Dan Primack at Fortune puts out a daily newsletter called Term Sheet. It's focus is broader than startups and VCs. It also includes private equity and other institutions. But it's a fantastic way to stay up to date on major deals across all industries and sectors.
Pash is right. No word yet on crowdfunding. It will be interesting to see how this change to the general-solicitation rules impacts the crowdfunding portion of the bill. The provisions are somewhat contradictory, so long as the accredited-investor limitation remains.
This is true and obvious to some extent, but there's some real downsides to the legal realism movement. Legal realism starts off with a correct premise - that judges are flawed and human like the rest of us - but some people go further and come to the conclusion that, thus, no justice is possible and we should just game the system as much as possible.
It's an absolute fact that the American legal code has become more much more bloated, and in my opinion, more haphazard, disorganized, and prone to severe contradiction following legal realism becoming a popular philosophy.
It's immediately obviously true in its premise, but some of the conclusions following from legal realism seem to make the justice system worse.
"Belief in the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to law. Many of the realists were interested in sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of law. Karl Llewellyn's book The Cheyenne Way is a famous example of this tendency. ... Belief in legal instrumentalism, the view that the law should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to balance competing societal interests."
This contributes to the current culture, I think, of having 1000 page laws that nobody except lobbyists have actually read. Legal realism says, "There's a problem here, justice isn't perfect" - but then proposes a cure much worse than the disease.
Yes, legal codes do tend to get bloated. But I think legal realism has been a foe, not a friend, of a straightforward and consistent legal code.
That's before even getting into things like fad psychology getting introduced to the courtroom, where psychiatric evaluators use things like the Rorschach test to evaluate people on trial. It's frigging scary that fad social science gets introduced without vetting into the court system, and it turns the common law system from an asset into a liability. But anyways, this is a long conversation - I just wanted to point out that despite legal realism's premises being correct, that doesn't necessarily make all of the conclusions lead to good places.
You're way overloading the idea of legal realism to make your argument, and ignoring things like the influence of critical theory (Marxist/Hegelian dialectic, which is not the same thing as Marxism), public choice theory, the pragmatic movement and so on. Yes, this stuff is very much inside baseball, but I don't think you should rely on Wikipedia to form your opinions about this complex subject.
FWIW I'm inclined towards liberal pragmatism, and biased with an admiration for Richard Posner, probably because I already shared his admiration for JS Mill. Posner's book 'overcoming law' is a good survey of judicial philosophies from the most conservative kinds of formalism/originalism to the most left-wing kinds of identity politics.
Fad social science? Sure, that sucks, but even "forensic science" evidence is often questionable (http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Unreliable-Limite...). Even worse, even if the test really does work (e.g. DNA testing), we get abuse of statistics like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy - "the probability of a random guy having this weight of evidence against him is 1/1 000 000, so this guy must be guilty!" (of course, there are 300 Americans you could convict of any one crime under this standard...)
Let's just say that modern justice systems are not without their faults.
To be clear, I wasn't really suggesting that one should game the system, hence the scare quotes. But a competent lawyer should, in my view, respect the fact that judges are human and respond just like other humans. That means paying attention to little details like dress, demeanor, font, grammar, and all the other elements of presentation that every marketer knows but few lawyers understand.
On a deeper level there are tactics like angling your argument to the judge's world view. (This makes judicial panels all the more important.)
I'd imagine that you could get yourself to the bay area if you went back to school for an advanced degree. I don't know if that's your path, but you could use that as a foot in the door.
I had no idea. Very cool. I think that if I were a sea creature I might like a new home. But this won't be so funny when shipping-container sized crabs ascend onto L.A.
After that, maybe see if you can get some people signed up for launch notices. Maybe see if you can get some female early adopters. That strikes me as the biggest dating-site problem.
I do not know much about dating sites, but I just heard from a male friend yesterday that guys tend to get a lot of advertisement showing pretty girls that end up being links for porn sites... so compare with these and make your site contrast!
I definitely agree that you need to motivate females to "trust" your site enough that they will sign up for it. Perhaps you might release a beta version for your friends and they can invite their friends?
Well, it is usually in the sense that people are more likely to discuss issues they are pissed off about (proof is available of such if needed, but just think of how much more likely you are to contact a company if they pissed you off, as opposed to just marginally satisfied you). Thus, controversial issues such as this might go left undiscussed if they didn't rile a certain crowd.
That said, I'd agree that it would be better to refer to it as being 'roused' to discussion.
I meant that it's likely to challenge some presumption held by nearly every reader. I enjoy honest analysis when it says: Side A is wrong and Side B is wrong, the answer lies elsewhere.
Everyone is angry at first because their sacred cow has been tossed on the grill, but in the end we reconcile and have a great cookout.
