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0 pointsmichaelochurch13y ago0 comments

If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap.

There are the conditions for suicide, and then there's the impulse that drives it to happen. The first is visible and appears over a long period of time-- felony convictions, mental instability, or extreme career adversity-- but it never seems that things are that bad (especially because a lot of people refuse to admit that good things can happen to bad people). The second is fairly sudden and seems "random". This is why suicides are so unexpected. A person can seem to be "not that bad off" one day, and the next day, commit suicide.

The scary thing is that the first kind of conditions are being more common. We have:

* draconian sentences for minor crimes, including drug possession, white-hat hacking, and file sharing, * an increasing willingness of corporations to use extreme and illegal career adversity (e.g. blacklisting) against whistleblowers, * increasing difficulty for a person to "re-invent" him- or herself in the wake of a bad reputation.

Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. (I don't consider this unethical in the context of radical reinvention, providing that you're not feigning competences you lack or defrauding people.) In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do.

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larrys13y ago

"Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do."

You can still do that today although agreed it is much harder. You could simply buy someone's company for example with a history and claim that is where you were (and modify the website with the appropriate collateral.) You can fairly quickly setup a linked in profile and get lots of contacts of people in any industry that you don't even know (source: I get people writing to me wanting to be a linked in contact constantly as I'm sure most people do.)

There are people that actually have an inventory of old websites that have been around since the 90's (and domains registered back then) representing a wide range of industries.

That said this is not as easy and of course if someone does a really through vetting much will be uncovered. But how often is that done?

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