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by chroma 1318 days ago
I am very suspicious of this post.

First, there's your story. To describe it as vague would be an understatement. What was the medical device? If the device does something important for the patient, wouldn't a big red button also be dangerous? You wouldn't want it turned off accidentally. Also the machine needs a button or switch to turn on, right? So why not have that component be the physical switch? And if the kill switch is on the touch screen, wouldn't that take up valuable pixels that could be used for other purposes? It would also make accidental triggering more common.

And you claim the button removal request was from the Chairman of the Board of Directors of a different company, who was a major shareholder? The board of the company you worked at, the C-level executives, and management all caved to him but you didn't, and you kept your job? That makes no sense. Someone with that much influence should have no problem getting an individual contributor let go.

Then there's you. Your Twitter account was created in September of 2017, but either you never tweeted until September of 2022 or your tweets auto-delete. Maybe you changed your username because neither archive.org nor archive.is have any history for your Twitter handle.

Your domain[1] was registered on September 22nd of this year, and it contains some general-sounding activism-du-jour. One might even call it "current thing". If anything it seems quite contradictory. Liberty does not march abroad... except when fighting a proxy war in Ukraine? OK, I guess.

I know my comment is controversial, but your post is exactly what I would write if my goal was to create perfect HN bait. It seems much more likely that someone lied on the internet than that things actually happened as described.

1. https://ldnma.com/

3 comments

I don't believe I said the Chairman was from a different company. He was from the same company. He certainly could have had me fired, at the expense of destroying their schedule. As I stated at the outset, I left out details as to not identify the company (although there is enough here for a former colleague to put it together). Medical devices are a small world with often only 2 companies seriously competing per type.

Your due diligence data is largely correct and I complement your research. I repurposed this twitter account from one I created in 2017 and used as read-only in the intervening time. Also worth pointing out my HN account is quite new.

Wasn't great to cross the wires of my advocacy and technology, but I used the account I had. Didn't expect my twitter comment to be noticed.

I didn't promote my blog at all in this post, but since you mention it, if you read it more carefully I think you will find I take care to distinguish the Ukraine conflict from prior US interventions. Namely, one is a defense of a democracy which invited us whereas others (Iraq, Afghanistan) were not. US troops are not marching into Ukraine. It's even less direct support than the French provided the US revolutionary war.

I don't take issue with your questioning except - the presumption that someone is lying before they have even had a chance to respond to your information.

Edit: removed redundant sentence

Wow, the game is afoot.
But why?
I'm a deep state employee of an as yet unacknowledged three letter agency whose propaganda blog received no traffic from this page until grandparent posted the link. I am a master strategist, playing chess in dimensions string theorists only dream of.