I dislike the framing of some inconsistencies as "conspiracy theory". Mistakes can and will happen, it's an argument of emotion to frame an inconsistency as a "conspiracy theory". Just because one possible explanation is that people colluded intentionally and conspiratorially doesn't rule out all the other more plausible explanations that something really is wrong.
It's also bad epistemology. Literally everything can be explained as a conspiracy, so the fact the the only explanation you can think of to an inconsistency is "people colluded" reflect more on you than on the problem. Historical records can and will be inaccurate.
Some people's epistemological metric goes haywire from those two words. People write inaccurate stuff all the time. It's literally just papers. Other civilizations are other clocks and there are very few historical evidence to synchronize those clocks, especially when the travel time of news and people in those times was extremely slow. Lack of international news also means loss of synchronization.
If the invocation of the words "conspiracy theory" in any way repels you from exploring inconsistencies with an open mind, the problem is with your emotional reasoning. If you believe this guy, something like the missing years could never have happened. It clearly happened, and I am sure there was no conspiracy behind it. Two words, "conspiracy theory", entirely shifted your internal model of the world emotionally, when epistemologically, it shouldn't change your opinion into either direction. The existence of an extremely unlikely explanation is completely equivalent to just no explanation. "Conspiracy theory" is purely an appeal to emotion. Someone claimed A, and a guy told you Conspiracy=>A therefore ~A. Only an emotional human would process this useless information in any way.
The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since.
Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.
See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information.
You'll find that HN, just like any other community, is largely conformist on major social/political issues.
It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization.
People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue.
This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics.
Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.
To be clear, the root problem here is that Google gives their own app store an unfair advantage. Third-party app stores can't auto-update their apps, among other things, without the phone being rooted, which carries serious consequences for functionality (e.g., can't use the camera anymore on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, can't use Snapchat, Netflix, or Android Pay anymore on any phone, and on some phones you just can't root at all, period). If third-party app stores could fairly compete with the Play Store, then there'd be no issue at all with it having draconian and arbitrarily-enforced policies.
If you use Magisk you can just sideload Netflix from APK Mirror or Aurora Store and you're fine. Samsung stock ROMs specifically have extra Netflix DRM checks built in iirc, but if you're rooted disabling them should be easy, I'm sure there's open source scripts on xda that will do all this. Netflix is even fully functional on GrapheneOS despite it being a custom build which doesn't pass SafetyNet, although the bootloader is locked and it's not rooted, but still it fails SafetyNet and Netflix runs fine without any tricks.
Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database. There are scripts to automate this on xda for certain, I used one before on my old Pixel.
Snapchat though is a lot more tricky yeah, they do their own checks outside of SafetyNet and it's a game of cat and mouse where whenever someone gets around one Snapchat adds five more. But then how many people still use Snapchat these days? Everyone I know just uses IG which works fine on a rooted phone.
> Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database.
"You just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database" has got to be the most unintentionally amusing thing I've read all week. I'm happy to poke around in the internals of Android, but even most of my developer friends would see a process like that and go "nope, not worth the effort". Ordinary people do not know what SQLite is, or how to run scripts, so a barrier like that is a deal breaker for them.
You can run a script to do it for you, you don't even have to know what SQLite is, you just need to go on xda and run the script that makes Google Pay work.
Although I would argue that these concerns only apply to regular users who wouldn't bother rooting their phones in the first place. Most people who root their phones are willing to run scripts and know they need to be a bit hacky to make stuff work.
Users who are not willing to take that view shouldn't be rooting.
The only restriction they have for unrooted phones is lack of auto updates, a mild inconvenience at worst. You also have to hit "install" on a little pop up window when you install something. That's it.
Most regular users are capable of hitting an update notification manually.
Try getting a non-techie to set up Magisk on their phone though. And just doing it for them isn't a practical option unless you live with them, because then they won't know how to install the monthly OTA security updates anymore.
If you have a rooted phone you probably have Magisk, it's virtually the universal go to rooting app and the easiest method of rooting. You can even still get OTA's if your phone uses the A/B update system like basically every modern Android phone.
It is managed through a simple UI that automates most of this stuff for you, and it also has a library of third party extensions you can install as easy as apps from the Play Store that apply various system mods including the Google Pay hack.
Anyone who cannot work out how to use Magisk is unlikely to have a rooted phone in the first place. As I said, Magisk is the easiest and most common rooting method used these days because it is the most simple and convenient.
My Samsung phone came preinstalled with an unremovable third party app store. No root necessary. Maybe device manufacturers aren't considered third party?
Silent installation of applications without your confirmation or knowledge is a privileged permission reserved for preinstalled apps. So Samsung can provide a 3rd party store on their phones that can silently install applications on your phone while others can't.
This was changed in Android 12 (I think) where silent app installation is a grantable permission for other stores like F-Droid.
Those are preinstalled apps with system access just like the Play Store itself though. It is still true you cannot do auto updates with user installed app stores like F-Droid unless you root.
Personally I don't mind just hitting update all in F-Droid every now and then so it's no big deal to me, just saying it is functionality only apps with system permissions (meaning pre-installed only if the phone isn't rooted) are allowed to have.
If, as you said in another comment, this will change in Android 12 that's a cool development. I hadn't heard this previously.
The problem is not quite Google's behavior. It's legal for the same reason it's legal for you to not allow someone inside your house for bad reasons or no reasons at all.
The problem is that we've allowed digital marketplaces to achieve the kind of market power that would make a robber baron blush -- and we're not talking enough about how breaking up FAANG companies into multiple competing companies helps prevent the kinds of harms discussed in the blog above (as well as others).
I purchase software from no less than 5 different digital marketplaces on my computer, but I am all but prevented from downloading software on my phone that does not originate from the Play store. Monopolies are not good for markets.
I have F-Droid installed on all my Android phones. Admittedly it's something you must go out of your way to do, but you can put third party app stores on Android phones very easily, or just sideload apps individually if they have an official APK link (many do).
iPhones on the other hand, yeah very different story.
When I was a freelancer, I was warned by my legal help that taking a businesses site offline in response to non-payment was legally risky. There was a chance of being sued for disrupting their business.
I wonder if there are grounds for a (reasonable) legal suit here. Anyone in the know that can fill us in?
You're talking about self-help that isn't in a contract, right? The OP is talking about self-help developer account suspension that presumably is a right listed in the applicable TOS.
That's OK: then any settlement gets distributed to the ex-company's shareholders.
(Of course some entity needs to fund the lawsuit: if the company cannot, and the lawyers will not take it on contingency, then the shareholders would need to.)
Most people even when they think they're in the right won't take legal action. Even when they think they'll get a payout they won't take legal action. If they get threatened with legal action they'll automatically backdown.
I'm sure there are a multiude of reasons behind why this is. But I think part of it is on some level fight or flight. I am sure for a lot it's just not worth the hassle.
I'm hoping for the day someone does take them to court especially in the EU where they're less likely to put up with the corporate nonsense that the American courts seem to put up with.
I'm in the EU the cost to taking them to court here isn't that much. In fact, I'm in Germany where there are legal limits to how much a lawyer can charge so the cost is not a factor. Yet, I know people who back down and avoid legal fights even when they think they can win.
It is legal because of the contract between the developer and Google. In this case Google decided that the developer violated the contract's terms and terminated the account.
Also, there might have been a human review, and it was decided that termination is going to proceed, hence no basis for human to intervene.
In the US, there's something called a class action lawsuit.
"As of July 1, 2010, Quiznos was close to reaching a settlement over the multiyear class-action lawsuit that covers nearly 10,000 of its current and former franchisees. The case comprises four separate class-action lawsuits dating back to 2006 which consolidated in 2009 — involved allegations by attorneys for franchisees that Quiznos Franchise Co. LLC and other entities with ownership or control of the Quiznos chain had violated U.S. racketeering and corruption statutes."
Is ransom payment even considered "stolen" in the usual sense? You have willingly paid that, nobody took that from you without permission. I wouldn't be surprised if ransom has it's own different definition.
Forcing an innocent to hand over bitcoins they had no clue they were tainted will make everyone lose trust in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. What's the point of anonymity when trading when you're culpable for wherever that currency came from.
A quick test for "willingly" as you put it, is not due to force, fraud, or fear.
I would think that a ransom situation would likely qualify as some type of duress. Deciding whether the criminal act is "theft" (ie. stolen) or "fraud" or something else is probably missing the point.
And certainly, some aspect in the exchange (pay money for this encryption key) did not involve permission: the encryption of the files!
But, how to restore things after a wrong has occurred? I agree with your point that there is a risk of committing a greater wrong against an innocent party. Hence the special protections of currency as a unique type of property in the article. Does bitcoin fit this model? An interesting discussion!
For large amounts such as this one IMHO the key issue is that the recipient can be questioned about the source of the BTC - are they themselves related to the actual crime in question? And searched for evidence of the same.
If they're innocent, they will generally be able to identify the counterparty to whom they sold the goods or services valued at close to $1M, and the goods&services may then lead to the culprit; because (here's the thing) if they "just" did a fully anonymous $1M cash or cash-equivalent transaction, then they're not really innocent in many jurisdictions, because for large amounts money laundering laws generally (nuances depend on country) require you to identify the other party or not do it. Selling something anonymously for $10 in cash is innocent, but selling something intentionally anonymously for $1M in cash (or BTC) generally is a crime of money laundering by itself, no matter where the money came from.
The original article assumes (with no grounding, but just as an example) that the 'innocent recipient' might be some over-the-counter broker. That broker is legally required to 'know your customer'. And if they don't know their customers, well, then they're not innocent and deserve to lose their money.
The same applies to Bitfinex itself - they're required to know from whom they got these 96 BTC. If they don't, well, it's their problem, why not fine them the equivalent of 96 BTC or more for that.
Does a mugger steal anything? You "willingly" hand them your wallet. In the cryptolocker case, it is to recover your locked file. In the mugger case, it is to not get stabbed.
"Forcing an innocent to hand over bitcoins they had no clue they were tainted" shouldn't wreck trust in cryptocurrencies, but rather in the organization unjustly harming those innocents—i.e. the government. If anything the fact that they had to track down each individual recipient and force them to transfer the funds, rather than simply pressuring some bank or other intermediary, ought to increase trust in cryptocurrencies.
The "but I didn't know" excuse of innocence is not universal. In some cases one is required to do due diligence or risk catching some of the guilt in one's trades. Whether Bitcoin traders should be held responsible for the provenance of their coins is an interesting question. It really comes down to whether we want to protect Bitcoin as a payment system. And few people even care so it's not looking good.
Due diligence is not sufficient in the interesting cases. If exchanges instituted a blacklist of known ransom payments, for example, ransomware authors would just wait until the coins have been changed into some other untraceable form before releasing their hostages. Blacklisting the transaction in time to do any good would be the same as not paying the ransom. Reporting the address after the fact can only harm innocents several stages removed from the ransomers who could not possibly have known that the transaction was tainted.
The only reasonable solution is to track down the actual ransomers and make them pay for the damage they caused. Dragging other parties into this can only make things worse.
Making the receiving parties intent in covering losses can help a lot during discovery. Dragging "innocents" into it might just get us to a system that makes it hard for extortionists. And that system might not look like the Bitcoin we know.
You can argue that we should suffer the extortionists for other benefits we get out of Bitcoin. I'm not convinced at this point.
> Dragging "innocents" into it might just get us to a system that makes it hard for extortionists.
If you're willing to harm innocents for the sake of your cause—even if the goal is to make things harder for extortionists—then you're no better than those you're fighting.
I see this as an example where the ends can justify the means. The maximum loss those people could incur would be the sums exchanged. If those are restored to the damaged party I don't see how there's a good reason to protect the people who traded. They can still demand restoration from their partners after all. If they traded with crooks, they might get nothing back. Such is life.
To say this is the moral equivalence of extortion is a long shot.
I think mortgages as a concept are bad, and do more harm than good to the people who need to take them. I think gradually banning mortgages, by increasing the minimum required percentage of house price required to start a mortgage all the way to 100% (when you can't really take a mortage), will be a good thing.
The way house investors view mortgages is as a very cheap leverage. So investing in housing will always be fundamentally skewed, because every single person can so easily get cheap leveraged investment in a house, so housing as an investment can perform much more poorly compared to other investment as still beat them by far because of the mortgage. This is so skewed up that a house now has an extra value: as a 'token' to get a cheap loan. This extra value is paid by everyone buying a house.
The way the average family looking to buy a house is completely different: they are looking to compete in the housing market with other families with similar financial abilities, to purchase a house. When you offer all sides of the competition the ability to enter a cheap loan, the side that doesn't take the loan loses the house. But if all sides didn't have the possibility to take a loan and pay more for the house, they would all pay less. Allowing buyers to take mortgages sets them off in a prisoner dilemma against every other buyers, and they all come out losing. If you outlaw mortgages, everyone interested in the house itself wins.
Moreover, once you have lured a family into strangulating themselves with a mortgage, they are now prone to financial stress that will cause them to take loans with much worse terms than a mortgage, therefore nullifying all the possible gains they had from taking the cheap loan. So while investors fully benefit from the cheap credit of the mortgage, families often follow up with mistakes and bad loans which, in total, make the mortgage costly loan.
The more you think about it, the more you should realize the winners from the concept of mortgages are real estate companies, investors and banks, and the biggest losers are the average family which are forced to take it from the Nash Equilibrium of a prisoners dilemma.
Moreover, if mortgages didn't exist, overall spending across the economy would rise, which will be a good thing.
Almost no one in the US has the cash to purchase a home. How would eliminating mortgages not dramatically shift land ownership to the wealthy and turn everyone into renters?
Because it would make houses an unattractive investment. Once you get rid of the cheap leverage, housing will never compete with other investments. You always need to pay for like 40% of the house to start a mortgage anyway, this will not change the fact you need a significant savings before you can buy a house.
As another sibling said it's fairly usual in the US for put down between 3.5%-5% for a house. Additionally, There are a ton of assistance programs for low-income people to get cash grants or loan assistance.
If the only way to purchase a home was with cash I suspect that nearly every home would be owned by a real estate investment company. Who else would have the cash to purchase a home? You already are seeing this happen on the west coast. I'm very skeptical that consolidating ownership of land into even larger businesses would be accompanied by fair and equitable renter's rights. I believe that the entire stock of housing in cities being owned by large, far away entities would have a negative impact on living standards and mobility.
why would having large commercial landlords be any different than individual landlords?
I'd say that a big commercial landlord has some edge over an individual landlord by being able to operate at scale, and thus lower the cost of maintenance. This would be reflected as lowered rents.
Because large commercial interests have increased power in city, state and national politics. Rent control? Screw it! Background checks for rental units? Mandatory. If there is a monopoly on housing there's the potential for some pretty nasty stuff.
>You always need to pay for like 40% of the house to start a mortgage anyway
in the united states, literally the exact opposite is true. you can get a mortgage with almost nothing as a down payment. By agreeing to take on PMI, private mortgage insurance, you can get federal loans with something like a 3-3.5% down payment
>You always need to pay for like 40% of the house to start a mortgage anyway
What does this mean exactly? Even these days (i.e. post-2008), you can get a loan on a primary residence with 3% down. Closing costs are comparatively minimal. Where does the other 37% come from?
If there are 150M homes in the US and suddenly only 5M have the cash to buy them, what do you think would happen to prices?
The inverse has already happened - the US gov't backs mortgages, allows 30 year terms, etc. All that does is drive up prices because everyone's purchasing power increases.
I believe prices would fall a small amount and then foreign and domestic investors would swoop in buy them all up, much like what's happening in Vancouver, BC.
Nothing screams "we have microsoft keys!" harder than the fact that the only vulnerabilities reported by the NSA is a cryptographic validation bug. If I had to guess exactly what kind of vulnerabilities they do not need, this is exactly those kind. Who needs crypto validation bug when you already own microsoft's keys?!
I think you're spot on. Everything agencies at this level do is calculated and weighed carefully. They definitely would not seek to patch a useful vuln. It is a PR stunt.
The NSA's job is to gather information. They have >400mil people to protect, and 6bn people to attack. They are in the business of using exploits, not closing them.
The most frequent misunderstanding of science, (and it applies to many other fields such as cyber security security, politics, etc.) is that an imperfect solution is worthless, that if a model is incomplete it's as good as no model, etc.
Perfect is the enemy of good. At the core of science is settling for the least errors model. You suggest solutions because doing them is better than doing nothing at all. Of course they will be partial if the problem is of such a large scale as climate change. That's not a reason not to do them.
So what if all the politicians are dirty scumbags? Voting for none is still worse than voting for the least shitty politician.
You need to accept you can't have a perfect solution. I find a perfectionist attitude to problems more common with religious people.
Because once you already have one single generalizing solution to so many questions (god / religion), it is just so tempting to believe the same applies to other problems.
Don't you think it is racist to actually care about the race of the interviewer? Would you even think about that if there wasn't a non-stop conversation about racial differences? Maybe the nonsense diversity discussion is only making it worse by creating anxieties that wouldn't even be there?
I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals.
Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing except one little piece of a giant puzzle?!
It also goes for women / black people who didn't choose a career in tech. There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You can't just pretend that they are all stupid and don't know what's good for them.
Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.
The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.
This whole thing is ignorant to the point of being offensive.
> Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.
I have felt this very acutely and it's offensive to assume I'm sexist just because I don't see people like me at the higher levels of the org, and struggle to figure out how to balance my identity with what the org wants as a result.
Women can have male role models, but it's not the same - there are behavioral expectations of men and women that are just different. A woman can't simply "act like a man" and get the same response, and saying that's a perfectly fine solution is quite ignorant. In any case you shouldn't have to give up your identity when that has nothing to do with what actually gets the work done.
When you enter a new workplace and realize that there is nobody like you there - especially in the higher ranks - you are fighting a very difficult battle. You aren't sure what behaviors get rewarded and which get you attacked. You get left out of the little friend groups and other opportunities for connection, and you feel like an outsider.
It's not about envy at all. It's about feeling seen, about feeling accepted and like you belong in the workplace. It's about getting the group that can do the best job, and that often means a diverse team, not a homogenous one.
So that's the only defining bit of personality? That you're a woman? What about your personality? Up-front / discrete? Introvert / extrovert? Mannered / rude? So many other traits? I'm pretty sure there are man with much more similar personality to you than just a random woman. You've just been brainwashed to have a single bit when judging people, by the same 'diversity' advocates. There is no one like you, and that is not a bad thing. There is no one like every other single person. You don't need someone like you to know you can succeed.
Carl Sagan wrote in his book The Demon-Haunted World about a kind of intellectual laziness.
"instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes. This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human"
He talked about the issue of stereotyping in science and the harm this caused his field, but it can really be seen as an insight in why people so easy start to do it once the culture makes it acceptable. It is easier. It does save the trouble of thinking. Looking at people as individuals is hard, takes energy and is prone to come back and bite you. Much easier to just reduce people to single bits of information and follow what ever the cultural accepted stereotyping (ie discrimination) that the environment allow.
> The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals.
No, that's not the reason. Senior/youth discount rates also doesn't look at individuals, and yet they're not generally seen as bad. The inherent moral nature of the discrimination itself is extremely important.
I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work.
I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're better and they suck.
You can't ever be accepted by those that envy you, the most you can get is that they stop using you to cope with their insecurities.
EDIT:
It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference.
If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it is a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel.
Unlike what it might sound, this isn't about me at all. I usually try to stay humble around normal non-envious people. But the best way to deal with envious people is to break their positive feedback loop. They need a strong negative feedback for their behavior so they don't repeat it.
I realize I will be hated by them. I also realize from so many different experiences being loved by them was never a possibility, and I am content with the small success of them dealing with their issues elsewhere.
Just going out on a limb here, I may well be wrong, but you might want to consider asking around for better tools in this area. None of this sounds healthy. Or enviable, for that matter.
> In general [in the simulation], mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.
But hey, even if you are literally Superman, we all love Superman because he goes around boasting how great he is and how much everyone else sucks, right?
It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference.
If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it isn't a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel.
As someone who moved from a post-socialist country to USA, I would like you to know there's a lot more to role model nonsense than meets the eye. And to environment in general.
My perspective on life, career, and success is completely than my girlfriend's. I grew up surrounded assuming that the only way to make more than $50k/year is to be a crook. She grew up in Palo Alto, making $X00k/year to her sounds like just a default. Successful people start the next ebay.
It took me years to overcome that. Without anyone discriminating against me at all. It was just me discriminating against myself by [subconsciously] thinking certain things just aren't possible.
Yes even though I had Bill Gates, James Watt, Edison, Tesla, and Oprah Winfrey as role models growing up. That was nice to dream but surely not achievable.
There's also the weirdness of these equality crusaders defining what white males are doing as the norm, and as the world should be, and trying to make other groups more like white males in certain respects.
What if the rate at which women enter, say, CS, relative to other fields is actaully the "correct" rate, and the male population's numbers are inflated for some bad reason?
The article points that specific entry points into the field are more biased than others. If you stop gatekeeping on these biased entry points, you will end up with a much more diverse workforce that correctly represents this "correct rate" rather than the biases of the industry.
I'm not speaking specifically - clearly, sexism exists, and it has the effect of keeping some people away from a field who would otherwise join, or driving some people away from a field they would otherwise stay in. My point is that using white males as a baseline of the way the world should be is flawed.
I dislike the framing of some inconsistencies as "conspiracy theory". Mistakes can and will happen, it's an argument of emotion to frame an inconsistency as a "conspiracy theory". Just because one possible explanation is that people colluded intentionally and conspiratorially doesn't rule out all the other more plausible explanations that something really is wrong.
It's also bad epistemology. Literally everything can be explained as a conspiracy, so the fact the the only explanation you can think of to an inconsistency is "people colluded" reflect more on you than on the problem. Historical records can and will be inaccurate.
Some people's epistemological metric goes haywire from those two words. People write inaccurate stuff all the time. It's literally just papers. Other civilizations are other clocks and there are very few historical evidence to synchronize those clocks, especially when the travel time of news and people in those times was extremely slow. Lack of international news also means loss of synchronization.
If the invocation of the words "conspiracy theory" in any way repels you from exploring inconsistencies with an open mind, the problem is with your emotional reasoning. If you believe this guy, something like the missing years could never have happened. It clearly happened, and I am sure there was no conspiracy behind it. Two words, "conspiracy theory", entirely shifted your internal model of the world emotionally, when epistemologically, it shouldn't change your opinion into either direction. The existence of an extremely unlikely explanation is completely equivalent to just no explanation. "Conspiracy theory" is purely an appeal to emotion. Someone claimed A, and a guy told you Conspiracy=>A therefore ~A. Only an emotional human would process this useless information in any way.