May not be a helpful comment, but investing in the US as a non-citizen is surprisingly easy. I have several investors from outside the US and they mock my US based investors who have more hoops to jump through.
The USG doesn't feel like it has to protect you, so if you want to put money here, they are more than welcome to take it. :)
(Of course, don't trust me, get a real advisor / tax advice)
I share a lot of the sentiment here, but I also think our generation is conditioned from a decade of hearing about all the newsworthy corner cases.
As an example: cops don't always make it worse, 95+% of the time they are helpful and create better outcomes for society. That said, all we've heard for the last ten years are the news stories that you mentioned - so we think of them as a negative force.
I think this same problem applies, in some capacity, to all the institutions listed here. That said, every single one of these institutions needs a massive overhaul to be a functioning member of the future (except cops, I really think you're wrong on that, they may need new priorities from the government -- but their organizational structure and methods seem to work pretty well).
The problem is that departments are too underfunded to maintain a large presence (the beat cop chilling on your street in your neighborhoods substation), and the construction of cities (especially suburbs) is such that they cruise around in cop cars most of the day, except when they're actually engaged in an incident.
That means that, to the normal person, the sudden appearance of a cop is that of an alien "other"--and I would suspect a similar sense of detachment from their side of the fence.
This also means that when they get involved, they have to use standardized practices, which over time snowball into the impersonal human-crushing machinery we have today.
While it might work for society at large, for the percentage of folks who get caught in the gears it can be pretty terrible--especially because the cops (by which I also include prosecuting attorneys, judges, and the other apparatchik of the judicial and executive branch) have no reason to be lenient or reasonable. They simply dispense the law, as written.
The cases where the cops aren't bad news bears? Those, I suggest, are the exception rather then the rule--modern policing is quite reactionary in nature.
The irony is your parent calls out a lack of trust in the news, and yet doesn't seem to recognize the places the news has shaped his/her other opinions.
Upvoted because this sounded interesting: "Our idea is simple - that anyone on your team should be able to use any iteration of your app or website with zero configuration. Awesomebox lets you create and collaborate like you would in the physical world, where it's easy to show people the real thing without having to ask someone to run code locally, install dependencies, or configure a staging server. What Heroku is to back-end development, Awesomebox is to front-end development - a platform that lets you focus on what you do best."
I couldn't find that on mobile without signing up, you might want to add that to an about or FAQ page.
Thanks for the feedback - this is really more a case of "two hackers trying to describe what we're building" than a "vague PR statement".
I think where we're struggling is narrowing down exactly what we do, without being pigeonholed into "just another hosting platform". We're really excited to talk to the many people who did signup and learn more from them, so that we can get better at this overtime. Thanks for being a "BS filter" and telling us where we're wrong - if you have more thoughts to share, we'd love to hear from you. contact@awesomebox.es
Would it be possible to get some sort of diagram or screenshots up that would at least give us something to look at? A theoretical, yet somewhat detailed, use-case would be great.
We're going to be following up with people to bring them into the product and helping them become successful with it. You're right though, a use case would help a ton. Perhaps this would be a good start to our blog. Contact us at contact@awesomebox.es if you'd like to discuss the idea further.
Has anyone ever tried something like this? Seems like an interesting way to get a good domain for an early stage venture (pay a high but not crazy monthly with an option to buy in a year).
However, this seems to have few "brand" domains and lots of autoaccidentlawyer.com type stuff. That coupled with the fact that the guy who built it tries to hide his involvement with the site makes me think twice about using it.
It seems hard to use emotional arguments against logical decisions, and vice versa. Given that their initial decision was emotional ("I want to build something my mom will use!") it seems likely that an emotional counter-argument ("you respect me, and you're losing my respect by acting illogical") was more likely to work.
Applaud the effort, despite the data problems. In its current state I consider it more interesting than useful, but future versions could clearly be massively useful.
One thought: since many reg d filings are purposefully delayed by 1-2 months to control timing (and press) it might be more effective to analyze the time period of 9 mo ago to 3 mo ago.
May also be useful to add levels of caution (yellow is no deals in the 6 mo period, red is no deals in 12+).
Also, factoring in deviation from normal behavior would be a wonderful addition (and would remove some of the folks without much data represented)
PG has always been in favor of "ramen profitability." I've never heard him disparage revenue or think having it is indicative of being a small company.
The link you provide in the original comment is for violent crimes (including rape), not for rape alone. There is little doubt that women are more likely to be raped in the US than men.
"In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women."
Rapes inside of prison are almost all male on male, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers of such are comparable to and may exceed rapes outside of prison. So it is not impossible that the majority of rape victims in the USA are men.
True, however, the vast majority of rapes of women are by men, and the vast majority of rapes of men are by men.
It's not like the issue of men being raped is predominantly due to women, whereas the issue of women being raped is predominantly due to men.
I also wonder if all the 'alpha male' bullshit might actually be a detrimental influence on prison rape, since it so clearly reinforces and mimics the sort of hierarchy that exists among men in prisons.
""Rape" is defined as forced sexual intercourse in which the victim may be either male or female and the offender may be of a different sex or the same sex as the victim. Victims must be at least 12 years old; victims less than age 12 are excluded from all estimates. Includes attempts and threats to commit rape."
>"Overall, an estimated 91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault were female." //
It may not change the ratio but of course one must remember that is "victims of rape and sexual assaults that were reported and recorded as such".
The study linked, (text version http://bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/SOO.TXT) says only a third of the rapes reported to them were reported to police and in my cursory glance I couldn't see how many of those reported led to a conviction and how many led to a dismissal of charges, etc..
However I did notice this:
"In 1994 victims reported about 1 rape/sexual assault
victimization of a female victim for every 270 females in the
general population; for males, the rate was substantially lower,
with about 1 rape/sexual assault of a male victim for every
5,000 male residents age 12 or older."
It's often joked on certain forums, eg reddit, that men who're incarcerated are likely to suffer rape (I'd guess women do too but the jokes are always concerning men it seems). I wonder how true that is and how well these figures reflect those crimes.
Men are less likely to report sexual assault and rape against them than women are, for a number of reasons. One being that rape is defined as being penetrated against your will, and not being made to penetrate against your will.
Any study that counts convictions, or even complaints, it going to underestimate male victimhood.
You need to look at victim surveys to have any hope of estimating how many man are raped, and how many women rape.
See my other post in this thread for details on that.
Women are 50% of rape victims, and 40% of rapists. That is in the general population and excludes prison rape. If you included that, men would be the majority of victims.
These figures are from the CDC's 2010 NISVS (National Intimiate Partner Sexual Violence Survey), although you won't find it in the executive summary. You have to look at the data tables. Here is a link to the NISVS: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/specialreports.h...
The executive summary tells the usual story of rape being a male on female crime. There are 2 problems here. One is that they define rape as being penetrated against your will, and not being forced to penetrate (what a female rapist would do to a man). This erases female on male rape.
However, they did ask men if they had been forced to penetrate in the prior 12 months, and 1.1% of men surveyed reported that they had, and 80% of those had been attacked by a woman. 1.1% of women reported that they had been penetrated against their will in the prior 12 months, and 98% of those reported a male attacker.
So we have 50% of victims are male and 50% female. Of the 50% of male victims, 80%, or 40% of total victims, were raped by a woman.
So women are 40% of rapists. Here is a image of the data tables from the NISVS, with the relevant figured circled: http://imgur.com/a/aw0eU
Earlier I said there were 2 problems with the executive summary. The second one is that the CDC looked at lifetime victimization, and prior 12 months victimization. Their figures for men as victims of rape (when you include being made to penetrate) are much lower than for women. In the executive summary, they use the lifetime stats to show women as the overwhelming majority of victims, and don't mention the prior 12 month numbers.
Why the disparity between lifetime victimization and prior 12 month? Lifetime stats will tend to underestimate the problem, because, over time, people tend to erase their memory of traumatic events as a survival mechanism.
From the analysis I linked above:
>Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.
> For men this effect is even more pronounced.
>
> 16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).
>
>Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women.
>
>That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men.
>
>Is it any wonder that the CDC’s 2010 survey (correcting for their mis-categorization of female-on-male rape) found that 18.3% of women and 6.2% of men were victimized over their lifetimes?
+1, an incredibly important point. Feeling detached/disconnected from the world is one cause of depression. Feeling disconnected is a logical outcome of changing everything about your life all at once.
Changing habits/attitudes/etc. is important, but I'd try to do it incrementally - testing to see if these changes improve your experience, while focusing on maintaining and strengthening connections to things that you think make life easier/more enjoyable (could be friends/family or work or hobbies or ...)
[I'm not well versed in psychology, please take this as an idea to start your own research, and not a prescription of activity]
As in my reply above, I have in fact pretty much just done this. I went to South America last month and will be for a few months, volunteering. I left everything behind and rarely talk to anyone I know. I think I may have expected too much of myself, being able to handle this. Incremental sounds more sensible.
