I think it is still taboo among most VC's and angels. Founders are supposed to be cookie-cutter stereotypes who fit a pre-established program. Your personality / public face can be "challenging" but not challenging, if you know what I mean.
Everybody accepts drinking coffee or caffeine, but its clearly "performance" improving. There is even a culture of providing adderall to employees if they want. Do investors frown upon those activities?
Employers turning a blind-eye to intra-company dealing / distribution is not at all a new thing but I don't think that was the poster's question. I think the poster was talking about open-ness and public face. Again, for VCs and such -- and although that crowd will sometimes deny this -- founders are supposed to be cookie cutter stereotypes.
An openly pot-head founder risks offending or scaring customers or buyers or later investors. It also indicates some who doesn't get the "performative" aspect of being a commodity founder: the expected degree of conformative role playing.
"There is even a culture of providing adderall to employees if they want."
Wouldn't that be putting the company and its management in a very risky situation? Distribution of controlled substances carries much higher penalties than mere possession. If a disgruntled employee calls in an anonymous tip to the cops, they might end up with a bunch of heavily armed cops kicking down their office door. Not so great for productivity...
Via huffingtonpost, here is a link to the IRS document which is the source of this report about "Open Source" firms being targeted.
What is released here is a "Be On the LOokout" (aka "BOLO") list - instructions to examiners. It talks not about specific companies but about criterea for evaluating applications for not-for-profit status. Regarding Open Source organizations, it notes that applicants may be the for-profit developers or for-profit support providers for the software. The advice given to examiners is to take it to their manager, since no more specific guidance is or was then yet available.
Bah. I call BS. You sound like a San Francisco real estate speculator or developer. "High density infill" projects are loved by the people who make money off the development of the property but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater. What you do accomplish with these projects, typically, is building very high-end price units, often of compromised quality (cheap materials, absurd square footage, etc.) Of course this does have the effect of reducing gentrification. On the contrary it steps up the pace while simultaneously leaving the city with a less desirable housing stock in the long run.
I call "math". Manhattan is 34 square miles and houses 1.6MM people. San Francisco is 49 square miles --- 1.5x bigger! --- and houses just 810k.
Working class people in SF aren't just upset that they're losing apartments they've lived in for years; they're upset that they can't predict where they're going to have to move to and where their kids are going to school; the whole city is crunched.
>but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater.
It doesn't make sense that they would, but that's okay because it's not the goal. In oversimplified microeconomic terms, new housing is built for the current price point, and can have the effect of preventing a price rise -- preventing demand from exceeding supply. Prices come down when supply overgrows demand, which doesn't happen by increasing supply, because the people doing so would lose money: demand has to decrease. tl;dr: high prices cause construction, but it's a negative feedback loop.
Concerns about housing quality seem misplaced. In a large majority of cases, new housing tends to be better than old housing, thanks to innovations in construction. High rises were popular in the '70s, which is why low-quality high rises are common: they're old.
I think PG is asking the wrong questions. None of merely plausible hypotheses as to the motive of an imagined government actor creating bitcoin is testable.
Perhaps more importantly, we've skipped entirely past the question -- a question we might actually be able to begin to answer with evidence -- what what bitcoin is actually doing in the real world beyond the obvious and superficial details that make headlines.
Setting aside whether the two groups you name are likely suspects, the fact that both public identities and open institutional affiliations does not contradict the hypothesis that a government did it.
For historic precedents, see for example Wikipedia on "Project MKUltra", or the book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power" by Seth Rosenfeld.
PG remarks that there were probably peer reviewers but none has stepped forward. Either of the two examples I gave illustrates how long and how tightly private-sector collaborators with secret government projects can keep their mouths shut.
Well, time will tell, eventually. Secrets have a habit of coming out over time there are enough hints and bits of fact here that eventually the people behind bitcoin will not be able to deny their involvement and this will likely happen while they are still alive.
The reasoning in this short message has been a consistent part of RMS' talk and actions since the very beginning of the GNU project. Earlier than Ogg Vorbis, the very existence of the LGPL is an example of similar reasoning, applied.
You wrote: "I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges"
I think you might have been conditioned to expect RMS to be that kind of self-defeating extremist because many people who are opposed to him, including some who pretend otherwise, describe him that way.
The poor sap made an off-hand remark from the dais during public comment on the Council's plan to send a letter to the USPS asking them to delay the sale of our historic downtown post office. He was, in effect, making idle chit-chat, not a real proposal, and he was apparently drawing on some half-remembered pop article about fighting spam. A local "news" web site made hay out of it, trolling for clicks.
A lot of people read this and this kind of story and they want to talk about the morality or value systems of these kids, themselves, and so forth.
I propose that there is a much more important reading:
Youth unemployment is extraordinarily high (effecting minorities even worse than these mostly-white kids, of course). Youth incarceration rate / engagement with the justice system is very high.
The numbers of people "dropping out" of legitimate society altogether look to be high and growing.
People's personal feelings about all this aside, it pays to notice when society starts to fray so badly as this.
