Except of course, when it’s cloudy. The only eclipse that ever happened where I lived in my lifetime was a total disappointment because you couldn’t see anything.
Ah, Billy Mitchell, you silly bitch, what is Karl going to make videos about now? I guess back to the Minecraft stuff!
For real though, they settled the case with Twin Galaxy, but the case between Karl and Billy is about something else, so it still continues, doesn’t it?
He can stop making videos on The Completionist unless you really want to see someone cosplaying as a journalist list things he suspects the guy did but can't prove (beyond the first video). There's a reason that an actual journalist would want to get actual numbers behind the golf tournament, for instance, or consult with someone to see if maybe it's totally ordinary for signatures to be missing from documents because they were e-filed, or perhaps make sure that their legal definitions came from something other than just the first hit that they found with a quick Google, but maybe that timeline doesn't work for the World of Tanks promo slot he sold for his video. If the "bait" that he fell for in Jirard's response was as damning as implied, it might be in his best interest to stop making videos about The Completionist.
What's the factual issue with what he said about Jirard? Like for example, would you say any of the big blockquotes in this story are specifically untrue?
Edit: Buried way down in the thread is my response after watching the video. TL;DR I stopped watching when after faffing around for 30 minutes, the guy finally got to the point, and almost immediately said with a straight face, "The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error."
Click the link in my comment. There is room for almost all of what he said to be true, but he didn't prove it, and that's a big problem, because there's also room all of it or nearly all of it to be false. It's why an actual reporter would get someone on the record to confirm a fact, consult with an expert, and be sure that the things they think are damning are actually damning. Meanwhile, he and OrdinaryGamers may have made some legal faux pas in the process of putting up videos that are sensationalist for clicks. Again, this doesn't mean that their allegations are false. But it's so, so important to actually prove it, because if they're wrong, lies travel faster than the truth, and if they ever make a retraction (I doubt it), fewer people will actually hear it.
I asked about the specific claims in the story I linked to.
Claim #1 can be verified by watching Jirard's video
Claim #2 can be verified by watching Jirard's video
Claim #3 is a simple statement of logic, no factual assertion
Claim #4 is a statement of what's in Jirard's video, and an argument about how the law works, no factual assertion beyond what's in the video
Claim #5 is a simple statement of logic (predicated on what's in Jirard's video)
Claim #6 is an assertion about what Jirard claims "constantly"; hard to verify without watching literally everything Jirard has published
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl's you're talking about. Your answer doesn't give me a ton of confidence that you're being precise in your allegations about Karl.
I haven't watched your video and don't plan to for a little while because of time reasons, but I'll take a look. I am curious on the topic (why I asked you the question I did.) The only other thing I'll say on the topic is, Karl's been on the receiving end of a $100k+ lawsuit already from the subject of one of his videos; it's possible that he's saying irresponsible things without consulting with his lawyer who would otherwise advise him not to, but I think it's unlikely.
I'll start you off by saying that his "textbook definition of charity fraud" is not from a textbook, and you'll find that and many other answers in the video I linked you. It's long, but it's chapter coded with timestamps, and while I didn't skip it, the author gives you a sizable chunk on tax law that you can skip if it's too dry.
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl's you're talking about. Your answer doesn't give me a ton of confidence that you're being precise in your allegations about Karl.
As far as I can tell, the only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that. Even that has a reasonable explanation from a legal perspective, and even that answer may not be good enough for the people who donated to Open Hand. As someone who just wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, there was no smoking gun in the next two Jobst videos I watched, and that's the problem. Legally, the video I linked gets into far more about what they shouldn't have said and why Jirard's video was definitely heavily advised and/or drafted by actual lawyers (which even us non-experts suspected, even if we didn't know why) who may have set up Jobst to fall for a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately sue him.
These two and a half videos from Jobst (I got fed up with his "this response is the worst thing ever" video) are the first I've ever watched from him, because it came up in my recommendations, and his reputation around Billy Mitchell and Wata preceded him. What I saw led me to believe that perhaps he just needs to be the guy who exposes people's scummy secrets, but maybe this one actually ended before it got truly juicy, because life isn't always as dramatic as what gets written for television, and then he just had to fill time in extra videos. Either way, I was not a fan of what I saw and decided to never watch a certain YouTuber again based on his videos; it just wasn't Jirard...oh, and ordinary gamers was probably worse than Jobst.
he only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that
The assertion was that Jirard had confirmed that some of the money was spent on things that weren't charity, and that the explanations Jirard gave for why it hadn't been given to charity after years had passed were nonsense. All of that depends just on Jirard's statements.
That said, I can buy the idea that there were other allegations in the video that shouldn't have been made because they're not provable; I'll watch your video.
a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately counter-sue
Counter-sue? Karl is suing Jirard? When did this happen?
There were no legal threats from Karl's side to get lost in. There were statements about Jirard's conduct, but no threats. I'm suddenly a lot more skeptical about what you're saying, although I'll still watch the video.
Okay, I've seen enough; I made it to 33:12. This video is way longer than it needs to be; Karl made some pretty specific allegations, which do line up with the legal definition of charity fraud (which is laid out in clear legalese in the video), if they're true. The most critical part is the way Jirard repeatedly on stream made very specific statements about where the money was going to go, or had gone, that turned out not to be true by his own later admission. The video could have started at 28:29 with "what is fraud, and did it happen," and done at most a couple minutes' Cliffs Notes for the rest.
I waited and waited for this to be addressed.
At 31:02, he artfully excerpts a statement from Jobst saying the behavior was "unethical and almost certainly illegal," by saying only the "certainly illegal" part. Those are two very different statements, and this was the first time my whoa-hold-the-fuck-up meter started to register.
At 31:30, he airs one of the statements by Jirard that's not really an issue, and explains that as a general statement it's not really an issue. How about the statements Karl took issue with? I was back in waiting mode.
At 33:04, he says, "The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error."
Shut the fuck up Mr. Lawyer Man. You can't make a whole half hour lead up about why the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding and what a great position Jirard is in since he never actually did any fraud, and then just casually drop that "Oh yeah and those the times he lied about where the money had gone he probably just made a mistake and it's not a big deal." Especially since part of the defense is, well we were waiting before we actually gave the money for it to be enough to be able to do X Y Z fancy thing.
I am not a lawyer. There may be some additional explanation that clarifies why they were "obvious miscommunications." But I saw enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Look, I get you're a fan of his, but this "if" is the problem, like I've been saying. The video I linked you, which you aren't interested in watching, only outlines why he may legally want to shut up about Jirard. The video author comes to this conclusion tediously because the law is tedious, but at least he's got some sense of humor. I personally just never want to watch another video of Jobst's because I think he did a poor job of reaching a burden of proof that an actual reporter would need before coming forward with a story. Even not being a journalist myself, I came to the same conclusion as that link the other user sent you. Good on you if you enjoy Jobst's videos, but I hope he holds himself to higher standards in the future.
I'm not trying to get into a big back-and-forth about this, but just to take one more stab at what I've been saying:
The Moon video, Jobst, and the article someone else sent me here all seem to be in agreement that Jirard is on video claiming to have already donated money that it turned out later he hadn't donated. I'm not sure where you're getting that there's a lack of evidence of charity fraud.
Jobst, if I remember correctly, showed the clips of him saying it. Moon said they were "obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements." Ernie said they were "slip-ups" and that he was just filling time on his stream. To me, the latter two sound like bullshit. You are, of course, free to draw your own different conclusions and judgements about any or all of this. Just the fact that he said some things doesn't automatically mean he's guilty. But it's weird to say there's no evidence when all the sources seem to acknowledge (with their own wildly differing spins on the presentation) that there is.
As for your implication that I'm just saying all this because I wasn't interested in the video, I just like Karl Jobst's videos, etc:
"Well, I haven’t ignored [evidence for creationism]; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged." -Carl Sagan
I'm not sure where you're getting that there's a lack of evidence of charity fraud.
The Moon video quite derisively mocks his and OrdinaryGamers' definition of charity fraud, as coming from the equivalent of "legal Tinder" for matching lawyers and clients, with the distinction being that one is interested in being easy to understand while the other is a definition that determines whether or not someone violated the law. They demonstrably typed in "definition of charity fraud" and went with the top result regardless of its reliability. The Moon video then goes on to point out several ways that the charity could be operating that would make the actions of Open Hand not just legal but ordinary. Jobst has circumstantial evidence for lots of things, and Jirard could be guilty of some of it. Given the scrutiny he's about to be under, we'll know for sure inside of a couple of years. The problem with what Jobst did is that we ought to be sure now, and we're not. If we're going to destroy someone's reputation (and the jobs of the people that he employs in the process) for doing something nefarious, we should know for sure that he actually did it.
I watched that section of the video, yes. Did you watch the section of the video after that, that I listed the timestamps of? I talked about it at some length.
Actually: I've exhausted the length of time I want to spend on this. Sorry. You're right that the early section of the video spends a ton of time being derisive towards Jobst, and explaining at incredible length that charities can in general do whatever they want with their money, which is true, and throwing shade at Jobst and strawmanning his complaints a little.
After quite a long time of that, it finally gets around to acknowledging one of Jobst's core complaints, which was not just that Jirard did whatever he wanted with the money (which is his right), but that he lied about it (which is, with certain caveats and reservations, a crime.)
I pretty much gave up on the video when he finally did admit that that happens but dismissed it so airily as oh, that was a "misstatement," it's fine, instead of acknowledging it in any kind of head-on manner or making some convincing argument that Jirard wasn't actually on video lying about it.
I'm actually find with tedium; I was irritated at the video because not because it was dry (it wasn't really), but because it seemed like it was spending time obfuscating the truth and dealing with trivialities. Did a lawyer help Jirard with his apology video? Probably. Where did Jobst get the simplified explanation of charity fraud he used in his video? I don't care, as long as the conduct does match the actual definition. Why was Jirard "saving" the money? It honestly doesn't really matter -- he can, as Moon notes, do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn't lie about it. But if he does lie, all of a sudden the explanation for why he was doing what he was actually doing when he was saying something else is probably irrelevant. Just get to the point. Etc.
Anyway. That's my take on it. You've got yours. Good luck and all the best.
I think I got so mad that I spent half an hour of my life watching this, that I replied to myself. But my response (after watching most of the video) is up there.
Often, when I am covering a topic I lack familiarity or specificity with, I bring in an outside source—in the case of nonprofits, that meant talking to sources like lawyers and financial experts on the challenges that can face charities. (Lawyers, it should be noted, often don’t speak in absolutes about specific situations when talking to media outlets.)
Jobst didn’t do that, essentially meaning he was interpreting the documentation himself.
Citation needed. I don't know that Karl consulted with a lawyer before making this video, but given that he's right in the middle of getting sued and has spent over $100k on legal fees defending himself in that lawsuit, it'd be pretty surprising if he didn't talk to his lawyer before making this video, but instead just sort of sprung it on him as a little surprise.
I'm curious what Ernie's reason is for asserting specifically that he didn't talk to a lawyer about his video.
I can take or leave Jobst’s claims of embezzlement—I think while Khalil probably spoke a bit too loosely during IndieLand, the format is a livestream and does lead to a lot of loose talk. Dude is filling time for hours, because that’s how the format works, and that lends itself to slip-ups. It doesn’t seem like he was being intentionally misleading, for the most part. But I do think that if Khalil decides to do another livestream like this in the future, he should probably cut out the middleman. It’s clear that what they were building towards struggled from an execution standpoint, and the use of a charity tied directly to Khalil has raised too many questions.
By saying that he'd donated money he hadn't donated, he was just... filling time on his stream? "For the most part?" Doesn't that aspect of the issue deserve a little more attention than this one dismissive paragraph?
(Edit: I expanded the quote to give full context. Contrast this against how Karl "not a bad journalist -- far from it" Jobst actually showed quite a few exact clips of Jirard saying the things he was referencing to support his arguments with specifics, instead of just making vague statements about "slip-ups.")
I have more I'd like to say about other things in this article, but honestly most of it is just beside the point. Like I said, the actual situation is actually extremely extremely simple. Seeing these huge videos or articles, which talk about charity fraud but spend almost all their runtime dealing at incredible length with issues other than "Did Jirard commit the technical definition of charity fraud?", actually specifically emphasizing that it wasn't a big deal if he did for the short time they touch on it, seems very weird.
(Edit: I could actually sympathize a lot more with the "Karl went too far" narrative before I spent so much time on things people are posting in this thread. It's definitely true that he's not a journalist and he makes money running a flashy Youtube channel; I could easily believe that he publicly attacked a couple of genuinely awful people like Billy Mitchell and it worked well, and he sort of got carried away looking for the next target, and then went too far in his Completionist video. I'd only ever really heard Karl's side of the story, and I didn't care about the topic enough to look into it any more. But these two attempts at defending what Jirard did are genuinely ridiculous.)
Video: Whoa whoa whoa, there's a very technical definition of charity fraud; you have to operate a charity and make false statements about what you're doing with the money (subject to a few additional caveats and restrictions.) This is a terribly irresponsible thing Jobst is saying without having proof of it or understanding the law as well as I do.
You: "There was no smoking gun" "He didn't prove it"
Also video: Those times Jirard clearly said untrue things about what was happening to the money, well hey, anyone could make that type of obvious innocent mistake
The first video showed the money hadn't moved. Correct, we can observe that from his research. The second video alleged more money was missing, alleged embezzlement and fraud, because he guessed that some money from a golf tournament wasn't accounted for. The problem here is that he has no hard numbers for how much money, no source to say that something malicious happened and was hidden, etc. Please recognize the difference here.
The video was phrased with reasonable doubt, while often juxtaposed against a tweet from someone to show why a reasonable person would think so.
Update: Moon took down his video, and posted this, saying among other things "Karl is right: I didn't engage with the entire body of evidence, thereby getting crucial facts wrong."
Oh really? Every SSD has an end date, you can’t overwrite them. Yet Microsoft has a special (encrypted) partition in the internal XBOX that has to match the main board. Because of this, you can’t simply open it and swap the drive. In many cases, cloning the partition has failed necessitating sending the entire thing to Microsoft to fix (for a fee).
I see where you are going with this… But let’s be clear this is not an attempt by them to make you fail at fixing it, but an attempt to avoid manipulations for jailbreaking/bypassing it’s security and block piracy attempts. That said yes, that has consequences for the repairability. And that maybe, I am not expert, there might be better ways to handle this.
Thank you for your response. I get what you’re saying but no matter what your stance on piracy is, it’s gonna happen. Absolutely inevitable. If (but mostly when) that encrypted partition is broken, they will load up a new 4TB SSD loaded with games they didn’t pay for, add the encrypted partition, pop it in their Xbox Series X, and they’re off to the races!
But in the meantime, absolutely everyone suffers. Anyone who has an SSD fail (remember: they have limited write cycles!) will pay the price in lost saves and time/money spent sending it to Microsoft. And after the encryption is defeated? Then only legitimate Xbox gamers who pay for their games will be hurt by this. And keep in mind it also adversely affects the less technologically-skilled people more.
So in summary, yes; I absolutely will blame Microsoft for implementing a measure that will only slightly slow down piracy attempts while permanently punishing and inconveniencing everyone else…
I get what you’re saying but no matter what your stance on piracy is, it’s gonna happen.
Except… It didn’t. Obviously they know what they’re doing because Xbox one has never been broken and is about to be retired. First console that could ever make that claim.
Most ssd write cycles are massively high and a console isn’t writing that heavily anyways.
That won’t matter. Discus comments are tied to people’s real identities in most cases and that didn’t stop them from posting unhinged bullshit underneath every story.
But besides that; are there any good PC kart racers?
(Emphasis on “good”, because I already know about Super Tux Kart, used to play it a lot more than 10 years ago, but today it feels very… Clunky and dated).
The only game I want to play is that new Donkey Kong game. Paying €520 for playing just one game is ridiculous. I’m gonna wait till Nintendo releases more games. I’m not gonna spend €450 for it to collect dust like my PS5.
EA should split itself up or sell off some franchises. The current situation makes nobody happy: investors don’t like the profitability of single player games, players don’t like the live serviceification of single player games, and I’m sure devs don’t like that they can’t work on projects that likely inspired them to become game devs in the first place.
The Sims franchise could support a medium sized studio on its own.
I played the Sims 1&2 as a kid, and love the fuck out of them. As an adult with disposable income, I would have gladly dropped even $100 on a proper modernized rerelease of these games I love. Instead, I saved my money and downloaded them for free. Because why the hell wouldn’t I? The pirate versions are literally better. EA is squandering the potential of this and many other IPs
I feel like I’m the target audience for this and I have no interest. Ive bought every PlayStation, including the PS4 pro, though I did wait for the 3 to hit $400. I’ve had ps+ since the PS3.
I still have plus until july as I’d always buy a year or 2 on black friday sales. They’ve jacked the price of plus so much that I’m very unlikey to renew now. And $700 for the pro is fucking stupid. If the PS6 continues on this trend, I might just be completely done with them even though I really do like the exclusives.
I hear you. I’ve had every playstation since the PS1. We even own a PS4 and PS4 Pro. Mythbusters was the beginning of the end for me. When they yanked Mythbusters without warning or recompense it drove home what I already knew: my digital library was only as good as the whims of Sony. I haven’t made a purchase on their platform since.
And like you I also have Plus for a while, but I’ve noticed more offerings are starting to be PS5 only. And maybe it’s bias informing my experience but I could swear they’ve already begun enshitifying the PS4 store the same way they degraded the PS3 store when the 4 came out. They removed some of the browsing options, like browsing by category.
I fully agree, I’ve been slowly drifting away from consoles since the tail end of the PS3. For the price it just really isn’t worth it anymore for how much I use. This time around I ended up going the X through they’re all access pass because it came the 3 years of Game Pass ultimate, and that was pretty cool not 200 plus dollars a year cool but it was pretty cool, and then when the PS5 became available I got that against my better judgment because I have been Sony my entire life and I wanted Ragnarok (which I ended up never finishing).
I was juggling two different subscriptions for a while a PlayStation Network and a Microsoft Game Pass subscription, but since I still use both of them it was kind of worth it, then Sony increased their price without offering any competitive reason for doing so for any benefits so I canceled and moved over to almost exclusively Xbox until my ultimate ran out,
Now I have neither subscriptions and both consoles collect dust because neither console has a subscription that I feel is worth paying for, or offers any content that I can’t just use my computer for without the need of paying a monthly sub. Last generation was iffy, this generation there’s no way it’s worth.
The developer of Fist Puncher has an insightful “Promoted Comment” now on the Ars Technica article:
therealmattkain I’m one of the creators and developers of Fist Puncher which was also published by Adult Swim on Steam. We received the same notice from Warner Bros. that Fist Puncher would be retired. When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators.
This is incredibly disappointing. It makes me sad to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries. Our community and our players have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost. We have Kickstarter backers who helped fund Fist Puncher (even some who have cameo appearances in the game) who will eventually no longer be able to play it. We could just rerelease Fist Puncher from our account, but we would likely receive significant backlash for relaunching a game and forcing users to “double dip” and purchase the game again (unless we just made it free).
Again, this is really just disappointing. It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form. March 7, 2024 at 12:51 am
arstechnica.com
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