Alice DSL support is atrocious.

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My internet is having problems and the German ISP Alice DSL is unable or unwilling to fix them.

Rant time children.

For the last few weeks my DSL connection to the internet has been having some pretty annoying problems. Very specifically, the WAN (The connection from my home to their servers) is dropping intermittently and comes back again after a minute or so. How often it will drop varies. I’ve seen it do it 3 times in 10 minutes and I’ve seen if happen once a day. I do know it’s the WAN specifically because I have a router with DD-WRT which can show me exactly what the connection is doing. I also know because I’ve had this exact same problem 2 years or so ago, and after a lengthy investigation back then, they eventually realized the problem was on their end. The problem back then was resolved after 3 months and a dozen support calls or so.

The nature of this problem is likely to be almost invisible to the average user, but for someone who likes playing games online, this is a show stopper. I can tolerate being disconnected once from the game, but once it happens 3 times in 15 minutes, I give up in frustration usually.

So you can imagine my dismay when the same exact issue cropped up a few weeks ago, because  I remember last time getting Alice DSL (My ISP) to fix this took an enormous amount of effort on my part, just to convince them to look in the right direction. The reason for this is because their first and second line support is atrocious and it becomes even worse when one does not speak good German.

The first problem one encounters is that they will actually refuse to speak english on their standard tech support line. It’s not like you happen to always fall on the odd person who hasn’t learned a word in english. It seems to be a company policy not to speak to customers  in english. After speaking to at least 12 people in their first line support, I find it impossible that not one of them knew even bad english, especially given that every other german I’ve met does, and that all Ggermans learn them at school. There can be no other explanation than that they’ve been instructed not to speak english at first line support.

This is obviously very discouraging for their non-german customers which brings me to my main suspicion that Alice DSL does not care about solving your problems, but primarily about getting rid of you. If they can do that quicker by fixing your problem, all the better, but if they can get rid of you by not allowing you to even report your problem, fine as well. Btw, if you mention that you do not speak german, then your only option is to have some of their english tech support people call you within 1-2 hours via phone appointment (and I think, only during business hours). Good luck if you have stuff to do in that time. Better drop everything and wait for the call.

But even broken german is usually not enough. Much of the time I can somehow speak well enough to make my point and  get someone to look into it, but then they will start using some fairly complex words I’m not familiar with and half the time at least, I’ll have to ask my wife to take over.

If you somehow manage to get past the hurdle of language, then you still have to deal with them not knowing what the hell they’re doing.

So as I said, I’ve got a problem on the WAN. This is the first thing I mention, as well as the fact that I’ve had this exact same issue before and it was on their end back then. I also mention that I’ve called before and we’ve gone through basic and advanced troubleshooting. Much of the time, they don’t care so back to basic troubleshooting we go.

Basic troubleshooting of course means that you’d better not be running anything other than MS Windows and Alice-approved hardware. Anything and everything else is absolutely not supported. GNU/Linux? Not supported. Third party router after their modem? Not supported. It doesn’t matter that the problem might be entirely unrelated to the hardware or the desktop, if you have anything that is not MS Windows connected to your network, your Alice support is liable to be revoked. So before you even think of calling Alice support, reboot to windows (reinstall if you don’t have any) and connect their modem directly to your computer and run their crappy installation disk. Otherwise, no support for you.

One time, at my 4th or 5th call to Alice support in 2 weeks or so, after I’ve already replaced modem and had some backend troubleshooting done by them, I called to report the issue persisting and got transferred to second line support again. There was a guy who refused to speak a word of English (of course) and demanded to know if I have a direct connection from my PC to the Alice modem. I told him that it didn’t matter because the connection was working just fine until now and I had already tried connecting directly to the model without success. He insisted in learning if I had anything connected and I said I had my own third party router. After some back and forth in German that I couldn’t really understand well, I passed to my wife to talk to him. He had her go look at the router, which I’d already told him is third-party, and tell him if it had “Alice” written on it. After that, he denied helping us further until we disconnected everything and connected only Alice hardware. And of course then we’d have to call Alice again and get a different technician…

Not all support techs are like that, but there are enough that are, and what inflames the issue is that Alice support refuses to open a ticket to track the progress. I’ve asked multiple times for a ticket number or something so that I don’t have to explain the same thing again and again, or go through the same basic troubleshooting steps every time, but they tell me it’s not necessary. Rather, I would call, and if I managed to get to someone who realized the problem was on the WAN connection, they would do “something” (They wouldn’t tell me exactly what. Usually they mentioned “restarting this connection” or “initializing that line”) and then call them back if the problem happened again. The problem would happen again, I would call, and then there was a high probability I would end up with a tech who just didn’t want to work that day, and start looking for excuses to avoid looking at my problem.

The latest of such excuses was that I was running Windows 7 English. I had my wife on the phone and the tech had her go on my workstation to check the windows settings. This is after we explained that this is the 9th time we called and we’ve already checked all that. Due to there not being a ticket open of course, he could just choose not to believe it, and rather have us check the same basic things again. Unfortunately, the settings the technician wanted to check on my workstation were in English and he couldn’t give my wife the correct instructions. His solution? “Call us back when you’ve had Windows 7 German installed”. At this point my wife hang up the phone in frustration after telling them that we’d rather switch ISP first.

To add to that, apparently the tech support was extremely patronizing to my wife, as if talking to an idiot, so there’s that as well.

And if you think that’s a one-off case, I will note that I’ve had the same exact troubles 2 years ago. Back then, they even sent a tech to my home who finally acknowledged that the issue was on their end. This after replacing virtually all Alice DSL hardware and making me run through hoops with my LAN.  After that, finally the problem was fixed (and I got a ticket number), but this time I couldn’t even get this far.

After 9 calls to Alice with no success to even to get them to listen to the issue, we’ve had enough. All those “call us back if the problem persists” wouldn’t be as bad if we didn’t have to explain the same thing again and again every time, and then still get a few techs that insist on taking us through basic troubleshooting in order to find an excuse to deny service. I should also note that calling Alice support is a charged extra (Yes, you pay them to have them fix their own problems) by the minute and the minimum wait on hold is 5 minutes.

Aaargh.

So I’m still with the same shitty issue. My wife refuses to speak to Alice DSL support anymore (and I don’t blame her) and would rather switch providers altogether. And after 9 calls to support, I doubt we can get Alice DSL to even look at the issue.

The problem is that we don’t know what ISP to go for. I’m excluded some obvious bad choices such as Telekom, but there’s still a lot of options left. So if anyone is in Germany, perhaps you can offer some advice. I’ve been thinking of checking out Cablesurf.de which is a small provider that seems to have the highest speeds and rating on Speedtest.net but my wife is not liking this idea because their small size might mean even worse support from Alice (doubtful but who knows).

If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

And any other fellow expat: if you’re not a good german speaker, stay the hell away from Alice DSL.

 

Oh Gawds, Wat? The most hilariously deluded libertarian ever

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Hoppean-Libertarianism must be the most inhumane ideology ever conceived

English: German philosopher of Austrian School...

This is…I don’t…

I am just reading through this interview by a radical libertarian called “Code Name Cain” who expands upon his ideology. I do believe this must be the most absurd libertarian I’ve ever read. Calling him Fractally Wrong is almost an understatement.

Take a look at the six parts interview, read through the thing. It gets much more absurd (and much more hilarious) in the latter parts.

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: Obviously it would be better to have defaulting borrowers be effectively enslaved in a way that fully respects their natural rights.

CNC: Obviously. Now that we’ve cleared that up, can you turn off the tape recorder? I want to get started on my steak.

Choice Quote:

CNC: With the secession strategy, you don’t need a majority. That’s good, because [t]he mass of people … always and everywhere consists of “brutes,” “dullards,” and “fools,” easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission [92]. Still, there can be no revolution without some form of mass participation. … the elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in  communicating its ideas to the public, openly if possible and secretly if necessary… [93].

ANDREW: Even if you do it secretly, convincing the masses that they are inferior sounds tricky.

CNC: That’s true, but you don’t have to convince Joe the Plumber that he is a brute. You can convince him instead that he is a hardworking, productive individual, and that other people are brutes who are making it so Joe has no control over his life.

(Note red parts are direct quotes from the AnCap ideologue, Hoppe)

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: I know that you think this is very unlikely, but suppose people living in the free society of the future decide that they don’t like it very much, and would like to go back to living in a democracy. Could they do it?

CNC: That will not be possible.

ANDREW: You mean, you are sure that no one will want to go back to democracy?

CNC: No, I mean they won’t be allowed to discuss that possibility.
In a covenant… among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s  own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. [218]

THAT WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE CITIZEN. Is it me, or does this vision of libertopia sound increasingly like a weird version of Paranoia? The next paragraph expands on how the rich would be controlling armies of death bots!

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: Noblemen and masters were obeyed because their serfs and slaves recognized that some people were naturally superior to others – but then some GLOs came in and started messing everything up by appealing to racism and jealousy. These “rogue GLOs” are where governments come from.

CNC: That’s right.

That it. We’ve reached peak absurdity people!

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: You are sometimes forced to engage in lobbying.

CNC: Yes. For example, the current meme in the investment community is that the combination of climate change and population growth will make it almost impossible to have enough food for the world by the year 2050. Farmland is soaring in price.

My hedge fund discovered uncultivated land in the African country of ***. The land did not belong to anyone, and so we tried to buy it from the relevant government. Outrageously, certain officials from *** insisted on…

ANDREW: Bribes?

CNC: … arrangements before they would agree to sell the land at a fair price.

ANDREW: Was this farmland unoccupied?

CNC: No one owned the land before we bought it.

ANDREW: But was someone living there?

CNC: There were some local tribesmen who claimed that they had a vague traditional “right” to the land. Decisive action was necessary before they stopped squatting on our land.

ANDREW: Involving trucks of men carrying machine guns…

Oh gawds, wat?!

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: But you changed the story! That isn’t how it ends – the father doesn’t agree with the older son. He says it is right for them to celebrate, for “thy brother was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And most readers assume that at that point, the older brother realizes that he has been acting like a two-year-old.

CNC: Look, I’m not like Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises. I don’t think that being a libertarian is incompatible with being a Christian. But since, as Mises put it, “all efforts to find support for the institution of private property… in the teachings of Christ are quite vain,” it is true that the New Testament needs to be edited a
little.

…so fucking funny….must not lol at work…

Fortunately for this world, the CNC character was fictional. Unfortunately, Hoppe and his red quotes are not. And the red quotes were the primary content of this “interview” 😉

In fact, I found Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ideas fascinating, but it would have been quite difficult to construct a dialogue entirely from snippets of his book. Even if I had done that, there would still have been a risk of misrepresenting his thought. Code Name Cain was created so that I could try to fill in missing or uncertain details of a Hoppe-like philosophy in the most logical manner I could think of, without attributing these additions to Hoppe himself. Some fine points that a couple readers thought I personally invented were actually adapted (rather faithfully) from Hoppe’s book: in particular, the graphs in part VI showing time-preference curves for different types of individuals (compare p. 8 of Hoppe’s book).

(h/t to the Barefoot Bum)

Taxes are voluntary…according to libertarian logic

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Libertarians are inconsistent if they consider taxes immoral, but not wage labour and rent.

Punch cartoon (1907); illustrates the unpopula...

A frequent and much beloved (Right)-Libertarian talking point is on how taxes are not voluntary and that they are claimed by the state at the end of a gun barrel. “Taxes are theft”, “Taxes are violence” blah blah blah. We’ve all heard the spiel I’m sure. But I doubt how many have realized that such an argument is not really consistent with the logic libertarians ((I’ll avoid using (right) for brevity. Let’s just assume it’s implied whenever I say “libertarian” in this post.)) apply in regards to voluntary contracts and choice.

You see, a common aspect of most strains of libertarianism is that any choice made voluntarily – by which they mean, in the absence of active coercion – is morally acceptable for both parties. Thus a person choosing to work for a wage, has made a conscious decision to get in this position, because it increases his marginal utility. In the same vein, a person choosing to work in a sweatshop have made a decision which makes their life better off than before, so the sweatshop practice itself is obviously moral. A female being sexually harassed by her boss, but nevertheless staying in the job, is a voluntary choice which naturally means that the sexual attention she’s receiving does not constitute “harassment”. Naturally it follows that if people do not want to end up in this situations, they always have the choice of not taking those particular jobs.

So, in this context, aren’t taxes voluntary just as well? Consider that when you sign up for a job, you agree to a contract that states that a part of your wage will go to the state. You are volunteering to a contract that stipulates taxes. If you do not like the contract, you always have the choice of not working at all. This is a valid choice, as much as it is for the sweatshop worker, is it not? You weight your options and choose the one more beneficial to you.

Most likely libertarians will mention at this point that even those opening their own business have to pay taxes, even though they have no contract with the state. But that would also be false. They do have such a contract with the state. The contract that leases the land they live on, for it is in the very end, the property of the state. You can’t own any land, unless somewhere in the history of that land, there is a contract between state and the first owner. And that contract, had stipulations for taxes. The taxes of the business owner thus become analogous to the rent of a land owner, and much like the contract with a land owner can have stipulations that you can accept or deny, so does the contract with the state. In this case being that you have to give an amount of your income to the state in the form of income tax, and all contracts with your employees must stipulate income tax as well. If you choose to enter this voluntary contract, then naturally you must think it acceptable. Surely if the land owner was simply a private person, requiring rent from you and everyone you employ, you would have the same amount of choice, no?

It is the case then, that if you don’t like the terms of such contracts, you are of course free not to work at all. Nobody is forcing you to make such a choice. But if you do make it, then it’s under our own volition, is it not?

I can foresee at this point the enraged flames that will start bursting my way. Most likely I will be informed that the choice is an illusion, since the state has artificially and violently limited the options to either paying income tax, or not making money at all. And I will admit, this is a very compelling argument indeed.

Which is why I will have to pull the “switch” to my “bait” now.

You see, the argument that will be made to point out that the choice between “work with taxation or no work” is an artificial one, is the same one I will use myself to point that “work for a boss or don’t work” is an artificial choice just as well. You want the option to  live in a society where nobody has to pay taxes, I want the option to work in a society where nobody has to work for a boss.

Libertarians might claim that everyone would have this option in a society with no taxes, but if some landowners already hoard all the available land, then that is simply not true, for no landowner would be foolish enough to sell it rather than rent it. It would be as likely as the state truly selling land (rather than renting it via taxes) and allowing anyone to secede. In fact, that is the truth of the matter: The state, at the moment, is acting just like a capitalist landowner renting you some land with stipulations. The “rent” you pay, is your taxes. Imagine for a moment that instead of states, you had private landowners who asked for rent instead of tax. Would you, as a libertarian, have an issue with this?

Perhaps the smart libertarian will claim that the state came into ownership of this land through violence, and therefore any ownership claims over it are invalid. This is undeniably true: The state did enclose all the land through brutal violence. But what is to be done? The libertarian of a Rothbardian persuasion would undoubtedly claim that the best option would be to simply remove the state as the player, and let the ownership titles stand as they are, or possibly owned by their current workers in a shareholder format.  But I would object to that, for this is not a natural distribution of ownership either, rather, it is artificially created by the previous violence of the state and its continued legacy of its collusion with the plutocracy throughout history. If one were to simply declare that the current ownership claims should be treated as “homesteading”, then why not do the same jump and claim that the current state ownership should just as well be treated as “homesteading”? Both these scenarios would ignore violent history anyway, so why not stick to the status quo? After all, I’m confident that very few libertarians would have an issue with the current arrangement if they were paying “rent” instead of “taxes” and they were living under the rule of a private landowner with extensive management staff, rather than a democratic state with extensive bureaucracy.

Or perhaps not. But then, I’d like to hear what the significant difference would be (except the lack of democracy that is).

The truth is that there’s isn’t a functional difference between a state and a landowner. Both simply ask for rent to allow you to live within their ownership claims (borders). The former simply also provides the illusion that you have a say in the policies that affect everyone under these border, as a way to pacify you. And this lack of difference remains whether you have 204 uber-landowners or 2.000.000. The size of their borders might decrease, but the effect of their rule would not.

As such, the original problem would remain. Perhaps the libertarians won’t mind, as long as they have 2.000.000 choices of contracts, rather than 204 but then again, that would mean the problem was in the number of states in existence, not in their taxation.

The lack of choice would still remain. We would still not have the option to live and work without rent and without bosses and landlords. For anarchists like me of course, that is still the biggest problem, but for libertarians it shouldn’t be; after all, bosses and landlords aren’t an issue for them…

Thus in the end, it would be simply hypocritical for a libertarian to claim that the state rent (i.e. tax) is immoral while the rent demanded from a landlord or boss isn’t.  Both are based on passive coercion, rather than active. “Work for a boss, or starve” is not much of a choice, anymore than “Pay your taxes or go to jail” is. Both rely on the same exact set of circumstances: The artificial limitation of choices through the past exercise of violence.

Something which we communists like to call Primitive Accumulation…

PS: This post was inspired when I watched the “income tax bait and switch” in action, in this reddit comment thread. Props to watwatwatwatt for thinking of it.

Related articles

Refuting the "Anarchism can't Work" Bingo.

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Need to write ~20 new posts now. :S

I posted yesterday’s Bingo chart I created to reddit and it was very warmly received. A lot of people since then have asked me to write refutations of each square in chart, so that people can easily be linked to them when they do make them. While a lot of the squares are worded in such a sarcastic way so as to contain their own refutation, I think the idea has some merit.

I plan to write a few posts refuting the more compelling parts of the Bingo. They will most likely be short & sweet, and rather than expand mercilessly upon them, I’ll link to more detailed arguments elsewhere. Stay tuned.

The "Anarchism Can't Work lolol" Bingo

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Ever get frustrated at the inane arguments against anarchism? Then this BINGO chart should come in handy.

There’s a few humorous BINGO sheets available on the internet, from the hilarious Libertarian Troll Bingo, to the sarcastic Sexism in Games BINGO. The latter one, I recently modified slightly and then run through the comments of reddit, which were discussing sexism in games, with great success. I had quite a lot of fun doing it and it also occurred to me that there is another topic where there are so many cliché criticisms that might benefit from a similar treatment.

To this end, I’ve created the “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” Bingo, which is a humorous view into some of the most common, and usually outright absurd criticisms of anarchism that are frequently trotted out when such discussions occur. You can find it below in a simple html form, or on the side, in an image format (click on the thumbnail for larger version).

So without further ado:

The “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” BINGO

Whitest kids you know / Something Positive / etc Go live in Somalia if you like Anarchy so much. Anarchist Catalonia and Ukraine were defeated in war, so this proves Anarchism can’t work. Democratic France being defeated in WW2 doesn’t count. Grow up and get a job! What have the Anarchists ever achieved? The “Haymarket affair”? Never heard of it.
Who would maintain the roads and gather the garbage? Why don’t you create your own political party and run for office? People are too stupid and evil to voluntary work together. They need benevolent leaders to do it for them. What do you mean “who would choose the leaders”? Who would control the huge corporations if the state didn’t exist? Today they’re perfectly regulated and kept in check by our incorruptible leaders. You’re a Utopian. Anarchy will never work the way you idealize, unlike Capitalism and the State which work perfectly now.
The corrupt politicians in power will never allow any movement that starts to challenge the state. Ron Paul 2012! You’re not a true anarchist unless you support the rights to private property, capitalism and wage slavery. Human Nature (FREE SPACE) Your ethical arguments on how humans should act in an anarchist society makes you as bad as Stalin and Pol Pot. If you oppose Capitalism so much, then why are you still using a computer and the internet, huh? And why do you buy groceries?
Let’s say tomorrow we magically had an Anarchist society… An anarchist society doesn’t exist right now, therefore it could never work. Why no, I do not know how old Capitalism is. The state is required because humans don’t exercise voluntary organization. Much like shoes are required because our feet lack the callouses one would develop by not wearing shoes. Whenever your revolutions were attempted, they ended up in brutal dictatorships after a bloody civil war. Unlike all democratic revolutions which were peaceful and never failed. I demand to know the exact details of an anarchist society of the future. People could easily predict 20th century Capitalism during the 19th.
Humans need hierarchy. All human societies throughout history were hierarchical. Why don’t anarchist start their own communes right now? Just buy the land from the state or capitalists and prove it works. Of course nobody will try to mess with it. Without a state and laws to tell me how to behave, I’d go on a killing spree immediately. Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron. I agree with you, but nothing can ever change, so why bother…

I don’t believe I need to point out that this Bingo chart is dripping with sarcasm 🙂

One thing you might like to note is that I’ve tried to align the chart in such a way so that the middle horizontal axis contains common arguments coming from right-libertarians and “Anarcho”-Capitalists, while the middle vertical axis contains arguments that approach a Marxist-Leninist/State Socialist criticism. This should allow an easy Bingo in case you’re arguing wish such ideologues. 🙂

Finally, in case you want to spread it around, or rework it, below I’m including two text files, one containing the bingo options in simple text format, while the other one containing the bingo chart in a way that you can paste into reddit comments.

Let me know if there is a more fitting answer that I’ve missed. A few of them are possibly not that common or absurd, so if you can think of a better replacement, let me know and I’ll update it.

Have fun!

This Wikipedia section annoys me

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Wikipedia can easily fall prety to bias when its supported by flimsy sources.

"North Hampton is a Domestic violence fre...

The section about teh mens on the epidemiology of domestic violence looks very much like an MRA talking point rather than a neutral POV. This is the second time I review the section and find that it is full of questionable sources and blatant editorializing. The first time I removed citations which were not only minimal (i.e. “Straus, 2005”, that was all) but sometimes just wrong. I replaced those with a [citation needed] mark, to force those adding those to backup their statements.

Today I visited again and notice that many citations have been fixed, only this time bad citations have been replaced with seemingly working ones, which at the same time are ones that are frequently brought up by MRAs as a silencing tactic. For example, the very first sentence is this:

Women’s violence towards men is a serious social problem. While much attention has been focused on domestic violence against women, researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.

This is an editorialized title, backed up by two citations. First this, which cites Gelles and does not provide a version on can check online. However I have read that Gelles has explicitly rejected interpretations that put violence against women on the same scale as violence against men. ((Unfortunately this Feminism 101 article suffers of of severe link rot, so I couldn’t link to the original source)).

The second part of the sentence links to this page of citations, which is very much like the annoying Wall of Text tactic, which primarily used to cower and silence opponents, especially those who are not privileged enough to waste even more time refuting it. This particular “Wall of Sources” is frequently linked and cited by MRAs because it is just so damn effective in cowering their opponents. Who can deny science? However, it’s not the science that we need to deny, but the flawed framing and outright dishonest interpretations of the facts and fortunately David Futrelle of Manboobz has done exactly that.

The problem with citing a Wall of Sources, is that it can be practically used to support anything, even a rhetorical point such as “researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.” The problem with this strategy is that it is trivial for people on the other side of the argument to respond with an even larger Wall of Sources, many thousands long, that can support the exact opposite ideological point. It then becomes simply a race of who can gather and choice-interpret or outright spin scientific studies, so that they fit their biases. And this is not how the truth is found, and especially not how Wikipedia is supposed to work.

And then there are the editorialized sources in the above Wikipedia article. If you look at the sources cited at references 33 to 37, you’ll note that they all have a short paragraph interpreting them to the audience, rather than let them stand on their own. This is not done commonly in Wikipedia (as far as I know) as it’s the paragraph being cited that is supposed to give this context. And yet, it seems here that those citations cannot stand on their own, or maybe – and this is what I really suspect – that this is yet another attempt to cower anyone challenging these assumptions, as all of those references are simply used to support the following sentence:

Other studies—typically family and domestic violence studies—show that men are more likely to inflict injuries, but also that when all acts of physical aggression or violence are considered in aggregate, women are equally violent as men,or more violent than men.

Again, another MRA talking point which goes counter to the section above it, and thus multiple (editorialized) sources are pre-emptively used to prevent it being challenged.

The whole situation, imho, stinks. And though I’ve tried to shape up the article somewhat by removing the most obvious citation bias, I am loath to really start editing it and likely end up in a citation war with the MRA watchers it’s sure to have.

Anyone more familiar with the Wikipedia bureaucracy have any idea if using such a “Wall of Sources” to support an editorialized introduction is acceptable? I get the feeling it’s not but I’m don’t really care to waste the time required to find out.

Finding an apt analogy for piracy

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I quote an analogy which exemplifies just why piracy is disruptive to obsolete business models, but not harmful.

Piracy

So my article on the ethics of piracy was posted in the /r/games subreddit and the thread pretty much exploded in arguments. I only saw it half an hour before I had to go to a Faun concert (and then straight to bed because I was working early next day), so I could only properly respond 16 hours after the fact, at which point everyone had already moved on. Still I did leave some answers in that first half-hour but I quickly found out I could barely get a word in sidewise, before being downvoted below the viewing threshold. Oh well, not unexpected I guess (albeit mildly ironic, given how anti-pirates are under the delusion that their opinions are unpopular). And it wasn’t just me, anyone who wasn’t explicitly negative toward piracy, was downvoted, even for simply stating facts.

Anyway, one of the classic problems when discussing piracy is finding an analogy that approximates the same dynamics. Anti-pirates will insist on using analogies relating to physical theft, such as shoplifting, car theft and so on, while pro-piracy people try to use analogies that simulate the zero harm caused to the current owner. It almost impossible to see eye to  eye on this between these two camps, but on the aforementioned thread, someone did make an analogy that I think is compelling in pointing out how piracy disrupts business models.

Quoth mrbobgray

Essentially, the current business model of video games is like this:

I paint a picture. It is a wonderful picture, and everyone loves it. I realize that people will pay me to see it, so I put it in a closed off room and charge people to come in and see it. This works fine for awhile, and I make a lot of money; then one day, everyone on earth develops x-ray vision. This sucks for me, because suddenly I realize that people no longer need to pay me to see my painting; they can stop by any time they like and see it.

What’s an artist to do? How can I possibly make money from my work?

What the video game industry currently does is simple; they ask the government to make it illegal to use x-ray vision on the walls to my house. Ta-da! Everyone has to pay me to see my painting again.

There is a problem though; it is essentially impossible for the government to tell who is using x-ray vision to look through my walls, and who is merely looking at my house. Thus, some people choose to simply ignore the government, and view my painting using their x-ray vision. There is nothing to physically stop them, and it doesn’t prevent others from listening to the government and paying to see it. I can say that I have lost money from those illegal peeping toms, but have I? How much? Neither I or the government know, because we have no way to tell who of the people using x-ray vision would be willing to pay to see my painting.

The problem with this system is obvious: it is reliant on an old, out-dated set of assumptions; namely, that people don’t have x-ray vision. Instead of adapting to new developments, a law was passed to simply pretend those developments don’t exist. This is where we are with digital goods and copyright laws.

Computers and the internet are truly incredible, amazing things. The ability to store and transfer incredible amounts of data near instantaneously has changed humanity as we know it. So why are we fighting it? Why do we pretend that it doesn’t exist?

The idea is not to prevent people from using the new, amazing developments we have as a society; the old model is fundamentally broken. What has to happen now is finding ways of utilizing these new developments to create even more value. Don’t ask me what that is, because if I knew, I’d be busy counting my millions.

 

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The Greenland Bank Transfer scam or Stranded Student scam still at large in Europe

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A Scandinavian person claiming to be a student who had his laptop bag stolen will ask you for travel money. It’s a scam

Remember two years ago when I got scammed in the streets of Frankfurt? It seems that person is still at large in Western Europe and they’ve been incidents of people being scammed still in 2011. I just wanted to remind people to be aware and perhaps help other people find out what happened and concentrate photos, aliases and other evidence.

Here are some other people who’ve posted online about being scammed

Some more photos of the scammer:

Going by the name of Dennis Janson or Erik NelsonPossibly going by the name of Dennis Janson or Erik Nelson

The scammer has also been known to claim he is from Norway as well. Sometimes he is encountered along with a partner.

Aliases I’ve found he’s used until now: Erik Nelson, Peter Janson, Den Larson and Dennis Janson

Fake Papers sent as proof commonly: These are edited from scam to scam it seems. The name of the “father” sending the money changes. You can see below it being “Henrik Jensen”, “Olaf Nelson”, “Erik Janson”, “Olaf Jensen” and so on.

Erik Janson's Fake ID

The “father” is commonly using a @hotmail.com, @live.com or @windowslive.com email address, which makes it difficult to trace. I’ve already tried contacting Hotmail to get more info but was promptly ignored. Still looking at the headers of that email, I’ve managed to trace the father sending it from a Spanish ISP (which I’ve also contacted with no success).

Someone claims they used the +44 7854270100 phone number, but is not clear if this is the phone of the scammer or the “father”. This is a German number. It may be the case that the scammer has scamming partners all over Europe and calls whoever is convenient. This seems consistent with the other samples of emails I’ve seen, where the English was even worse than the one I received.

Beware

This person is a really, really good actor, with a very detailed, sad and believable story. He will talk about his family, he will show you pictures of his “house”, he will give you a fake skype address (same as his name) he will talk to you on end, without any stress or fear. He has done this dozens, if not hundreds of times. This person is absolutely shameless as well. He guiltlessly accepted an offer to buy him dinner and then bargained for 50 extra euros (with more sad sad stories).

If you see him, what you do is up to you, but by the time you realize you’ve been scammed (usually after 2-3 days when you realize the “money transfer” is not coming) your Police department is probably going to be useless. He’ll be long gone to another city or country by then.

Things I wished I did when I was being sold the story

  • Ask to go together to the police station to verify his story. He had claimed he has already been there and had filed a police report.
  • Look more closely at the Bank transfer receipt, which on close inspection was an obvious photoshop.
  • I also wished I was more cautious of the free email address and the egregious spelling errors in the email coming from an “International lawyer”

Anyway, spread the news and info around and hopefully the more people aware of this scam, the less likely it is that they’re caught unaware and lose their goodwill by being scammed when trying to help someone in need. Also if you’ve been scammed and managed to grab more info (email addressed, aliases, photos, phone numbers) contact me and I’ll add this to the list. If you’ve written about this, link it in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.

The more people who know about this, the more likely someone will recognise him during the act and take action to stop him or at least make the victim aware.

Take care and don’t lose your mutual aid feelings just because of this scumfuck.

SWTOR is just WoW with Lightsabers

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SWTOR is just WoW with better graphics and more immersion in a Star Wars setting. AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

A World of Warcraft Orc with a space helmet, floating above the earth, while a Dragon is flying in space.There, I said it.

…But mostly just to troll those butthurt by the statement 😛

There is however some truth in the title statement. SWTOR is for almost all practical purposes, a “reskin” of WoW, with better graphics, better story and full voice acting. You see, when someone makes this statement, they’re expressing something specific, something that most people who have played WoW can instantly notice behind the thin veneer of polished dialogue – that the gameplay mechanics are not just fundamentally the same, they are exactly the same as in WoW.

Yes, many people at times have compared new MMORPGs to WoW, or called them clones of it, but much of the time this was an unwarranted comparison, which is why such sentiments were never particularly common or popular. However the single most common opinion expressed about SWTOR is that it’s basically WoW in Space. Why is it that this comparison comes so naturally and so often to gamers, when it so uncommon against other games? I’ve seen a lot of other MMORPGs come and go, but very rarely has this comparison been so popular among their critics.

The answer is that even though many of the other games might have shared some core aspect of MMORPG gameplay, as it’s been refined by Everquest and later on by WoW, they nevertheless included a lot of interesting innovations to make their gameplay stand out. I am not an MMO expert, but from the little I know: Conan had a completely different combat system, Warhammer online had its Overall campaign which relied on a dynamic conquest mode, D&D Online has a completely different leveling/class system and significant innovations in questing (eg the Dungeon Master). All these make these games stand out in their own way in regards to gameplay. Even if they didn’t manage to dethrone WoW as a fantasy MMO, they still helped to advance the gameplay of the genre of MMORPGs as a whole, by experimenting with incremental or sometimes revolutionary changes and see how well they work.

And even small gameplay changes can have significant effects on the dynamics and the “feel” of a game. This is how FPS manage to stay fresh, even though they’re all the same “point & click” if you get right down to it. SWTOR fans love to sarcastically respond “Yeah, and CoD is Doom with Snipers” in an attempt to point out that all FPS’ have the same control scheme. But the changes that differentiate between CoD and Doom and FPS in general, are not in the control scheme, which has to stay the same if a game will be in the same class and also instantly convenient/familiar to FPS players. Such sarcastic remarks,deliberately or not, misunderstand where the innovation in FPS happens. It is in the weapon mechanics, in the player health, in the player speed, in the implementation of cover mechanics (or not). These changes may be minor on first look, but due to the emergent dynamics of fast-paced games like FPS, they grow up to change the whole pacing. Consider for example that Quake 3:Arena and Unreal Tournament came out at roughly the same time. They were both very similar theoretically. Both had a sci-fi theme, both had fast-paced PvP-only focus,  both had some  weapons with similar use (rocket launcher, machine gun, shotgun), same type of game modes (FFA, Team Battle, Capture the Flag) and so on. And yet, the games, aside from the core “point & shoot” gameplay, play nothing alike. The game just feels completely different instantly.

And this unfortunately is not true for WoW and SWTOR. The games feel exactly the same. The gameplay feels like someone took WoW, improved the graphics, switched to sci-fi, renamed the abilities and classes and called it a day.

It is mistaken to mention the core similarities of FPS when trying to prove how dissimilar WOW and SWTOR are. This is because the core similarities of MMORPGs are on a different level. If we exclude strong outliers like EVE Online or Dofus, and simply look at the more focused example of “Theme Park MMORPGs”, the core mechanics – that is to say, the gameplay features that have been incrementally improved, shown to function well and most players of the genre are familiar with – are the 3rd person view, skill with cooldowns, quests, combat, levels & classes, and item seeking. At the root of all Theme Park MMORPG (TP MMORPG), all these exist in some form. Note however the last part: “In some form“. The fact that all such games include these tried & proven & expected mechanics in no way means they are clones of each other, because there’s still the differentiation happens on a layer on top of that, much like the differentiation of FPS happens on the layer above having a point & shoot, first person, multi-weapon game.

What is that layer? That is the layer where you decide exactly how the core mechanics function.

  • Just how exactly are your skills with cooldowns are implemented in combat? How many can you have active? Do they use some form of “mana”? How?
  • How many levels do you have? How do you gain them? How are they limiting the player in the world? What does a difference in levels interact in PvP?
  • How are your quests activated? How are they completed? What is the usual types of quest? How many types do you have? When completed, is there any change in the world as the other players perceive it? How are parties created and how do they function?
  • How do classes differentiate? Are they using a “holy trinity” setup? How are they progressing on their early levels? How does specialization happen? At which point?
  • How do you find powerful items? How many kinds are there? How do people split the loot?
  • What is the combat flow? Are there other mechanics outside of skills with cooldowns? Does maneuvering and a player’s  skill make a significant difference given equal characters in power?

These are all the kind of questions that show how and where a TP MMORPG differentiates in gameplay from the other TP MMORPGs. A game which has significant changes in some of these, is usually changing its emergent gameplay and the general feel of the game so much, that it cannot possibly be considered a clone of another. Sure, fanboys of one game may call it a clone of their favourite game so as to discourage other players from jumping ship, but such voices are usually easily dismissed by those who experience it.

However, when almost nothing is different in all these aspects, aside from cosmetic changes (such as disabling auto-attack) or simple streamlining, then games feel and play practically the same. And this is sadly the case of SWTOR compared to WoW.

  • The skills with cooldowns? Same exact mechanic. There is a cosmetic change in that your basic attack is now a skill as well and is not automatic but other than that, I haven’t seen a significant difference.
  • The level mechanic is the same. A level cap is 50 (WoW was 60 at launch), you have areas with specific level requirements/expectations, you defeat everything of a significantly lower level easily, at the max level, the things that will keep your interest are very different from everything before.
  • The classes all start at a safe area specific to them. The classes all have skills dedicated to a role of the holy trinity designed for  them (healer, tank and DPS). The classes all select a specialization at level 10. There is a skill tree and you get or improve your skills with money.

And so on and so forth. Won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say, the rest of the list is very much the same trend. There are cosmetic changes here and there but nothing particularly noteworthy. SWTOR fans at this point usually try to point out that this is the standard recipe for TP MMORPGs, so why should SWTOR change what is working? But that’s the thing, this isn’t the standard recipe for such games, all of them have at least a few significant changes in their gameplay. If they hadn’t, they would rightly have been called “WoW with ____” as well.

SWTOR hasn’t even attempted to put their own unique spin on mechanics. It’s just a shameless copy-paste of the mechanics that WoW has perfected, into a different theme. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you. I have nothing against a game doing this, so that someone can have the same gameplay they know and love, but in a theme they prefer. Some people are all for that as a matter of fact, and just shinier graphics and Star Wars are enough to make them switch.

But at least call a spade, a spade. Nobody is bashing SWTOR for being what it is. When people mention that SWTOR is simply “WoW with lightsabers”, they express something specific, that perhaps is not immediately obvious. From what I understand it is “I am tired/bored of WoW gameplay (or don’t like them at all) and was looking for something significantly different, but SWTOR is not it.” And again, there’s nothing wrong with that statement either. This is why it perplexes me when the obvious is denied. The obvious being that SWTOR is directed to people who wanted to play WoW – but in sci-fi, or people who wanted to play a Star Wars with the proven gameplay of WoW (or don’t care about the gameplay at all).

SWTOR does have strong and interesting points to notice, but they are not its gameplay innovation. The innovations of SWTOR lie on a different layer entirely: In the layer of the RPG elements and storytelling. In short, exactly the reason they chose Bioware to do this. And yes, from what I’ve seen, the story does seem to be worth it and anyone who liked KOTOR should probably like SWTOR as well. I would personally play it as well if the price was right, but it isn’t (primarily because I personally did not like the WoW gameplay.)

There is no reason for fans of SWTOR to get annoyed and deny that SWTOR is WoW with Lightsabers. The correct answer should be “Damn straight, and that’s all I wanted!”. And there’s nothing wrong with that.