morganwick 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: YouTube Streamer Hit With Demonetization Over Copyright Claims To Numbers '36' And '50'

    morganwick ( profile ), 26 Jan, 2020 @ 03:22am

    Re:

    I've followed at least one content creator that hopped around from one site to another as each one went down and finally just gave up and went to YouTube. I think content creators by and large have decided they're stuck with YouTube, at least for the time being.

  • On the post: City Of Dallas Shuts Down Business Of Man Who Called Cops Over 100 Times In 20 Months To Deal With Criminals Near His Car Wash

    morganwick ( profile ), 18 Jan, 2020 @ 01:46am

    Re: 414 pages = 130 calls

    Its interesting, because in my (admittedly left-of-center) view, the headline implies that the car wash owner was probably just being racist and calling the cops over minor things or things that aren't crimes at all, and the cops finally put a stop to it. It actually makes the city look like the good guys, reinforced by the inflated number of calls, assuming you aren't firmly against the ability of government to take private property at all and aren't aware of Techdirt's general opposition to such things. A more "Techdirt-y" headline, and one closer to the point of the post, would be something like "City of Dallas: Is your business located in a den of crime? Stop it yourself - or we'll take your business."

  • On the post: Chrome's Move To Stomp Out Third Party Cookies? Good For Privacy, Good For Google's Ad Business… Or Both?

    morganwick ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 12:41am

    But Mike, you're such a Google shill you should love this! /s

  • On the post: Yes, The DNC's Debate Format Sucks, And There's An Easy Fix

    morganwick ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2019 @ 06:36pm

    Re: Sensationalism Sells

    The only way I can figure that "the Republicans aren't doing the same" is that they aren't doing the same this year, which might have something to do with having an incumbent they don't want to legitimize opposition to that in any case has no hope of unseating him. If anything, Democrats' stubborn insistence on substance means they haven't embraced sensationalism nearly as much as Republicans.

  • On the post: Yes, The DNC's Debate Format Sucks, And There's An Easy Fix

    morganwick ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2019 @ 06:34pm

    Re: Re: Sorry, wrong.

    The old standard of "electability" - that the candidate that pivots to the center, has firm ideas and plans and a better grasp of the issues, and offends as few people as possible wins - turned out to be badly wrong. But since every candidate before Trump did that to some degree or another, that doesn't say much about our ability to evaluate electability; certainly the person you responded to has some idea of how to do it that would incorporate Trump. There are certainly some key clues: the more charismatic candidate has won every presidential election since at least 1980, and when half the electorate doesn't vote and those that do can vote for exactly one candidate in the general election, energizing and turning out your base while demonizing the other guy is a viable strategy.

  • On the post: Congress Now Creating A Moral Panic Around Deepfakes In Order To Change CDA 230

    morganwick ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2019 @ 05:37pm

    Re: You're not understanding what I'm saying

    They are just mustache twirling cartoon villians who want to destroy the internet for shits and giggles. Like Captain Planet villians who just want to destroy the environment for laughs and funnies.
    If you weren't the original poster I would think you were making fun of him.

  • On the post: Congress Now Creating A Moral Panic Around Deepfakes In Order To Change CDA 230

    morganwick ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2019 @ 05:33pm

    Re: Re: Moral Panic...

    The most popular form of RCV leads to two-party domination as surely as FPTP in part because the results it produces can seem random and nonsensical once you start digging into them, and other forms have their own problems. Range voting is the best way to reform the problems with the system and might do a better job of it than you might think possible just by changing the voting system.

  • On the post: Congress Now Creating A Moral Panic Around Deepfakes In Order To Change CDA 230

    morganwick ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2019 @ 05:49pm

    Yes, you can paint lots of stories about how corporate controlled media without the fairness doctrine/massive tax cuts for the rich/lead paint/etc. could impact things, and I do think there's value in thinking through how that may play out in various situations (such as elections/media and politics/kids' brains), to assume that corporate media/unchecked wealth/lead paint will absolutely fool/impoverish/poison people and therefore we need to paternalistically "protect" the public from possibly being fooled/impoverished/poisoned, seems a bit premature. That could change over time. But we haven't yet seen any evidence of any significant long term effect from corporate media/unchecked wealth/lead paint, so maybe we shouldn't be reverting/changing a fundamental media/tax/housing law without actual evidence of the need.

    I mean, I get and mostly agree with the point you're making, but history is full of developments we didn't sufficiently control until they already started having catastrophic consequences and it was too late to walk back on them. Maybe some of the ones I listed don't work very well, especially in this specific metaphor, but there are plenty of things where people say "we should have never allowed X, at least without knowing more about the consequences". If deepfakes do have the catastrophic consequences people envision, where will you be then? This is why fearmongering works: because there really are cases where seemingly innocuous changes can have far-reaching, permanent consequences.

  • On the post: Once Again, China Is About To Use The US's Obsession With 'Intellectual Property' Against Us

    morganwick ( profile ), 30 May, 2019 @ 05:26pm

    Re: Re: Years that end with 9

    dismisses parent comment as "numerology nonsense" proceeds to expound on a wild conspiracy theory about "globalists" called "Them" using the trade war as cover to institute Their New World Order, and acknowledges that other commenters will call him a "kook"

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    morganwick ( profile ), 26 May, 2019 @ 05:48pm

    "Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter with a bit of highly-contextual wordplay that I could try to explain but you should probably just read the original thread:"

    Eh, not as contextual as you imply. There are two other pieces of wordplay in the thread but they aren't relevant to the joke. You probably could have said something like: "our first place winner comes from our article on the court decision against Strike 3. After a thread that brought up comparisons to three other copyright trolls, one with plenty of hilarious wordplay and humor to begin with, an anonymous commenter came in with the coup de grace:"

  • On the post: And Scene: Suburban Express To Shut Down In Mere Months

    morganwick ( profile ), 13 May, 2019 @ 09:10pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Says the person without a username to the person with one.

  • On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup… But Seems Confused About All The Details

    morganwick ( profile ), 09 May, 2019 @ 08:34pm

    This post is kinda repetitive. It would have done better if Mike had just summarized all the points Chris makes about how problematic Facebook is that cleaving off Instagram and Whatsapp wouldn't solve, only break out those points where he can say something beyond that, and then go in-depth on Chris's vision on what a broken-up and regulated Facebook would look like.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    morganwick ( profile ), 08 Apr, 2019 @ 05:24am

    Regarding the second insightful editor's choice: I've long felt there should be a rule in the US government that any bill should be public for a minimum amount of time based on its length before it's voted on. That would effectively prohibit the thousand-page bills that tend to be all too common in Congress where only lobbyists know what's in them. It wouldn't ensure the people putting their names to a bill would have actually read them, but it would ensure someone did, or at least had the chance to.

  • On the post: Here Comes The Splinternet: How The EU Is Helping Break Apart The Internet

    morganwick ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2019 @ 12:16am

    Re: Re:

    If you want a completely unmoderated free-for-all, check out 4chan. I think most people have good reasons not to want their discussion areas to be like that.

  • On the post: The EU's Catastrophic Copyright Directive Can Still Be Stopped, If Governments Of Sweden And Germany Do The Right Thing

    morganwick ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2019 @ 11:54pm

    Re: Re: Democracy is dead in the world.

    The problem is not necessarily the concept of the EU, but the structure where the democratic institutions serve no other purpose but to rubber-stamp the will of unelected bureaucrats in the pocket of big corporations. The people of the EU must demand: real democracy or break it all up.

  • On the post: Free Software Foundation Europe Comes To Its Senses After Calling For EU To Fund Open Source Upload Filters

    morganwick ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2019 @ 01:02am

    Re: The EU ends The Open Internet, but for a Deeper Reason?

    I knew when this comment adopted a solemn tone with regards to the increasing restrictions on the open internet and the "deeper reason" behind it, and when it twice used the grammatically incorrect phrase "millions of opposition", it was going to lead to some bonkers conspiracy theory. But even after mentioning the US military situation in Syria and North Korea, I wasn't prepared for it to jump all the way to "the world's governments are planning World War III and trying to shut down the Internet so we don't know about it until they actually launch the nukes and wipe out mankind". Presumably the reason why all these governments are planning World War III at the same time with no one knowing about it, despite the fact that they too would perish as part of "mankind", is because they're actually lizard people that would survive a nuclear war to become the new dominant species on Earth, and my questioning of this narrative is just because I've let their chemtrails infect my mind and prevent me from seeing The Truth(tm) because I don't wear a tinfoil hat like this one guy that has alone stumbled onto their plot to start World War III by locking down the Internet and wake up sheeple.

  • On the post: What If Google And Facebook Admitted That All This Ad Targeting Really Doesn't Work That Well?

    morganwick ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2019 @ 12:49am

    Known Google shill Mike Masnick continues to stick up for them with an article that (checks notes) questions their current business model and suggests that the aggressive, invasive targeting they've been engaged in doesn't actually work.

  • On the post: Enough MEPs Say They Mistakenly Voted For Articles 11 & 13 That The Vote Should Have Flipped; EU Parliament Says Too Bad

    morganwick ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2019 @ 01:35am

    Re:

    As I keep saying, Brexit may be a bad idea economically but that doesn't mean there aren't serious problems with the way the EU works. Britain should say they're willing to remain in the EU but if it won't give more freedom to the member countries, it must become truly democratic. No country should be willing to give up any of their sovereignty to an entity run of, by, and for the corporations by its very structure (not just because of corporations exploiting flaws in the structure).

  • On the post: A Century Ago We Killed The Radio Commons; Don't Let The EU Do That To The Internet

    morganwick ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2019 @ 05:20pm

    Re: Re: It's only about two months until the next EU election...

    Britain should tell the EU: We'll hold a new Brexit referendum and potentially stay in the EU after all, but only if you make yourselves actually democratic, not have all laws he proposed by an undemocratic commission in the pocket of big business and have them unable to be repealed, only overridden.

  • On the post: EU Internet Companies Warn EU Parliament Not To Vote For Articles 11 & 13; Say They'll Hand The Internet To Google

    morganwick ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2019 @ 02:36pm

    Known Google shill Mike Masnick with an article about how checks notes a bill he vehemently opposes will entrench Google's supremacy.

    Forget Axel Voss, I wonder what mental gymnastics a certain class of troll right here would use to write this off.

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