See: Homeless in Silicon Valley
See whose looking for hackers?
"Tinder suit underscores image of tech boys’ club" by Alex Barinka | Bloomberg News July 04, 2014
NEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by a female executive alleging harassment and discrimination at a popular dating startup is reinforcing concerns that the technology industry is still a boys’ club that is unwelcoming to women.
Whitney Wolfe, former vice president of marketing for Tinder Inc., who described herself as a cofounder, said in a lawsuit filed June 30 that cofounder Justin Mateen verbally disparaged her and that company executives ignored her complaints and didn’t publicly recognize her as a cofounder because she’s a ‘‘girl.’’
Tinder’s chief executive Sean Rad said in an internal memo to employees obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by the company that the allegations are ‘‘full of factual inaccuracies and omissions.’’ Rad and the company, and parent IAC/InterActiveCorp, which was also named in the lawsuit, haven’t yet responded in court.
The allegations raised in the complaint underscore the perception of the US technology industry as a male-dominated culture unfriendly to women, according to Scott Kessler, an analyst at S&P Capital IQ in New York.
‘‘Although it is tempting to describe the conduct of Tinder’s senior executives as ‘frat-like,’ it was in fact much worse — representing the worst of the misogynist, alpha-male stereotype too often associated with technology startups,’’ Wolfe said in her complaint against Tinder, filed in state court in Los Angeles.
Rad, 28, said in his memo that the startup ‘‘did not discriminate against Whitney because of her age or gender’’ and takes gender equality very seriously.
Rosette Pambakian, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles-based Tinder, declined to comment beyond Rad’s memo.
Tinder was hatched two years ago during a hack-a-thon at an incubator backed by billionaire Barry Diller’s IAC. Though Wolfe was with the company from the onset and had been recognized as a cofounder, Rad stripped her of the title when she was 24, according to her complaint.
Wolfe said in her lawsuit that she was subjected to sexist comments, e-mails, and text messages from chief marketing officer Mateen, 28, and that her complaints were ignored by Rad. She said she was forced to resign and is seeking compensatory damages including back pay and equity.
Mateen was suspended upon the receipt of Wolfe’s allegations, pending an ongoing internal investigation, said Matthew Traub, a spokesman for IAC.
‘‘Through that process, it has become clear that Mr. Mateen sent private messages to Ms. Wolfe containing inappropriate content,’’ Traub said in an e-mail. ‘‘We unequivocally condemn these messages, but believe that Ms. Wolfe’s allegations with respect to Tinder and its management are unfounded.’’
Mateen didn’t respond to an e-mail sent to his work address seeking comment on Wolfe’s lawsuit.
The allegations could have an impact on IAC’s plans for Tinder, according to Kessler.
Tinder is part of IAC’s Match Group, a business segment that was separated into its own unit in December, potentially setting the stage for a spinoff of the dating services.
‘‘Given what’s going on at Tinder, I would assume that probably would cause IAC and Match to think a little bit longer and harder about pursuing that at this juncture,’’ Kessler said.
Even as the technology industry’s glass ceiling is being shattered by high-profile executives like Facebook Inc.’s Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo Inc.’s Marissa Mayer, complaints about gender equality persist.
See:
Sandberg Leans Back
Yahoo For Alibaba
Technology companies Google Inc. and Facebook have recently acknowledged that women make up 30 percent and 31 percent of their workforces, respectively, ramping up pressure on Silicon Valley to hire more women and minorities.
Facebook and Twitter Inc. were criticized leading up to their initial public offerings for not having any female directors, and 74 percent of US workers in computer and mathematical occupations last year were men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Snapchat Inc. chief executive Evan Spiegel apologized in May for profanity-laced e-mails he sent during his fraternity days at Stanford University that celebrated getting drunk and convincing sorority women to perform sexual acts.
Related: Toeing the Boston Globe Line
In March 2013, Adria Richards received threats of violence and was fired from her software job at startup SendGrid Inc. after she posted an image online of male programmers she accused of making inappropriate innuendos at a programming event in Santa Clara, Calif.
Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sued the venture capital firm in 2012 alleging it treated female employees unfairly by promoting and compensating them less than men. She said she faced retaliation after she complained about sexual harassment. Kleiner, which tried unsuccessfully to move Pao’s claims to arbitration, has denied the allegations.
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Here is another guy who will have a permanent home now:
"Prostitute charged in overdose death" AP July 10, 2014
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — A Silicon Valley success story turned sordid this week with the arrest of an upscale prostitute who allegedly left a Google executive dying on his yacht after shooting him up with a deadly hit of heroin.
Forrest Hayes, 51, was found dead by the captain of his 50-foot yacht Escape last November. At the time, a simple obituary described him as a beloved husband and father of five who enjoyed spending time with his family and on his boat.
On Wednesday, that got a lot more complicated as Alix Tichelman, 26, of Folsom, stood handcuffed and mumbling in red jail scrubs facing manslaughter charges for her role in Hayes’s death, as well as drug and prostitution charges. She is being held on $1.5 million bail.
Surveillance footage from the yacht shows everything, police said, from when she came aboard until after Hayes collapsed. That’s when Tichelman picked up her clothes, the heroin, and needles, casually stepping over Hayes as he lay dying, police said. She swallowed the last of a glass of wine and walked back on the dock to shore, police said.
Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark said on Wednesday that Hayes had hired Tichelman before and their Nov. 23 encounter ‘‘was a mutually consensual encounter including the introduction of the heroin.’’
That doesn't bother me because the laws are for the 99% of us, not the elite. They never have to worry and even have ma$$ media run interference for them.
Clark said it’s not clear if Hayes was a frequent drug user. Clark described Tichelman as a high-end prostitute, who lived three hours away and charged $1,000.
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Also see:
Tichelman (pronounced TICKLE-man) may have advertised herself online as a fetish model, but police said she was, in fact, a high-end prostitute with more than 200 clients, many of them in California's money-drenched Silicon Valley.
More sickness from the upper cla$$es.
Police said Tichelman arranged relationships on the website SeekingArrangement, where women can find wealthy men to pamper them. Hayes fit the picture of a Silicon Valley high flier: He was part of Google's highly secretive division responsible for robot cars and Google Glass.
Hmmmmmm.
Maybe more to the murder than meets the eye?
Take a look at evil.
This case won't be going anywhere, and I predict she will soon meet with an unfortunate accident or suicide.
Also see:
Horrified Lowell residents had little time, few options
Firefighters made plunge into ever-growing danger
Fire victims were fixture on their Lowell block
Community holds vigil to remember Lowell fire victims
In Lowell, search for answers begins after fatal fire
Looks like arson:
"Murder verdicts overturned in 1983 Lowell blaze; Judge cites new evidence in fire that killed 8" by Peter Schworm | Globe staff July 09, 2014
For the 30 years Victor Rosario has been behind bars, he steadfastly denied setting the Lowell fire that killed eight people, five of them children, in 1982.
Twice he has sought a new trial and twice he has failed, until this week.
On Monday, Superior Court Judge Kathe M. Tuttman overturned the murder convictions, ruling that new evidence cast “real doubt on the justice of the conviction.”
We have reached a point where there is no faith in it, be it past or present. Such is the state of the nation in the early 21st-century.
Rosario, 57, was convicted in 1983 after confessing that he and two other men had used Molotov cocktails to set the fire, the deadliest in Lowell’s history.
But in a 99-page decision, Tuttman ruled that new evidence of potential flaws in the 1982 investigation, along with questions over whether Rosario’s confession was given voluntarily, warranted a new trial.
“I conclude that the defendant has met his burden to establish that justice was not done in this case,” she wrote.
Andrea Petersen, a lawyer who has represented Rosario for eight years, said Rosario was overjoyed by the decision.
“He has said from the very, very beginning that he is innocent,” she said. “He has been fighting this for so long.”
*******************
Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan’s office said it was reviewing the decision and considering whether to appeal. Meanwhile, Harold Waterhouse, a lead investigator in the case in 1982, said Wednesday that he stood by his conclusions, despite new expert testimony that has cast doubt on whether the fire was arson....
State can never admit error or wrong, or has to spin it when caught. And then we wonder we find them detestable.
In June 2010, a Boston Globe article written by reporters at the New England Center For Investigative Reporting concluded that the investigation and prosecution of Rosario had been compromised by a “series of grave shortcomings” that suggested he was wrongfully convicted.
The news account found that no accelerant or physical evidence of the three Molotov cocktails was discovered at the scene and that Rosario’s original court-appointed trial lawyer offered a weak defense. The lawyer was facing vehicular homicide charges at the time of the trial, a situation he admitted was a distraction, according to the article.
Rosario’s case is the latest of several arson convictions overturned in recent years amid doubts about the initial investigations.
And my level of faith in official investigations and authority goes from nil to irretrievable.
Specialists say that evidence once considered a definitive sign of arson has more recently been shown to occur in accidental fires and that investigators at the time routinely relied on flawed assumptions....
NO!?!!?!!
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Sorry, folks, but after seeing the frame job I was really put off by the rest.
Related: Judge sets bail pending man’s retrial in 1982 fire
I've had to put out fire coverage due to lack of time, sorry. I'll provide links to any further embers or sparks I see in my Globes below.
1984 Beverly fire etched into memory of witnesses
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
Investigators focus on Lowell building’s alarm system
"Lowell fire hits heart of Cambodian community" by Evan Allen | Globe Staff July 12, 2014
One way Lowell and its large Cambodian community is coming to grips with the tragedy that killed seven....
“In Cambodia, America is paradise. It’s where people come to make it,” said Voop de Vulpillieres, deputy director of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association of Lowell. “To have something like this happen — this is where people were supposed to come to feel safe.”
Maybe we used to be, but not anymore.
That's the myth immigrants are getting from our state and federal governments?
The fire displaced more than 50 people, most of them Cambodian....
There are around 30,000 Cambodians living in Lowell, a city of about 108,000, and de Vulpillieres said that Lowell is the second-largest Cambodian community in the country behind Long Beach, Calif.
Comes with being a sanctuary state, and I'm sure there is a subset of illegals even if it's racist to say it (strange how a supremacist news organ promoting genocide in Gaza can scream such a thing, but so be it).
Many of them arrived in America in the early 1980s after the Khmer Rouge regime slaughtered at least 1.7-million people in the late 1970s.
After six years of ferocious bombing by the U.S. that laid the groundwork for the red takeover.
Members of the community are united by the trauma they left behind in their native country, she said, and the shared struggle to build a new life in America. The fire, she said, struck in the heart of Lowell’s Cambodia Town — literally and figuratively.
“This fire, it really shook a core here,” she said. “We have a very tight-knit community. One person’s problem becomes everybody’s problem.”
I notice immigrants are always so much better than us Amurkn slobs in my agenda-pu$hing new$paper. Must be the decades of inculcation and indoctrination of the Zionist value system via the ejewkhazional and ma$$ media in$titutions.
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Don't get me wrong; any loss of life is a tragedy. What do you think I've spent 8 years here screaming about day after day?
I guess I'm just finally tired of the agenda-pushing, ax-grinding me$$enger; what occurred above was apparently an accident, while I have a war-pushing paper calling for killing with intent. Sorry it that sets fire to your rage.
UPDATES: Lowell fire victim loved hunting, fishing
Community gathers to remember Lowell fire victims
