Is Y Combinator Violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act?

These acts protect the vulnerable and exploitable. HN readers do not count as exploitable. Anyone who makes it to the interview stage with pg really does not count.

But that's not really the point - we are entering a period where many, perhaps most "jobs" will be as freelancers or in small professional tribes. We stop thinking of the global elite and start thinking about everyone, including the vulnerable - and employers (or investors) will be able to exploit these new self-employed workers. But we are not sure how or where they will exploit them.

I think we can see an age of wonders ahead - but as always ages of wonders need hard-headed regulation to succeed (I am thinking factory safety legistlation to stop children crawling into looms not the stuff politicians complain about).

So, I say we are likely to wait and react to the way the world has changed. To put it loosely, we need to see children being forced into looms, before we realise that's a problem and ban it. And the fact that this will all be done in different countries only complicates matters enormously - the next health and safety legistlation movement will come from the WTO.

And no, pg wanting to clearly understand his investees maybe on the edge, but its not exploitation, nor socially undesirable, so it is not an indicator of the new problems we shall see.

Edit: Hippo related rewrite basically

The answer is "no", because Title VII affects employers not investors.

There are some other anti-discrimination laws that affect other business relationships, with different provisions, but largely they address things like housing and public accommodations, which a startup incubator decidedly is not, and, in any case, looking at Title VII's particular rules isn't useful to evaluating of those other laws would apply anyway.

If you want to look at whether YC is doing something illegal, you need to do the work to find a law that is actually applicable to what YC does.

If you want to argue that YC is doing something immoral, then bringing in an irrelevant law is both unnecessary and unhelpful.

The article here is lazy and pointless.

Yes, that's the question that is being asked in the OP: is an investor subject to the Civil Rights Act. Which, in my opinion, is quite clearly to be answered 'no', since an investor doesn't fall under any of the categories in the law, the interpretation guidelines or (as far as I know) in the case law. So this is basically whining by somebody who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Even when you hire somebody, you can discriminate all you want, except not against a limited set of criteria such as ethnicity, gender etc. So if you decide to not hire somebody because you don't like his shoes, that's perfectly within your right (except when you can construe that the shoes are correlated to another, protected aspect. Let's say you don't hire a woman because she wears a bra and you don't like bras. That's almost certainly a violation).

Who says it's a 'loophole'? What does that even mean?