Commenters To Dropbox CEO: Houston, We Have a Problem 448
theodp (442580) writes "On Friday, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company's board of directors, promising in a blog post that Rice's appointment won't change its stance on privacy. More interesting than Houston's brief blog post on the method-behind-its-Condi-madness (which Dave Winer perhaps better explained a day earlier) is the firestorm in the ever-growing hundreds of comments that follow. So will Dropbox be swayed by the anti-Condi crowd ("If you do not eliminate Rice from your board you lose my business") or stand its ground, heartened by pro-Condi comments ("Good on ya, DB. You have my continued business and even greater admiration")? One imagines that Bush White House experience has left Condi pretty thick-skinned, and IPO riches are presumably on the horizon, but is falling on her "resignation sword" — a la Brendan Eich — out of the question for Condi?"
Re:Recycling Personalities (Score:5, Informative)
The bills from the Obama administration will dwarf the minor fraction of debt that was from the Iraq war.
Discretionary spending under Obama has grown at the slowest rate for any president since Eisenhower. Admittedly, the sequester has played a big role in this. The annual deficit Obama largely inherited from Bush has been cut in half. Go ahead and live your delusion. Some of us, including the parent poster HAVE moved on. Will you?
Re:Recycling Personalities (Score:3, Informative)
The bills from the Obama administration will dwarf the minor fraction of debt that was from the Iraq war.
The amount wasted on the war due to incompetence in carrying out the occupation would easily pay for the health care for all uninsured citizens for almost a decade.
Re:Justice (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it was Clinton's CIA man (that remained on for Bush) that said the intelligence was a "slam dunk" on WMD. The day before Bush took office, the entire world's intelligence (including Clinton's) believed Iraq had WMD. The exception of substance was Russia.
It's Black folk who HATE Condi Rice. (Score:2, Informative)
Condi Rice is as black as Barack Obama's corporate lawyer wife. Condi Rice is utterly detested by her fellow black folks for going on a NYC Ferragamo shoe shopping spree and catching a Broadway Musical Comedy, Spamalot, quite literally as Hurricane Katrina came ashore in New Orleans and her brothers and sisters were fighting for their lives. Quite literally fiddling while Rome burned. You forgot, huh? Here's snopes.com to reminds you...
http://www.snopes.com/katrina/... [snopes.com]
"...That evening, upon arriving at the Palace Hotel, I flipped on the television. Indeed, the hurricane had hit New Orleans. I called Henrietta, who said that the main issue was making sure our people were safe. She'd also convened a departmental task force because offers of foreign assistance were pouring in. I called Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff, inquiring if there was anything I could do. "It’s pretty bad," he said. We discussed the question of foreign help briefly, but Mike was clearly in a hurry. He said he'd call if he needed me. I hung up, got dressed, and went to see Spamalot.
The next morning, I went shopping at the Ferragamo shoe store down the block from my hotel, returned to the Palace, and again turned on the television. The airwaves were filled with devastating pictures from New Orleans. And the faces of most of the people in distress were black. I knew right away that I should never have left Washington."
Re:The real question (Score:5, Informative)
The real question is, "what does she bring to the table" as a member of the Board? Does her tenure as a faculty member in the Stanford School of Business matter? What about her time as the director of the Stanford Global Center for Business and the Economy?
Ms. Rice is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of Political Science, and the Faculty Director at the SGCBE.
Outside of Stanford, Rice is the founding partner of RiceHadleyGates. She also serves on the boards of C3 (energy software), Makena Capital, Commonwealth Club, Aspen Institute, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rice is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ms. Rice is also an author, a contributor to CBS, and makes frequent appearances on the lecture circuit.
I have a lot of respect for Ms. Rice, but when you look at all the organizations and activities she's involved with, I really *do* wonder what value she would bring to the board of Dropbox. Rice seems to be spread pretty thin already.
I suspect Dropbox put her on their board for visibility/star power as much as anything.
Re:And the attempt to duplicate their efforts resu (Score:3, Informative)
Just as United States had "no grounds" to remove Hitler from power. Nazi Germany did not attack the United States in Pearl Harbor. Did United States illegally fight the war against Nazi Germany, too? Everyone knew that it was Imperial Japan which attacked Pearl Harbor.
Ridiculous comparison. Germany had invaded nearly all of continental Europe and North Africa, and the US barely lifted a finger. Know your history... prior to Pearl Harbor, a large portion of this country wanted little to do with Nazi Germany and what was going on in Europe, beyond what money they could make from trade. Few in the US were concerned about how Germany was treating its people, or the people it invaded. The economy was finally showing signs of pickup after the depression, and nobody wanted war. Germany was Europe's problem, not ours.
The US first declared war only on Japan after Perl Harbor. Then Germany then declared war on the US, according to its treaty with Japan. It was only then the US declared war on Germany. Then we kick everyone's butt, without asking permission or crying about BS WMDs. Then we rebuilt our former enemies with the Marshall Plan and hired what Nazi scientists we could get our hands on to run NASA.
I don't recall a wartime ally of Iraq attacking our naval base in Hawaii. I don't recall the US declaring war on that allay as a result of the attack. And I don't recall Iraq declaring the war on the US in response. Iraq couldn't even succeed in invading a neighbor less than 1/10th its size with no military.... They had no scientists useful for a space program. Aside from the ethical implications, nobody worried about invading Iraq. It was clear we would win that one. To compare the lead-up to the Iraq invasion with WWII is a fantasy - a fantasy that some fans of Lil' Bush's administration apparently hold to this day.
And the US did nothing to adequately rebuild Iraq - not that there was much we could do beyond inserting another iron-fisted dictator.
About the only thing that was really the same between WWII and the Iraq war was that we kicked ass. But kicking Iraq's ass kind of looses its luster without the threat of enslavement by Nazis.... Perhaps that is why some still hold onto this comparison of Iraq to Nazi Germany - its lipstick on a pig.