'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

Post by Grimeton » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

cataphract wrote: post #78

energy123 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.

I don't think that's the lesson. What I take from that is that people adapt to norms and incentives they have. Despite all the talk about "academic integrity" and whatnot, very rarely were there punishments for people who cheated. For every professor that wrote FRAUD in the grade sheet and escalated to the Disciplinary Committee, there were 100 that turned a blind eye or at most confiscated a paper being passed aroun…

Post by brynnbee » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

ninjagoo wrote: post #63

alexpotato wrote: post #44

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased): Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly. For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction…

> Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly. Do you have any evidence to support your claim? On the contrary, a 2019 analysis [1] combined 400+ experimental treatments, 44,000+ participants, and 47 countries. Participants surrendered roughly three-quarte…

Post by dylan604 » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #100

dylan604 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dream a little dream of the world you want, then be prepared for the alarm to go off to rejoin the real world. An insignificant number of people care and while everyone else does business with anyone as long as there's benefit for them. As exhibit A, I present all of history

I wonder if Captain Boycott would agree.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

Post by breakpointalpha » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chance there wasn’t anything incriminating. The top guys kept conversations live or intimated they wanted something done; the lowers took the planning and execution upon themselves.

Mobsters have it down to an art. "You take care of it." means "Murder him and dump the body into a building foundation." "I don't see any problems." can mean "The ambush will happen at the scheduled time. Vinnie will clean up the bodies." etc. You'll also see a lot of politicians using "dog whistle" statements, that are interpreted by listeners to mean something entirely different from the stated words.

Post by collingreen » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #95

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices This vastly overestimates the opsec of most tech executives.

I was told to do something that was a crime by my line level manager at a tech company when I was only a few years in my career, with code that he hand wrote and wanted me to type in and commit under my name. When I refused he called me into a 1:1 and verbally told me I would be losing my job if I didn’t and only backed off when I told him he was never getting that paper back and asked if he wanted to go HR right now…