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Comment by geoffbp | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if he’s ever had anything positive happen because of it. That list looks like a PITA :)

I share the same name with a local TV star in my country. Even that is a PITA. Can’t imagine being named Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Jackson or anything like that.

At some point there were teenager girls calling me (no idea how they got the phone number). I started acting like they called the right person and there would be happy screams on the other hand. I guess the high point was that. I decided that might not be a good idea though. Would definitely continue if my “fans” were middle aged men.

Michael (A.) Jackson is the inventor of representing programs in this diagram format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming

It used to be that whenever I told people about his work, they'd ask if that was the beer guy.

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer) , who was one of the most famous experts on beer and whisky.

I seem to recall when he was on TV he leaned into the joke ("not that Michael Jackson"). Of course that was long before the days random people could send abuse on Twitter.

Michael Jackson is a fairly common name though, I went to school with one. Also with a George Washington, he had a harder time...

The "rich" Mark Zuckerburg should give him some compensation for the hassle.

That would be right thing to do.

Answer the question: What would an asshole do? They would buy up their neighbors' houses to make an unapproved mega compound, buy up ancestral Hawaiian land to block communal land access, and do unlicensed shit without permits making their remaining neighbors miserable. So what is right by virtue is unlikely to happen because almost all billionaires are legitimized criminal aristocrats subject to a different set of rules than average or poor people who are killed in the street for selling loose cigarettes like Eric Garner.

Okay

Cigarettes kill. Selling loosies to kids kills.

No. The individuals genuinely at fault here are

1) those who inflict harm on others, considering that being wealthy or disliked does not justify actions such as death threats

2) those who target the wrong person simply due to a shared name.

Any discussion of compensation should be directed at them.

> 2) those who target the wrong person simply due to a shared name.

In this case that includes the other Zuck's company. He should at least do something about that.

He should at the very least ensure that there was some kind of liaison person at Meta for these not quite as rich (and certainly less obnoxious) Mark Zuckerbergs to reach in case of trouble with his service. This lawyer Mark should just have his account flagged with a huge 'Vetted, this guy is called that; leave it.' notice for any Meta algorithm or employee looking into it.

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