harrumph

>A lot can change in that period. It's hard to imagine Hughes providing a "smoking gun".

I see it the opposite way: any forensic examination of the business lines in an IT-only operation can benefit greatly from institutional memory such as Hughes can provide and few if any other cooperators could. The "why" of business processes are often quickly obscured/lost by successive operations and if the company is a candidate for breakup, old decisions often speak to demarcations where business lines can be reasonably separated. Of course, the company's counsel would never admit to any reasonable theory of separation, so old execs are kind of essential to the examination.

>Note: As I understand it, anti-trust litigation isn't based on stuff a company did long ago, it is based a company having and abusing a commanding position. What does someone who left long ago know about this?

They know the why and all of the how and the when, which allows anyone interested in breaking up the company to put their fingers on the hidden fault lines buried by successive layers of years of "new normal" at the company.

>“Incredibly dangerous”!

Totally agree about how inane and insufferably out of touch this complaint is. As if today's now-totally-normalized tech company valuations, openly built on nothing more than cash bonfires, aren't dangerous at all.

Thank you.

Weaksauce centrism: it's a helluva drug.

You are unsurprisingly incorrect on the history. I say unsurprising, because history is a humanities study, and HN is home to many who are effectively humanities-illiterate, and who tend to mistake a well-rounded education with their own abilities to operate and occasionally build technology.

Agitation for women's rights, including suffrage, first appeared formally in the US east in the 1840s. Suffrage was radicalism of a historic part with abolitionism, a radicalism over which a giant and entirely justified civil war would be fought and won by the emancipators in twenty or so years. Emancipation is the central theme of radical left thought, and here is no exception; while capitalism and imperialism went effectively unexamined theoretically until Marx in about the same decade, there is no left radical idea before or after that fails to hew to emancipatory ideals in the US.

Speaking of failure, it appears as if you've failed to "observe the real world" of historic occurrence, and have done so in pursuit of an ideology -- a weak, vacuous, change-nothing, injustice-friendly centrist ideology. I suggest you heed your own advice.

To review: left radical ideas become mainstream and improve the society when they do. The chief opponent of this mainstreaming is not the radical right, but rather the enormous, cowardly middle, whose political emptiness has always been the greatest friend and enabler to those who enslave us.

> I believe you will find plenty which negate what you are saying.

No, there are no serious counterexamples to the claim "allowing women the vote improved society and made it fairer", nor to "ending official, normalized white supremacy improved society and made it fairer." These outcomes were mainstreamed only after appearing as left radical ideas, a plain fact that weak, doltish centrists don't wish to admit, believing as they do in "incrementalism" and "nuance", which in the context of historic change served only as codewords for "abetting and protecting the status quo, no matter how unjust".

> Claiming your opinion is absolute fact doesn't make it so.

Sorry, it's not an opinion: the examples given in the first paragraph of the article are nothing but left radical ideas that became mainstream. Don't mistake plain, historical, uncontroversial fact for opinion. They are left radical ideas that, like others of their kind, became mainstream and made the society fairer and better. It seems you don't want to admit it -- probably because it would interrupt your pose of above-it-all detachment -- but the good thing is because we have a shared history, you don't actually have to admit it. It's true anyway.

>I have political opinions also.

Good for you. The thing is, it's not a matter of opinion: radical left ideas do, in fact, improve the society and do, in fact, become mainstream.

>Incremental changes work. Radicals causing destruction very seldom do.

The only thing Rosa Parks destroyed was the unchallenged idea that she was rightfully subject to lesser treatment. What she did was not incremental in the slightest, though, so, lame centrist chiding that would have her act "incrementally" is at best meaningless and at worst openly supportive of the unjust status quo of the time.

> People think they are Rosa Park

Rosa Parks gives us a model for behavior, for bravery in the face of institutionalized injustice. We want as many of her as we can get, because left radical ideas make the world fairer when they become mainstreamed by people like her.

> So instead they look to make issues

No. If you had ever been on the receiving end of what radicals exhibiting bravery actually get as response, you would understand that nobody prefers that kind of abuse.

Amazing, thanks for posting.

load "sysres",8,1

Markets such as the US health care market, characterized by ineslastic demand and secret prices, should never, ever be tolerated under any circumstances. This arrangement is here to benefit the supply side and screw the demand side and it has to be stopped. The only pathway out of this crisis starts with the federal government replacing private insurers, relegating them to selling supplemental coverage. Such companies also should be legally compelled to run as mutual insurance companies, where any profit deriving from good risk management is sent back to policyholders. It is long past time everybody in the US admitted that markets have completely failed in US health care.

> We therefore paid an unemployed person

> Such brutal honesty would be welcome in other papers.

To say nothing of the commitment to employment fairness!

> after it had finished, all those garbage recommendations showed up for everyone to see, making it look like I am secretly some lunatic.

This is kind of my nightmare! Condolences.

YT, wtf.