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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m not saying it can’t be done, but getting a compromise from a debate is not a primary goal. For competitions, the goal is usually to demonstrate and practice debate skills and the topic and positions matter less. For more serious debates, it is meant to be a way to expose people to the strengths of your position’s arguments and expose the weaknesses of your opponent’s. It’s valuable as an opportunity to persuade an audience of people who haven’t been firmly entrenched in either position, or who may have only been exposed to one side’s arguments in earnest.

    The framework does presume both viewpoints are valid, since both sides are expected to believe in their position, be rational, and be reasonably well-informed. An invalid perspective would not be argued by someone meeting these criteria. It does not presume equality as that would be preemptively judging the quality of the argument. Either the debate platform or the other debater would presumably not agree to a debate with someone who cannot be expected to meet these criteria.



  • People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.

    It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.





  • I am not a lawyer, but consumer protections should generally kick in when an issue is actually evaluated in a court. If you are being charged for things you believe to be unfair, you would need to refuse to pay, then see them in action after the business escalates it. Often, a predatory business will give up when it knows it doesn’t have a case. But it’s pretty hard to work on behalf of a citizen if they ultimately are convinced that they do have an obligation to pay after all.

    I agree with the other commenter on the first issue. If you have been paying the amount you were charged, and then hit with surprise retroactive charges, you would have a serious case in small claims. I expect a judge would favor you if it’s as described. $1000 for late fees is exorbitant, especially when the glitch was from their software and not rectified quickly. Unless you’re leaving out relevant details that explains the situation better.

    For the second issue, needlessly cumbersome cancellation processes are considered dark patterns and may be illegal in some cases. These cases are being enforced more recently, even against large companies like Amazon. For your pest control case though, if you face pushback when cancelling it’s pretty simple to tell them you won’t be using their services and will refuse to pay. If you already paid, you may be able to issue a chargeback after explaining the situation to your bank. Seeing as how you would be being charged for services not done, I don’t see how the business could contest that after being informed of the cancellation. You would still be on the hook for a (reasonable) cancellation fee, as lost business from a cancelled reservation does represent real damages.

    We are a country with a litigious history and we have recognized considerable rights for consumers. Just because you feel powerless doesn’t mean you are.







  • At 15:05 it isn’t clear what is meant by a “full campaign”, but it does sound like you can set up games to be only one age. I hope so, as I am skeptical about swapping civilizations. It was actually the primary thing that put me off Humankind, rather than a selling point. Resetting not only your Civ’s identity but also the world’s resources, map size, and the tech tree is concerning. If one age isn’t an option, I am sure mods will save us at least.

    Mod support and multiplayer are huge interests for dedicated fans, so hopefully we will get more information soon. VI improved a lot from V, so I expect it will be good.

    I prefer the new graphics to Civ VI’s overall, but I don’t want to say it actually tops V until I’ve played it myself. A few screens seemed visually unfinshed. Story events, navigable rivers, leader skill trees, and the calamities at the end of ages seem intriguing at least. No mention of a world congress, hopefully they have a better system in mind than VI’s.

    Still curious about culture progression. They didn’t show a card system like VI, so that at least makes me hopeful. Ideally I would like a permanent unlock/upgrade tree and a way to temporarily boost something at a cost in another system, like edicts in Stellaris.

    Looks like districts and wonders still take a tile to build, but now other buildings do too? Cities sprawl out a lot, and are diverse within. Perhaps we will be able to build duplicate buildings that were previously one per city, especially since they mentioned city specializations. It also seems like workers/builders might be attached to a particular city rather than movable units.

    Overall, I’m a bit less excited and more worried. There were a lot of changes from V to VI that I was disappointed with from the onset and honestly they did not grow on me.


  • There doesn’t seem to be a pattern for whatever name politicians become known by colloquially, except last name is most common. Hillary makes sense to distinguish her from Bill, but I remember people generally using her first and last. Kamala is usually Kamala, but you see Harris too. Trump is Trump, but you’ll see people use his first name at times (like r/TheDonald). Biden is still referred to as Joe occasionally. Bernie was much more common than Sanders. For supreme court justices, it’s usually last name or first and last. I’ve never seen anyone refer to AOC as just Alexandria. Obama is Obama, but I’ve seen Barack in really informal contexts. Nancy Pelosi is first and last. Elizabeth Warren is either first and last or just last.




  • Non-interference is a good default position to have, but we are capable of acting on behalf of others when we have a certain threshold of confidence for what they would want in a situation. Otherwise, we would consider it wrong to give CPR to an unconscious person.

    When it comes to life, people overwhelmingly prefer to continue existing when they have the power to choose. So it makes sense for us to presume that a hypothetical person would choose to be born given the opportunity.


  • For general rape, the victim is typically capable of giving consent but chooses not to, meaning we know the rapist is violating them. For situations where the victim is incapable of consenting, it is true that we are assuming a position for them. As a society, we have observed that being made to have sex in a vulnerable position is a negative experience, so it makes sense to extrapolate they would be opposed if they were capable of choosing.

    For life, the observation is different. Once people have the power to knowingly “opt out” of existing, they rarely do. Most people instead prefer existing and consider it to be positive. So we should assume a hypothetical person would also choose to be born when acting on their behalf.


  • I remember seeing a video of a rubber arm experiment that goes through a series of exercises to convince someone’s mind that a rubber arm placed against their shoulder is theirs, while the real one is blocked out of sight. Once these phantom sensations are in place, the organizer then hits the rubber hand with a hammer, causing great shock in the subject but no real harm. The immediate panic is exaggerated by the fact their mind can’t actually move “their” hand out of the way when they see the swing coming.

    Another study had organizers shine a harmless light on participants’ arm for a few minutes and see how they react, allegedly for some sampling purpose. The twist was that they would have the real subjects stay in a waiting room beforehand and watch actors leave while appearing to be in considerable pain from the session where the light was targeting. They then experienced a significant burning sensation from the “laser” despite the organizers insisting it was harmless. Some would go as far as to raise their voice and demand the experiment stop.

    The idea is that people can be convinced that something is painful just from others’ reactions to it. This may have been what the organizers were actually testing for, and the electrical shock wasn’t real or was barely large enough to felt. But OP was just immune to being influenced. I would expect the ability to follow cues from others has strong correlation to success at socializing, so considering they use 4chan OP might actually just be built different.