This is an interesting perspective. I feel like a frog in a pot of boiling water, the discourse in my life is just getting gradually worse and most of the media is happy to gaslight people into thinking...Well, anything that gets a click. I'd be interested to hear any more of your perspective.
This reminds me of something about flash games in the 2000s. I was in high school at the time and every morning in class I would check onemorelevel, kongregate, etc for new games. There was a pattern in flash games where someone would make a great simple game with an interesting, novel, or long-forgotten mechanic. It would get to the frontpage of all these sites, and a few months later you'd see that mechanic mixed with every other popular flash game mechanic. It was really cool to see a community of creative people embrace an idea and then beat it to death in a short period of time. I think in a lot of other creative genres, this kind of "copying your idea but a twist" is seen as poor form, plagiarism, or derivative. Maybe the flash game community was low enough stakes that it welcomed that kind of community engagement. I wonder what the people actually making the games thought.
Anyway, this is a really cool example of that. It's wordle, but with a twist.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” https://www.benshoemate.com/2012/08/02/what-does-it-mean-goo...
I have experience with physical eurorack modular synths, visual sound programming tools (VCV rack, Max, audioweaver), and DSP programming (Supercollider, Matlab). I think the simulated wires paradigm IS the best one...for someone who doesn't want to learn at least programming and probably also matrix algebra. In my experience, sound code is generally a LOT of ugly boilerplate code surrounding a few really brilliant lines of code that require years of education to understand. But in a code-based version of VCV rack, the brilliant code would all be inside some object.
You're essentially dealing with connected one-directional graphs of arbitrary complexity. Feedback loops are required for the eurorack experience. That's pretty easy to lay out visually, but I haven't seen good ways of laying it out in code. There's room for innovation here; Someone in the programming world has a more intuitive, more informative way of visualizing data in a graph that could be adapted into DAW paradigms.
You might be curious to check out Faust[0] which is a functional programming language specifically designed for audio dsp, sort of based on a simulated-wire structure.
Faust really operates at a much lower level than Rack. You could write a Rack module with Faust, but you wouldn't (probably) do the sorts of things you do in Rack in Faust.
The idea that zero was "invented" at a certain time by recent humans and not in use until then has always seemed absolutely absurd to me. I will admit I haven't read deeply into it, but there's just no way people didn't have a concept for "none of a thing" until a couple millennia ago.
One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is: There's no reason to record buying 0 fish or owning 0 acres of land. Another justification given is the difficulty children experience with 0 - but we don't teach children to start counting with 0, so it makes sense that they would get tripped up there.
I guess the argument sometimes seems to be that we didn't have a symbol for 0, and that this was somehow more confusing to adopt than other symbols? But if that's the case, then isn't claiming any culture "invented" zero the same as claiming a culture "invented" any concept they came up with a word for?
I'd love to hear all the reasons I am wrong and stupid.
I think the thing which came surprisingly late in history wasn't having a concept of 'none' but rather of allowing it to be considered a number with the same status as 1, 2, 3 and the rest.
Indeed some of the ancient Greeks were of the opinion that 1 was not a number (since numbers were for counting a plurality of things).
It's quite the realisation that you can use the usual rules of arithmetic for 1 and 0, and not have anything go wrong. (Except of course division does go wrong!)
You see this in programming languages too. Many languages distinguish between one of something and a collection of them, e.g. int x vs vector<int> x. In other languages, like Matlab, everything's a vector, and a scalar is just a vector of length one.
Well, its not that they distinguish between one of something and a collection, its that one of something is different from a collection of things.
So, int x is a handle to an integer value, whereas an array handle (your collection) is a handle to a pointer, which points to the start of your data structure and you can get the other elements by using an offset etc. etc.
My point being that they are differentiated because they are different things.
Having a concept of "none of a thing" is one thing. Abstracting that to a number is a different thing.
Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have," and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one with a negation (not), instead of a number.
Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. My personal take is that its possible, predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic representation ? Its not clear that they do.
> Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate.
This seems fairly trivially true just based on how common it is for someone to have 100% full understanding of a concept and then be completely incapable of remembering the word describing it, or even a phrase that conveys a decent approximation.
Linguistic representation can deal with what's-the-word-again place holders though. So, not being able to recall the name of an object or concept does not prevent linguistic thinking.
Hellen Keller's writings may interest you. Her recollections from a time when she did not have an internal language is very interesting.
Many believe that animals do not have an "I" the self reflective "I", that they are not aware of themselves etc etc. This runs contrary to my beliefs, I have had several conversations/arguments on HN along those lines, but lets not dwell on mere beliefs.
What I find interesting is what test/experiment can one perform that can demonstrate that a human, who is not allowed to communicate linguistically, has the attributes mentioned above. If we cannot design such a compelling experiment that shows are inability to detect those attributes in animal even if those attributes maybe present.
We need the restriction of no-linguistic-communication so that animals and humans are on the same playing field. Hellen Keller, when she did not have language she would have been on the same playing field.
My position is that if I cant even prove/demonstrate to others that you are sentient in the senses described above, how can we even claim that animals aren't sentient. We have no way of demonstrating it even if they were.
Seems contrived. 'None' is an equally valid answer, and easy to conceptualize as a number, eg 'start with three, take away two, take away one, now you have none.'
There's a book called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" that goes into the history of zero in detail, admittedly I haven't finished reading the book myself but got at least partway through and it was fascinating to read about it and I'll one day finish it :)
What you said about it not being in the numeric system is definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything, and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean
I more or less had understood that what was meant by "zero was invented" is zero as used in a positional number system. In other words, the digit zero, not the quantity zero.
Zero is an overloaded concept. There are at least like 5 or so different things that we use the word "zero" for, some of which are very sophisticated.
On the one hand, it means there's none of a thing in there. Most animals understand this. There is zero food here. There are zero predators on that island. Pretty sure crows have this one down pat.
Taking it one step further, you have zero as a number. Zero which is on equal footing as numbers like one or seven-- it is a number that you can perform arithmetic on or with. You can multiple by zero, you can add by zero, you can divide by -- wait, you can't divide by zero! The Greeks understood this. But lots of people say the Greek's "didn't have/didn't invent zero" because they used the word "nothing" instead of its own word. But Aristotle did say "nothing and nothing, added together, make nothing" and "there is no ratio of nothing to a number".
Crows probably don't understand that you cannot divide by zero. Maybe you could teach a crow that if two crows got ten total nuts, each crow would get five nuts, and so on. If you told that crow to split ten nuts between no crows, and ask the crow how many nuts each crow would get, the crow might tell you ten nuts, but it's not going to tell you that that operation is undefined.
Then there's the use of zero as a digit in a place-value system, like the one we use, as opposed to Roman numerals or Chinese numerals or so forth. Before there was a symbol for zero, you couldn't write one hundred and four as 104, it would just be 14 which was ambiguous. So when the Indians "invented zero" in the 7th century or whatever, it wasn't zero that they were inventing, it was the place-value system we use today to conduct our daily lives with, which is a shitload better than Roman numerals or trying to do arithmetic with a straightedge and compass or whatever.
There are a lot of people who claim that, for instance, the Maya were more mathematically advanced than the ancient Greeks, because the Maya had a symbol for zero (which looks sorta like a French baguette and an American football had a baby) and the Greeks didn't. While the Mayan way of writing down a number was much better than the Greek method, we don't have any evidence that the Mayans had much in the way of math beyond counting and extrapolating. The Mayans primary method of calculating is by drawing out tables: they knew the cycle of Venus is (roughly) 585 days, they knew the cycle of Mercury was 117 days, so you'd get a table with thousands of entries counting up the cycles. The Dresden codex has a table with 2340 entries, with 585 entries for Venus repeated 4 times and 117 entries for Mercury repeated 20 times. With a place-value system that used zeroes for zero digits. Which... ok, the place-value system was more advanced than the Greeks, but the Greeks would have done that same 'calculation' with a lot less tedium.
Then you have zero as in the additive identity, which opens whole new worlds of mathematics to you. Now you can start talking about things like rings, fields, and groups, and can have all sorts of fun. Pretty sure crows haven't sat down and discusses abelian vs non-abelian groups, but I wouldn't put it past them.
So anyway, any time someone starts talking about inventing or understanding the concept of zero but do not, themselves, display an understanding the concept of zero, (by explaining what it means in that context) it's generally a good time to stop listening.
I have chronic back pain due to a disease which went undiagnosed for most of my life.
I understand that this comment is made in good faith and with the best of intents, but I loathe getting this kind of advice. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just want to let you know that this advice is extremely frustrating for a lot of people suffering from back pain. ESPECIALLY "you look young and healthy"...Yea thanks, I'll probably still look young when I'm in a wheelchair.
PS If your back hurts and your doctor doesn't seem to believe you or care, get a new doctor.
I grew up outside of Detroit, MI. Talking to strangers does not seem like much of a thing there. The first time I spent more than a week outside of Michigan was in Oklahoma. I would be walking down the street and people would not just say hello but ask me how I was doing and then actually listen and make conversation. At first I thought they were trying to scam me or something. When they'd approach, I would step back, take a mental inventory of my pockets, and evaluate my surroundings. Eventually I realized they were just being friendly!
People may have a different experience if they are more extroverted, but some places really are friendlier than others.
I was in the same place a couple years ago. It's too bad DSP is not more well-known, as I definitely would have chosen to study DSP over Software Engineering in college (Having already known how to program)
So does the fact that so many people know about and despise Shkreli mean that the jury selection process will select for people who are less informed or don't reflect the values of the general population (Or just people who are willing to lie about their ability to be impartial)? Is there a term for this, or how is this accounted for in the process?
Actually the people who hate Shkreli are almost universally under-informed.
Listen to the man speak for 5 minutes, instead of listening to the media's portrayal of him, and you'll learn he's an intelligent guy doing no harm.
Nobody was priced out of being able to get Daraprim. Only 2000 people take it. 70% of it was given away FREE to people who said they couldn't afford it. Insurance companies paid the increased price. Drug prices are a very small percentage of the costs insurance companies pay (most of it going towards doctors' fees IIRC). The extra profit was put into researching improvements on Daraprim, which was a 70 (?) year old drug. The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
According to that Vice interview it's a fraction of a penny, and some giant corporations like Walmart were the only ones who actually stood to lose anything, which maybe helps explain why our corporate-controlled media was quick to portray him as the devil.
> and you'll learn he's an intelligent guy doing no harm.
Bullshit. He's an intelligent guy who used his his abilities to blatantly subvert the public good for personal profit. There are a lot of smart, greedy people out there; what made him stand out was that he was his fuck-you attitude and how transparently greedy his actions where. Most assholes are smart enough to put up smokescreens and complicate things to deflect the hate. He wasn't. In some ways that imperfection makes him a good example of the idea that the devil has a silver tongue.
Daraprim is generic and off patent. Shkreli's "innovation" was to find a scenario where he could exploit well-meaning safety regulations to essentially make a generic drug proprietary and price-gouge people (or their insurers). Guess what happens when insurers get price-gouged? They jack up the price of everyone's insurance, meaning fewer people can afford it. That's hardly "doing no harm."
> Listen to the man speak for 5 minutes, instead of listening to the media's portrayal of him, and you'll learn he's an intelligent guy doing no harm.
From what I've seen of him on Twitter he's a complete asshole in addition to being kind of a creep (he's currently banned after repeatedly harassing Lauren Duca). That's enough for me to not like him regardless of his company's price gouging.
> The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
I think you should read the Wikipedia article [1] (and it's may sources). But quotes like this don't lead me to believe that Turing acquired Daraprim to "make it better":
> Presentations from Retrophin, a company formerly headed by Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing, from which Turing acquired the rights to Daraprim, suggest that a closed distribution system could prevent generic competitors from legally obtaining the drugs for the bioequivalence studies required for FDA approval of a generic drug.
> In India, over a dozen pharmaceutical companies manufacture and sell pyrimethamine tablets, and multiple combinations of generic pyrimethamine are available for a price ranging from US$0.04 to US$0.10 each (3–7 rupees).
The solution to 'assholes' like Shkreli is to preventing them from being able to exploit markets in the first place. He's already going to court for his shady actions in the hedge fund industry, so the system seems to be working there.
Regarding pharma he's far from the only person to increase pricing, merely the most popular (and easiest target) among a long list of companies who have jacked up prices in the past few decades. This is a uniquely American phenomenon and pharma is basically the only industry where a company can increase prices 200-500% and not get destroyed by competition (even well after patents expire).
> The “most important factor” that drives prescription drug prices higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world is the existence of government-protected “monopoly” rights for drug manufacturers, researchers at Harvard Medical School report today.
In addition to the extensive backlog at the FDA crippling competition, the various monopoly positions are heavily exploited by "pharmacy benefit managers":
> Americans pay the highest health-care prices in the world, including the highest for drugs, medical devices, and other health-care services and products. Our fragmented system produces many opportunities for excessive charges. But one lesser-known reason for those high prices is the stranglehold that a few giant intermediaries have secured over distribution.
> In the case of PBMs, their desire for larger patient networks created incentives for their own consolidation, promoting their market dominance as a means to attract customers. Today’s “big three” PBMs—Express Scripts, CVS Caremark, and OptumRx, a division of large insurer UnitedHealth Group—control between 75 percent and 80 percent of the market, which translates into 180 million prescription drug customers.
Notably the power of PBM's monopoly is driven from the fact they control all the lucrative pharma purchasing for "unions, state and federal employee plans, even Medicare and Medicaid" as well as the insurance companies.
Martin Shkreli has a pretty active YouTube channel with pretty solid stuff about Finance, Investing and Organic Chemistry. Of course, his live sessions are a bit tedious but can be insightful. Based on the videos, I found him intelligent and fairly geeky. The media portrayal did not do him justice, I guess that is the case with pretty much every one.
Martin purposely feeds into the image the media created for him as this greedy capitalist big-pharma monster.
You can see him do it sarcastically on Twitter and see how effective it works.
It's a common tactic these days to exploit the tendency for the news to breathlessly cover insignificant/minor actions of fringe people and blow them up into these exaggerated caricatures of powerful people that need to be stopped/fired/shut down/etc.
When it reality the entire 'power' of these 'monsters' is due to their subsequent notoriety in the media. This is how they gained their following and how they grow it.
If they were ignored they would go back to being nobodies.
The same thing is happening to many people the media calls 'alt-right' and (actual) white supremacists. They're useful idiots for lazy journalists and motivated political groups looking for exaggerated adversaries from which they can rescue the world from.
The media hands them power, which makes them seem powerful and influential. Then a small group of people willing to ignore the 'bad' stuff being said about them, or they actually research it and see it was all blown out of proportion, then joins their cause - people who would otherwise have never heard of them.
The wonderful side effect of outrage culture is that it fuels the things they are outraged about and in many ways becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's far deeper implications to insisting the media takes a balanced and reasoned approach to their coverage than simply having class.
What can be done to make sure the incentives don't align?
Right now the fringe groups get what they want through "any publicity = good publicity" and low effort journos get what they want through stirring up fake outrage and getting more views by writing exaggerated clickbait about these fringe groups.
Thus they both keep doing what they're doing, which poisons the public debate (by making fringe groups seem more significant than they are, sometimes to the point of drowning out the more reasonable voices)
The only hope is that the people on the both sides see the flaws in both of their failed strategies.
In the current form that means that
a) the left realizes their obsession with outrage culture have taken fringe, nobody, groups like the 'alt-right' and made them powerful, when they otherwise wouldn't have been. While also making Trump look like an oppressed underdog speaking the 'truth' against a barage of largely overblown exageration and fear mongering. As well as having empowered a number of unhelpful leftist groups in their own ranks who only further alienate their cause amongst the centrists whom they desperately need.
b) the right realizes they will need to see beyond emotional gratification of having fringe groups like Trump and 'alt-right' gain new found power at the left's expense and look for the actual ROI these groups bring. People who gain power through controversy are only good at controversy, smart rational people are needed if you want good productive output.
> Based on the videos, I found him intelligent and fairly geeky.
And if Hitler had a Youtube channel, some might describe him as "visionary" and "a great orator". The problem is none of his Youtube stardom mitigates Shkreli's actions which have demonstrably made the world worse - at the very least by increasing healthcare costs in a country that's already paying for some of the most expensive healthcare in the world.
Raising prices by orders of magnitude on sufferers of rare diseases is a ticket to Hell in the express lane. Making the world hate you is not smart business. Instead of raising prices, maybe they could cut their massive marketing budget to finance more research.
>cut their massive marketing budget to finance more research.
You think a company that sells a single drug for a rare disease has a massive marketing budget?
The pharma industry (medical industry in general, really) has been completely fucked for awhile, and Valeant did much more harm to people than Shkreli but no one bothers to actually read about anything. Knee jerk reactions and following the current is much easier.
Martin himself is the meta-troll most excellent here.
You can't not like that he named his company after Alan Turning. Daraprim (the only drug they sold) is used to treat toxoplasmosis, also known as "crazy cat person syndrome", a condition caused by parasite. It makes you slightly crazy / more neurotic and you get it from living with cats.
He grey hat hacked the pharma system in a way that exposed the vulnerabilities of a the insurance payments here in the US. He did give it at no cost to anyone that reached out to him about not being able to afford it. From everything I've read about him, I really don't think he did this with the intent to harm, rather to show how effed it really is, by orders of magnitude.
What I didn't think he expected was for every other pharma multinational to follow suite, since he basically got away with it, got pretty wealthy too.
Not a terrible point but it's worth considering that this was a 70-year-old drug. It's not like Shkreli put the money into the research in the first place, and he certainly profited personally.
(Not sure why anyone owns the "rights" to a drug that old in the first place..)
It really is a case of shooting the messenger. It isn't exactly clear what the messenger was saying, though, other than "This is one of the reasons why the US health care system is broken."
Every pharmaceutical company is doing exactly the same thing--overpricing their life-saving drugs--and he did it to such an extreme degree that ordinary people actually noticed it.
The only real reason to hate him is that he disrespected Wu-Tang Clan. (Read to the very end of the article.)
I keep seeing this and it's still totally unbelievable to me how many in the tech world have been taken in by this charlatan.
>Insurance companies paid the increased price.
Yes but who pays insurance? Us as individuals.
>Drug prices are a very small percentage of the costs insurance companies pay (most of it going towards doctors' fees IIRC).
Do you have a recent source for this? Thanks.
>The extra profit was put into researching improvements on Daraprim, which was a 70 (?) year old drug.
Shkreli admitted his company sold the same form of pyrimethamine, or Daraprim, that had been on the market for 70 years — although he expressed hope that his company could develop a more potent form of the drug that did not hinder the body’s production of folic acid.
“The mechanism of the drug is folate inhibition,” Anandya reminded the CEO, adding that what Shkreli had proposed might not even be scientifically possible.
“The entire mechanism of the drug is to stop the production of folic acid in the first place and the bulk of its side effects are tied up with that,” Anandya said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive to say that you are going to solve this problem when it’s not a problem as much as the whole raison d’etre of the drug. This I find is the main problem with your plan. That the solution is not worth $749.”
“One cannot suggest such a (monstrous) increase in the price of a drug which by your own admission does nothing better while telling me your plan is to (because this is the only way it would work) create an entirely new drug not related to pyrimethamine at all because it would require a new structure,” the physician continued. “Which in turn would give you a big hassle since you would require testing and FDA approval from scratch anyway. I think your plan is flawed.”
Here’s an excerpt from an email sent Dec. 8, 2015 from McLeod to Nancy Retzlaff, Turing’s chief commercial officer and Eliseo Salinas, Turing’s president of research and development: “I understand I know nothing of what makes Turing solvent and able to do research and of course I value that a lot too.…However, Martin [Shkreli] did say that he had to maximize profit for investors and that was why price is high. He did not say it was for research primarily that it was a high price. He called that the ‘dirty secret’ of pharma.”
As for Shkreli’s claims that the profits will go to research for a better version of Daraprim, experts aren’t buying it.
"Turing has not got a single clinical trial underway. Shkreli’s not testing new drugs of any kind for toxoplasmosis. He's got nothing registered," Attaran said. "No one needs a new drug for toxoplasmosis anyways. It works so well bloody well."
>The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
Ah yes, the ever charitable Shkreli.
Here’s Shkreli on May 27, 2015 in an email to the chairman of the board of directors after news that Turing was making big progress toward acquiring Daraprim: “Very good. Nice work as usual. $1 bn here we come.”
He sent a couple of emails to company contacts, saying that the drug purchase would be announced, and providing some estimates of how much money the company could make. From one on Aug. 27, 2015 he wrote: “I think it will be huge. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000…So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000—almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more. Should be a very handsome investment for all of us. Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate.”
>The only reason Shkreli's company even acquired the rights to Daraprim is because other companies couldn't make enough money on it to want to keep making it.
I'd love to see a source for this as well. As far as I know Impax had no plans to discontinue the drug, do you have anything indicating otherwise?
I've listened to my fair share of Shkreli videos too. One of the best ones that give his side of the story is his speech at Harvard [1] (it's long, and a bit hard to hear, and you may have to skip over people yelling and such, but ultimately he is trying to present his case for a full hour which he doesn't always do).
That said, your description of him doing "no harm" is not correct based on what I know about him. He has fairly strong arguments for what he did for Daraprim. Namely, the drug is priced similarly to similar kinds of drugs, they need the money for research and development of future treatments, if people cannot afford Daraprim the cost will be subsidized or the drug will be given to them, and ultimately access to the drug has increased after his acquisition of it. However, these arguments are built upon the healthcare system of the United States, and when Shkreli's activity exceeds the confines of the US these arguments start to break down.
KaloBios Pharmaceuticals (Shkreli's company) also acquired worldwide distribution rights for a drug called benznidazole [2] which treats Chagas [3] which most frequently afflicts people living in South and Central America.
While the healthcare system in the US protects the poor from predatory practices like Shkreli's, poor people in Central and South America may not benefit from similar protections. I called in to Shkreli's livestream and asked him if he would make the same commitment he made for Daraprim, that anyone who couldn't afford the drug would be given it for free or for a dollar, and he at first denied that his company even had worldwide distribution rights. When I linked him to the court document [2] that clarifies he did in fact get worldwide distribution rights, he claimed that he hoped what every CEO hoped, which is that everyone would buy his product. I continued to press him on what would happen if poor people in countries that didn't have legal protections needed the drug, would they be able to get access to it, and he called me dense and stupid without ever answering my question.
Shkreli strikes me as an interesting and intelligent person. He is definitely more complicated than the media makes him out to be. And yet, there is also an element of amoral heartlessness to him. I think his business practice does cause harm. In the US, it causes harm by straining the healthcare system with higher costs, and outside the US it poses the potential to reduce access to critical drugs.
I do think media coverage of Shkreli is typically disingenuous - they focus on Shkreli because he is, to many, an unlikeable jerk doing a bad thing. Instead, they should focus on larger companies who are doing similar bad things on a much greater scale, and causing much greater harm. Ideally, this negative coverage would drive the public to understand the problem and seek legal reform to improve healthcare costs and outcomes.
Also, I once made a bet with Shkreli about how Google search terms worked. He said if I could prove it with an excel file documenting 100 test cases of my explanation he would tweet out a message I wanted him to send. I produced the excel sheet, showed it to him, walked him through it, then he refused to tweet it.
I think this post is very good and is the most honest coverage of the guy I've seen. The systems that enable these types of behavior should be broken down. A guy like him is a drop in a bucket.
“I’m just getting pissed off. That’s not the way I do business. If I hand you $2 million, f-ing show me some respect. At least have the decency to say nothing or ‘no comment.’
“The guy says ‘…before his business practices came to light.’ What the fuck does that mean? I f-ing make money. That’s what I do. That’s why I can f-ing afford a f-ing $2 million album. What do you think I do, make cookies? No, motherf-er. I sell drugs. [Laughs] I felt insulted.”
All I need to look at is his previous (and continued) harassment of Lauren Duca to know he's not just an "intelligent guy doing no harm". He's not completely evil but he does very bad things intentionally.
This is the alleged harassment: he invited her to Trump's dinner (she believes all Trump supporters are racist and support white supremacy), and then made a profile picture mocking them being in love: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/09/martin-shkre...
Edit-response to comment below due to rate limit: indeed "if I'm acquitted, I get to fuck Lauren Duca" is quite rude, but mocking journalists isn't harassment and more to the point: it was after Duca claimed Skreli was harassing her. Don't misrepresent.
The jury should be neutral going in and have the facts presented to them.
The worst case scenario is having someone who has been previously influenced by reading newspapers. Especially in this day and age of outrage culture and highly politicized
'journalism'. I do not want my judicial system being tainted by politics and ideology the way the media has.
It's not unheard of for small towns to pool jurors from another county on certain highly publicized cases do to the concern of a fair trial.
Otherwise the constitution guarantees a jury of your peers not a jury of people with the same/similar/local values. Certainly in context "peers" could come under scrutiny in light of the dictionary definition.
"The officers involved in the operation were suspended with pay" So they made a pothead buy coke and guns and get murdered, and got punished with a paid vacation...
