> 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.
* 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.
You're horribly mistaken, likely because you haven't spent time in communities that aren't hostile to women. It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to women unless you're a woman. A lot of guys just don't understand how much harassment a typical woman 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.
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.
Your point is wrong, though. Targeting everyone based on their distinct still isn't being equally hostile to everyone - you're just more exclusionary. That just means gaming communities are racist and fat shaming and etc in addition to being sexist. Equal harassment would mean they target people based on shared characteristics - like skill level, for example.
What is the difference between "cliche" and "same, tired," and "tried-and-true"? (That is a rhetorical question, but the reader is encouraged to answer it for themselves as an exercise).
There is a nearly irresistible temptation for people reading comments like the grandparent to engage in tribal thinking. "I'm against being a dick to women," they think, "This guy, who shows signs of being a dick to women, therefore has nothing of merit to say."
I don't really have a point, except: Beware your epistemology! Your cognitive biases put Trump in office and you still don't understand why. If you can master the difficult art of reading things you disagree with, there may yet be hope for you.
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.
Some gaming communities are hostile to noobs. Some are hostile to women. Some are both. I'm surprised anyone is willing to make the claim that there is no hostility towards women in videogame communities!
It doesn't seem like he's implying it's not hostile to women. Rather, it's hostile in general. Which is bad, but not merely because you're women. Though that happens as well in some community.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
I'm just wondering if you've looked at any hot topic that uses disqus or facebook for comments?
People aren't exactly reluctant to speak their minds, with their real names attached
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.
So you're too scared to tell the truth with your real name attached, thus empowering the apparently stifling political correctness you complain about? Wouldn't actually speaking up, ready to accept the social consequences, be the defiant act?
It's actually your opinion that I find much more threatening. You don't want the freedom to talk shit about fat people, which, honestly, is still pretty easy to do, and getting easier. You want my response to be acceptance of your political incorrectness. You want to cap my free speech so that you don't feel the social consequences of yours. You want a captive audience. Who's more of a danger to freedom of speech than you, who would take the right to respond away from everyone else if you had your way?
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.
My point is that your remedy for the problem of political correctness stifling you is for everyone else to act differently. You have unpopular opinions but you're afraid to voice them, and what you'd like is for people not to crap all over you when you voice them. You want a safe space for political incorrectness. What's more threatening to freedom of speech than safe spaces?
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.
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.
But a ban on plastic bags is easy, it is quick and immediate. Whereas the other problems you mention may take decades, if ever, to solve. At least they're doing something. And it's not like the people enforcing the ban would be the same people who would otherwise install air and water filtration systems. If there's anything India does have in abundance, it's manpower.
Even if you poop in your fancy bungalow toilet, it does end up in the rivers, along with detergent and toxic toilet cleaners.
Banning disposable plastic and non biodegradable detergents would go a great way in letting microbes and plants do their job in cleaning up the environment.
With plastics not clogging up the rivers and chemicals not killing all river life, the rivers would definitely run much cleaner. This move was incidentally meant to curb air pollution, so clean rivers or oceans are an added benefit.
> Even if you poop in your fancy bungalow toilet, it does end up in the rivers, along with detergent and toxic toilet cleaners.
Wastewater should be treated. And at least if you concentrate all the waste into one place, you greatly reduce the spread of infectious diseases spread by untreated waste.
Not when you eat the animals that eat corpses afterwards. That's how you spread diseases, plus when animals eat human flesh, they leave bits floating in the water supply.
We bury people for a reason. Or we burn them, or leave them on the land to get eaten by animals, away from water supplies. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial)
The difference between what you're proposing is the difference between composting an animal corpse and then using it to fertilize your crops, or just grinding it up and spraying it all over your tomatoes.
This feels like a piece of "what-about-ism". Certainly there are other environmental issues facing India -- but that doesn't mean that this one isn't worth dealing with either.
This was affecting air pollution, from 2nd and 3rd paragraph: India’s National Green Tribunal (NGT) introduced the ban following complaints of illegal burning of plastic and other waste at three local rubbish dumps. The ban took effect on the first day of 2017.
The illegal burning of waste was said to have been contributing to air pollution, which is a major problem in India.
Does a software company focus on improving just one aspect of their software or during any time progress is made on several fronts? Why is it that governments (specially the ones in developing countries) are expected to make progress in only one front when there are more specialised departments for each areas?
What will be the effect in air pollution when burning plastic garbage is replaced with things like paper garbage and the poor return their glass bottles because it gives them $$$?
I don't think that's the case. Sturdy glass bottles can simply be washed a few dozen times before they wear out, whereas aluminum cans must be melted down and remade.
Sorry, I was talking about glass recycling vs can recycling.
Yes, washing glass is quite a bit more economical than glass recycling. We do the whole glass deposit thing in Germany where I grew up.
(The deposit is actually pretty clever: if you are rich enough not to care, you can just leave your bottle anywhere, and someone else with more time but less money will pick it up sooner or later.)
Yes but Delhi currently has a clown for a Chief minister. He comes up with notorious schemes like this. Recently he came up with odd-even rule for traffic and with clever exemptions for women, taxies and what not leading to a complete failure.
Water logging is a big issue in Mumbai and perhaps there this policy was useful.
Delhi's air pollution is not because of Delhi but because of surrounding areas. Nothing can be done there.
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.