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>Sorry, but a 60-something "finance" guy with an entourage of teen models doesn't add up Honestly, it sounds like you just don’t go out very much.
If this sort of scenario seems normal to you, maybe you live in the wrong neighborhood. I see a lot of shit when I go outside, but old geezers with entourages of very young eastern european women is not something I can claim to have witnessed.
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> Why does it matter if Epstein was aggressive or not if Gates wrote the check? To respond to concerns that the two were spotted together frequently. This is an answer to a question. Figure out the question and you will understand.
Surely Bill Gates hires big burly men who can enforce his personal space. I find it hard to believe that Bill Gates could earnestly be the victim of such hounding for more than a brief moment.
Some lawyers I know were in Seattle to take depositions for a big lawsuit they were on. They went to dinner at a restaurant, and then went out to get a cab back to their hotel.
A bunch of other people were leaving at the same time, and people going in the same direction were agreeing to share cabs so people would not have to wait as long.
They were about to get in to the cab with one of the other diners who was going in the same direction and agreed to share, when they realized that other diner was Bill Gates.
Since Microsoft was the defendant in the lawsuit they were taking depositions for, and they were lawyers for the plaintiff, and were in the midst of a fight with Microsoft's lawyers over whether or not they could depose Gates, they realized sharing a cab with Gates was probably not a good idea, so waited for the next cab and let someone else share Gates' cab.
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I read the first half of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-je... That is the original article this while comment thread is attached to. It doesn't mention existing convictions in the first half. I didn't read the article the comment I replied to linked to. I am not a robot. I can not simply recursively read the whole internet. I was curious about the supposedly "damning paragraph", not a…
Do everybody else in this discussion a favor and read this article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer... You already responded to a comment about that article, so you owe it to others, if not yourself, to actually read it.
I would be interested in what made the Media Lab guy do it.
I suppose many people are confronted with an opportunity for "unethical gains" some time in their lives. Maybe the Media Lab guy simply weighted things in his mind and thought it was worth it, to keep the research going, finance his researchers, or whatever.
I would be interested if it would be wrong in all cases. Like maybe (hopefully) Bill Gates is clean, and via shady Epstein MIT could get clean Gates money. OK or not OK?
Good. Here’s a particularly damning passage from Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article [1]: > According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room. >…
Sorry, I don't get it. Somebody having assistants who look like models and are from Eastern Europe is suspicious of trafficking women? How? Why? I have heard about Epstein, obviously with hindsight all sorts of things he did can be seen in a new light. I just don't understand what is so damning about the passage above. Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be…
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Yes, in places where there is an extreme power imbalance, with few employment opportunities for the disadvantaged, and no morals or accountability among elites, all manner of scummy things happen. We should strive to ameliorate the conditions in the world that make this happen, so that young women can aspire to being scientists or doctors or businesswomen, instead of some corrupt asshole’s decorative servants.
It's this type of attitude that makes most on the right cringe at the left. The notion that if someone isn't living their life in a way that you deem to be of value, then there must be a "power imbalance" that needs to be corrected. Has it occurred to you that not everyone wants to be a doctor, or "businesswoman". And that many young women actually like sex and furthermore like using their sexuality to get things in…
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Critical thinking can extend beyond the ability to find the most efficient API to solve a problem.
I have to assume you meant to reply to someone else in some other thread, because otherwise this is just a massive non-sequitur.
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If you read the article, you'll see that MIT specifically blacklisted Epstein from making donations as a result of his conviction, and Ito went behind their backs to keep getting money from him anyway. That's fraud, and MIT could definitely argue loss of reputation. I don't know if they'll go after Ito, but if they do, they'll have a pretty good case.
Out of curiosity, do you say this from firsthand knowledge as an expert in civil fraud law, or just in the message board sense of "it seems like they might have a pretty good case"?
But it might be covered by this: https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/MC1/MC1-Part1Sectio...
Essentially any argument that donated money accepted in good faith is stripped of its criminal origins is wholly wrong.
If I steal a TV and donate it to a school, the police can recover the TV and return it to its owner. The fact that the school didn't know it was stolen is irrelevant.
Donations sourced from criminal profits are a more complex example of the same long-established legal and moral principle.
This is why the Sacklers are having such a time of it - the jury is still out on whether pushing opiates was actually criminal, but it's certainly not simply a civil case. And it's also why anyone who had any kind of association with Epstein is trying very hard to distance themselves from him.
Which is why Ito's actions weren't just stupid, but could be considered criminal in their own right.
There's no doubt Epstein was involved in some very nasty things. If profits from the nasty things were accepted unknowingly, then there's no criminal liability. But anyone who knowingly benefits from criminal acts risks being accused of being an accessory to them, even if the connection is purely financial.
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And why would that exclude girls? Would “girls’ night out” be an unusual expression where you’re from?
So is “boys night out” but you wouldn’t refer to grown men as boys.
Good. Here’s a particularly damning passage from Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article [1]: > According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room. >…
Sorry, I don't get it. Somebody having assistants who look like models and are from Eastern Europe is suspicious of trafficking women? How? Why? I have heard about Epstein, obviously with hindsight all sorts of things he did can be seen in a new light. I just don't understand what is so damning about the passage above. Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be…
Trafficking of young women from the former Soviet Union is a complicated issue. During the collapse, and well into the 90s and mid 00s, many people were desperate. Literally starving, with ~no public services. And many criminals took advantage of that, recruiting young women for work as models, nannies and prostitutes. Plus of course all of the websites for Russian etc brides.
And that's still happening, because many areas are still very poor and chaotic. And Epstein clearly took advantage of that. Along with many other Americans, mostly in less abusive ways.
Generally, people who recruited destitute young women in legitimate ways would have no reason to hide that. Wives, nannies, servants, models, etc. So I guess that Epstein was just trying to maintain a pretense of legitimacy.
Edit: Here's a personal example. Indirectly through family, I knew a young woman who made it to the US in the late 80s. She'd been trained as a restoration artist, and the demand for that collapsed along with the Soviet Union. But once here, she worked for some years as an exotic dancer.
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> when you take that job†, I think you also undertake an ethical obligation to leave that post as soon as it becomes reasonable to say that your continued presence is a distraction or disruption from the mission of the organization While that's all well and good when it's an issue you agree with, would you be willing to apply that standard in the other direction? If Joi Ito had created a controversy by standing on pr…
I think people who accept high-profile positions don't have a moral right to retain those positions. It may not always be the case that they have a moral obligation to abandon them at the first sign of trouble; the analysis will always be fact-specific. Here, I don't think there's much doubt. Ito should have left weeks ago. He had to know this was going to happen; the last few weeks of drama have come entirely at the…
Though it seems more pragmatic than a moral right.