Koby 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: No, TikTok Is Not ‘Programmable Fentanyl.’ Stop It

    Koby ( profile ), 18 Apr, 2024 @ 05:26pm

    I remember that Tide Pod challenge from a few years back. That's what a fatal social media overdose looks like.

  • On the post: No, TikTok Is Not ‘Programmable Fentanyl.’ Stop It

    Koby ( profile ), 18 Apr, 2024 @ 10:33am

    Mentally Crippled

    I’d already pointed out if China is using TikTok to influence American opinions, it’s doing a terrible job of it, as American opinions towards China are at record lows.
    The opinion towards China doesn't matter. The point of both fentanyl and tiktok is to cause the user to lose their mind, and then self-destruct. It doesn't matter who you dislike when you're dying from an overdose.

  • On the post: The GOP Is Blocking A Last Ditch Effort To Bring Cheap Broadband To Poor Americans

    Koby ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2024 @ 07:15am

    No I Dont

    you’ll recall the Trump tax cuts doled out $42 billion to AT&T
    This is a lie. There was no specific carve out for AT&T. All companies were subject to the same tax rules. Also, a tax cut doesn't give money from the government to taxpayers; it just allows them to keep the money they earn. This is beneficial because it incentivizes companies to try and earn even more money. As a result, the Federal government collected MORE tax revenue after the tax cut than what it was collecting before. If you are in favor of the government collecting more money so that it can do more stuff with the money, then you should be in favor of the tax cut.

  • On the post: DeSantis Signs Bills To Create 25-Foot Halo Around Cops, Strip Oversight Boards Of Independence

    Koby ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2024 @ 02:55pm

    Just Use Your Zoom Lens

    Ron, I don’t think anyone should “match” what you’ve done. And it’s certainly not being done to “protect the citizens” of Florida
    The citizens will decide whether they should match, by voting with their feet. Crime ridden democrat cities, or southern red states? Right now, the population movement is clearly in the red states favor. When oversight boards protect perpetrators and demonize cops, the citizens receive muggings and burglaries.

  • On the post: Elon Is Now Forcing Bluechecks On Users Who Don’t Want Them, And Refusing To Let Them Hide Them

    Koby ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2024 @ 12:11pm

    P2W

    The pay-2-win phenomenon in video games and MMOs works because it's difficult to distinguish who has paid for account boosts, versus those who didn't pay and accomplished everything without paying extra. It's enough of an achievement that many folks proudly proclaim their account as free-to-play. The old Twitter 1.0 checkmark system sucked, but the Twitter 2.0 system screamed "pay-to-win". This new X-Twitter system at least includes plausible deniability, which has been deemed somewhat acceptable by the masses.

  • On the post: Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Propaganda Newspapers Surge Ahead Of Fall Election

    Koby ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2024 @ 09:23am

    But there definitely is a condition called "unprofitable", as the old news outlets discovered.

  • On the post: Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Propaganda Newspapers Surge Ahead Of Fall Election

    Koby ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2024 @ 08:53am

    Got Woke Went Broke

    The CJR/Tow Center article doesn't criticize the quality of the local papers; it only disagrees with their editorials and points our the source of the funding. Of course, if leftist corporations sponsor NPR or PBS, then everything is fine. But if the local leftist news outlet loses most of its subscriber/viewer base, and gets replaced with a conservative one, then it's time to hit the panic button. The term doesn't actually mean anything, "pink slime" just means you disagree on politics. If the previous generation of news outlets was somehow better, they wouldn't have folded in the first place.

  • On the post: Police Chief Hailed As A Hero For Crashing Into A Car While Fleeing The Scene Of A Shooting

    Koby ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2024 @ 11:46am

    Watched Too Many Movies

    His wife was (apparently) the first to notice a gun. Rather than act like a cop in a cop vehicle (off-duty or not), Chief Medina chose to compound the danger...
    It sounds like Tim has zero tactical awareness. Stopping the truck in the middle of the road, and presenting yourself as a target, without knowing who has a weapon or who was the aggressor, is a great way to get yourself shot. I bet Tim would get himself killed within a month if he was on the force.

  • On the post: Judge Tells Corrections Officers To ‘Suck It Up’ If They Can’t Handle An Endless Stream Of Executions

    Koby ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2024 @ 11:21am

    Step It Up And Save Lives

    The death penalty used to have a deterrent effect. The long lapses in time between the murder and the execution have reduced this deterrence. These correction officers are jeopardizing public safety by their insistence on further delays.

  • On the post: Fifth Circuit: Never Mind Your Lying Eyes, These Cops Who Killed A Woman Deserve Immunity

    Koby ( profile ), 09 Apr, 2024 @ 05:44pm

    Unsafe At Any Speed

    We've complained about passive writing before at Techdirt, usually about police descriptions of events when they attempt to describe events that didn't end well. But now Techdirt is doing it too.

    At that point, the engine of the van turned on. A fourth officer (Officer Hess) jumped into his cruiser and moved it forward to block the van. The van went into reverse and bumped into the cruiser. Then it moved forward and hit the fence. The van went back in reverse again as officers yelled again for the driver to show their hands.
    No, the engine of the van didn't turn on. The driver turned on the vehicle. No, the van didn't go into reverse. The driver shifted the vehicle in reverse. Passive writing is done to offer excuses. Don't try to flee the scene. Don't crash your car into other vehicles or a fence, at any speed. As usual, a perp gets shot because they can't chill for just 5 minutes. Let's put some responsibility on the driver: don't flee from police, or try to ram their cruiser. In a stolen vehicle.

  • On the post: Supreme Court To Nick Sandmann: ‘Lol, No’ To Hearing His Omnibus Defamation Lawsuit Against News Orgs

    Koby ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2024 @ 12:30pm

    Social Media Made Them Obsolete

    and many of those opinions looked a bit silly within days (again, in any political direction).
    No, it was a matter of hours. As in, 6 hours max, as the full video was posted. And it only looked silly in one political direction, as the major corporate media companies scrambled to delete their previous coverage. This is why we call them the Fake News. Any amount of investigation would have revealed that they were wrong.

  • On the post: Let Me Rewrite That For You: NY Times Misinforms Readers About RFK & Biden

    Koby ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2024 @ 10:06am

    Credibility Depletion

    Actually, the best way would have been to let him say what he wanted to say without censoring him, and then finding the best people to debate him and his argument. Then you wouldn't have had to try and explain away the Twitter Files.

  • On the post: California HOAs Are Buying Up Flock License Plate Readers; Giving Cops Open Access To Them

    Koby ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2024 @ 12:26pm

    It Definitely Works

    Homeowners have been putting up signs in their yard to deter theft for decades. Surveys of convicted criminals have shown that burglars definitely avoid homes with security signage. In fact, it's effective enough that some people without a security system will nonetheless buy and display just a sign. The main thing to ensure that these HOAs benefit from the deterrent effect of security cameras will be to prominently display signage at the entrance. Crooks aren't stupid.

  • On the post: Republicans Keep Taking Credit For Local Broadband Projects Funded By Federal Bills They Voted Against

    Koby ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2024 @ 07:29am

    Without Nuance

    Most legislation nowadays contains multiple provisions, often for some items they do like, and others they don't. A representative IS allowed to agree with some provisions of the bill, while voting against it because they disagree with the overall package. Karl is showing his narrow-mindedness, typical of democrat pundits: no dissent is allowed.

  • On the post: GM Pinky Swears It Will Stop Selling Driving Data To Insurers After Lawsuits, NYT Bombshell

    Koby ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2024 @ 05:43am

    Call Their Bluff

    If GM is so committed to not selling customer data ever again, then they wouldn't just update their policy. They would offer a warranty to buyers expressly stating they won't hand over the driver data to anyone.

  • On the post: The New ‘Sports Illustrated’ Promises To Still Do ‘In-Depth Journalism’ Despite Being A Hollowed Out Husk Now

    Koby ( profile ), 25 Mar, 2024 @ 07:09am

    Somewhere, there's a bag holder. For the AT&T/Time/Warner/Discovery fiasco, some folks collectively lost billions of dollars. And now, we're seeing someone else collectively lose millions more with these other media outlets. I don't know who these bag holders are, but they are the ones who haven't learned their lesson yet. I suspect that the investors don't know which companies will lose money, or which ones will make money. But they currently don't care. As long as their overall investment value increases, they will be willing to accept a shotgun style investment approach, knowing that some money will occasionally be lost, and they will be left holding the bag. Most people would be willing to play the coin flip game for $1 per attempt, if they get their dollar back plus $1.10 with every favorable flip. There's one possible scenario which will get the bag holders to stop called Risk Of Ruin. Basically, if a string of losses wipes out the investment money, then there is no more money with which to continue the game. Roughly translated to the financial market, this would be a stock market crash with no bailout. I don't particularly wish for this to happen, because a lot of innocent people will get hurt. But it would teach a valuable lesson, and would take out the trash in the process.

  • On the post: Auto, Tech Industries Falsely Claim ‘Right To Repair’ Reforms Are A Threat To National Security

    Koby ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2024 @ 08:12am

    Priorities

    O'Brien, in his article, complains that foreign governments might discover vulnerabilities within vehicles, such as sending out a OTA signal that could brick a car, or access its onboard cameras for spying purposes. But foreign adversaries with a high degree of technical expertise can already purchase these models of cars, and attempt to discover systems to exploit. If systems are exploitable, a better solution is for the vehicles get examined by private experts, who then report on the flaws, which then embarrasses the manufacturers into fixing the flaws before they can be exploited. Or better yet, avoid the negative P.R. by creating more secure products in the first place.

  • On the post: It Appears Users Are Getting Bored With TikTok

    Koby ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2024 @ 10:34am

    Imagine The Drama

    Tiktok gained popularity for being edgy and degenerate. Prediction: the next big social media trend will be an Iranian-owned pro-Hezbollah social media app with strong encryption, and users will be encouraged to sarcastically send religious death threats to one-another. If that doesn't send lawmakers and the U.S. intelligence community into a tizzy, I don't know what will.

  • On the post: As The US Freaks Out About TikTok, It’s Revealed That The CIA Was Using Chinese Social Media To Try To Undermine The Gov’t There

    Koby ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2024 @ 09:43am

    Unsafe At Any Dosage

    Or do we think so little of Americans in general, that we think they won’t be able to resist the allure of this one social media app and its algorithm?
    It is the digital equivalent of crack. It's not just Americans, but anyone anywhere in the world can become addicted. China has been trying to forcibly reduce its citizens' exposure.

  • On the post: Trump Is Right (For The Wrong Reasons): A TikTok Ban In The US Would Be A Huge Problem

    Koby ( profile ), 12 Mar, 2024 @ 10:49am

    It might be similar to supporting only one telecom company such that it becomes a monopoly. It would be better if there were numerous competitors in the telecom sector. Tiktok isn't the enemy of the public; corporate monopoly social media is the enemy of the public.

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