Slashdot Mirror
The Outing of Pranknet
An anonymous reader writes "The Smoking Gun recently published a story on their investigation and outing of Pranknet, an online cabal that aims to take pranks to the next level. Their legacy includes thousands of dollars of damage, and many harassed souls. Many of the pranks have clear criminal implications. Reading their report may send chills down your collective spines." From the linked article: "Coalescing in an online chat room, members of the group, known as Pranknet, use the telephone to carry out cruel and outrageous hoaxes, which they broadcast live around-the-clock on the Internet. Masquerading as hotel employees, emergency service workers, and representatives of fire alarm companies, 'Dex' and his cohorts have successfully prodded unwitting victims to destroy hotel rooms and lobbies, set off sprinkler systems, activate fire alarms, and damage assorted fast food restaurants. But while Pranknet's hoaxes have caused millions of dollars in damages, it is the group's efforts to degrade and frighten targets that makes it even more odious ..."
here we call them FELONIES!
successfully prodded unwitting victims to destroy hotel rooms and lobbies, set off sprinkler systems, activate fire alarms, and damage assorted fast food restaurants[...]Pranknet's hoaxes have caused millions of dollars in damages,
Movies cost hundreds of millions to create, market, distribute, and be consumed for the same reason: Entertainment. The difference is, movies are legal and often fictional. But does it matter to those watching? No. The deeper question here is -- why do people watch it? Why the popularity? The answer says a lot more about us, the audience, than it does about the criminals.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Reading TFA it shows that this kid doesn't go to school and doesn't have a job, he just spends his days and nights mooching off his mom and finding ways to entertain himself.
One of those cases I'd file under "parents enabling the problem". Kick him out on the street where he belongs, force him to get a job and spend some of his time doing something constructive, rather than 100% of his time spent on destructive self-entertainment. There are some cases where the parents bear a significant chunk of the responsibility for their kids' behavior, and this is definitely one of them.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The economy sucks, the rich have destroyed liquidity to keep their dollars valuable... now more than ever we need community. The one thing rich and unethical people hate.
WTF? Yes, all rich people hate community. Just the other day I saw a rich person going all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire. When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell.
I really thought we had moved beyond this class warfare nonsense a long time ago.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Are you implying that because the victims displayed great naivety, it somehow excuses the criminals who engaged in these "pranks" ?
...to see how these fine folk reacted once they were outed by TSG. Props to the folk who got the job done.
Tariq Malik calling the cops on reporters standing in a public way outside your flat after having posted numerous episodes of taking advantage of gullible people on youtube has to be the epitome of chutzpah. If the allegations against him and his cohorts are true (and the evidence they collected against themselves seems to back those allegations up), I hope they get to pay restitution to all the folk they tricked and spend a considerable time making up their 'pranks' to society.
Documenting your own crimes and posting them to the internet in the hope of glory seems a bit backwards to me, but hey, to each his/her own.
This is the most ridiculous comment I've read in a long time. The problem, as you see it, is a group of greedy amoral bastards. So your solution is solidarity with a group of immoral sociopaths? While you're at it, why don't you invite a few rapists and serial killers too.
Yes, I too associate community with inciting people to commit criminal damage.
For fuck's sake.
I write bullshit
I really thought we had moved beyond this class warfare nonsense a long time ago.
You must be new here.
Jealousy is at least as basic and powerful a human trait as greed. The only way to "move beyond" either trait would be to impose hard societal limits on both wealth and poverty that could not be circumvented by anyone, thus eliminating "class" as it exists now.
Good freaking luck with that.
I see a parallel here with the victims of Nigerian scammers, so recently discussed here. To what extent are the victims (perpetrators, in this case, of felonious acts; the mechanism by which they lose their own money in the other case) responsible for their own actions? To what extent is someone else responsible for bringing those actions about? A key difference here is that the Pranknet guys often rely on danger/panic scenarios: those situations when time wasted can be dangerous, and the guys at Pranknet were portraying themselves as helpers, whereas the scammers usually appeal to their victims for "help." I guess it's a difference of degree...
Do something about world hunger. Click here
You know, they could have been found out much earlier if one of those employees had stopped to make a sanity check of what they were being asked to do.
Also blame employers. Most employers prefer the subordinate type that follows and asks questions later. Those employees are especially vulnerable to attacks like this. All you have to do is find one 'yes sir/no sir' type to 'change the fuses'.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
So...I take it you're one of the pranksters on Pranknet?
Malik, of course, expressed no remorse for his stunts. Prank targets, he declared, were "responsible for their own actions." The victims he and his cronies abused and degraded daily were simply "sheep" with "no brains of their own."
I suppose it doesn't bother you either that much of the pranks are also illegal?
Beetle B.
The people who impose such limits invariably exempt themselves.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
You'd be surprised at how much you yourself rely on trusting other people, even if you do speak like a stone cold trust no-one badass. You'd also be surprised at how much society relies on the ability of its people to trust each other. This is what pranksters and scammers rely on.
I'd like a society where we trust and help each other. What these people do is to make us all trust each other a bit less and to look at our fellow man with the attitude that "they're going to screw me over, so I'm going to screw them first, ha!" a bit more.
Pranknet are scum, quite simply.
Some people think the Rodney King riots were a justified response too. It would appear that they are cut from the same cloth.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
by supporting an economic distribution that erodes the middle class and forces more people into poverty
You mean by raising taxes on the middle class, as has recently been suggested?
By de-funding social safety nets such as soup kitchens.
I'd be interested to know how you can 'de-fund' a soup kitchen the majority of the ones I've seen are run by private charities and not the government.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You'd be surprised at how much you yourself rely on trusting other people, even if you do speak like a stone cold trust no-one badass. You'd also be surprised at how much society relies on the ability of its people to trust each other. This is what pranksters and scammers rely on.
This really needs to be modded up.
Expecting people to routinely distrust authority will probably create more havoc than Pranknet will. Granted, they were a bit too trusting, but that doesn't make them the guilty party. The pranksters are always the ones who should be blamed.
Beetle B.
Are you implying that because the victims displayed great naivety, it somehow excuses the criminals who engaged in these "pranks" ?
Maybe he's implying that if a random stranger calls up a naive person, and convinces that naive person to smash windows and destroy i.e. hotel property, perhaps it is the naive person who should be fully responsible for paying the damages. Just one or two well-publicised cases like that and suddenly the effectiveness of these pranks will strongly diminish. Knowing that it is unlikely to work anymore, the pranksters would then have a deterrant.
To put that another way, let's take your question and turn it around. "Are you implying that because the prankster had bad intentions, it somehow excuses the fact that a person willfully and knowingly decided to do a lot of property damage merely because an unaccountable stranger told him it was a good idea?"
They're both valid questions. Perhaps the best way to handle it would be to charge the prankster with "harassment" or "malicious use of the telephone network" or whatever they call the misdemeanor offense of prank calling, and then to hold the target of the prank legally liable for any damage done. Though personally, I see the target's stupidity and particularly the desire to excuse and protect it as much more dangerous to society than the prankster's nonviolent maliciousness. Besides, nonviolent malice is much easier to cure than stupidity.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's lucky in one sense that this guy was just an immature asshole. He's obviously pretty good at manipulating people over the phone. He could probably have got away with some more high impact crimes. Luckily now he's just going to go to jail for some relatively minor stuff.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
As much as I dislike a lot of the tactics which have led some to be rich by default, you're absolutely right. While it probably is true that on the grand scale, that the rich harm more people overall, it isn't personal and it does at least have the genuine motive of making oneself better off. And the rich typically give far, far more back to the community than those sociopaths do. Which is wholly different than fucking with people to this extent just to get some cheap laughs.
Sigh, the Rodney King riots had very little if anything to do with Rodney King. They were much more heavily influenced by the murder of a black girl by a Korean shopkeeper than by anything that the police did. The verdict was just the last straw. It's not exactly a coincidence that the black community focused so heavily on Korean own establishments.
Perhaps those receiving the prank calls should use some critical thinking before they obey those claiming to be authority and have their best interests in mind. Still, lying to someone and then laughing when they believe you is painfully juvenile
Well, my insurance company took my money, didn't pay for my health care, and now is trying to convince the dumb Americans (which are unfortunately in the majority) that we should reject health care reform.
Well, the Government is taking 6.2% of my money for social "security", which will be bankrupt by the time I reach retirement age and from which I'll be lucky to recoup the money I've put in, let alone any extra monies above and beyond that. If I had invested the money that's been taken from in FICA taxes over the last ten years into bonds and equities I'd have about 110% of what I started with. You'll forgive my skepticism that they are going to do any better with health care.
To say nothing of those companies, that just can't stand the idea of paying taxes like we all have to...
You just don't understand do you? If you charge a corporation taxes then the corporation is going to pass that cost along to it's customers. In the end it's still the people that wind up paying the tax. All you've done is to put a middle man between them and the government and allowed some jackass leftist to claim that he's fighting for the "little guy" when in fact it's the little guy who is paying for the new tax. He's just paying it on his automobile insurance/gasoline/grocery bill/electric bill/etc instead of paying it on his tax bill.
Corporations will screw you over to make a buck every fucking time.
Yes, they will. Ever heard the expression 'caveat emptor'? The difference between your friendly mega-corp and the government is that nobody is forcing you to do business with the mega-corp. The mega-corp can't come and take your money at gunpoint. You have to decide to do business with them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Having succumbed to baser urges, Malik [...] is now stuck dealing with the messy consequences.
I find the messy consequences after succumbing to my baser urges to be quite easily cleaned up, actually. Has this guy not heard of tissues or something?
You are confusing your lower urges with your base urges.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
I agree. Trust and critical thinking aren't mutually exclusive. They're both absolutely essential to a properly functioning society IMHO.
authority, should never, ever, be given the benefit of the doubt just because its labeled as "authority". Such blind trust has caused so much damage throughout the history of human kind its terrifying.
read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Seems like one of the Pranknet guys (Markle) was jailed for two years for raping a five-year-old. He "warned the girl that he would kill her parents if she did not comply with him".
The people who impose such limits invariably exempt themselves.
Now where have we ever seen that before? Surely our system is better than that, right?
"Also, a check of Pistol License records shows that Senator Schumer possesses an "unrestricted" pistol permit, a rarity in New York City. Licenses are distributed in different categories in the Big Apple: Target Permits allow only use of a firearm at a licensed firing range; Premises Permits allow weapons to be kept in a home or apartment; Restricted Permits allow the gunowner to carry their firearms concealed but only within the purview of their job (security, jewelers, armored car guards, etc.). So it's evident that Senator Schumer has two sets of rules -- one for Americans and one for himself."
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others......
The free market sees taxation as damage and routes around it.
Best sig ever :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Just one or two well-publicised cases like that and suddenly the effectiveness of these pranks will strongly diminish. Knowing that it is unlikely to work anymore, the pranksters would then have a deterrant.
Hence their breaking the story, and it appearing on Slashdot.
The article also pointed out that one locale (forgot which - in Florida?) that had been the target of their pranks sent out a bulletin warning businesses.
But let's be realistic. Even with it being publicized, it's highly unlikely that most business owners will see it - running a business takes a lot of time. It's equally unlikely that their employees will see it as well.
Those "pranksters" are at the very least accessories to the crime. Impersonating certain officials (e.g. fire department) is likely also a crime. It wouldn't surprise me if duping can come under fraud, or some related law.
"Are you implying that because the prankster had bad intentions, it somehow excuses the fact that a person willfully and knowingly decided to do a lot of property damage merely because an unaccountable stranger told him it was a good idea?"
That's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. He/she didn't do it because someone told them it was a good idea. They did it because they were trying to save either the property or people's lives.
Though personally, I see the target's stupidity and particularly the desire to excuse and protect it as much more dangerous to society than the prankster's nonviolent maliciousness.
That's like saying that ordinary low level potential Al-Qaeda members are more dangerous than Bin Laden, and that most of the blame should be put on them rather than on Bin Laden. Or that drug addicts are a bigger problem than drug dealers, and that we should focus on targeting users rather than dealers.
Beetle B.
The Criminal Code of Canada states (emphasis mine):
22. (1) Where a person counsels another person to be a party to an offence and that other person is afterwards a party to that offence, the person who counselled is a party to that offence, notwithstanding that the offence was committed in a way different from that which was counselled.
(2) Every one who counsels another person to be a party to an offence is a party to every offence that the other commits in consequence of the counselling that the person who counselled knew or ought to have known was likely to be committed in consequence of the counselling.
(3) For the purposes of this Act, "counsel" includes procure, solicit or incite. [R.S., c.C-34, s.22; R.S.C. 1985, c.27 (1st Supp.), s.7(1).]
Given that Malik and at least one other pranknetter are Canadians, I bet that would apply nicely.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
If I was dumb enough to get tricked by these idiots I'd at least have the sense to shut up and not tell anyone.
Not bloody likely as you would have to explain the damages and chaos you caused.
I can understand the fun and feeling of superiority when tricking obviously stupid persons into doing obviously stupid things. We all do this now and then with stupid (l)users but most of us draw the line at causing actual damage. As to inflicting emotional stress of the victim, the prankster's mercy usual correlates directly with the character of the victim. If he/she is an asshole they may be required to take a lot more than someone perceived as nice or harmless. Going for total strangers is very low, though. Where's the challenge in that?
Still the prankster should have to face the consequences for the acts they caused to happen. More so if the damage was intentional.
What a rare punishment is avarice to itself! - Aye, with our help sir. A quote from "Volpone - or the Fox." still going strong in theatres after 400 years with a strong theme of Schadenfreude and abuse of stupidity. Schadenfreude goes a long way - especially in the safety of a theatre audience.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
If somebody burst into your home at night claiming to be police, would you be a "dumb dimwit" and believe them, or maintain your cocksure skepticism and wind up like this woman?
Yes, and the Milgram Experiment has been repeated a number of times.
While I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't try to guard ourselves from the effects of authority, the fact that this has caused so much damage (as you put it), and that the experiment is very repeatable, suggests that those who exploit an innate human weakness like this one should get the bulk of the blame.
Putting it mostly on those who fell for the pranks is simply trying to make humans out to be something other than what they are. Sure - some will successfully thwart the pranks, but most will fail to do so under a systematic attack.
I was once walking down a street when I saw a bunch of people who looked like cops and firemen on the corner. They saw me (street was mostly deserted) and came over to me. They instructed me to take a detour of a few blocks because there was a gas leak in the area and they weren't sure it was safe as yet.
Should I have demanded an ID from them, and called the police and fire departments to verify their identities?
Beetle B.
It's not really that easy in either direction. Trust in society is a good thing, blind trust is not.
The biggest difference between the two are verifying your sources. If a guy comes to your door claiming to be the police and asking to be let in, do you trust that he's the police and let him in?
Or do you ask to see his badge and call the department to verify it's really him?
Or at least do something in-between, like talk to him outside instead of letting him in (without a warrant)?
Most of us, myself included, would let him in just based on his clothes and acting like he belongs there. With the internet and smart phones though, is there any good reason NOT to verify unusual claims?
I understand what both of you are saying, and I'd like to add that the truth is a little bit inbetween (and messy).
Sometimes, authority must be trusted and obeyed immediately. A situation would be a soldier in combat receiving orders - there is no time to sit back and ponder. But that only works because commanders are told to build trust among their subordinates - if the soldier doesn't trust the commander, they won't obey.
People trust, for example, someone dressed as a police officer, because real police officers have built up that level of trust. (Conversely, if the real police hasn't built trust among the public, they are not trusted - see your nearest ghetto for examples.) During trust "building", one should be critical. As you say, blindly trusting someone is to be avoided. But sometimes you may be in a situation where you just have to go with the gut feeling, and if you have learned to trust authority during the "building", well, you just might do something very stupid - or something very good.
What pranksters do is to leech off this trust.
In regards to Milgram - it is relevant, but there is a slight difference in that and what happened here. In Milgram, the subjects were told that they were inflicting pain. Here, the subjects were told that their own survival was at stake, or that they were helping someone.
You mean by raising taxes on the middle class, as has recently been suggested?
This has been "suggested" by paranoid radio elite who lie about the intention of others who have made it clear that taxes will not be raised on 95% of the public, and all of the middle class.
I'd be interested to know how you can 'de-fund' a soup kitchen the majority of the ones I've seen are run by private charities and not the government.
Soup kitchens are part of the network of the social safety net, many of which are supported by the government via direct funding (religious "faith-based" and other charities) and via tax exemptions. Unfortunately, support citizens for the poorest has been gutted over the last 30 years-- through preferential economic policy tilted to the rich in the Bush/Regean eras and through welfare "reform" of the Clinton years.
Insofar as the government is not involved directly in the day-to-day operation of many soup kitchens, you are making my point for me. Government should be doing much more for the poor, not less. When the middle class gets fucked via class warfare attacks by the rich, the financial base for soup kitchens dissolves while the demand for soup kitchens and food banks increase. So one is directly is connected to the other.
Do you seriously think they'll go to jail for any of that? The people who destroyed thousands of dollars' worth of property were the braindead idiots who were targeted by the calls, not the members of PrankNet.
It made them accessories, don't you think?
They trashed hotel rooms and so forth of their own accord, no one made them do anything.
That's like saying that hit men killed on their own accord, because no one made them do anything.
I know the case of a man who, over almost a decade, would call people in different parts of the world (mostly US and Canada, though), claiming to be stuck at an airport and needing money quickly. He would always know a number of the guy's friends, and personal details about them. Given the "emergency", a number of then roughly gave $1000-2000 (prior to cheap long distance calls and cell phones being common - so you couldn't easily verify). Happened to someone I know.
He was finally caught. And prosecuted. So clearly, it is illegal. The issue likely wasn't that he took the money, but that he caused loss of money.
And at the very least, they could be sued by the victims...
Beetle B.
Someone I respect very much told me, "Trust, but verify." I have no problem with trusting someone whose identity can be verified--whose credentials check out. These so-called victims did not seem to even lift a finger to verify the authority of the person asking them to humiliate themselves and do thousands of dollars in property damage. Maybe they're not terminally stupid, but definitely they're hopelessly, terminally naive. Clearly the mods disagree, and you can see the karmic punishing I'm taking in the GP post :)
I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise. If people could simply trust each other to do right, we wouldn't need a quarter of the laws, contracts, corporate policies, and regulations that we have. Hell, even marriages are sewed up with prenuptial agreements nowadays. Fact is, there are tons of people out there who will screw you over and take your money/job/freedom if you give them the chance. They don't look like cartoon bad guys. They look like you and me. Some of them run companies, some of them are in public office, some of them go to your church. By implicitly trusting people, you are virtually guaranteeing that you'll be taken advantage of one day.
Or to put it into Slashdot terms, you can live your life trusting people either: "Order Deny, Allow" or "Order Allow, Deny". Either way is fine, as long as you set the rest of your exceptions up reasonably. Choose wrong too far one way, and you risk becoming a cynical trust-no-one bastard like me. Choose wrong too far the other way, and we'll get to laugh at you when you strip down naked in Times Square because someone on the phone told you he was the police.
Thats some hilarious ownage by TSG. Good job.
It all goes to show what all the 'internet tough guys' really are. Useless little bitches hiding in their parents homes. Roflmao. These kids gotta be shitting bricks now.
Altho it would be alot funnier if now that someone that pranknet has fucked with. reads all this info. Showed up at this guys house. And shot him.
Now that would be an awesome prank. And would be doing the world a huge favor.
Note. i do not advocate the shooting of douchebags in this or any other instance. it would just be really funny justice and good for the human race.
The biggest difference between the two are verifying your sources. If a guy comes to your door claiming to be the police and asking to be let in, do you trust that he's the police and let him in?
No, because:
Or do you ask to see his badge and call the department to verify it's really him?
If a fireman comes to your door and tells you that you need to leave immediately because of a gas leak, are you going to say "Hold on! ID first, and let me call the fire department to make sure it's not a hoax".
The point is that you have less to lose by agreeing to leave the building than by verifying his story - the latter could cost you your life.
If a cop says he's evacuating your office building because some alleged local Muslim terrorist with Al-Qaeda sympathies has planted a bomb in the building that may go off at any minute, are you going to say "First show me this bomb you speak of"?
Beetle B.
And remember, it's not just the people that make idiots of themselves that suffer. The people that owned the motel had to put up with broken windows and smashed TVs. The victims own stupidity doesn't make the Pranknet lot any less culpable.
If I were the motel owner and one of my guests did this, my response would NOT be, "Oh.. let's put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and find out who that mean prankster was!" It would be, "You better find a good lawyer, because my insurance company will be calling."
The victims are not at fault and any insinuation to the contrary is in the same spirit as that presented by the attackers, who like to think of their victims as "sheep" and "dumb bitches". The situations are engineered to disable the normal precautions which keep people from following bad advice. If you think that social engineering is a hoax, you're just lucky enough that it hasn't happened to you and shortsighted enough to think that it couldn't happen to you.
You ignored the context I provided and misunderstood my post. I suppose it wouldn't be Slashdot if somebody didn't do that.
Critical to what I said was that the recipient of the prank call SHOULD PAY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT THEY DID merely because a random stranger told them to do it. What I said should be well-publicised are cases where the incompetent target who did damage was also held liable for that damage. The implication was that this should describe all such cases. THAT would make people think twice before smashing property they do not own merely because an unverifiable voice told them they should. It naturally follows that people who think twice (or even once) would be harder to successfully target with this kind of prank. That's the deterrant I mentioned.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If a fireman comes to your door and tells you that you need to leave immediately because of a gas leak, are you going to say "Hold on! ID first, and let me call the fire department to make sure it's not a hoax".
It's not an either-or. It's a judgment call, and you have to take into account many things, the environment, the potential prankster's appearance and demeanor, and the probabilities and severity of the possible outcomes.
* Guy is in a fireman's outfit, there are big red trucks with flashing lights all over the place, and I smell propane = I leave my house.
* Guy is wearing a red bike helmet and tennis shoes, and it's 11 o clock at night = Get lost, buddy!
* Guy's nervous but looks a little like he might be a fireman, and I hear sirens in the distance = Let me call the station, if you could wait out here....
Should I have demanded an ID from them, and called the police and fire departments to verify their identities?
1) yes always ask for proper ID from cops/fire department, don't they teach everyone this when your like 5 years old?
2) if they were directing you to do something you knew to be dangerous, hell yes verify their ID with the police department, asking you to walk down a different street (assuming its a safe neighborhood) and asking you to destroy a hotel room or strip naked outside in New Hampshire in the dead of winter are slightly different kinds of requests, some require verification, some don't.
Not defending these prank guys, i don't find them entertaining in the least, but do you really think its any different than the myriad of other ways humans have exploited the idiots in our population whether it be for fun/business/profit/etc ? Why do you think they target fast food places and low end hotels? You can well bet anyone working there isn't terribly bright thus making for an easy target.
I've re-ordered your post, because I kind-of agree with the end of it but not the start.
Choose wrong too far one way, and you risk becoming a cynical trust-no-one bastard like me. Choose wrong too far the other way, and we'll get to laugh at you when you strip down naked in Times Square because someone on the phone told you he was the police.
I've found that the more I can trust a person, the more I get done. If we as a society can't trust each other reasonably well, we won't get anything done due to paranoia. Anyway, we've both set our dials here and I don't think we'll be able to convince the other about the optimal setting.
So now for the interesting part:
Someone I respect very much told me, "Trust, but verify." I have no problem with trusting someone whose identity can be verified--whose credentials check out. These so-called victims did not seem to even lift a finger to verify the authority of the person asking them to humiliate themselves and do thousands of dollars in property damage.
Which raises an interesting question: How do you verify this on the phone, with very little time, and in one case (gas leak), where your life may be in danger? For that matter, how do you verify a cop badge?
I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.
That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.
I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers, but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.
When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.
I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.
There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.
Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.
Beetle B.
I forgot to add this: "If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen."
Verifying authority on a cell phone is rarely going to take more time than you can spare. Especially if it's a smart phone where you can quickly look up the authoritative phone number to call, or even check on the webpage itself.
If you'll do anything someone tells you to just because they put "or you're going to die" at the end of their request, or preface it with "I'm in authority, trust me", you're going to get taken advantage of by scammers and "pranksters" like those in the article.
In life or death situations you'll have to make a judgement call based on what's being requested and what evidence there is around (like a fire truck) to support their claim of authority.
The more common situation is that you're at work and someone calls making some claim of authority and requesting information, or knocks on the door claiming to be an HVAC tech your boss requested. They most certainly can wait while you verify their claim. The problem is that it's rare for anyone outside of a security industry to make that basic effort to verify people's non-urgent claims to authority.
Which raises an interesting question: How do you verify this on the phone, with very little time, and in one case (gas leak), where your life may be in danger? For that matter, how do you verify a cop badge?
What department are you with and what is its main emergency dispatch phone number, not your direct line? I'll call back in five seconds.
Sure, you won't fool a very sophisticated prankster with a partner, but it's a start. You can also verify the area code seems right--you can check to see if you get a Canadian number in Tulsa, OK. That can be done with a phone book, a pencil, and 10 seconds.
If you'll do anything someone tells you to just because they put "or you're going to die" at the end of their request, or preface it with "I'm in authority, trust me", you're going to get taken advantage of by scammers and "pranksters" like those in the article.
That's somewhat of a strawman. I didn't say "anything". You do a cost benefit analysis and take a risk. They took the risks and in one sense paid the price. That doesn't make the pranksters not liable.
The more common situation is that you're at work and someone calls making some claim of authority and requesting information, or knocks on the door claiming to be an HVAC tech your boss requested.
In a sense, that's another strawman. Your scenarios are much more benign than what Pranknet were involved in. Someone falling for yours perhaps should get much of the blame, but it has little to do with the article at hand.
Beetle B.
It was actually claimed to be a carbon monoxide leak, which is odorless and tasteless. Many hotel rooms have windows which cannot be opened. Still, being told to break the window (and especially the TV) certainly should raise some eyebrows. I guess once you get the victim started it's probably pretty easy to keep them going.
Why? Because it indicates that you could have answered your own question? I suppose that might be a bit embarassing.
So first you don't need a third party (me) to tell you what he implied. Now you want that third party to tell you that "maybe he implied yes." Are you always so inconsistent? Because that consistency thing is pretty important if you want me to do anything other than chuckle when you pontificate about what I should have said. Of course I don't mean to imply that I would ever take seriously anyone who tells me what I should say even if he didn't immediately contradict himself, only that it's more amusing when he does. When you find some pushover who wants you to tell him how he should express himself, I am sure he will appreciate your advice. Meanwhile, I'm not that guy. So how about we just stick to opinions and reasoning?
How do you reconcile that with the fact that the target is the crucial, active element for any and all property damage caused by such a prank? Does it concern you that by coddling and protecting this kind of stupidity you are only encouraging it and making life easier for it? Just to be clear, I have no desire to harm anyone or to treat them any differently merely because they are stupid. However, I don't wish to let them off the hook for damage that their stupidity causes either. That's especially true considering that many of these people aren't really all that stupid; they just refuse to think.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's particularly disturbing that people who my own security and well-being depends on--hotel and restaurant staff--are stupid enough to fall for these kinds of pranks.
Are you genuinely surprised that there are stupid people in the world? Or that stupid people would work menial jobs? If so, there's a word for people like you.
I rather think that stupid people, by definition, will always be with us. And I also believe that one part of being a good citizen is not taking undue advantage of other people's weakness. This kind of rule is helpful on the inevitable day that one meets someone smarter or stronger than oneself.
If pranknet causes these people to be more careful in the future (or to just gather a couple of Darwin awards), I'd feel safer.
If your feeling of security requires normal people losing what little trust in others they still have, or stupid people being tricked into killing themselves, then I hope to god you never feel safe.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
You'd also be surprised at how much society relies on the ability of its people to trust each other. This is what pranksters and scammers rely on.
I don't really agree that this is about trusting strangers. All these pranks are about instilling fear and then providing a means to alleviate that fear. That's really a lot more about the fear and panic than it is about trust.
I'd like a society where we trust and help each other.
I guess.. It's a nice thought, but little more than that. Blindly trusting people you don't know is just a bad idea in general. They might not even be "scammers", but just someone who puts their own interests far and above any of yours.
The thing we don't hear is how many people these douche-bags had to go through to get a sucker. The article makes it sound like they pick up the phone and immediately get a sucker willing to do anything they tell them.
AccountKiller
There are a lot of comments here suggesting that the victims should take most of the blame.
As food for thought, I'd recommend those commenters watch this fascinating TED talk.
He gives a number of examples where we feel that we're in control of our decisions, but the designer of the systems/situations have measurably a greater influence in what you'll do than you yourself may. His point at the end is (paraphrased):
When it comes to the physical world, we're acutely aware of our limitations, and we build systems to overcome them (e.g. stairs to climb vertically, wheels for easy transport, etc). When it comes to the mental world, we have this unreasonable view of ourselves as supermen. We think we are always in control, and that we are always responsible. We need to understand our mental limitations so that we can design systems (e.g. public/company policy, transportation systems, etc) to overcome them (and make the world a better place).
Beetle B.
Thanks for displaying the height of masturbatory "nerd" hubris that so infects a large percentage of people on tech sites.
I'm sure that there is no area in your life that you would fall for one of these intricate scams.
You are a god amongst men and we pathetic humans bow down to you "tuxracer".
Precisely. If this guy is able to pull off this kind of crap without any ulterior motive other than his own amusement, imagine what someone actually *trying* to cause serious harm might be able to get away with. Remember, these "stupid" people are the ones who keep society running at a very fundamental level. If they can be convinced to drink strangers' pee and smash their own windows, is it really all *that* hard to imagine that hotel staff might be convinced to hand your room keys to burglars, or that fast food workers might be convinced into inadvertently poisoning their food?
Let's be clear: this has nothing at all to do with trust; it has to do with authority. The pranksters didn't call up and ask for a personal favor; each time they called up and pulled rank, relying on an appearance of professionalism to manipulate people lower in the hierarchy. If it only costs a few thousand dollars of damage here and there to erode the do-what-you're-told-and-don't-think-about-it culture that modern businesses encourage, it will be a bargain.
Unfortunately, these incidents will probably just lead to more training regarding the org chart rather than to an environment in which employees are not actively discouraged from questioning their managers' instructions.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Wow, I think I'd find your neighborhood kind of eerily idyllic. We lock and bolt our doors at night, and if your package gets delivered to your neighbor's house by accident... let it go, man because it's gone. And the few remaining stores that actually have return policies get taken advantage of mercilessly.
To be fair, they were actually police, and they came to rob her with an illegally obtained no-knock warrant. Believing or not believing they were the police would not have helped - they didn't ask, they just killed her when she put up a small resistance to her home invasion.
Now, getting off topic a bit, but I found this part of the story to be really, really disturbing:
The Rev. Markel Hutchins, acting as spokesman for Johnston's family, said her family members were "stunned and disappointed" by the announcement of the indictments because they believe it will disrupt a larger federal investigation of civil rights violations by the Atlanta Police Department.[13]
WTF? Who the hell is "stunned and dissapointed" when the murderer's of a family member are indicted for murder? That's fucked up. It's not like the indictments are going to somehow hide the illegal warrants regularly being obtained at that PD, and it isn't like NOT indicting the guys will kill an investigation into the rest of the department. Whether or not you can make what you have stick is a problem prosecutors deal with all the time, and they probably would not have gotten anything out of these guys either.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Wow, I think I'd find your neighborhood kind of eerily idyllic. We lock and bolt our doors at night, and if your package gets delivered to your neighbor's house by accident... let it go, man because it's gone. And the few remaining stores that actually have return policies get taken advantage of mercilessly.
And because of it, your neighborhood sucks, and mine doesn't.
I didn't mean to suggest the whole US was the way I described, but much of where I've lived in it is. Suggesting people become mistrustful will likely turn my neighborhood into one like yours.
Beetle B.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him. You're doing it because you've been taught to take orders from anyone who speaks in complete sentences and has a manager he can put on the phone. These pranks don't erode my trust in other people any more than the thousands of Nigerian scam emails I get each day. They might, however, give me a little more courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
What do you really expect from low level near minimum wage service personnel? No one wants these jobs so only the desperate take them. Would you want to answer the phone to complaints at a hotel at 3am?
I dislike how the mention of pranknet brings up generalizations on how stupid people are, which is a belief that kept the pranknet people motivated. There are a lot of smart and clever people, and guess what, they're smart enough to not get stuck as front line service personnel.
There used to be ways and means of dealing with humans who exhibited this sort of destructive uncivilised behaviour.
If they were lucky they'd just be Shanghai'd, if they were unlucky they would be lynched and if they really pissed a community off they'd be tarred and feathered.
It's fortunate for the likes of these individuals that western society has bound itself so tight with law and regulation that it's now unable to deter the parasitic members with any sort of finality.
I don't think we're disagreeing - my main point is that verifying authority should be more commonplace than it currently is in our society.
Basically the tips listed here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0729091ocsheriffbull2.html
That be common practice for everyone, and policy at every company. At least half of the companies I've worked for had similar policies in place. Enforcement, however, is notoriously spotty.
One company "reminded" everyone (for the first time) after a potential client tested them. The client was able to gain access to the building just by walking in behind another employee. Needless to say, that security-conscious client was a lost sale.
There is nothing inherently benign about lying to gain access to a building or to information. Depending on the building and the information, it can be extremely serious!
All western societies are based upon implicit trust.
99.99999% of the time it's fine to trust strangers, if you're suggesting we should reorganise to a society where nobody trusts anybody then have fun living in a cave.
The rest of us will continue living in our free, prosperous and trusting societies and will continue to find and punish the parasites who consciously take that trust and use it to abuse decent folk among us for their own pathetic ends.
Fair enough, you make a good point. How much are we a product of our environment, and how much is our environment a reflection of us?
If somebody burst into your home at night claiming to be police, would you be a "dumb dimwit" and believe them, or maintain your cocksure skepticism and wind up like this woman?
This woman was in a no-knock warrant fiasco, they did not claim to be the police, they just attacked her house, killed her and planted drugs on her to get away with her murder. Her problem was bad aim, not lack of trust.
You can't take the sky from me...
Except that the Canadian penal code probably does not apply in Tulsa or Manchester, or anywhere else in the US.
I notice the nanny lovers at /. modded me down. That is funnier than shit. Mod away baby,yeah!
That does NOT change the fact that if a total stranger calls me on the phone and says "I iz dah prezidentz of USA. Go strip nekkid and play in deh traffix!" and I do it? Then I am a stupid moron who doesn't deserve to live!
Do you REALLY want a nanny government, is that what the users here at /. really want? Just look at the stink over the suicide girl on Myspace. yes, that woman was a total douchebag. But hey, since being a douche isn't illegal, we'll just screw the law until we get her, yeah! Either you have freedom, or you don't. It is just that simple. News Flash: there have been douchebags for as long as there have been people. We don't make douchebaggery illegal for the SAME reason that the whole suicide girl thing was bullshit-because to do so we would have to make laws that could be abused so badly free speech would be thrown in a fire.
We are already seeing enough nanny government bullshit as it is, do you really want more? Just look at what they have done to the smokers, now they are planning to do the same to "teh fattys". Do you enjoy a cola? Or a donuts? Then pay up, because nanny government says you are duh stupidz and can't be trusted to feed yourself without their help. Freedom includes the freedom to do stupid things and the ONLY way to remove stupidity is to remove freedom. Hey, there are too many morons falling for 419 scams! We can fix it! We can just have mommy government approve all your large expenses! isn't that great?
See the problem? and what if I say "I hate stupid people. I wish they would play in traffic" am I to be charged if some moron does that tomorrow? Of course we'll have to keep logs of every post on every site, so we can catch these evil criminals like me who tell someone stupid to play with matches. See how that slippery slope works? You can NOT protect people from their own stupidity. Every attempt at making something idiot proof has just shown idiots can be even stupider than you imagined. Do you really want a mommy government to protect people that are SO stupid they follow any directions a stranger on a phone gives them? Is that really what we have become? I'm glad my grandfather that fought for freedom in WW2 is no longer with us. You could probably power the entire southern region with the revolutions he is turning in his grave.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, the Government is taking 6.2% of my money for social "security", which will be bankrupt by the time I reach retirement age
Actually it's 12.4%. You have 6.2% withheld from your paycheck for Social Security (up to the Social Security wage base limit, which gets increased every year and most people's salaries never reach it, it's well over $100,000 now), but your employer also pays another 6.2% on top of it. Although the employer's so-called "contribution" does not count towards your "official" salary, this is what it costs your employer to keep you on the payroll. It's really your money, except that you never see it.
In addition, you pay 1.45% of your salary as Medicare tax, and your employer also pays another 1.45% on top of it. In the end, over 15% of your real salary gets confiscated by the government, before you even get to regular income taxes, on the promise of you supposedly getting it back later down the road, in some form or other, when you retire. So, don't you worry your little head over the money still being there when you retire.
There is stupid, and there is gullible. The former have been mocked since the dawn of time. The phrase "village idiot" is still used today. The latter involves a betrayal of trust and could happen to most people these days, as they have been conditioned to respond to authority. Note the link between the government's (both US and UK) repetition of appealing to 'security' and 'safety', and the pranks' similar appeal. Though the jokes are tasteless and often minor vandalism, they do serve as a good public warning. Much as simply obeying traffic signs isn't enough to stop you having a car accident, blindly following rules because they appear to come from somebody in authority isn't enough to get you out of trouble if you switch off your common sense. You are responsible for your actions, and if you delegate your responsibility to somebody else you'd better make sure you know who to!
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Small, independent online news outlet? You must be new to this planet. Say hello to the Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital Network and all their friends at TimeWarner. (Lemme guess...you also thought Adult Swim was just a couple of guys jazzin' on Williams Street.)
education is no substitute for intelligence
To say nothing of those companies, that just can't stand the idea of paying taxes like we all have to...
You just don't understand do you? If you charge a corporation taxes then the corporation is going to pass that cost along to it's customers. In the end it's still the people that wind up paying the tax. All you've done is to put a middle man between them and the government and allowed some jackass leftist to claim that he's fighting for the "little guy" when in fact it's the little guy who is paying for the new tax. He's just paying it on his automobile insurance/gasoline/grocery bill/electric bill/etc instead of paying it on his tax bill.
That isn't true in all cases. While it may work for Inelastic goods such as medicines that people absolutely need to survive and will pay almost anything for, it won't work for more elastic goods. If the government puts a huge tax on something like sugar, corporations which make sugar will need to "eat" some of the tax. You probably wouldn't pay $100 for a bag of sugar because you could easily switch to sugar substitutes. Although the corporations may pass some of the tax along to the consumers, they often won't be able to pass all of it on.
All western societies are based upon implicit trust.
Totally agree with you, but you still need to use your noodle mate. If someone calls my number and says that I am late with a bill payment, I trust them and assume it's right - it's within the realms of common sense. If someone was to call me and say that my car had been picked up by the police and I should call the station at such and such, no problems, I would probably give them a call - but if they started telling me to start throwing chairs through windows to get a quicker police reaction time... I would have to let some common sense creep in and think it was a prank.
If you have such total implicit trust in strangers that you would do whatever they tell you, let me be the first to warn you about Nigerian email scams. They don't really have the money! It's all a scam!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I've got news for you, pal.
Two things:
1) They will have to increase taxes. There's only a few ways the government can collect money. Taxes. Charging for services. Selling off state property. Borrowing. Printing money. The government is on the knife edge of bankruptcy (every one else, including China is sitting back and collectively saying WTF? We don't want no part of this, we're not lending), which means they're printing virtual money. FACT: The money pixies are running out of magical money fairy dust, and we're in an unsustainable position.
2) Printing virtual money is a direct cause of inflation. Inflation *IS* a sales tax *ON YOU.* It means you have to trade *more time* to your employer to buy the money which with you purchase the things you want to buy.
Unless you see Washington auctioning Area 51, and Alaska off--or (preferably) changing the direction we're going in, we're patently fucked.
Right. Such paranoid radio elite as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council director Lawrence H. Summers.
Well, the Government is taking 6.2% of my money for social "security", which will be bankrupt by the time I reach retirement age and from which I'll be lucky to recoup the money I've put in, let alone any extra monies above and beyond that. If I had invested the money that's been taken from in FICA taxes over the last ten years into bonds and equities I'd have about 110% of what I started with. You'll forgive my skepticism that they are going to do any better with health care.
A better comparison for healthcare would be Medicare, which is indeed a government-run medical insurance program. Medicare boasts around 2-3% administrative overhead, whereas private insurers span 20-25% administrative overhead.
As much as people like to bemoan the concept of "a bureaucrat between the patient and their doctor", the numbers seem to indicate that a shareholder between a patient and a doctor is even worse.
It is no mystery why: the corporate shareholder's best interests run in direct contrast to that of the patient. It is more profitable to deny treatment whenever possible.
Yes, they will. Ever heard the expression 'caveat emptor'? The difference between your friendly mega-corp and the government is that nobody is forcing you to do business with the mega-corp. The mega-corp can't come and take your money at gunpoint. You have to decide to do business with them.
Let's at least pretend to have an honest discussion.
You simply cannot get by without insurance, and in many cases, your only choice is to take whatever plan your employer has, because you are subject to far more strict acceptance requirements if you try to get an individual plan. Most people do not have the choice to take their business elsewhere.
Yes, they will. Ever heard the expression 'caveat emptor'? The difference between your friendly mega-corp and the government is that nobody is forcing you to do business with the mega-corp. The mega-corp can't come and take your money at gunpoint. You have to decide to do business with them.
Technically this is true, however, since the alternative to not doing business with health care companies is a likely early death. You are in a way forced to do business with them, if you want to stay alive.
Just the other day I saw a rich person going all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire. When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell.
Haha! That was you? It's a small world after all!
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
I'd be interested to know how you can 'de-fund' a soup kitchen the majority of the ones I've seen are run by private charities and not the government.
This is such a hilarious statement that it's not even funny, of course all the soup kitchens are run on private donations and funds. Because that's the only way they CAN run, the government is not interested in helping soup kitchens they have allocated no funds towards supporting them therefore if you want to help out the poor you have to do it privately. Therefore what are all soup kitchens? They're all underfunded and have no way to even come close to meeting the demand.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
I notice the nanny lovers at /. modded me down. That is funnier than shit. Mod away baby,yeah!
That does NOT change the fact that if a total stranger calls me on the phone and says "I iz dah prezidentz of USA. Go strip nekkid and play in deh traffix!" and I do it? Then I am a stupid moron who doesn't deserve to live!
Do you REALLY want a nanny government, is that what the users here at /. really want? Just look at the stink over the suicide girl on Myspace. yes, that woman was a total douchebag. But hey, since being a douche isn't illegal, we'll just screw the law until we get her, yeah! Either you have freedom, or you don't. It is just that simple. News Flash: there have been douchebags for as long as there have been people. We don't make douchebaggery illegal for the SAME reason that the whole suicide girl thing was bullshit-because to do so we would have to make laws that could be abused so badly free speech would be thrown in a fire.
We are already seeing enough nanny government bullshit as it is, do you really want more? Just look at what they have done to the smokers, now they are planning to do the same to "teh fattys". Do you enjoy a cola? Or a donuts? Then pay up, because nanny government says you are duh stupidz and can't be trusted to feed yourself without their help. Freedom includes the freedom to do stupid things and the ONLY way to remove stupidity is to remove freedom. Hey, there are too many morons falling for 419 scams! We can fix it! We can just have mommy government approve all your large expenses! isn't that great?
See the problem? and what if I say "I hate stupid people. I wish they would play in traffic" am I to be charged if some moron does that tomorrow? Of course we'll have to keep logs of every post on every site, so we can catch these evil criminals like me who tell someone stupid to play with matches. See how that slippery slope works? You can NOT protect people from their own stupidity. Every attempt at making something idiot proof has just shown idiots can be even stupider than you imagined. Do you really want a mommy government to protect people that are SO stupid they follow any directions a stranger on a phone gives them? Is that really what we have become? I'm glad my grandfather that fought for freedom in WW2 is no longer with us. You could probably power the entire southern region with the revolutions he is turning in his grave.
When it's fairly obvious that the person is giving their sincere opinion or position on a subject, I agree that it's childish and pointless to mod them down by pretending like they are trolling. That kind of practice is a detriment to everything that is enjoyable about this Web site. If I wanted a sanitized, politically correct, never-offend-anyone, 'G'-rated sort of experience I would go to a mainstream news site. I am here instead because of how profoundly unsatisfying and unchallenging that would be. I don't think the more knee-jerk moderators realize the truth of this, or that they have even taken a moment to think about what they are doing and why.
Otherwise what you say is quite true. Many people are just a shadow of the kind of person that they could be, and should be, and so they want to be taken care of. They want to be saved from every last little bad thing that might possibly arise as the result of their poor decision-making. Those people think they want a nanny state because they have no idea how dangerous or how dehumanizing it really is. Others, particularly here on Slashdot, are not like this. Instead, they seem to think that you can have a large, powerful government that will use force to protect other people from themselves without losing the freedoms and civil liberties that they enjoy. It seems to come from some misguided idea of compassion, that treating people as livestock and micromanaging their lives is better than allowing those people to experience the results of their decisions. Of course that is false, and it only s
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Woah, internet tough guy invoking the lawyers!
*shudder*
What is this "economic distribution" that "they" are "supporting"? Those who say stuff like that presuppose that there are people somewhere who arbitrarily assign and dole out wealth to others, and how, if we just had the "right people" (such as yourself) in charge of it all, we would have a utopia.
Now this Malik guy is an internet celebrity, which is exactly what the article states is his desire. All of his actions have suddenly been validated, because hey, he's an internet star. Visits to prankster.com (or whatever, I don't know) probably just went through the roof, generating some ad revenue for him to pay for another full body massage at the corner-shop. Hundreds of jackass 15 year old imitators are already foaming at the mouth to copy these douchebags. While the article was hilarious in pointing out the creepy people behind prankster, they did them a huge favor by introducing them to the rest of the world.
I really don't like this argument that if you financially penalize a corporation they'll just pass the cost to their consumers. If a corp is selling service, for example, at $45 per month, and they get a $900-billion slap from the EU, and they increase costs to $60 per month, why weren't they selling service for $60/month earlier?. Corporations don't set a profit goal and toe that line exactly, they charge what will get them the most profit. A penalty is a sunk cost, and is completely irrelevant when making future profit optimization analyses.
Well, the Government is taking 6.2% of my money for social "security", which will be bankrupt by the time I reach retirement age
Actually, this is only if nothing gets done. There are a several ways social security can be fixed, it's just a matter of congress getting together and actually fixing it. Among the options are, increasing the starting age of payout (since the average life expectancy has increased significantly since social security started), increasing the maximum possible contribution slightly, slightly decrease payments to retirees, or slightly increase the percentage everyone pays in. We can reasonably predict how much money is needed, and how much money will be going into it. It won't take much to fix it. Normally I would say there is no reason to believe the government wouldn't fix it, but it seems our government is more interested in copying systems which have lost favor in other countries than it is in actually solving problems.
Also, you can complain that you might not get as much back as you put it, but frankly, we are going to be paying for old people either way, we aren't going to push them out on the street to die. It's a tax to help people out who didn't quite make it in life.
Qxe4
Although the corporations may pass some of the tax along to the consumers, they often won't be able to pass all of it on.
In which case the tax is still coming out of the pockets of the individual, because now the corporation isn't passing along as much profit via dividends and investments into the labor market. But go ahead and tax corporations some sure. I guess 10% unemployment isn't high enough for ya. Wanna shoot for 15%?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I really hope you validated this. Wouldn't want some old man getting hundreds of angry phone calls.
If the government puts a huge tax on something like sugar, corporations which make sugar will need to "eat" some of the tax.
...and then many of them will go out of business, which shifts the supply curve left/up, which increases the market price.
If you read the story (boy is it long).
The moment the issues were traced to a foreign location the investigation halted due to jurisdiction.
Now, enough damage will warrant more attention and eventually authorities will deal with international issues.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Technically this is true, however, since the alternative to not doing business with health care companies is a likely early death. You are in a way forced to do business with them, if you want to stay alive.
It's technically also true that you need to do business with the food companies to stay alive. Maybe the Government should take over the agriculture industry as well?
Oh wait, through corporate welfare and lobbying interests (tax breaks, money into boondoggles like ethanol, a need to appease Iowa to win Presidential primaries, etc, etc) it already has. Hmm, I wonder what the result is? Surely a balanced and well managed system that's working for the greater good, right? I bet if you had left it up to the free market we could have wound up with something that runs on fast food and high fructose corn syrup and which has resulted in 30% of Americans being obese.
You'll forgive my skepticism that the Government is going to improve the health care system.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Right. Such paranoid radio elite as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council director Lawrence H. Summers.
On NBC, a network known for being extremely far-right and hostile to President Obama's agenda. I must admit that a chill went up my leg when I heard them talking about raising taxes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I did in fact read tfa. But do the reporters have investigative tools (or the right to use them in Canada) not available to law enforcement in the US? I'm not familiar with Canadian law so I truly do not know.
"I'm not upper class. Currently lower, probably."
However the OP had the foresight to say "identify with" and not just assume you were rich. In arguments like this the rich don't even need to hurl the class warfare accusations, too many people anticipate their own wealth.
This reminds me of the following self-videotaped paintball drive-by attack "pranks" for which the perpetrators were rightfully given jail sentences and in some cases mandatory psychiatric treatment:
3 Teens (Anthony Skoblar, Javier Perez and Malcolm Boyd) Face Prison in Paintball Attacks committed in 1996(some of you might remember watching this on TV as it got a lot of coverage)
The Anchorage paintball attacks committed in 2001 by Charles Deane Wiseman and two juveniles whose names were not released
You understand you agreed with him and contradicted yourself, right?
They're all underfunded and have no way to even come close to meeting the demand.
Really? Show me the wasted corpses of Americans dead of starvation.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
"WTF? Yes, all rich people hate community... When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell. "
Yep, that's pretty much word for word what Margaret Thatcher said in 1987:
"And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."
Set the soup kitchens on fire? Hardly, dahling. Far too much effort. So much cheaper to just de-fund them.
It's their own fault they're poor, you know.
"I really thought we had moved beyond this class warfare nonsense a long time ago."
Not until the rich stop making war on the poor, no, we haven't "moved beyond" the class war.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
There's a very strong norm against publishing phone numbers, addresses, etc in journalism (esp. criminal and political journalism). I readily agree with this norm -- it seems that publishing such information can invite vigilantism and generate life-long problems for the accused without the benefit of a fair trial. I would generally expect journalists to abide this norm in news reports on robbery, drug trafficking, arson, embezzlement, etc.
Never-the-less, I felt a twinge of satisfaction while reading phone numbers and street addresses in TSG's article. I wouldn't mind if these serial harassers received a series of harassing phone calls.
Then again, TSG accuses Pranknet of systematically violating the informal norms that their victims rely on; is it proper for TSG to turn around and break an informal norm of journalism?
I'd like to better understand the ethical question here. Perhaps TSG's approach is the only way to deal with Pranknet? Perhaps it's poetic justice? Has TSG made a special ethical judgement regarding Pranknet? On what basis? Does TSG habitually violate journalistic ethics? Do the participants in Pranknet deserve worse treatment than anyone else accused of crime? How would our opinion change if TSG had presented the story differently?
"You are aware that we just elected a professional class and race warrior as president, right?"
Classy *and* racy!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"And I thought everyone had realised by now that Rand was full of shit, but clearly not."
Objectivism: It's all fun and games until someone cuts open a sea cucumber.
Oh no! Mr Bubbles!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I suspect he is a member of myg0t, I wouldn't suprise if he is a neo-nazi.
New Economic Perspectives
And you know the government has not... how exactly?
Seriously, the government/law enforcement agencies aren't going to move until they have a fairly reasonable case, and even then they aren't going spread the details all over the press - they save that for the courtroom.
"Foisting class warfare stereotypes on sheeple who know no better is how leftists got into office"
No, I think you'll find it's having a hard-right President and Congress commit war crimes by launching an illegal war while crashing the economy which is what elects leftists into office.
In 2000, I was pretty much indifferent to the whole Gore vs Bush gridlock. "They're both the same," I said. "Republicans, Democrats, left and right... they all have the same policies." After all, could anyone be more meh than Clinton? Took him til 1999 to release the crypto export provisions. Invaded Yugoslavia. Slept around like a Frenchman. This Bush guy was talking about "humble" foreign policy. Okay, I thought. They're America, they might be screwing Russia over, and not removing their nukes fast enough, and still trying to control the world... but at least they're not outright stupid.
And then I watched in horror how much, much worse it could get - what happens when you have a Republican rather than Democratic president who "responds" in a lather of panic and pride to a fairly small terrorist incident. Kabloom! United Nations? What United Nations? We'll baldly lie outright to the world if we want! We're Mericka, eff yeah! Bombs away!
A few years later your party of choice picks about the scariest pair of gun-crazy candidates you could imagine to replace Bush, and the world goes "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. comma. Uniform. Sierra. Alpha? Hotel Tango Hotel? Over? Hello? Anyone in there, Major Tom?"
And then a miracle occurs.
And that's how come you have a quiet, intelligent, soft-spoken mixed-race Democrat representing you to the world. And the world breathed a sigh of relief and muttered "wow, and here we thought you Yanks really were a bunch of fascist jerks... guess we were wrong. When you've exhausted all other options, sometimes you do make the right choice. C'mon over here and give us a big, manly trade and arms reduction deal. We know we'll hate ourselves for it in the morning... but you're just so sexy right now!"
Yeah we know Obama's just JFK and Clinton reborn. We know he's stepped down Iraq just to ramp up Afghanistan. We know he's a master of the velvet glove of American imperialism instead of the naked iron fist. (Bush naked. Either of them. Brrrrrrrrr. Bad brain.)
But, well, he's half-black. And he got elected! That's, whuh, we still can't quite stop pinching ourselves. If you guys don't realise what a massive foreign policy boost you guys get just from having him there...wow.
And domestically, so he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet. But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP? We here in NZ look at American-style healthcare as a Very Very Bad Idea which we flirted with in the 1980s-90s, and thank goodness we didn't completely go that route. It looks like hell, and we're so glad we don't have the mess you now have to fix.
You're welcome.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
If I were the motel owner and one of my guests did this, my response would NOT be, "Oh.. let's put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and find out who that mean prankster was!" It would be, "You better find a good lawyer, because my insurance company will be calling."
Well, of course that would be the reaction of the hotel owner. The hotel owner would be thinking short-term, that he/she just wants the damage fixed. But can you see how that would be a half-assed response to the problem? The minute the hotel owner got the damage repaired, the douchebag in question would just make another phone call and have the room trashed again. The bottom line is that the people staying in the rooms aren't the real problem. These scams aren't successful because people are idiots. They're successful because there's a deeply-ingrained, very human instinct to cooperate with your fellow human beings -- particularly authority figures. As social animals, it's evolutionarily advantageous for us. And the reason that it usually works is because most people aren't antisocial douchebags.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him.
I disagree. When you obey something someone says over the phone because of their supposed authority, you're exercising a kind of trust that's generally called "benefit of the doubt", meaning that you trust someone unless/until they give you a reason to believe otherwise. That trust is not necessarily contingent upon the person speaking in complete sentences (although it probably helps). The fact of the matter is, authority and intelligence are not always coexistent in the same figure. I'd also submit that the Nigerian scam emails can (and indeed should) make a person less trustful. It would be remarkable if a person could get thousands of scam e-mails a day and not look at his/her e-mail with more jaded eye. Luckily, these kinds of incidents are rare, and in the e-mail realm, people are becoming a little bit more educated as to what kinds of requests would or would not come via e-mail.
I would love for The Smoking Gun or maybe someone who lives in the area to find the unsecured wi-fi connections and help those folks secure it. I get the impression that without those connections the loser would have no internet.
"I notice the nanny lovers at /. modded me down."
Nah it was the "mouth breather's", the "nanny lover's" would have asked nanny to do it for them. BTW: I tend to agree with the "mouth breather's" since I have no idea how you can correlate a blocked sinus with intelligence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We *all* do foolish things, whether in a state of panic or during calm sensible moments. All pranknet was doing was recording how dumb we can be.
To that question, we all know the outcome.
Too bad they weren't working on how smart we can be.
But I thought that pranks want to be free!
Oops...
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
"but how much perceived threat can a caller on a phone generate to cause people to act out of fear rather than stupidity?"
Do the words "bomb threat" mean anything to you?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
authority, should never, ever, be given the benefit of the doubt just because its labeled as "authority". Such blind trust has caused so much damage throughout the history of human kind its terrifying.
read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
That's true. But part of the point of Milgram's experiment is that people do trust authority figures. Even decades after the original experiment, follow-up experiments show basically the same results. It's part of the human condition, really. No, it's not irresistable. Milgram's experiments did show that approximately one third of people wouldn't administer the fatal shock. But there are two points to consider: 1) Two thirds (or more) of the participants would inflict the fatal shock. 2) Even those who wouldn't inflict the fatal shocks were still susceptible to the order to inflict very painful shocks. It's very easy to look at these calls at a distance and call the people at the other end idiots, but I think that people are much more vulnerable to such attacks than they think.
"All western societies are based upon implicit trust."
Actually all societies are based on trust. Language would not have evolved if what was being communicated was not trustworthy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's technically also true that you need to do business with the food companies to stay alive. Maybe the Government should take over the agriculture industry as well?
Oh wait, through corporate welfare and lobbying interests (tax breaks, money into boondoggles like ethanol, a need to appease Iowa to win Presidential primaries, etc, etc) it already has. Hmm, I wonder what the result is? Surely a balanced and well managed system that's working for the greater good, right? I bet if you had left it up to the free market we could have wound up with something that runs on fast food and high fructose corn syrup and which has resulted in 30% of Americans being obese.
Farm subsidies are just a way to manage the country's resources, I do not think it would be good for America if all the farmers were going out of business and selling their farms to housing developers. Besides, the American agriculture industry is one of the best in the world, whereas the health care system in America is almost completely private and one of the least efficient in the world.
You'll forgive my skepticism that the Government is going to improve the health care system.
Health care in America is a huge problem, and since the insurance companies are profitable, they are not going to do anything to change the system. The government is obligated to protect its citizens, so it has to do something to change the system.
The problem is that most of the pranks involve convincing people there is imminent danger. Given even 30 seconds to think about it, all but the dumbest people would realize what they are being asked to do is stupid. Having to make a split second decision in what they believe is a life and death situation, and in the absence of any other information, a lot of people will tend to just do what they are told, regardless of how outrageous it sounds.
Orlando Florida recently passed a law that makes giving a homeless person food in public a crime. A lot of the city's most prominent men lobbied for it.
(The link I attach doesn't go into this last point, but the law is apparently suspended until a state court challenge is resolved - thank goodness!)
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.youtube.com/watch%253Fv%253DHsvcwQEFKAI
Who is John Cabal?
Critical to what I said was that the recipient of the prank call SHOULD PAY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT THEY DID merely because a random stranger told them to do it. What I said should be well-publicised are cases where the incompetent target who did damage was also held liable for that damage. The implication was that this should describe all such cases. THAT would make people think twice before smashing property they do not own merely because an unverifiable voice told them they should. It naturally follows that people who think twice (or even once) would be harder to successfully target with this kind of prank. That's the deterrant I mentioned.
But the problem is, that's a really bad idea. Why would you want someone to suppress their Good Samaritan instincts for fear of a lawsuit? Not only is it pointless, but it's counter-productive. The last thing anyone should want is for everyone to mind his/her own business in an emergency situation. Don't we have enough of that already?
Sorry; I was attempting to mod you insightful, but my trackpad decided to hit "Troll" instead. This reply exists only to undo my mismoderation.
I really don't like this argument that if you financially penalize a corporation they'll just pass the cost to their consumers. If a corp is selling service, for example, at $45 per month, and they get a $900-billion slap from the EU, and they increase costs to $60 per month, why weren't they selling service for $60/month earlier?.
There could be a lot of reasons why they weren't doing it earlier. The most obvious one is competition. The free market isn't just based on charging whatever you can. It's based on charging what the market will bear. In practice, that means that if your competitor is charging $45/mo., you do whatever you can to stay at or below that threshold, so that you don't lose customers. If you get smacked with a $900 billion fine, and have to raise your rate to account for it, that will lead to a loss of business. (Of course, the impact on customers is rarely that obvious. Corporations usually try to hide such increases in fees that they don't have to include in the monthly rate, so that they can advertise "only $45 per month!", even though the new fees make the price considerably higher.
Have you taken a walk outside lately? Any Dense urban centers perhaps? Maybe noticed a few people around that look like they could perhaps use a good meal?
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
but from what i understand, unless you are juvenile, if criminal charges are filed against you, its a matter of public record. and by public record, that means the public and the press have a legal right to access it
now you could wax and wane philosophical about vigilante justice and such, but i think the presumption of vigilantism all the time is just as noxious as the presumption of no vigilantism possilbe
so the real answer to your questions about making this information public is that there should be guidelines, and it should be case-by-case. not no information provided all the time, and not all information provided all the time. but the presumption of vigilantism everywhere, which seems a way you lean, is just as naive as the presumption of no vigilantism possible
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Besides, the American agriculture industry is one of the best in the world
If by 'best' you mean we've produced an industry that contributes heavily to our obesity problem and which is over-centralized thus leaving it vulnerable to both crop diseases and contamination, then yes, we are the 'best'.
Health care in America is a huge problem, and since the insurance companies are profitable
I hate to break it to you but insurance companies are not the only or even the biggest problem that our health care system faces. The insurance companies aren't the ones who set up the "pay for service" model that encourages health care inflation. The insurance companies aren't the reason that we have a shortage of GPs. The insurance companies aren't the reason why malpractice insurance rates are so high. I know it's popular for the Democrats to paint this as a "big insurance vs. everybody else" battle but there's really a lot more to it than that.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The agriculture companies can't forbid you from purchasing or using their products. An insurance company can.
I, like many, lost my job. Thankfully, I have a very marketable service and have been able to strike out on my own very successfully after having a very difficult time trying to find a "regular job". When I had insurance, I went to the doctor like I'm encouraged to do, and I was diagnosed with heart disease.
Now, I'm on my own. My insurance is gone, and I no longer qualify for insurance under the 'pre-existing condition' clauses. So, even though I'm a productive, contributing, and tax-paying member of society, I am not entitled to stay alive.
If you're so jaded as to not see how that is wrong, then I hope with all my being that you end up in my position someday.
Maybe noticed a few people around that look like they could perhaps use a good meal?
No, but I have noticed quite a few people in my non-dense suburban area who are abusing the social safety net that should be protecting the people who legitimately need help. My favorite is to see someone in line at the grocery store paying for their booze and junk food with cash while they buy all their groceries with a state issued benefits card.
I'm of the opinion that if you have enough disposable cash lying around to buy beer you probably ought not to be consuming public benefits. But I'm glad I can finance their recreational chemicals for them. "Work harder, millions of people on welfare depend on you."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The free market sees taxation as damage and routes around it.
The free market sees any sort of liability as damage, and tries to route around it (by shoving it off to someone else... usually the commons). Taxes are just one special case of that. So your sig is true, but it also explains why truly free market inevitably screws up the society that lets it loose, and why some regulation is needed to ensure optimal operation.
I'm sorry, this very serious subject makes me think only of a Cheech and Chong bit; "Listen, don't answer the phone, even if it's me calling!"
Or to put it into Slashdot terms, you can live your life trusting people either: "Order Deny, Allow" or "Order Allow, Deny". Either way is fine
I can't find the reference now, but I recall that mathematical modeling shows that "Allow,Deny" (i.e. positive rather than negative bias on first contact) is more optimal on the whole, unless the majority of others is doing it the other way around. In other words, if more than half of all people in your society give the benefit of doubt to strangers, it is slightly advantageous for you to do the same.
Or to put it into Slashdot terms, you can live your life trusting people either: "Order Deny, Allow" or "Order Allow, Deny". Either way is fine
North Americans in particular shouldn't have a problem with traffic lights going out, because you already have 4-way stops, so everyone should be familiar with the idea of slowing down and going in order. Elsewhere there's no such thing, so it's somewhat trickier, since "yield to the right" can result in a nice deadlock on a busy intersection.
That's what I learned when studied economics, too. In working life, however, I've discovered that pricing decisions are very seldom rational, and costs are indeed often passed directly on to customers, even if that doesn't make economic sense.
I think a lot of PrankNet activities involve authority figures rather than trust. People will hurt other people or in this case destroy other people's property when they are asked to by an authority. I believe it the Milgram experiment. In none of the cases, were the callers ever faced with the possibility that doing something that was asked would cause them personal injury or loss. They were presented with the situation when not doing something would be bad but doing whatever was asked would not result in any personal loss. The choice was easy.
The CraigsList scams are just versions of Crank Yankers with racist and sexual insults. They are stuff you see on movies in Borat, TV on Crank Yankers etc.
What I'm most uncomfortable is the absolute lack of respect of empathy shown towards the victims. Milgram would never be able to do his experiment in the modern times since the subjects suffered after the experiment. I'm sure a lot of the victims are suffering from post-traumatic stress. I remember a story in MSU (Michigan state) during the Anthrax scares when some employees at an office called the firefighters when they saw a white powder in the garbage bin plastic (it was lubrication powder). The firefighters asked the women to completely undress and hosed them, bleached them etc. After the incident, a lot of the women were psychologically traumatized - some quit their jobs, some are afraid of bleach and the sound of firefighters. They followed everything the firefighters asked them to because the firefighters acted as authority figures. At any time, they could have refused to undress but they all complied against their judgment. Post traumatic stress can be very damaging and only by calling them inferior human beings, were PrankNet members able to rationalize what they were doing.
Property is insured, damage to mental health isn't so easy to undo. You're not talking whoopie cushions here, this kind of very public humiliation can stick for a long long time.
Hey, I like Obama, but if...
...Obama's just JFK and Clinton reborn.
...then the tabloids are going to have a field-day. What's Ken Starr doing these days?
he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet.
It's not just dumb, but accord to William K. Black, it's illegal and wrong: just watch or read.
But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP?
I fear like the previous attempt in 1993 this one will fail and the US will still be saddled with its current mess.
Lots of people use the "personal responsiblity" defence for these kinds of pranks. Unfortunately, your brain is hard wired practically from birth to listen to authority.
Want to know the best way to mug someone? Just ask for their wallet. Con artists have relied on the fact that all it takes to rip off most people is the confidence to pull off the scams.
Actually, a rather large percentage of people probably would do it.
Lovely thing about people - most of us will obey perceived authority. The Milgram experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) showed that most of us would quite likely kill, or at least harm, an innocent person if a perceived authority figure pushed us to do it in the right way.
Comparatively speaking, getting you to break a window is simple.
Yes, all rich people hate community.
Learn to read. Learn to do simple boolean logic. Learn some set theory. Maybe then you can figure out that "rich and unethical people" is not equal to "all rich people".
Frankly? If you're stupid enough to do what a person on the phone tells you without first verifying that the caller IS in the authority position he claims to be, well, you just learned a valuable, albeit expensive, lesson...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd be interested to know how you can 'de-fund' a soup kitchen the majority of the ones I've seen are run by private charities and not the government.
By making sure those private charities have their funds dry up? It's a myth that the majority of charity donations comes from the rich. Yes, they make substantial donations, they get parks and hospital wings named after them, but the real money comes from middle class citizens.
If they can't donate, you pretty much drain those soup kitchens and other social services of their money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Penalizing a single company will not be passed on. Penalizing an industry will. Because everyone has to.
When you slap a single company with a fine, they have to swallow it. They can't just jack up the prices because then their competitor takes over, being cheaper. When you slap a tax on a product, the price of the product will rise (provided there is no substitute for it, and ignoring some other effects that might take place) because everyone will have to do it to stay in business.
That's why cartels are usually disallowed, so alleged competitors can't simply agree to set an arbitrary high price, knowing that everyone has to pay it because they can't do without the product and there is no alternative.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's basically the US from the outside.
Bush jr. was maybe the worst thing that ever happened to the US international image. He was loud, he was crude, he was as charismatic as a 60s staircase. This wasn't the Uncle Sam we learned to like so much. Sure, Unkie Sam was often a fairly tough guy, but you always had the feeling that he likes you. More the big protector than the belt-wielding "do what I say or bend over" uncle you had to spend your vacation at. And then Bush comes along and is just that: Someone kicked my nuts so now I'll lash out, take cover if you don't want to be hit. It was like rednecks taking over the rule of the country, and we were honestly a little scared. It wasn't easy to like that Uncle. People were really considering the alternatives, but they were even worse, the other Uncle you could run to had that long beard, spoke gibberish and smelled funny. Because the other Uncle, ya know, the funny drunk with that poofy hat, he kinda slept. Or died. Or something.
So the world looked at the US and Bush and what to come after. And we collectively groaned when we saw the Dem primaries. Two candidates without a chance. One not man enough, the other one not white enough, that's what we thought. Not in America. They're gonna elect that half-dead wreck and his churchy sidekick who is first of all even stupider and less educated than Bush was (yeah, we kinda like our politicians intelligent and informed) and second, she'll take over in a year or two after the old man croaked.
And then the miracle happened. The US elected that black man. That guy who was witty (ok, telepromtwitty, but still), who knew how to speak what we like to hear, who promised a lot of good things and who was a lot more charismatic than anything we were used to before. He was the Uncle we liked! Ok, he looked funny, but hey, who cares? I mean, compared to Bush... anyway. He's jovial, he sounds believable when he tries to talk about the burden of the 'common man', he comes across as someone who knows his stuff (again, being able to read those teleprompters surely helps there a lot), and he has a bit of that Kennedy air that we love so much, and that we didn't see since Clinton went away. Oh, we sure liked Clinton. We prefer prezzes that get blowjobs to ones that need one direly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"And domestically, so he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet. But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP? We here in NZ look at American-style healthcare as a Very Very Bad Idea which we flirted with in the 1980s-90s, and thank goodness we didn't completely go that route. It looks like hell, and we're so glad we don't have the mess you now have to fix."
He flushed an amount fairly close to our yearly GNP down the bankster hole and specifically banksters he had connections with. If we count the type of fraud these Prankster people did as criminal, then what Obama has done (following what Bush started, building on the foundation laid by Clinton...) has to count fairly high on the felony scale.
But the biggest thing is that you misunderstand something critical about American politics and why many of us strongly resist "reform". Reform here means changing the rules so that your cronies will profit instead of someone else's cronies. It has been that way since at least the '60s, probably longer and is largely true of both major parties. Health care "reform" means booting the folks who currently have control of healthcare out and putting your people in all the while leaving the actual *citizens* with less power. Each change of regime results in the pendulum swinging further into insanity with each administration trying to top the criminal aspirations of the previous. That is how they now get away with the House passing a 1000+ page bill that no one had read because it hadn't even been completed at the time of the vote ("Cap and Trade"). The memos and briefs coming out of the Obama Justice Department read word for word similar to those from Bush's with statements about how indefinite detention without charge (or even cause) is fine, the accused have no rights because of the severity of the accusation, and we don't really need to tell anyone, even a judge, who we are wiretapping or having followed. Obama's defense budget still has more money in cost overruns and blatant pay-offs (to mostly the same people as usual) than the GDPs of many countries. So it is not really a matter of what the subject of the bill is these days but rather that it is prudent to not let ANYTHING pass right now [at the Federal level] because we cannot control the time bombs they are writing into them until we get firmer legislation at the State level to protect ourselves from Federal overreach, stupidity, and corruption. I would rather have Ghengis Khan in control of my health options at the moment than a Congressional-appointed committee.
It is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing. I believe Democrats to be wrong about the best way to run the country, but I believe most of them are on the level. I, myself, am a Republican because I look back to ideals the party was actually founded to promote... like personal responsibility, personal charity, and freedom. But the core ideals are not promoted by the top levels of *either* party and grass roots efforts to actually change something are quickly co-opted by monied interests, pork, riders, and 'oversights' in the legislation until they do much more damage than if the problems had been left alone. There is a deep racket here where the 'leadership' treats the citizens exactly like those Pranksters, as if they are useless sheep who can be paid off in bright baubles and trinkets to look the other way... and cheating them isn't really immoral. That attitude infects the citizenry just the same, who try to emulate their 'betters' by making their own racket and trying to get a piece of the pie... and cheating The System isn't really immoral... so in a way, the attitude of the leadership ends up being accurate. That's how we end up with people in charge of liberal policies and promote using our tax money to "help others" who have not paid their own taxes in many years and people do not really find it odd.
Health care 'reform,' if it passes will do no better than utility 'reform' or the many Defense-Industrial budg
Wait, I thought Palin was candidate for vice-president only, and that she lost.
She might not have lost had there been a guarantee that she would stay "vice-president only" .
The same kind of person who arranges a press conference for national television to apologize to the guy who shot him for all the pain and anguish he and his family suffered in those trying times?
"I'm so terribly sorry that you were too blind and drunk off your ass to not see the difference between a guy wearing an orange vest and a quail, and we hope for the sake of his family, friends, coworkers as well as all of society that he will get his eyes fixed, and that right soon!"
Are you genuinely surprised that there are stupid people in the world?
No, but I don't think they should be in positions where they can affect my safety.
Or that stupid people would work menial jobs?
I don't consider hotel staff to be "menial".
If your feeling of security requires normal people losing what little trust in others they still have
People shouldn't trust anonymous phone callers, period.
or stupid people being tricked into killing themselves
Killing themselves?? Where did anybody kill themselves?
I think the people who fell for these pranks should lose their jobs because they are a threat to their customers.
I'm sure that there is no area in your life that you would fall for one of these intricate scams.
This story isn't about "areas of one's life" or "intricate scams", it's about people peeing on each other and vandalizing their hotel rooms in response to a prank call.
What do you really expect from low level near minimum wage service personnel? No one wants these jobs so only the desperate take them. Would you want to answer the phone to complaints at a hotel at 3am?
Hotel and restaurant staff isn't supposed to be "near minimum wage". Hotel staff is supposed to be professionally trained because dealing with irate customers at 3am and sorting out prank phone calls from real emergencies in a way that makes customers want to come back is actually tough work.
There are a lot of smart and clever people, and guess what, they're smart enough to not get stuck as front line service personnel.
It can be a good job if it's at a well run hotel and for decent pay.
Why would you recoup social security? It's a contribution you make to help other people in society who are not as well off as you -- apparently you have even a job! The only way you should recoup it is if you lose that, or in some other way get into a really bad place. Maybe you don't like being forced to help other people, that's fair, and you've got all kinds of ways to fight against it, as indeed market liberals have very effectively been doing forever in your fine country.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Are you kidding? So far the majority of stories involving someone acting like a sociopathic prick online, have attracted a number of wannabe sociopathic pricks that lionized the perp on one or more of the following grounds:
- muahahaha, now we're the ones with the power. Phear us! Payback time for the former school bully... and the cheerleader who didn't want to be my GF... and the jock who got her as a GF... and that geography teacher who got me bored to death... (Basically as if having been a victim once is all the reason and rationalization needed for victimizing others in turn. Newsflash: if anyone wasn't a bully just because they lacked the power and/or balls, but turns into one as soon as they can, they never had a moral high ground to start with.)
- OMG, if they were too stupid to defend themselves, they deserved it. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- more generally, if it's high tech and not everyone can do it, then it's right to do it if you can. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- It's just bits and bytes, and information wants to be free!! (Especially when said information is someone else's credit card number;))
- if it slips through some loophole of an existing law, despite being blatantly against its spirit, then it's morally right. The proposed new amendment against it is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
- if it's already illegal, that law is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
Etc.
In fact, my best guess is that now the majority opinion is against it only because it was _social_ engineering, and we don't relate that well to that. It involves talking to people and... eew ;) If it were about slipping someone a trojan to terrorize them via their computer, you'd see 200+ posts just defending the perp and blaming the victims.
So maybe it is stuff that matters. Reminding more wannabe sociopaths that doing it over the internet is no shield, is a good thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And why was I seemingly born 20yrs to soon for these sort of LULZ!?
This sounds like a destructive version of shoutcast streams I used to listen in on at #prankradio on efnet. That was about 10 years ago, though.
/getoffmylawn
Is it related to "Tit for tat"?
Well, I dunno about at home or at a hotel, but from my experience with corporations, a lot of people seem to intentionally shut off their brains at work. If you just apply the rules, no matter how dumb, usually the worst that can happen is that you're skipped for promotion. If you do something original, you're to blame if it goes wrong. And often you're to blame if it goes right and makes the PHB who ordered otherwise look bad. Plus, if you think too much about all the stupid decisions and rules and stuff, you (A) end up very unhappy, and (B) you might pipe up and be seen as the malcontent who rocks the boat.
There's a whole class of managers whose whole job is to avoid taking any decision, and not rock the boat until pension. You know, the kind that'll count the pixels and complain that the kerning of "lore ipsum" on the site viewed in IE is different from the concept art done in Photoshop, just because that's just about the only thing they can do without showing any personal initiative or get into technical details that would require a personal decision. Or the kind who'll ship an extra manual for a printer in a box the size of the whole printer, just because some rule said "use box type 14 for that printer model." Etc.
Honestly, in some places I've seen, if a phone call came from the management requiring one to break the windows or destroy a monitor or whatnot... it wouldn't even be too far off from the normal idiocy coming from above.
I mean, think about it. I've been in an "urgent" project in December before, which got promptly cancelled on the 2nd of January, just because a department had some money to burn at the end of the year and they'd get their budget for next year cut if they didn't burn the last cent of it. So they deliberately blew their remaining budget on something they knew in advance that they don't need or want. Planned waste. Or there have been places where after a mild winter, people have been instructed to leave the heating and lights on overnight, because if they don't use their heating budget in full this year, you guessed, they'll get said budget cut next year when there might be a real winter. Etc.
If you were one of the people working in one of those places, and had just spent the spring turning heating _up_ when you leave and turning it back off in the morning, just because your department needs to waste some money... would you be particularly inclined to think twice, if someone called and asked that you break a window so they can use that bit of budget? Heck, would you be inclined to think twice about any other stupidity? Or, like everyone else, would you back up into a more comfortable, "not my business to worry about that kind of thing" attitude?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
someone with the handle "adult film producer" is the last person you want to be talking about this subject matter with
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Penalizing a single company will not be passed on. Penalizing an industry will. Because everyone has to.
When you slap a single company with a fine, they have to swallow it. They can't just jack up the prices because then their competitor takes over, being cheaper.
When you slap a company with a fine, who do you think ends up paying that fine -- the Good Fine Fairy? Any and every business cost is paid by the customer. All the companies do is find artful ways to conceal it.
Consider that in many cases, the pranksters exploited the natural deference to authority, assuming the identity of a trusted source (police, fire department, and so on). By claiming an emergency situation, the pranksters further short-circuited normal behaviour. It's abuse of a social structure, really; all designed to prevent critical thinking and lowering the chance of the victim to recognise the scam and pull out.
It's already been mentioned here on Slashdot that people are highly susceptible to using certainty to judge how valid an argument is: if a flat earther were to hammer with his argument repeatedly against a scientist who lacked self-confidence, then the chances of the flat-Earther are actually pretty good. It's hard wired into us, and even we geeks have to work hard on questioning authority in our heads.
Exploiting people's greed and uglier sides may be funny, exploiting people's trust and naivite is just your usual scummy criminal at work.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
US law enforcement can do less than a US tourist in Canada. Well at least if they want to keep their job and not end up with all their evidence thrown out.
Here is the wikipedia link. Based on the information there, it does sound like the judge went too easy on her. There were two witnesses and a security camera that say the female Korean store owner was not in danger when she shot the girl.
The agriculture companies can't forbid you from purchasing or using their products. An insurance company can.
Any body can refuse to do business with you. The agriculture company would just have a harder time of it because they sell their product through a large number of channels and have little control over what those channels do with it.
Now, I'm on my own. My insurance is gone, and I no longer qualify for insurance under the 'pre-existing condition' clauses.
So why does it follow that we need the government to take over the health care system? Nobody on the left side of the political spectrum seems content to strengthen insurance regulations to prohibit this type of behavior -- they are hell bent on passing a 'public plan' that will eventually drive the insurance companies from the market entirely and leave us all at the mercy of the government.
I am not entitled to stay alive.
That's hyperbole and you know it. The worst that would happen to you is that you'd wind up filing bankruptcy. I've been through bankruptcy and let me assure you it's better than dying.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Oh, well that TOTALLY justifies the random assault on and murder of innocent bystanders, wanton destruction of property, and terrorizing of an entire city.
Kudos to TSG, this article is quite remarkable. Talk about in depth reporting. And all the details they uncovered, they've had to have had some very dedicated folks rooting out this sort of stuff... and here I thought true reporting was no longer a reality... Well done!
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Your sunk cost argument is compelling, but sunk costs is a decision concept, not a pricing one. Fixed costs are also sunk, for example. We build a multi-billion dollar processor fab, now we're going to produce CPUs. That fab is a sunk cost. You can't get it back. If you don't include it in your pricing analysis, you'll quite rapidly be out of business.
You're certainly right that a business will charge the price that maximizes profit. When your costs increase, that profit maximizing price changes. If your product cost was $31 before and the fine bumped it to $46, you're losing money selling at $45. Will you make money (or lose less) selling at $60? It depends on the demand curve. Maybe. For price-inelastic goods, yes, you'll make more. Why weren't you charging $60 before? Maybe at a price point of $55, it becomes attractive for smaller players to get into the market and you wanted to avoid that while you could. Now you can't, unless you choose to lose money. A company's marketing strategy is a lot more than cost and profit maximizing price.
Here is the crux of the situation- it's not illegal to be stupid, in fact you can willingly forego any notion of higher education if you wanted to. Sorry, but as a person in the world, you need to deal with this. What IS illegal, is if you take advantage of them to perform illegal acts. It's the same situation if you 'tricked them' into shooting someone. The person who GIVES orders is just as responsible, or even more responsible, then the one who follows them.
if social security actually did go bankrupt we would be pretty screwed as a country. It isn't going to, no matter what irrational BS you have heard.
Social security is an unfunded obligation of the government, which means that the program is essentially a ponzi scheme.
The problem with a ponzi scheme is that it requires an certain ratio between those paying in and those collecting be maintained. It needs an income that literally grows exponentially. Now the babyboomers are retiring and they weren't known for having large families (I.e., they don't have lots of working children and grandchildren paying in to support their benefits). And as we learned last year, just because something is big doesn't mean it can't fail.
We will find a way to make it work.
The unfunded obligation as of 2008, was $13.6 trillion, larger than the entire Federal debt after the bailouts and stimuli ($11.7 T). To put that in perspective, the unfunded social security obligation per person is roughly $44,000. Note that this includes citizens who are already retired, and thus not actually paying in. Yeah we could figure it out for a while--we can treat the Federal government like a limitless resource that can bail anything out--but remember that everything the government has it takes, in one way or another, from it citizens (usually by coercion). I for one do not want to be coerced into balancing the budget of a failed ponzi scheme.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Come to the UK and experience the NHS - then you'll fight to the death against public healthcare.
I pay a substantial amount of tax - if I recieved a refund of the amount used to fund the NHS, I could afford very good health insurance. But instead, the government takes my money and pisses it away.
An example:
I recently moved home and have to register at a new doctors. NHS doctors only accept patients that live within a certain geographic areas, so I have no choice which doctor I register with - and you have to be registered to get anything other than a emergency appointment. When I tried to register, they tell me that I need to fill in a form and make an appointment to see a nurse who will process my registration.
Then they tell me that such appointments are only available Wednesday and Thursday between 2pm and 3pm. If the taxes of all people who were at work on Wednesday and Thursday between 2pm and 3pm disappeared, these people would suddenly be unemployed.
Stay away from state healthcare.
We aren't talking about a penalties applied to individual companies - we're talking about a tax paid by all companies. In your example, the reason they weren't charging $60 a month before was that their competition was charging less for the same service. A new tax will drive up the cost for all companies, so custoemrs won't be able to shop around.
Health care in America is a huge problem, and since the insurance companies are profitable
I hate to break it to you but insurance companies are not the only or even the biggest problem that our health care system faces. The insurance companies aren't the ones who set up the "pay for service" model that encourages health care inflation. The insurance companies aren't the reason that we have a shortage of GPs. The insurance companies aren't the reason why malpractice insurance rates are so high. I know it's popular for the Democrats to paint this as a "big insurance vs. everybody else" battle but there's really a lot more to it than that.
You cut off my quote in mid-sentence, and I think you missed my point. It sounds like we agree that the health care system is a problem. However, since the health care companies are profitable, they have no incentive to try and fix the system. This means the government has no choice but to step in and do something.
authority, should never, ever, be given the benefit of the doubt
Actually it should get the "benefit of a doubt" most of the time. A simple car analogy can prove that: When I'm, driving in my car i usually trust the maps I have, I also trust the the sign that says that the road ahead is blocked and I should take a detour. The only reason for this trust is the fallacy "proof by authority". But it works far better than never ever trusting my map.
You usually should have a reason for not trusting authority. Otherwise you are not able to function in today's society
It's from various game theoretical studies of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemna, which show that "Tit for Tat" is the optimal algorithm in most setups i.e. nice by default, then copy what your opponent did in the last turn.
http://www.iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net/
If they were lucky they'd just be Shanghai'd, if they were unlucky they would be lynched and if they really pissed a community off they'd be tarred and feathered.
That's a great idea. Let's burn them a the stake. Worked great last time.
The first rule about Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions!
I suspect that you're entirely right. There's nothing shameful about believing lies that are being fed to you in an emergency situation.
Actually.... It would appear there is.
I can't wait to read the stories about these peoples houses being burned down in pranks, that will be funny.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Certainly it has to come out of the company's revenue, thus effectively it's paid for by the customers. So far, so right. But he cannot simply increase prices to cover the fine, or customers will take their business elsewhere, to companies that don't have to factor in the cost for a fee or fine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the government puts a huge tax on something like sugar, corporations which make sugar will need to "eat" some of the tax.
...and then many of them will go out of business, which shifts the supply curve left/up, which increases the market price.
This. If you need another reason than 'it makes logically', consider these:
A) People operating sugar companies have fewer barriers to entry for abandoning a market and 'reinventing' themselves than the average person would.
B) Capitalist societies (and humans in general) operate out of a 'gain' motive. If the huge taxes are too great a strain, no one will be interested in participating in the system. No will require them to sell sugar, and eventually the government will probably wind up subsidizing it. Perhaps agriculture is a bad example, but when a good's profit potential dives too much, many of the growers jump ship overnight. Look at hogs in the last few decades for a specific example.
C) Sugar-selling companies are nearly all held by multi-national, diversified conglomerates. While this doesn't lend to them going out of business, this could well see them opt out by shutting down divisions. 'No more sugar sales in the US, the taxes are too high. Sell it to China instead. Transfer the best US employees to the substitute division, and fire the rest.'
Rich people like being rich, which is a huge part of why they are presently rich. Arbitrarily applying a tax isn't going to change much of anything. 'damage, route around it' - indeed.
You're assuming one company, in which case it hurts. If you're talking about an entire industry (ie taxes) you've just universally jacked up the cost of doing business. They can all charge $60/mo instead of $40, remain competitive in their market, maintain their profit margins and in the end the "little guy" eats it.
Taxes suck.
It's peculiar how your comment history oscillates between "X, Funny" and "-1 Troll".
You know the feeling when you hate something that no one else seems to hate? Next time your anger issues threaten to surface, why not use one of those, instead of one of your standard expletives?
Viz:
Hey, Buffy, "stupid" is relative, and criminals are criminals.
That way, you'll still feel the sweet satisfaction of handing one out while people won't be so distracted by the verbal abuse because they actually like or are at least ambivalent to your address. This, in turn, will lead to them not modding you Troll so much, which will make you feel more loved which, again, might help you with your anger issues and make you want to use your standard expletives less. This is what we in the know call a "virtuous circle". Try it.
Uh, wait—
assfuck
Did you try to do this already?
If somebody burst into your home at night claiming to be police, would you be a "dumb dimwit" and believe them, or maintain your cocksure skepticism and wind up like this woman?
From my point of view, she did exactly the right thing. She died a hero, of sorts, by exercising her right to defend her home from attackers using a firearm.
If she hadn't responded in the way she did, she would be alive. But she may well be living in a worse version of America than we are.
In short, sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed. That's called 'courage', and we tend to revere it.
No, I think you'll find it's having a hard-right President and Congress commit war crimes by launching an illegal war while crashing the economy which is what elects leftists into office.
You give people too much credit. Nobody here gave a damn about "an illegal war" during the presidential election. What they didn't like was the state of the war and that banks were foreclosing on their homes. People on both sides deserve to take bullets for that.
And then I watched in horror how much, much worse it could get - what happens when you have a Republican rather than Democratic president who "responds" in a lather of panic and pride to a fairly small terrorist incident.
You're fucking kidding, right? "Fairly small terrorist incident"? What, pray tell, do you consider a serious terrorist attack in backwater NZ, tough guy?
But, well, he's half-black. And he got elected! That's, whuh, we still can't quite stop pinching ourselves. If you guys don't realise what a massive foreign policy boost you guys get just from having him there...wow.
That's just stupid. The foreign policy boost is because he's half-black? How shallow and superficial is the world community? It couldn't have been because he's more eloquent and careful? Bullshit. Stop speaking for the rest of the world.
Your whole post stinks of typical, thoughtless US bashing. A common thing here, but it usually has to be more rational to snag mod points.
The commons? Do you mean the consumer? When a business is taxed, it is forced to pass that additional expense on to its customers in the form of price increases. Higher prices make that business less competitive and therefore damaged.
All taxes are ultimately imposed upon the individual, some just inflict collateral damage as they pass by.
My post was about the inherent corruption of authoritarian governments. Discussion of my signature is off-topic at best.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
She wasn't being robbed.
Since I've not seen anyone else point it out yet, I just thought I'd point out that the 'pranksters' are simply exercising Foot-in-the-door technique. They probably aren't, necessarily always, stupid people that get duped by these situations. The actions they are being instructed to conduct are all reasonable - in relation to the one they just finished completing. The 'big picture' isn't as readily available as you might thing.
I hesitate to point this out, because it could empower other 'pranksters', but the formula is basically:
A) Get them to do something innocuous
B) Get them to do something logical
C) Get them to do something slightly/somewhat less logical
D) Continue escalating requests until something breaks
The 'humor' is often found at the ridiculousness of 'D)'.
Look at the hotel scenarios:
A) Get them out of bed thinking there is an emergency
B) Get them to line the underside of the doors, etc
C) Get them to 'open' a window, by force if necessary
D) Get them to break the TV (since force was already used on the window)
No one calls them up and goes straight to 'D)', and THAT alone is why it works.
The best defense against this would be to keep 'A)' in mind at all times. The leap from 'A)' to the end should also make sense without the intermediary steps...
All taxes are ultimately imposed upon the individual
Of course, but it is imposed on various categories of individuals. The notion that a company taxed higher will just raise prices while keeping the profit margin and high exec salaries is extremely naive.
My post was about the inherent corruption of authoritarian governments.
And my point was about the inherent transition of anarchical societies to authoritarian governments.
Discussion of my signature is off-topic at best.
You must be new here. On Slashdot, the only thing that's offtopic is that which is modded as such. Flamebaiting sigs like yours (or mine) have always been considered a valid discussion subject - after all, why else put it there for everyone to see?
Certainly it has to come out of the company's revenue, thus effectively it's paid for by the customers. So far, so right. But he cannot simply increase prices to cover the fine, or customers will take their business elsewhere, to companies that don't have to factor in the cost for a fee or fine.
Granted, if the fine is small enough, the comapny will simply absorb it as the cost of doing business and take a hit for that quarter on their balance sheet. But a substantial fine (and I think we can both agree that the hypothetical fine mentioned was substantial) is going to be absorbed by the customers in one way or another, or else the company will fold. We can argue, of course, about what the limits are on a "substantial" fine, but for a fine to be punative (which would be the point of imposing one) it has to be big enough to hurt the company somehow, and if it's big enough to hurt the company, then the company is going to have to defray that cost.
Frankly? If you're stupid enough to do what a person on the phone tells you without first verifying that the caller IS in the authority position he claims to be, well, you just learned a valuable, albeit expensive, lesson...
Do people need to do more verification, when possible? Of course. That sort of goes without saying. I used to work in an environment where we would get calls all the time from people seeking information about the company. The people asking the questions were always (to my recollection) well-mannered and outgoing, but that didn't change the fact that we weren't supposed to say anything to them. Whatever they asked, we were supposed to redirect them to the public relations department (although I think if it was concerning a specific employee, we were supposed to direct them to HR). But I'd make two points about this: 1) These were non-critical situations, in which no one's life or property was directly at stake. I don't know what would happen if someone called and said something to the tune of, "I planted a bomb in the building. You must evacuate now!" 2) Even the response of sending a query to Public Relations or HR is a learned, authority-based response. The worker in question isn't making an independent judgement that it would be better to send such a request to a certain channel. If they did, the decision might go another way (which is the point of having a procedure). To sum it up: Verification isn't part of most people's jobs. Their only task is to kick it up to whomever is responsible for the decision. When you're dealing with an organization such as a fast food joint, anyone at that level is probably half a dozen levels and several thousand miles away from where the incident is taking place.
Where did I say they should get a walk? Show me anywhere in my post where I said that the prankers that break the law should go unpunished. What i said is I don't want any more nanny government crap passing even worse laws to make sure that douchbagggery like this is illegal, ala the Myspace suicide girl. Because as it is I don't see what exactly you are gonna bust these douchbags for exactly.
As I said if I call someone on the phone and say "I iz dah prezident Osama. Go play in deh traffix!" what exactly would you bust me for? I did NOT say I was Obama, I didn't say what I was prezident of, so what is the crime? You MIGHT be able to catch these douchbags for impersonation, maybe. But more likely they are changing just enough just as I did to make it total gibberish to anyone who actually thought more than 2 seconds a day. So what, change all the laws to make douchebaggery illegal? What I consider douche behavior and what YOU consider douche behavior is probably 2 completely different things, and those in power will probably think anyone that doesn't go "yay government!" is a douche, just see "free speech zones" for an example.
As I have said before the ONLY way to outlaw trolls is to make anything other than groupthink illegal. Is that really the country we want? As my late grandfather said when I asked him if Vietnam protesters pissed him off "As long as they don't touch the troops, not at all. I fought for the right to say what you felt, even if I don't agree with it" and trolls are simply pushing that belief to the edge. Do I think they are douches? Absolutely. But in a free country one is free to be a douchebag, just as one is free to be a dumbass. The only way to remove those two conditions is to remove freedom with them and I will NOT give up my freedom!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ah. So, that's the technique being used to invalidate anybody who might hold that opinion? If they hurl class warfare accusations, then they're 'rich'... or 'identify with' or 'anticipate someday' being rich.
You don't need to be a member of a group, or even anticipate someday becoming a member of a group, in order to defend that group. I'll never be an Islamic woman; I can still speak out for their rights. I don't need to be rich, or anticipate becoming rich, in order to speak out against class warfare.
By the way, mods, my original comment was in no way a troll. That's just poor moderating. If you disagree with me, fine; argue, like jack455 did.
FTFA,
For example, a bizarre July 20 prank ended with a hotel worker actually sipping from a urine sample provided by a guest at a Homewood Suites in Kentucky. Additionally, at least twice this year, fast food workers--fearing that they would suffer burns after being doused by chemicals from a fire suppression system--stripped off their clothes on the sidewalk outside their respective restaurants.
You know, without Audio and Video; this stuff sounds like a very funny story. Did CNN, or the BBC cover any of these stories? Based on ACTUAL pranks, my favorite is from the Touch Tone Terrorists, specifically the incident where the "Coke Junky", "burns", the clients Diamond Ring. "Scooter", you ROCK!
I read the entire Smoking Gun article linked, and found a disturbing lack of evidence presented as to the identity of Dex, the leader of Pranknet.
According to this Windsor Star article, Smoking Gun sent Dex an e-mail with some custom crafted URLs claiming they were public articles on the Smoking Gun website. When he allegedly clicked on the link, they supposedly had his IP address.
Never mind the fact that that is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and the real Dex would almost surely have been wise to it, but the article leaves out a critical detail. According to the Star article, after obtaining Dex's supposed IP address, Smoking Gun investigators then went to his home address, and looked through server logs, etc. What they fail to mention is how they obtained his name and home address from the IP address. I don't know too many ISPs who hand over such information to private investigative firms. Some are even reluctant to hand over this information to law enforcement without a warrant. So how did Smoking Gun get this information? Which server logs did they subsequently investigate and how did they get access to them? And most importantly, according to Smoking Gun's own article, Dex apparently never paid for his Internet access, but rather found open Wi-Fi access points to obtain Internet access. If that is the case, how did Smoking Gun map his IP address to to name and address? This all sounds very suspicious. The Windsor Star even refused to print his name and address, because they were unable to independently verify any of this.
Yet, reading the above posts, it appears that many Slashdotters take it is a given that the identity of Dex revealed in the Smoking Gun article is correct. Aren't such people exhibiting the same kind of mentality of many of Pranknet's victims?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I think her point was that charitable giving should start on a personal (uber local) level rather than an institutional one. I highly doubt she was opposed to soup kitchens.
I have one of these pricknets that live by me. I've been tempted to do something rash but not yet. Here's the local article. http://www.dailysentinel.com/news/content/news/stories/2009/08/06/luf_prankster.html He's actually named in the "smoking gun" article.
I'm here to kick a$$ and chew bubble gum...and I'm all out of bubble gum!
When in Rome...
The elite (rich person) does not go "all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire" but is largely responsible for the need for soup kitchens. When 5% of the population has over 50% of the wealth, there's a deeply unfair distribution of money, property, and opportunity. This apportionment takes necessities from the poor to provide luxuries for the rich. The rich don't think "community sucks" but rather don't think about the community at all. Your example of how rich people act is a ridiculous straw man. If you're unaware of the effects of class distinctions then you live in the same isolated environment as this guy who talks about his world view as a corporate executive versus the reality of his decisions and actions.
[Disclaimer: I'm expecting few to read this, so I haven't spent much time editing the post so I apologize to any poor soul who reads the following disorderly thoughts]
Really...Really??? Who do you think provides money to the soup kitchens and homeless shelters? That's right, it's rich people. What makes you think that rich people don't deserve to have the money they have? The majority of "Wealthy" people (at least in the USA) are people who worked hard for the money they have. They deserve every penny of it an more. Most of them are people who have put in endless hours in order to grow their small businesses into something that makes them profit and provides jobs for others. Those who aren't small business owners, are simply people who lived on less than they make, and saved as much as they could, and after living frugally and saving for 20 or 30 years, they are now multimillionaires. Then what do they do with that money they have saved and invested? They give it to churches, they give it to soup kitchens, they give it to the poor and needy.
Class warfare is a foolish thing. The rich have no reason to hate the poor. The rich have no reason to "attack" the poor. I would wager that any ware that exists between the poor and the rich was started by the poor. Not the poor in general, but the poor who are too lazy to try to get ahead. The poor would be much better off befriending the rich as a rich man will always be willing to help his friend, but if the poor make themselves the enemy of the rich, all the rich can do is defend themselves, and to some people that is going to look like an attack.
Yes, because you noticed a few people like that, of course, all welfare and food stamp recipients are like that. Dismantle the programs, Shakrai noticed a few people abuse them.
If that is the worse thing you can come up with about NHS, you really have no idea how bad the private health insurance is in the US. Wow, you have to go register at a new doctor because you moved. How about being denied coverage? Or paying co-pays, deductibles and prescriptions on top of your premiums? Or losing your health care because you lost your job? Or being denied care because of a pre-existing condition?
From discussion with Republicans and what I have read, they basically believe that you shouldn't stay alive, simply because you can't afford to pay for your medical care yourself. You see, you aren't being "self reliant" which, according to Republicans, is the American Way, and more importantly, what Jesus taught his followers.
Maybe people shouldn't be so stupid as to listen to anything someone tells them on the phone and demand to see someone in person if it's as serious as they are being told? I sure as hell would tell anyone calling me on a phone to go fuck themselves if they even hinted at wanting me to do anything which I could be held liable for.
I am sure that the world has no shortage of people who are less intelligent than you.
My question to you us, are you blaming the victim? As in, placing fault on the victim for a failure to make good choices? If you are, then you are arguing, "The stupid deserve to suffer, and other people have the right to abuse them for being stupid." Which is exactly the argument that people who bilk money from elderly people on fixed incomes use. It's the argument that psychopaths use.
It is evil and illegal to deprive people of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud no matter how stupid they are and no matter how much the predator enjoys it. People who do that to others, no matter how stupid the victim is, deserve to be prosecuted by the state and preferably incarcerated where they can't harm others.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
So, don't you worry your little head over the money still being there when you retire.
I sense you're being snarky, which isn't nice to do when playing with people's retirement. OF COURSE the money will be there when you retire.
Additionally, the retirement age will be 91 when you retire.
Enjoy your golden years! They're the best years of your life!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
If the idiots in the theatre trample each other in a mad rush from a fire that doesnâ(TM)t even exist, it was their own stupidity and lack of clearheadedness that killed them, not the person shouting fire. If your reaction to the mere threat of danger is to hurt others, you are the culprit.
For example, think of George Costanza in the episode of Seinfeld where he throws the old ladies in their rockers to the ground in order to rush to the door. Are you going to tell me it was the messengerâ(TM)s fault? NO. His behaviour was deplorable and his panic was his own fault for being a non-clear-headed individual willing to hurt others just to preserve himself.
If someone tells me there is a fire, I am going to at least look for smoke so I can figure out what direction to flee. And I am not going to trample people unless I actually see a real fire about to burn me up and itâ(TM)s me or them. But trampling people just to get out when thereâ(TM)s no actual fire? Simply because of a panic? I think thatâ(TM)s far worse than yelling âfireâ(TM).
I know I am unique in my extreme opinion.
I think painting speech as potentially physically harmful has a chilling effect: Just look at the whole Cartoon Mohammad thing for an example of that.
âoeWords can hurt, so you canâ(TM)t say words [or draw cartoons] that hurt.â
The censoring of Mohammad in this weekâ(TM)s South Park was a perfect example.
Anyway: Words donâ(TM)t hurt people. People hurt people.
Learn to think for yourself, and mere words will never be able to physically hurt you.
The idea that everyone must mindlessly follow whatever words they hear, in and of itself is a dangerous idea. Should we panic just because someone told us to? No. Should we panic if the loudspeaker tells us to? Maybe. Should we panic if Fox News tells us to? Quite likely. But before you go tramping people to death (and thus tramping our free speech rights by being too much of a moron to think for yourself), consider whether you are actually on fire. Dumbass.
Edit, 9/12/2007, comment from below incorporated into this post:
Fyngyrs (http://slashdot.org/~fyngyrz) says:
âoeThere is no harm in yelling fire. There is no harm in filing out of a building that isnâ(TM)t burning, There is no harm in filing back in. These are the acts of reasonable people. In fact, the practice would do people some good. We used to do it all the time in school. The fire alarm would go off, and out weâ(TM)d go, not knowing if there was a fire, or not. No one ever got trampled. The theatre owner has, as an owner of a private business, the option to no longer serve that customer. Of course, should one patron fail to file out reasonably, and in the process trample another, then a crime has been committed, that of assault by that patron upon another. The idea that it is acceptable for people to trample one another â" or that it somehow âoeisnâ(TM)t their faultâ â" is just one of the things that is wrong with the cliche, aside from the initial, completely incorrect, idea that one could not yell fire â" or anything else â" in a crowded theater. Itâ(TM)s socially retarded, and if it were *my* theatre, itâ(TM)d be the last time you ever got in the door, but other than that, there you go. Free speech trumps all. Every time. Thatâ(TM)s the basis of liberty.â
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
i pasted it from here, where it's properly formatted: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/04/14/294/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com