Ex-chair of FCC broadband committee gets five years in prison for fraud | Hacker News Reader

Ex-chair of FCC broadband committee gets five years in prison for fraud

arstechnica.com

240 pointshoward94122 comments

Wow, pretty blatant stuff here. Forged signatures! But some of this could have been prevented. For instance, one of the defrauded equity investors was apparently promised a guaranteed 8% annual return, and was asked to wire money in advance of deal documentation [0]... both of which should have immediately been red flags.

Raw press release here. [1]

[0] Jensen complaint: https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-wordpress-client-uploads/adn/wp...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-ceo-alaska-based...

This certainly begs the question as to whether she sought out the FCC position in hopes of directing Federal money towards projects like hers. It seems like she was desperate to cover up her fraud for 2 years, and especially around the time she took her post in the FCC.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16137/begs-the-q...

We lost. You'll feel better if you give up, too.

Honesty it makes more sense in the modern usage. Assuming something which should have been proven seems like the opposite of begging for [someone to ask] a question.

In the original idiom, the "begging" is for acceptance of the speaker's claim on its face, rather than by "earning" agreement with supporting evidence and reasoning.

The "begging" is a mistranslation of medieval Latin petitio, "logical postulate", as if it were classical Latin petitio, "begging".

The idiom descends in a continuous scholarly tradition from Aristotle and his original Greek refers more plainly to "assuming the original [conclusion]".

See https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290 .

Oh I'm not trying to feel better, I'm trying to help people understand why they say the things they say. And a lot of people don't know about rhetoric.

I don't think what you linked has anything to do with why. The why is straight-forward: what the phrase means in formal logic is not intuitive, and how people use the phrase colloquially is intuitive.

I wonder how many years Ajit Pai will get when it's his turn?

I always find its best not to defame someone, no matter how much you might dislike them or their policies, unless you have a specific fact you want to cite?

How about his willful undermining of the integrity of the public comment process for the Net Neutrality regulations for starters?

He got his way aside by refusing to investigate the tens of thousands of fake comments supporting the repeal of Net Neutrality regulations.

Considering that the comments are completely useless for anything except to let the commissioner know what the public opinion is on a topic, it's not like he actually changed any outcomes by not investigating. The comments aren't votes.

Russian election meddling was mainly fake comments/posts on FB, Twitter, etc. Similarly to Pai, the current administration refuses to investigate those fake comments too. Looks like a trend :)

Astounds me how anti-human organizations such as ALEC are granted such influence by Republican and Democrat alike in the USA. The fraud on the other hand, doesn't surprise me. Despite their power, these regulatory institutions seem more captured by vested interests and partisan politics than the public good they should be providing.

ALEC is a conservative organization with 98% Republican membership.

That seems like a contradiction. I cannot think of any conservative policies advanced lately by the Republican leadership.

No, it's not. Conservative corporate policies desire restoration of a regressive, apartheid theocracy... think Clarence Thomas and Scalia.

That is hardly a conservative goal; it is radically reactionary. Actually conservative policies would resist change, not seek it out.

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