reasonable direction as well. The Board of Supervisors is still packed with nuts, of course.
This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
> It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
I think it's a little more than just fear of change. Garry Tan knows where his (material) interests lie, and will do and say anything to fight off those who would build a more equal society, even if it means supporting actual fascists like Trump. The ultra-wealthy are very class conscious.
Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.
It’s weirder than that. Even the idea of an apolitical journalism is ahistorical.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
There's abusive intersections of politics and journalism just like there are abusive intersections of all sorts of other things and journalism. The idea of a truly neutral reporter though is a fiction.
Journalism is politics. Choosing to daylight information about government is a political choice, regardless of which information you're daylighting. Often, there is a political party (or multiple political parties) trying to avoid daylighting that information. That's also a political choice.
The existence of the fourth estate is the existence of a political actor in tension with the others.
This article isn't that -- nothing excellent is achieved. It's pure intra-party squabbling between leftist and centrist factions of California Dems. Balko is just trying to score points for his faction.
Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
Maybe I just want to eat what tastes good, and not have to worry about how what I chose on the menu is going to support a politician, political party, businessperson, etc.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
Just because you choose to ignore the externalities of your choices doesn't mean they no longer exist. It just means that you value your personal well being and comfort more than being informed about the results of your actions.
I never said anything about ignoring the externalities. I also never said that I was ignorant to the results of my actions.
It's just not political for me.
I guess I'm not surprised that this cognitive trap about politics has spread - after all, people care more about deploying any tools they can to "win", rather than being correct.
It's a poltical act to eat food that tastes good, in defiance of the activists who think that the food yiu find tasty is immoral and want to make it illegal for you to do so. Something is a poltical act if other people want you not to do it and want to enforce this through law, which you have no control over.
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an argument that you completely made up.
You don't like to be called selfish for not considering how your actions might affect others, but others are supposed to care about how their actions might affect you? Seems like a pretty self centered attitude to have.
Once again, I have no idea what you're responding to, but it's not arguments that people are actually making in this thread.
It creates a much better discussion if you respond to what people write rather than what you may have heard other random people say anytime over the last few years.
You're almost there and then you give up on original thought at the last minute.
>“Care because I think you should!”
Welcome to politics. Not only do I demand that you care because I think you should, but I will smash you with the full force of the law if you don't.
Now, if you decide to do nothing, well, you're getting your ass smashed by the full force of the law and whining like a little bitch saying "I'm not political, why did this happen to me".
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".
And "There are no neutrals in the reality, entropy forbids it".
>Children playing in the park aren't being political
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
What children? What park? The presence of a park pre-supposes a political society that has prioritized parks, the budget to enact those priorities, and the space to do so. Any one of those can spiral into its own political microcosm.
How is that park maintained? Is there a special kids area of the park? Is it "for kids" or is it "The kids area", implying that kids aren't allowed in the rest of the park? Are the children not allowed in the park after a certain time - and who decides that time, and why? Sometimes the park is used for town events, but can get rented out. Who decides that?
Complexity is inherent, from the atoms to the galaxies. Any rejection of that is just plugging your ears, willfully or not.
The children playing in a park aren't being political, and are largely insulated from the politics of playing in a park... but those circumstances are surrounded by all kinds of political process. As another commenter said, the park's existence is probably due to politics; as are the rules the children need to follow, what activities are permitted, the safety and maintenance of park equipment and facilities, curfews, etc. It is also a choice on the part of the parents to let their kids play in a park, and which parks their kids play in, and those choices aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the perspective of the adult should not be to view children in the park as apolitical, but to be cognizant of the processes that influence their children and try to ensure that they work for the children's benefit.
Re. hatred towards progressives and the Boudin recall:
>Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)
There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.
> In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.
This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.
Given how many articles he's published in Reason Magazine over the years, Radley Balko might qualify as "libertarian" or perhaps "civil libertarian" rather than "progressive." Not that the labels ought to matter too much.
(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)
It shouldn't be any big surprise that a guy like Garry Tan is power-hungry and manipulative. He's got his hands in all kinds stuff like influencing elections. https://garrysguide.org/elections
> "Centrist" in America is just "far-right but doesn't talk about it very loudly"
Centrist in America means institutionalist, i.e. gunning for the status quo. That's going to piss off lefist and right-wing fanatics because both want to blow up the status quo. (They tend to be seen as a spoiler for progressives and conservatives. Think: Joe Manchin or Susan Collins.)
Way too broad a brush to paint with. If we want to retain any sort of liberal democracy we need to stop with the rhetoric that "if you're not as far in X direction as I am, you must be on the other side". Its destroying the democratic party.
I'm a staunch democrat, and this is just sad to see. Progressive and centrist should both be able to coexist. We should be able to call out ineffective policies within our own movement without being called far right radicals.
the far right will collaborate with people more left on the political spectrum if it benefits them. Think the molotov-ribbentrop pact. The nazis benefited from stalling any soviet aggression and the soviets got poland before going to war with germany
He's also a non-white immigrant. The amount of brown skinned nutjobs try to cosplay as white so they'll be accepted as "one of the good ones" is too high.
Hey brown or yellow immigrants - the conservatives will gladly accept your vote, but the second you walk away they won't even refer to you by name in conversation, they'll refer you to with every slur in the book. I grew up with some very far-right types who had money...nice to "the help" in person, but soon as earshot is out of range, you hear the n-word like it's as common as the word "the". And just because you're not black, doesn't mean they don't hate you too. I've heard some horrid things said to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc.
Anyone remember the young republicans club at Florida International University scandal? Lots of young male Cuban immigrants (or kids of immigrants) desperate to be seen as white. Problem is, you pull any one of those kids out of Dade county, they'll be called a Mexican and told to go make tacos.
Garry's actions on social media remind me of those kids, albeit someone with a bit more money, and a little less perspective on things.
It's a requirement to reach the levels they have reached. Someone with empathy would get enough money to take care of their family (maybe even for multiple generations) and then be satisfied and focus on reducing the suffering of others instead of running up the score on net worth
I mean, after I racked up a two digit number of milions of dollars I believe I'd find myself thinking "why the fuck do I need more, it's time to go fuck off and do anything else".
Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
> Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.
One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.
... no ... someone with empathy would spend time with their kids and their kids' kids, teaching them how to socialize so that they don't want to hoard wealth and be scared all the time.
> Lim’s book, called Amplified, was published by Third State Books, a company started by Tan’s wife, Stephanie Lim, to provide a voice for Asian-American authors.
How is this even legal? Surely the article means it’s a company focused on stories relating to Asian Americans, regardless of the race of the author.
The person you're replying to is making the argument "Would you object to a book publisher that only signed writers who were white" or "Should a coffee shop be allowed to only hire white barristas". Which is a sound logical argument if you ignore the entire history of racism in the United States.
That’s a common misconception. Nobody serious has ever doubted that the Civil Rights Act creates a colorblind system. Any contrary treatment has always been justified as exceptions. Even Lawrence v. Bakke in 1973 struck down the racial preferences at issue in that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C....
I think people got this misconception that affirmative action was legal because universities practiced it. But the EEOC guidance for example has been consistent since the Carter administration. “Under Title VII, there is no separate legal concept of ‘reverse discrimination.’ Discrimination against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin violates Title VII.”
The only exception was that employers who had practiced segregation could take measures to undo the effects of that in their workplace. That’s what “affirmative action” meant. It was not sanctioned as way to address perceived disparities in society at large.
Title VII doesn’t apply to independent contractors. If you want to argue that authors should count as their publisher’s employees, go sue TSB in some complicit jurisdiction.
Gotcha. That was the gist of my question. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this. I can’t keep the roman numerals straight. It’s interesting there’s not something that applies to contractors. I expect that’s also how OpenTable and whatnot get around these promoting “minority owned businesses.”
Balko was a big proponent of police body cams, as they would clearly reveal massive police abuse and brutality.
Since the bodycam rollout however, we're inundated with videos of justified police actions, over and over again. Proving that most criminals are indeed retarded, unable to follow simple commands and escalate minor stuff into full violance, necessitating the use of force against them.
Balko now of course sees bodycams as propaganda or "copaganda".
Utterly biased "reporting", starting with an agenda and then trying to prove the point by any means possible.
Well, to be fair, Garry's article was clearly 100% AI-generated. So perhaps he didn't even really post it; maybe it was just a rogue agent. Or, y'know, an assistant who posted without his authorization. Or perhaps Ambien was involved. Or, it was an Ambien-addled assistant who misconfigured an agent to post the article. Clearly not Garry's fault.
That’s always true of almost any story. There are many signals that influence a story’s rank: votes, flags, vouches, age, site, software penalties, and moderator intervention (usually to override flags and automatic penalties).
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
User flags can weigh stories down. If you'd prefer a different sort, try https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ("active" is popular, though not my taste really)
The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues
Huh, I went through a similar journey in New York, starting as an advocate of criminal-justice reform and then getting fed up with the incompetence.
And while I wouldn't say ideological inflexibility is ideology per se, one of the contributors to ineffectiveness I saw in New York was a simultaneous inability to tolerate competent people with even slightly-divergent viewpoints (and there were a lot of red lines–I don't know what multidimensional beast could thread them), or, alternatively, an inability to fire or beach clearly-incompetent people because they were part of a priority community. (Read "community" broadly. It might be an identity. It was more often whatever union or local progressive club the person cropped up through.)
Some of the difficulties of criminal-justice reform include: you can't arrest your way out of mental illness. It's easier for society to lock up the mentally ill in with a 1-dollar bond that it is to provide the help that they need. It's probably cheaper to do give them the housing and help, but it's easier to get money for jails and jailers than it is to get money for mental health facilities.
> It's probably cheaper to do give them the housing and help, but it's easier to get money for jails and jailers than it is to get money for mental health facilities.
It’s not really. We are approaching $100k/year in Seattle just to house someone in a tiny home or apartment building as charged to the city/county by local non profits, without any help beyond that (and no guarantee that they wont go out and, for example, shoot a pregnant woman driving a Tesla). Prison/jail is only around $60k/year, in comparison. There must be some corruption going on, but no one in government will even consider it as a possibility.
I agree that this is a major challenge, but (for example) it has basically nothing to do with the carjacking phenomenon. I'm just saying, this stuff is complicated, and anyone with a straightforward solution is wrong.
>but (for example) it has basically nothing to do with the carjacking phenomenon.
Nevermind if this is even a "phenomenon". How about we just pick 2 or 3 issues and actually solve those first? It's very clear that we are at best spreading ourselves thin and at worst being distracted by everything in a malicious attempt to flood the zone. We aren't angry enough at any single issue as a result.
Pick 2-3 main issues, and just spend an entire year tackling those. Easier PR, easier accountability.
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"George Floyd's community is better off with him gone" is absolutely not OK on this site.
Rayiner has interesting beliefs about black people.
What’s interesting is that you take a felon who held a woman at gunpoint while robbing her, and sympathize with him based on his skin color.
I’ve never read a story about “brown” terrorists and felt any connection to the terrorists. Not even based on shared humanity, much less ethnicity. Indeed, I’m sad we got rid of the lady who was mowing them down in Bangladesh.
The world will surely be a better place when everyone you hate is executed without trial I guess.
It’s interesting I said “terrorists” and you translated that to “people I hate.” As if I have some different, unstated motivation. No, I just hate terrorists, obviously.
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Search Dan's comments for "advocating violence".
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How does it seem that Radley is talking past Gary?
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
Can you elaborate on "basic competency issues", either in the case of Boudin's office and/or other high profile reformist prosecutors? Is that just a polite way of calling them dumb, à la what the kids are calling a 'skill issue' nowadays?
I can speak at length to the tenure of Kim Foxx, Chicago's former high-profile progressive prosecutor. I know some of the issues rhyme with Boudin's term, but San Franciscans can tell his story better than I can.
So, first, no, I feel like I'm saying the opposite of "they're dumb". I don't think either Foxx or Boudin are dumb. I think they're both interesting people with interesting and valuable views.
When I say "basic competence issues", I'm talking about the kinds of things that would go wrong if, like, you or I took over the CCSAO and started managing all the prosecutions in Cook County. For instance: having huge numbers of line prosecutors resign, in part because you totally fuck up the promotion ladder, in part because you shift staffing priorities away from line prosecution and towards internal policy positions, and in part because you fail to sell your immediate-term vision for how you're going to manage the agency.
The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency. These prosecutor offices were incredibly strained before people like Boudin and Foxx got there. Which means: there was already an extent to which prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
What's more frustrating is that Foxx was doing this at the same time as Illinois was rolling out SAFE-T, which ended cash bail in Illinois. I am wholeheartedly in favor of SAFE-T, and I think by-default cash bail is an idiotic system that unnecessarily amplifies the societal cost of law enforcement. But SAFE-T was ultra-controversial in Chicagoland, and Foxx went through all this stuff while people were freaking out daily about catch-and-release. It didn't help that all of this coincided with a huge regional increase in carjackings, the second most important urban index crime after murder. It further didn't help that she was accused of refusing to prosecute juvenile carjackers, and that when confronted by reporters about that, she didn't have a clear denial.
I hope this reads as I intend it to, which is: not ideological, just an assessment about whether someone is prepared to step in and run the office, most of which is boring and just needs to be done correctly.
(I think you can probably look at Krasner as an example of a prosecutor who has avoided these traps.)
We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
To some degree there simply isn't any plan you can have beyond that in the short term things will suck and hopefully the long term benefits will be worth it. If the existing incumbents are sufficiently ideologically opposed to your goals that they'll refuse to work rather than let you even inch towards them, there's not much you can do beyond try to replace them with people who don't have the relevant experience but are willing to work with you.
"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.
So it's not enough to say that the progressive ideology is a bad plan in that environment? You said it yourself, there isn't any plan. What happens in complicated high risk situations when there is no plan? You end up with bad results, which is a result of the failed ideology.
Prosecutors have no agency over police funding.
I mean, you have basically no control over law enforcement if they decide to arbitrarily slow down arrests or protest your leadership. This has been one of the more consistent issues in American politics and you can see it when the police union doesn't get their way they have a huge tantrum and make things worse for everyone involved.
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.
The flip side I've heard is that LE doesn't arbitrarily slow down arrests due to a difference in ideology. It seems more simple than that. Who wants to go through the effort of making arrests if the DA is letting them free. The LEO will see them commit the same event the next day. I don't think anyone would want that in their day to day job, much less law & order.
It's like writing a PR/MR every day [by hand] and having it declined every day, eventually you stop.
Maybe so, but the difference is that my job is my job; if I don't do my job I get fired. If the police don't do their job they get rewarded with more funding because people see the effect and not the cause.
You could make the argument that it discourages them from making the effort, but they're still getting paid and supported by my tax dollars and so should do their damn job.
-- When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! God so many people don't "get" this. Engineering leaders that come in and create and exodus of senior leaders, same thing. I started calling it organizational momentum. The speed at which you get things done, goes up as the organization gets to understand itself. A bunch of key people leave and BAM momentum goes to zero and suddenly all the milestones you are missing are putting all the wrong pressure on the org to get moving again.
> prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
> When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
So, circumstances were making prosecutorial decisions, and the new DA efforts to make fundamental changes did not fix those circumstances, and therefore all changes they made were considered to cause that state.
The office wasn't running. It is not the fault of the new guy that it keeps not running.
If you assume office and things get worse, that is in fact on you! I'm not saying Foxx's predecessor was good; Foxx's predecessor was Anita Alvarez, who was herself a trainwreck in the opposite direction.
A problem I see all the time in these kinds of public policy debates is that people have ideological rooting interests. That isn't going to get you anywhere in a debate about a major metro prosecutor's office. You can't project out "this person was progressive therefore they were good" and you can't do "this person is a law-and-order tough-on-crime prosecutor so they're good" either. It's a very difficult job. Notably: I think you'd have a hard time finding credible people who believe Foxx did a good job in her office.
A problem I see all the time is that you are responding to a hell of a lot that I didn’t say.
The office was running. Not in a way the voters wanted but they were competent in accomplishing their goals. Then the new DA was elected and tons of people left and now the office isn’t running.
That is not my understanding.
Yeah people think government is like, you elect people and they get a turn at the wheel. But all the people you could elect aren't equally experienced or competent drivers, and the car doesn't suit them all equally (this is simple systems theory, either your government is highly tailored towards--say--centrists running it and thus is very efficient, or anyone on any part of the political spectrum could run it but it's significantly less efficient).
Or like, in your example (to be clear I defer to you entirely on the facts), not only would Foxx have to be a competent State's Attorney, she'd have to be competent at changing a system that's not ideal for her into one that is, e.g. by persuading existing staff, hiring new staff, etc.
This is by no means impossible--it's called leadership. My hot take, more or less, is that if you get someone into office who shares your values but can't make the office execute those values, not only will you fail but you'll tarnish your political movement for... a good long time, so competence is actually more important than values alignment.
My even hotter take is that people used to know this. When people from minority groups or political persuasions got power (women, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic/religious minorities, ideological/philosophical minorities, etc) they knew they were modeling for everyone in their group. Is it fair? No. Is it reality. Super yes! Is whining about unfairness good politics and/or attractive at all? Super no!
> the second most important urban index crime after murder
Can you comment on why this is? Is it because it's common? Or so visibly impactful?
Carjacking is a subset of motor vehicle theft, which is an index crime, but carjacking commands more public attention than anything except for murder; this is a vibes-based assertion but I feel like I could back it up easily.
Importantly: the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault). She was in an incredibly tough position --- she also had to deal with Chicagoland police departments that have not covered themselves in glory over the last 20 years. But she didn't rise to the challenge.
How is carjacking Kia’s fault? Kia had a problem with immobilizer anti-theft devices not being installed plus a well documented trivial way to “Hotwire” certain models. This would simply be car theft. It was a well documented (via social media) technique that lowered the skill level needed to steal a car to basically the ability to sit through a 30s TikTok.
Is it that it’s a “gateway crime” to full on carjacking? You get away with a few joy rides in a Kia and get bold enough to do an armed carjacking of someone’s SUV while they load their kids up in the alley garage?
Carjacking is up there with murder for “scary” urban crime because it’s violent and anyone can imagine being a victim. Having your car stolen off the street overnight doesn’t really elicit the same visceral response.
Add in the CPDs general “no chase” policy (mostly a good thing for harm reduction) plus a bunch of largely juveniles posting on social media the dangerous driving stunts they were pulling on social media to really amp up the fear and outrage. Even if it were mostly for show, no prosecutor is going to survive an election if they come across as soft on that style of crime.
Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off. Carjackers (at least in Chicagoland) don't generally post up in parking lots waiting for victims; they're highly mobile.
(I have two carjackings on camera from behind my old house, where we had a Nest camera. One thing I learned from that: anybody who thinks carrying a firearm is a realistic defense against a carjacking is in fantasyland. You don't get even a split second to react; the encounter begins with a gun in your face.)
No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area. Every once in awhile where I live we get trustee candidates promising to bring chases back, and I have to wonder what they're smoking.
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off
Oh, I misunderstood the term. I thought you meant randos who steal cars.
This strikes me as the sort of violent crime that should be aggressively followed and punished.
> No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area
Drones?
To avoid double-posting, replying here.
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off
Ah yeah, I forgot about this part. Makes sense. I also happen to have two (well, 1.5 - only caught the drive-away for one of them as the actual carjacking happened down the block) carjackings on my home cameras in the immediate post-COVID era. It happened in a similar manner here in one of the "very safe" neighborhoods of Chicago with burner cars. One of the burners was another stolen Mercedes - so I guess it's likely turtles all the way down until a KIA.
> Drones?
We have giant human-operated ones here in Chicago (helicopters) with at least one in the air seemingly all the time (according to my desktop ADS-B display). These coupled with the various traffic cameras spread all around seem to do a fairly effective job of tracking a stolen car if the police care enough to respond in time. Of course it's limited in the number of "chases" and available manpower.
Not sure why drones haven't made more of an entrance to this space. I think partly police union/labor issues, and partly the size of a drone needed to be useful enough (station keeping and response time) for the task would tend to look at lot like military surveillance drones. I vaguely remember some noise about about CPD trialing something like this, or it could have simply been "partnering" with Federal agencies during various recent protest activity. These are MQ-9 Reapers and similar drones in the class and they have been deployed over the city in recent memory.
I'm not sure giving CPD that capability is a great idea overall. If they end up having one or two drones in the sky 24x7 as a matter of course, surveillance concerns and abuse opportunities multiply. At least with the helicopters there is a large manpower and financial cost involved, and it's usually very obvious when one is deployed in your area due to noise.
I still fail to see how carjacking rates are Kia's fault. I mean, Did carjackings increase everywhere relative to the % of kia's on the road in every area (urban and rural)?
Carjacking increased a lot in Chicago, seriously a huge amount, when TikTok started showing people how to steal Kia’s. It really wasn’t an issue at all until then
> the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault)
I leave my keys in my car and don’t lock my front door. That isn’t because of the local prosecutor. But it’s not to their demerit. If my car were stolen, I’d still expect them to at least do some work.
I think a lot of the cars actually get recovered? It's a pretty fucked up situation; 16-22-year-olds seem pretty clearly to be doing it for sport.
> 16-22-year-olds seem pretty clearly to be doing it for sport
If they’re getting away with it, with YouTube views to boot, it is* sport.
I think it might be because you live in an area that has created zoning laws that make it impossible for non rich people to sleep anywhere within an hour and a half of you. You live in Jackson hole right?
Carjacking is when somebody opens your door at a stoplight, points a gun at you, and tells you to get out of the car. Are you instead referring to vehicle theft in general? How is this Kia's fault?
Answered elsewhere on the thread.
O'Neill Burke is no more competent than Kim Foxx, and is a member of an Illinois crime family, but she has the support of the carceral state including the FOP. The reality is that Foxx's tenure coincided with (and partially caused) an effective strike/work stoppage by the police in Chicago.
How do you as an elected official change the culture of a rotten institution, that the public wants reformed but is engaged in vital public service who can simply stop doing the work if you piss them off?
I don't know. I feel like so many of our institutions are rotten these days and attempt at reform are sabotaged and/or cause backlashes.
Make small, incremental changes in the correct direction that will face minimal internal resistance?
A lot of people want everything, immediately, and seem to believe maximalist approaches are no more politically dangerous than more incrementalist ones. They're wrong: prioritization is a thing, and pragmatism and realism about what you can accomplish isn't a sign of selling out but of wanting to be an effective agent of change.
And once you succeed at the first tranche of easier wins, you've built up the trust, skills, and political capital to take on the second tranche. Rinse and repeat.
That works only with honest opponents and that is not situation the world is in.
Successfull minimalist beneficient reforms will be maligned as much as possible, to prevent subsequent beneficient reforms. Simple as that.
If you're suggesting she's related to Ed Burke, no, she isn't. But I'm also not here to argue that EOB is doing a great job. I'm telling you why Foxx is widely viewed as a failure, including by reformists.
Lots of organizations are riven with corruption (exhibit A: every fire department). Doesn't mean you can fuck them up, at least not if you want to matter in public policy for long. This is a difference between message boards and reality.
I enjoyed this long post about how changing the culture in a DA’s office is bad and should not be attempted
Because that's definitely what I said.
Well, yeah
>The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency.
Your whole point is (aside from Chicago and San Francisco being interchangeable to the extent that Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin are functionally the same person) “if you don’t keep your ideological detractors happy and employed then you’re doing a bad job.” That’s just another way of saying that culture change isn’t feasible
No he's saying that realistically it's a challenge you have to accept if your success depends on culture change.
Where did he write about success?
It read to me like a post mortem on why she failed [opposite of success]. She failed because she was bad at changing the culture which is a core competency of leadership. It doesn't really matter what the people think one way or another, the job of a leader is to lead, "win hearts and minds"
This seems pretty self evident.
The main HIPAA claim seems to be that the victim didn’t provide (or consent to the publication of) that X-ray, and neither did their only family member known to possess it. I don’t know who released it, but if it was someone in the medical office, that is a genuine HIPAA violation.
It could be a violation at the medical office, but Lim isn't a covered entity, and the document accuses her directly.
HIPAA only covers entities that are legally required to follow it. Covered entities and business associates. It doesn’t apply to anyone else.
> I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship
Strongly inclined to hire such a prosecutor. Has this model been successfully deployed in any large U.S. cities? My only experience is watching it struggle in a medium one.
On your last point: given the ethical responsibility of a prosecutor, I’d go one step further. If you’re the prosecutor for a jurisdiction where a journalist works, and you make any statement about the legality of the journalists works, you better be substantially likely to secure a conviction, otherwise you should mind your business.
Yes. It is a weird document. Journalists are unfair to prosecutors and police chiefs all the time. Shut up and do the job.
(I have feelings here because we're in a mini-spat between our PD and our terrible local newspaper, which is upset that our chief won't give them an interview after the local police union gave her a no-confidence vote; where I live, that vote is, reasonably, viewed as a sign she's doing the job well. But either way: she's not going to give an interview on this!)
> The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian.
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
Direct gdrive link for those who don't want to go back and scroll through the article again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZKYxe0oGq7HeC5Kj2lxf-X55r4...
edit:
> At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...
> Direct gdrive link
I'm confused where this came from. I cannot find this link in the original article as submitted:
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-jo...
The most I can find is "But I found another place where someone has posted all 81 pages. It’s here. Feel free to look them over."
Where "here" links to:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21011168-responsive-...
That is the 81 page PDF referred to multiple times in the article and is titled "Responsive Records Lim - Balko correspondence_Redacted". I don't see "HIPAA" appear in it anywhere. Toward the end of that document on page 69 is a screenshot of a text that includes a Word attachment titled "Dion Lim Misrepresentati...". After that are screenshots that are excerpts of the gdrive document that you linked, but the HIPAA accusation is not in any of those screenshotted excerpts.
So how did tptacek even come across the HIPAA accusation, and how did you find the document that you linked that contains it?
Edit: ah, it's linked from this sentence "But in the interest of transparency, I’m posting it as well. You can read it here." where "here"[^1] links to the gdrive document.
Sheesh.
[^1]: Pet peeve - you've failed HTML 101 if you use "here" as a link. A few sentences earlier in that paragraph is the text that should've been the link text: 'the “Dion Lim Misrepresentations” document that Tan mentions in his post'.
That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking. I really think you have to kind of slant your head and squint to come away with the impression that that section isn't about Lim, but rather the unnamed medical office.
A. That's how I read it too. B. You can be criminally liable for HIPAA violations, if you induce someone covered by them to violate them. See for example https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/media/1254226/dl (indictment of KEITH RITSON)
"COUNT 2 (Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose Individually Identifiable Health Information) 19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein. 20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information: a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient confidentiality. b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’ medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by the law and privacy regulations. c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant KEITH RITSON did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose individually identifiable health information and protected health information maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United States Code, Section 1320d-6."
Is there a fact pattern where Lim could have bank-shot criminal liability despite not herself being a covered entity? Probably? She could have misrepresented who she was and obtained the records through fraud, for instance. Again, my thing here is, if you're going to put those kinds of accusations on the table, and you're a district attorney, you'd better come correct. The facts presented in the document the DA's office shared are not sufficient to allege wrongdoing by Lim.
If you induce someone to violate HIPAA who is covered by it (like say a nurse at a hospital), you can be criminally liable. There is no carve-out for journalists. BOTH the person who gave the record and the person who induced them to give it could be liable (not in the same way, possibly). In any case, you seemed to think there was a bright line rule of some sort, that "At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters)." when in fact you can be criminally liable for inducement/conspiracy etc if you induce someone who is covered to give you those records, under https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1320d-6
Here is another similar case of a non-medical person violating HIPAA.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/memphis-man-sentenced-c...
Take the L :-)
No, I don't think I will. Reporters covering public policy matters and obtaining records from covered entities have First Amendment protection arguments that a conspiracy among insiders and external mules to sell health information don't have. But none of this is my point. I'm not arguing that it would be impossible for Boudin's office to allege wrongdoing. I'm arguing that they failed to do so. Like, a really basic thing: where'd she get the X-Rays from? The allegation doesn't say.
I'm commenting on the specific thing Boudin's office (inexplicably) wrote about this particular reporter. I'm not making a grand statement about HIPAA.
(I don't know anything about the reporter other than that they worked for ABC7 in SFBA and not like GatewayPundit).
It would depend on exactly how the records were obtained. If hypothetically she paid a nurse $100 for it (and had done so many times in the past), that could be criminally liable. In practice, no-one would prosecute over a single x-ray. But when a reporter gets legally protected medical information "somehow", an insinuation that a legal violation took place at some point to effect that is not unreasonable.
It's strange to find myself so clearly on the side of tctapek here but yes it is super unreasonable for a district attorneys office to accuse reporters of things without a solid set of facts supporting it. There should be absolutely no abuse of the power of the office and of every official, the lawyers should be most likely to get this right.
A functioning justice system MATTERS and being trustworthy is one of the core requirements for a functioning justice system.
I somewhat agree that the whole document is sloppy, but I also think this conversation overemphasizes what is wrong with it. It is not as if the document simply accuses the journalist and leaves it there; it actually elaborates on what it means by “violated HIPAA” in that context (and please don’t make me start comparing it with current administration behavior).
There is also a broader question of how to properly handle what are, quite honestly, likely bad-faith actors — the journalist in this case. Should the office simply ignore the smearing campaign and the lies? Maybe. But this is already an issue even before accounting for the significant amount of money — pushed by a very small number of people — being spent against the attorney’s office.
Yes it is. And when it's a prosecutor saying that, doubly so.
As i said, neither of us is lawyers. Neither of us are experts in what a DA's office has written, and what that writing should be interpreted as under the law. Perhaps a more charitable reading is what is called for, given we're not experts in the domain.
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
The question you're raising isn't a legal one, at least as I understand it. I read you to be saying "the reasonable take on this document is that they are saying SOMEONE violated HIPAA, but not Lim".
That's a question about messaging, not the law.
i didn't raise the legal point.
> † btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking.
you seem to be inferring that the DA has made an allegation of unlawful acts, and that there could be consequences for that allegation. that sort of thing often entails "legal stuff". courts and judges stuff. hence, my spiel on "we are not lawyers".
i believe you stated an *uncharitable* take on the bullet points in the document. my point is that there is another reading. one where the benefit of the doubt is given to the relative experts in law. a sibling in the thread seems to agree that *a* violation occurred, not directly implicating Lim, which implies that they may have read it a similar way to my *charitable* take.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184449
Violating HIPAA rights and “violating HIPAA” aren’t the same thing. The rights granted by HIPAA are universal, everybody’s got them and anybody can violate them, it’s just that healthcare professionals are bound to not do that. You could violate my HIPAA “rights” all day and not get in trouble, because the law around protecting those rights does not apply to you. I could still write in a memo that the associated behavior is a dick move or a troubling issue with your character and ethics though.
Anyway, possibly poorly-worded title aside, it is made clear that Lim was receiving information from someone that clearly was violating HIPAA laws.
Here is the text:
It says that the victim’s HIPAA rights were violated in the process of that information being released, which appears to be objectively true. The second reference goes further to clarify:> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
The only way to read that sentence as an accusation of Lim violating HIPAA would be to read it and conclude that she was both “an unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA” and also the reporter that the unauthorized source shared the information with (in violation of HIPAA, the law)
Calling the whole document “Trumpian” is kind of extreme when the criticism is “There’s an ambiguous phrase in it and I will not be addressing the clarifying language a couple sentences away from it” or “I think this lawyer meant ‘statutes’ when he wrote ‘rights’ which I imagine makes him wrong”
There's a whole subthread that already covered this ground. The passage obviously implicates Lim --- the subject of the entire document --- a reporter, in lawbreaking, without alleging facts sufficient to establish that liability, and was written by the DA's office. When Trump's DOJ does this sort of thing, we all (rightly) freak the fuck out.
DOJ puts an accusation with clarifying text in semi private document? They don’t do this, they do much worse things (and get, rightly, much worse response).
This document isn’t great, but comparing it to Trump administration actions isn’t great either. As well as focusing on it rather than on a substance of the article in question (which is, about Garry Tan accusations in a first place).
Thank you for your comment though it made me go back and reread the linked text more critically.
> I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies
Political achievement via moral/ethical/legal means does not work. We expect a single person with extremely limited power to assume a relatively minor position in government, then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong? It's nearly impossible. Progressives need to return to the good old days of corruption and coercion if they want to get anything done.
> then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong?
No, we expect them to do like one thing right without bungling the basics. The track record of the pre-pandemic era wave of progressive prosecutors was some combination of doing absolutely jack shit in the first category and/or being asked for table stakes on the latter and swallowing their chips.
In the about page, this author states that they produce "original reporting and commentary on the criminal justice system and civil liberties." I really think it is a mistake to blur that line. These days it feels like you can pretty reliably predict what narrative a journalist will present on any given story based on their individual poltics.
How can you reasonably expect to be viewed as an objective reporter of facts if you also are acting as a commentator trying to shape public opinion?
I used to think that it was possible to “objectively report facts” but the reality is we all have biases. Everyone needs to decide for themselves what is worth mentioning. So even if you state only 100% true facts, you can present a skewed lens on reality. This is how most propaganda works: not by spreading false facts but by selectively spreading true ones.
It's really not realistic to expect people to have deep knowledge of a topic and also have no opinions on it.
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I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.
I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".
>> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
If you ever meet these people you're bound to have a "don't meet your heroes" moment.
All of these people have also significantly contributed to societal collapse. You can’t look at a stock going up $100 but ignore the drop of $92.
That reply is utterly baffling. We can set aside Bezos and Musk, but the exploitative actions of Zuckerberg and especially Gates are extremely well documented.
The claim was that they refuse to help others in any significant way. Clearly nonsense for Gates at least.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...
I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.
> When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting
He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity. Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet which would indirectly force the decision to leave Amazon onto their drivers. A depreciating stock price means their corporate RSU grants look less attractive, which I speculate would make working at Amazon less attractive, leading to worse talent and declining company performance. If a decline was to happen in this way there would probably be more demands on drivers, potentially decreasing demand for the job as the whole, and leaving the drivers who stay behind in worse conditions.
This is an insane comment/prediction.
> He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity.
A distinction without a difference.
> Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…
> One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
Yes, “Another” would. Anyone who has existed in the world could tell you that. “Just get another job” is so incredibly tone deaf. It’s up there with “just sue your employer if they are stealing from you/harassing you/etc”.
> I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet
Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
> It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…
Yes, especially since it would be considered a business minutiae in the grand scheme of things.
> Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
I'm curious as to what you think would happen? If schedules were loosened and drivers were paid more, what do you think would be the long-term impact? Tell me how the way you would change things would improve the world.
Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s
To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.
He took a course on how to use your laugh as a domination tactic.
To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If you're in control of a company, and that company is an "orphan crushing machine", it's your responsibility because ultimately someone must be responsible. You could argue the board shares responsibility, and certainly every high level manager endorses it.
You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18916406
How much money do you think causes it? Additionally, perhaps it's the other way around. Being someone who's predisposed to those tendencies is better at gaining capital. I think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC. Him having a substantial amount of wealth didn't turn him evil, so perhaps either he didn't hit that threshold or got lucky enough to not need the unhealthy and controlling tendencies to make it big
>think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC
You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.
Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.
if the US of all places isn't a culturally christian environment I don't know what is
Has US Christianity always been like this or has it changed? It all feels very manipulative to me now and the morals / virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside.
It started episcopalian (more liberal anglicanism). The evangelical movement in the US really didn't start to so visibly change things until reagan
it isn't, not in his sense anyway. The moderate, central and northern European mainline Protestantism that fostered democracy, education, an egalitarian social contract and temperance you if at all find now only in small pockets.
It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.
You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.
This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.
We used to say the pathologies were the ones who made it to a billion! Times change. :)
Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.
This.
Directors of small companies are the same, they're just not wealthy enough that they could do any harm.
It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.
You are actually kinda right. I do think that if you turn as a "really rich" person, you just don't know about anything to trust at a certain point.
Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.
But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.
In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.
Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.
All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.
just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.
Or like... getting money is a big filter and any normal person who hits it stops working and disappears from the corporate world.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
I read this and had a similar question of why do they all go so far down the right wing rabbit hole? Just noticed that one of the amplifiers was such which got me thinking. It seems like all these extremely wealthy people pick up such destructive and twisted worldviews that all somehow feed on this weird energy of stupidity. I’m just so baffled by it cuz they are surely smart people but so blinded. Sometimes I think it must be a marketing stunt but nope.
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I'm always a bit sad that silicon valley just doesn't get free speech. Or rather, their view of free speech is "I can say what I want". The damning part for Tan here isn't the defence that Balko makes of their work. It's this
>The DA’s office, which should have been prosecuting the people attacking Asian Americans, was orchestrating a media hit on the journalist covering those attacks.
A reporter being in contact with the prosecutors office and getting their view is a core part of the reporters job. It would be malpractice for them not to be getting that view on this story. To characterise it as the government "orchestrating a media hit" is just flatly wrong. It's just straight up defaming a journalist for doing their job.
And this is a consistent trend in silicon valley - that reporting they don't like is actually just corruption. This is a fundamentally anti free speech view and it's toxic and you see it all over silicon valley.
Everything makes sense when you see it as an expression of hierarchy. Tan is an anti-liberal. He does not believe everybody should have the same rights. So of course "free speech" means different protections for him and his buddies.
So two different parts of the state use favoured journalists as methods to publicise information that they could not make public directly. When they do this they also get to shape the framing.
What a rather unpleasant business.
It is hilarious that Garry Tan is still talking about Chesa Boudin. I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?
> I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?
I mean, kind of? You can definitely point at certain quantified types of crime falling since Boudin left office in 2022: https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s... . (Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.) And Lurie seems to be taking steps in a reasonable direction as well. The Board of Supervisors is still packed with nuts, of course.
> Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.
Or part of a nationwide trend that couldn’t possibly be caused by Boudin or Tan
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-re...
Sure, sure. The important part is it isn't falsifiable.
An acknowledgement, let alone an apology is highly unlikely.
This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
> It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
I think it's a little more than just fear of change. Garry Tan knows where his (material) interests lie, and will do and say anything to fight off those who would build a more equal society, even if it means supporting actual fascists like Trump. The ultra-wealthy are very class conscious.
With respect, you just reiterated what I said. We agree 100%. He's invested in the status quo and will throw us all under the bus to keep it.
It would be nice if billionaires could f off to billionaire island and leave everyone else alone
you won capitalism. go away.
This isn't great reporting. It's politics.
Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.
It’s weirder than that. Even the idea of an apolitical journalism is ahistorical.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
Yikes. Vastly outweighed by the ruination of journalism by politics.
There's abusive intersections of politics and journalism just like there are abusive intersections of all sorts of other things and journalism. The idea of a truly neutral reporter though is a fiction.
Journalism is politics. Choosing to daylight information about government is a political choice, regardless of which information you're daylighting. Often, there is a political party (or multiple political parties) trying to avoid daylighting that information. That's also a political choice.
The existence of the fourth estate is the existence of a political actor in tension with the others.
This article isn't that -- nothing excellent is achieved. It's pure intra-party squabbling between leftist and centrist factions of California Dems. Balko is just trying to score points for his faction.
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Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?
Everything is politics.
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
Maybe I just want to eat what tastes good, and not have to worry about how what I chose on the menu is going to support a politician, political party, businessperson, etc.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
Just because you choose to ignore the externalities of your choices doesn't mean they no longer exist. It just means that you value your personal well being and comfort more than being informed about the results of your actions.
And have the luxury of being able to ignore them. That is a luxury.
I never said anything about ignoring the externalities. I also never said that I was ignorant to the results of my actions.
It's just not political for me.
I guess I'm not surprised that this cognitive trap about politics has spread - after all, people care more about deploying any tools they can to "win", rather than being correct.
It's pretty clear your definition of politics is a lot more narrow than what almost everyone else is talking about in this thread.
And I know that you never said anything about ignoring the externalities, that's what I'm saying about you.
It's a poltical act to eat food that tastes good, in defiance of the activists who think that the food yiu find tasty is immoral and want to make it illegal for you to do so. Something is a poltical act if other people want you not to do it and want to enforce this through law, which you have no control over.
Sure, you can. But don't pretend that's not a political choice.
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“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an argument that you completely made up.
You don't like to be called selfish for not considering how your actions might affect others, but others are supposed to care about how their actions might affect you? Seems like a pretty self centered attitude to have.
> “If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an argument that you completely made up.
Incorrect. People were saying if you don't vote at all, you're supporting Trump.
Once again, I have no idea what you're responding to, but it's not arguments that people are actually making in this thread.
It creates a much better discussion if you respond to what people write rather than what you may have heard other random people say anytime over the last few years.
So anecdotes are completely banned now? You better let the thousands of other HN users that use them, know.
> I have no idea what you're responding to
You're being disingenuous. Obviously I'm replying to the comment that I replied to.
If you don't have any good rebuttals, don't try to attack the messenger instead.
You're almost there and then you give up on original thought at the last minute.
>“Care because I think you should!”
Welcome to politics. Not only do I demand that you care because I think you should, but I will smash you with the full force of the law if you don't.
Now, if you decide to do nothing, well, you're getting your ass smashed by the full force of the law and whining like a little bitch saying "I'm not political, why did this happen to me".
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".
And "There are no neutrals in the reality, entropy forbids it".
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood my point.
I never said “If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil”.
My point is that there is no not participating in politics. The lack of participation is a political choice in itself.
That's a pretty depressing worldview. Children playing in the park aren't being political. It's possible to just exist sometimes.
>Children playing in the park aren't being political
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
We don't even have to zoom in, to be honest.
What children? What park? The presence of a park pre-supposes a political society that has prioritized parks, the budget to enact those priorities, and the space to do so. Any one of those can spiral into its own political microcosm.
How is that park maintained? Is there a special kids area of the park? Is it "for kids" or is it "The kids area", implying that kids aren't allowed in the rest of the park? Are the children not allowed in the park after a certain time - and who decides that time, and why? Sometimes the park is used for town events, but can get rented out. Who decides that?
Complexity is inherent, from the atoms to the galaxies. Any rejection of that is just plugging your ears, willfully or not.
But that park was probably created as a result of a vote or other political process.
The children playing in a park aren't being political, and are largely insulated from the politics of playing in a park... but those circumstances are surrounded by all kinds of political process. As another commenter said, the park's existence is probably due to politics; as are the rules the children need to follow, what activities are permitted, the safety and maintenance of park equipment and facilities, curfews, etc. It is also a choice on the part of the parents to let their kids play in a park, and which parks their kids play in, and those choices aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the perspective of the adult should not be to view children in the park as apolitical, but to be cognizant of the processes that influence their children and try to ensure that they work for the children's benefit.
It's not that long ago that black children were barred from being in the same space as white children so at one point yes, it was political.
Re. hatred towards progressives and the Boudin recall:
>Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)
There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.
From an article linked in the original article:
> In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.
This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.
Given how many articles he's published in Reason Magazine over the years, Radley Balko might qualify as "libertarian" or perhaps "civil libertarian" rather than "progressive." Not that the labels ought to matter too much.
(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)
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It shouldn't be any big surprise that a guy like Garry Tan is power-hungry and manipulative. He's got his hands in all kinds stuff like influencing elections. https://garrysguide.org/elections
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This Tan guy is a real douche and in full support of the author but...
"Usually it's the latter, because, who wouldn't want the needle to move even a little bit in the right direction?"
Which direction? The one you think is right or the other one, other people think is right?
why is YC worshipping this guy who pretends like he's the only guy who knows how to use cc?
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And Paul G has defended him on X as a centrist. Weird blind spot.
"Centrist" in America is just "far-right but doesn't talk about it very loudly"
I thought centrist stayed in the center, but left or right moves far in one direction. So in relatively speaking, you maybe right, but not absolutely.
But this particular one does?..
> "Centrist" in America is just "far-right but doesn't talk about it very loudly"
Centrist in America means institutionalist, i.e. gunning for the status quo. That's going to piss off lefist and right-wing fanatics because both want to blow up the status quo. (They tend to be seen as a spoiler for progressives and conservatives. Think: Joe Manchin or Susan Collins.)
Dude there is nothing "far right" about him.
Way too broad a brush to paint with. If we want to retain any sort of liberal democracy we need to stop with the rhetoric that "if you're not as far in X direction as I am, you must be on the other side". Its destroying the democratic party.
I'm a staunch democrat, and this is just sad to see. Progressive and centrist should both be able to coexist. We should be able to call out ineffective policies within our own movement without being called far right radicals.
Tan does not believe in equal franchise.
Dude he's decrying "Marxists" online. The dog whistle can't be any louder, it's hurting my ears already.
He's so far right that he endorsed Scott Weiner! That's pretty far, all right!
the far right will collaborate with people more left on the political spectrum if it benefits them. Think the molotov-ribbentrop pact. The nazis benefited from stalling any soviet aggression and the soviets got poland before going to war with germany
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I was using an example to back up my statement, nobody with basic knowledge of rhetoric would see it as a 1:1 comparison
He's also a non-white immigrant. The amount of brown skinned nutjobs try to cosplay as white so they'll be accepted as "one of the good ones" is too high.
Hey brown or yellow immigrants - the conservatives will gladly accept your vote, but the second you walk away they won't even refer to you by name in conversation, they'll refer you to with every slur in the book. I grew up with some very far-right types who had money...nice to "the help" in person, but soon as earshot is out of range, you hear the n-word like it's as common as the word "the". And just because you're not black, doesn't mean they don't hate you too. I've heard some horrid things said to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc.
Anyone remember the young republicans club at Florida International University scandal? Lots of young male Cuban immigrants (or kids of immigrants) desperate to be seen as white. Problem is, you pull any one of those kids out of Dade county, they'll be called a Mexican and told to go make tacos.
Garry's actions on social media remind me of those kids, albeit someone with a bit more money, and a little less perspective on things.
The cult of Thiel - is he also the shitty vibe coder ?.
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It's a requirement to reach the levels they have reached. Someone with empathy would get enough money to take care of their family (maybe even for multiple generations) and then be satisfied and focus on reducing the suffering of others instead of running up the score on net worth
I mean, after I racked up a two digit number of milions of dollars I believe I'd find myself thinking "why the fuck do I need more, it's time to go fuck off and do anything else".
Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
They are not connected to the same world we are.
> Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.
One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.
... no ... someone with empathy would spend time with their kids and their kids' kids, teaching them how to socialize so that they don't want to hoard wealth and be scared all the time.
Guessing its the Thiel School.
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yes just ask claude to add quick-silence-dissension to your project
Ahh yes the [ Removed by Reddit ] function
leave gstack alone!
It's just text files Garry!
No problem - if I want a slow poke blog site powered by slop ;).
> Lim’s book, called Amplified, was published by Third State Books, a company started by Tan’s wife, Stephanie Lim, to provide a voice for Asian-American authors.
How is this even legal? Surely the article means it’s a company focused on stories relating to Asian Americans, regardless of the race of the author.
Why would it not be legal?
The person you're replying to is making the argument "Would you object to a book publisher that only signed writers who were white" or "Should a coffee shop be allowed to only hire white barristas". Which is a sound logical argument if you ignore the entire history of racism in the United States.
That principle is not only logical, it’s a core premise of the civil rights laws, as the supreme court reaffirmed 9-0 in a decision recently: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1039_c0n2.pdf. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
I guess it’s not illegal to have a publishing house that promotes white authors. I’m no expert in that area.
It's logic that is incompatible with about 60 years of affirmative action policies that the United States has carried out.
That’s a common misconception. Nobody serious has ever doubted that the Civil Rights Act creates a colorblind system. Any contrary treatment has always been justified as exceptions. Even Lawrence v. Bakke in 1973 struck down the racial preferences at issue in that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C....
I think people got this misconception that affirmative action was legal because universities practiced it. But the EEOC guidance for example has been consistent since the Carter administration. “Under Title VII, there is no separate legal concept of ‘reverse discrimination.’ Discrimination against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin violates Title VII.”
The only exception was that employers who had practiced segregation could take measures to undo the effects of that in their workplace. That’s what “affirmative action” meant. It was not sanctioned as way to address perceived disparities in society at large.
Yeah, he doesn’t care about history. He already knew the legal answer to his question, he was simply fishing with rage-bait.
> How is this even legal?
Title VII doesn’t apply to independent contractors. If you want to argue that authors should count as their publisher’s employees, go sue TSB in some complicit jurisdiction.
Gotcha. That was the gist of my question. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this. I can’t keep the roman numerals straight. It’s interesting there’s not something that applies to contractors. I expect that’s also how OpenTable and whatnot get around these promoting “minority owned businesses.”
Balko was a big proponent of police body cams, as they would clearly reveal massive police abuse and brutality.
Since the bodycam rollout however, we're inundated with videos of justified police actions, over and over again. Proving that most criminals are indeed retarded, unable to follow simple commands and escalate minor stuff into full violance, necessitating the use of force against them.
Balko now of course sees bodycams as propaganda or "copaganda".
Utterly biased "reporting", starting with an agenda and then trying to prove the point by any means possible.
Go Gary.
Well, to be fair, Garry's article was clearly 100% AI-generated. So perhaps he didn't even really post it; maybe it was just a rogue agent. Or, y'know, an assistant who posted without his authorization. Or perhaps Ambien was involved. Or, it was an Ambien-addled assistant who misconfigured an agent to post the article. Clearly not Garry's fault.
Then he shouldn’t be posting under his real name? Or specifically call that out.
When people tell you who they are, listen to
I catch the /s, but honestly - if you sign your name on work product, you own it. Regardless if it was written by AI or ghost-written or whatever.
Why are there so many stories that are older AND have less points higher on frontpage?
That’s always true of almost any story. There are many signals that influence a story’s rank: votes, flags, vouches, age, site, software penalties, and moderator intervention (usually to override flags and automatic penalties).
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
User flags can weigh stories down. If you'd prefer a different sort, try https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ("active" is popular, though not my taste really)