throwaway420

More than 40 Twitter users sent similar strobes to Mr. Eichenwald after they realized they could trigger seizures, he tweeted Friday.

I'm not suggesting that these people shouldn't be charged with some sort of crime, regardless of whether or not they can prove that Eichenwald had a seizure (which I have my doubts about). There's a precedent set that things like lasers shined at pilots eyes are gone after regardless of whether or not it causes a crash.

However, while not condoning these peoples' alleged actions, I can understand why this guy attracts a lot of derision online. Eichenwald appears to be a really scummy character. Google his name and "child p*rn" just for starters. There appears to be a lot of wild stuff there about a big time shady payoff to a site he was "researching".

He also recently appears to be becoming mentally unhinged. He recently went on Tucker Carlson's show and gave a serious repeated accusation about Trump being hospitalized in a mental institution that he later claimed was a joke.

Should be a fascinating legal case to follow if it goes to trial.

A lot of comments about this on Ars Technica are about debating whether flashing lights or an image can ever be an assault or not. I think it probably can be, and examples like "shining a laser into a pilot's eyes" are some things that most people would probably agree are an assault. Seizures are serious business and can cause death, so I don't think people should be doing that.

I have sympathy for Kurt if he was actually harmed. However, based on seeing how often this guy lies about things and how extremely shady he acts, I wouldn't be too surprised if he didn't actually have a seizure, and was just happy at an opportunity to claim victim status and cash in with a big time court case and possible lawsuit.

The court case here might end being very interesting on many levels.

a) Red pill? Gamergate? What's that stuff? Certainly nobody should ever google any information and do their own research and make up their own mind.

b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.

c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?

PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.

a) Where did I say that women aren't experiencing harassment on some gaming communities? In fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. Your post is kind of pointless virtue signaling or something.

b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the obvious insults. An ugly guy will get obvious insults. A young kid who has a high pitched voice because he hasn't hit puberty yet will get obvious insults. A gay man will get obvious insults. So will a black guy or an arab. Or a christian. They'll use any facts they know about you. And guess what, women are treated equally here as well and will get insulted. Not saying it's right, but it's what actually happens to everybody. Gamers are treating women equally, I thought that's what women wanted?

c) The only difference is that when a woman gets harassed, most of civil society is sympathetic about it by default and she'll get a horde of white knights expressing sympathy. When a man gets his feelings hurt, he's portrayed as weak for showing emotion. Maybe this is part of the reason that some men are seeking an escape from society?

d) It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to men unless you're a man. A lot of women just don't understand how much harassment a typical man experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information. (2 of us can play this game)

e) While this is a fascinating discussion that I'd love to have, this point about sex and male/female relationships is 100 times more important than debating about harassment to women gamers for the hundredth time. Things like family and relationships are important motivating factors to men, and when social reforms (some people call that progress, some don't) remove or lower that factor for ~80% of men, civilization will also decline.

* Disappointing that the false meme about some gaming communities being hostile to women because they're women was promoted in this article. Some gaming communities are very hostile to newcomers: but it's not because you're a woman, it's because you're a noob or just suck. Welcome to one of the last remaining meritocracies.

* The article makes a correct observation insofar as more men (not just an occasional sad social reject) are using games as an escape, often due to poor economic realities. But it's disappointing that the huge role that male/female relations and sex plays in this trend is ignored.

* Google terms like "the sexodus". There are many politically incorrect truths here about what is going on with male/female relations and why more men are seeking an escape and why everybody is unhappy that I think are more at the root of this issue.

Mayer got a multi-hundred million dollar compensation package to sign up with Yahoo and run them into the ground, but somehow the narrative here is that a man is being paid more than a woman?

You make a valid point about defiance. The Overton window and the timing of ideas is something that I've thought about a great deal and I'm not going to dispute that. The real answer is that like most people I don't have "fuck you" money and speaking my mind publically would be a risk in this politically correct environment. One of the best things I feel Trump has done is started taking the lid off of that culture of political correctness and it might be getting easier in the future to speak your mind unless this "everybody I don't like is a Nazi, and it's ok to punch nazis" Antifa type of guided movement takes off.

I have no idea where you're getting this idea that I want to stiffle anybody's right to speak. If you want to use Facebook or not, it's your call and I've never said otherwise so you're wrong about that.

Stunning observation, but thanks for proving my point.

If my professional identity was on here, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying politically incorrect ideas.

Sure, out of a population of a billion on Facebook, if even .1% speak their minds that's still a lot of people. That doesn't really negate my point that most people are silenced most of the time.

Also, who those people are is important. The smartest folks who have careers and a social reputation at stake are going to be less likely to contribute. The people who might be more willing to speak their mind on Facebook might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Autism and craziness aside, if you want to discuss real ideas online you go to places like 4chan. You see memes and ideas created there pop up elsewhere on the internet days later.

Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless.

The complete opposite is true.

The true meanlessness in society is the bland echo chamber on places like Facebook where everybody parrots the politically correct ideas they're told to say by the corporate media.

With real names and identities attached, most people are usually pressured away from saying any idea that goes outside of the narrow 3 x 5 Card of Official Approved Public Opinion. Real names and identities create an echo chamber of political correctness and trying your damnedest NOT to offend anybody lest you ruin your social or career prospects. Sure, some people trickle in truth sometimes, but enough people are silenced so that people who hold normal opinions are made to feel like they're the minority.

As far as meanness goes, sure freedom sometimes gives people the ability to say dumb things, but there's no way to curb that without restricting freedom. But honestly, the true meanness in society is not people telling the truth and leading them down a road to ruin. To give a very minor example: you're not supposed to say the truth about fat people because we have a body acceptance movement that has declared that everybody fat is beautiful and no choices are unhealthy. Wishing that something was the case doesn't make it so and denying reality and "not being mean" leads to people destroying their lives. The real mean thing in this case is to stay silent and deny reality and not tell the truth.

I wonder if a younger Bill Gates would have supported heavy taxes on his company's computer software that allowed 1 accountant armed with a spreadsheet to displace the jobs of, I don't know, maybe a dozen experienced accountants using paper?

Surely, society is so much worse off with so many workers being displaced because of all of this technological progress created by Microsoft and others and being denied of so much extra tax revenue?

I find the logic presented in this article to be ridiculous.

If markets for healthcare can't exist, why is medical tourism a thing?

But enough about that, let's proceed.

Yes, if you just got hit by a bus you have no ability to comparison shop for ambulance services, but you also have no ability to do literally anything.

Outside of the comparatively rare emergency situation where somebody is bleeding out and going to die literally right there without treatment, there's always an opportunity to reasonably comparison shop for medical services even if you're sick.

I don't believe that the insurance system advocated in this article is a panacea. Because of the crazy insurance system that exists, simply getting the actual prices of procedures is nearly impossible. It's easy to comparison shop for a phone or a toaster because stores advertise prices. But it's difficult for even trained professionals to figure out the ballpark prices even for the most common procedures because of the crazy insurance system.

There are many articles like this where people call healthcare providers and try and determine pricing of even common procedures like child birth and get the complete runaround.

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/what-does-birth-co...

Yeah, less than 24 hours after a video of a woman asking Alexa if it's connected to the CIA goes viral and Alexa refuses to answer, we get a fun, light-hearted PR distraction piece about poop.

* The article makes some great observations about energy levels. I think you can definitely run a company more productively if employees had more leeway about picking their own hours as long as the job gets done. Anecdotally, I'd get far more work done if I set aside just around 9-midnight every night for coding from home rather than waking up early and slogging to an office.

* The article presents some opinions without really justifying them. According to who exactly does the 40-hour work week not work anymore? It works great for some folks, it works badly for others. Personally, I'd rather see more people working less, and I think more jobs should be more flexible about things like remote working and letting people pick their hours when possible.

* This article also erroneously gets some history wrong. People like to cite some of Ford's management innovations as some magnanimous gesture on his part to give employees enough cash to buy more products. The reality is that he was initially having a problem keeping employees because assembly-line work is so monotonous and doesn't leave much room for human contact and many employees would quit or inconsistently show up to work after a while. He was trying to make working conditions as good as possible to reduce employee turnover/absenteeism, greatly reducing his recruiting/training expenses in the long run and making things run smoother on a daily basis. It was in his self-interest to do this because once you got a great Ford job you wouldn't quit or just not show up to go to a baseball game or whatever people did back in those days. I believe some people erroneously got this part of history wrong because there's a narrative out there that the free market is some kind of predatory exploitative thing that needs to be completely controlled or it will work to destroy people. To me, that's incorrect because employers also need to compete for employees' labor. Going forward, innovative and smart companies will increasingly offer things like remote working, picking your own hours, limited work week, etc to compete for the most talented employees. Some companies might want butts in seats at 9AM and will compete by offering cash. That's fine too, let people have a choice.

Not a huge fan of outright bans, and think this is probably the wrong priority for India to focus on. (I understand this is just Delhi)

Air pollution is huge right now. And sad to say, people pooping in streets and rivers is still a major problem.

To me, plastic remnants are a very minor issue in comparison.

What does criticizing air pollution have to do with prejudice?

I honestly don't think he hates anybody but the 10-15 year old audience he has to continue to pander to for years and years on end.

I think there's fair room for critiques on this implementation and their methodology for selecting priority.

If more than a small number of protesters brought up these kinds of rational arguments, I think many on the right would be far more receptive to seriously listening.

Instead, you hear about a "Muslim ban" and people calling Trump literally Hitler and most people on the right are sick and tired of these kinds of arguments and aren't going to be receptive.

I read it and I believe your interpretation is false.

It DOES NOT allow minority religions in while excluding the rest.

It does instructs the applicable departments to simply prioritize people facing religious persecution. Prioritizing people through the safety checks and paperwork who are at the most risk should be the EXACT purpose of a refugee program with a humanitarian basis to it.

How is this bringing people together?

The email advertising this movement repeated false claims about the government banning people on the basis of religion. Spreading hysteria and fear and inaccurate facts is not the way to win the argument.

Interesting that the executive order doesn't block anybody on the basis of religion, yet they continue to repeat this false claim.

Were you applying at large companies or smaller startups?

a) 5-6 years ago, devs loved them and were building all kinds of creative software on top of their platform. Twitter got too greedy and wanted to have it all and squashed that. Don't know if they can somehow get devs to trust them again, but that was an ideal situation for them IMO that they ruined.

b) Run Twitter like a business. Focus on making profit and piss off with the social justice warrior crap. Have a system in place to report abuse? Sure, that's great and necessary. But stop blocking random accounts just because of political correctness, throttling accounts, etc. All of the engineering and design effort Twitter places on this endless virtue signaling could be dropped and their workforce could shrink and they can actually try and make money. Run it like a business, because that's what it is.

Thanks for your thoughtful response and attempt to provide logic and reason. I respect that. Just to quickly reply to some of this though.

both you and the media would need to possess the truth. Since that is clearly not the case, you are once again jumping to the conclusion that the conspiracy must be true,

I am not rushing to jump to the conclusion that this conspiracy is true. I said the allegations should have some type of investigation. It is actually the media that has determined, with no conclusive proof one way or another, that this story is absolutely false.

However, starting from the position that all organizations are assumed to be pedophile rings until proven otherwise is a complete inversion of our entire judicial system.

I never stated this. When speaking about Pizzagate in the past, I've always maintained that everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Given the types of allegations being spread here however, I support some type of investigation.

Many of your arguments are analogous to saying that since some rectangles are squares, and we can't directly observe this particular rectangle, we must conclude that this rectangle is a square.

No, I'm saying that since we can't directly observe this particular rectangle, I think it's wise to investigate before making a determination about it's shape. The media are the ones that have already decided what shape it is before having proof.

Most sites probably should move to https, and it is easier to do it these days.

However, not all sites would technically need this. If you have a small blog for instance where you want to show off a few pics of your garden or baking or something and users aren't logging in anywhere or buying anything, the utility of a secure website is a bit less and it's not absolutely critical. (still useful to have as you can guarantee that the ISP doesn't alter content I guess)

My main concern with this https movement is that it adds up another barrier to buying a domain and creating a simple small blog or website. It encourages normal folks to just say "all this extra work is too complicated! how the hell do I set up an SSL certificate and deal with this stuff?" and they just say screw it and sign up for a Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest or other walled garden which is bad for the open web.

The answer is to make this https process as simple as possible, but I still think this sort of thing is an extra minor barrier that contributes to the open world wide web of random small website gems slowly dying off.

That last sentence wasn't too precisely worded so I can understand your response...but when I said "so many voices here" I was more thinking about the media entities who were so adamant that there's nothing to see here than the genuine posters on this site. Many of the posters here are well-intentioned, I'm sure, but misled by the media.

Pedophile rings have been uncovered in many walks of life: religion, sports, hollywood and media, business, foreign governments, even Dennis Hastert and many others. Yet somehow the current US political establishment is immune to this?

Look, I'm not saying to lock up anybody without a trial or anything. We admittedly don't know if there's even a crime here yet. I just think the pile of circumstantial evidence is enough to at least warrant some kind of investigation. The media declared this "fake news" and brushed much of the weirdest facts under the rug.

Supposedly, somebody filed a FOIA request to get info on the DC police's investigation into these allegations and despite previously saying that their investigation hasn't yielded any proof of a crime, it turns out that the police never even investigated it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omlQHWrgmd4

Nothing conclusive here, but again, there are so many voices here who are so hysterically adamant about something that can't be proven either way that it makes me think that there's more to this.

It's good to see this analysed

This article is just a great description of the network of people discussing the idea, not an an actual analysis of this theory in light of Merkel's actions.

We can't know what the intentions in her heart are, but if she's not deliberately trying to destroy Europe she's certainly running it into the ground.

We can't know for certain what's going on there, but you will notice that some people are desperate to declare that this has been "debunked" without there being any sort of investigation.

Is she deliberately trying to "Hitlerize Europe" or is she just somebody whose heart is in the right place but repeatedly making poor policy choices? Regardless, she's running Europe into the ground.

We can't know what Merkel's end goal is because we cannot read her mind, so this theory is obviously just conjecture that fits some of the facts and cannot be proven or disproven.