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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.



  • It seems bizarre to me that the only user I have seen actually trying to provide constructive criticism for the bot so far in this thread is the one that already likes it. Especially when others instead advocate for things like the mods taking a political stance to endorse and using mod powers to reinforce it.

    I like the bot. It’s valuable to have context for the organization pushing a story. I agree that others are reading too much from the orgs they like being labeled as biased. It’s assumed a news source will have some bias, and trying to avoid acknowledging that is dangerous. The takeaway is simply to be wary of any narrative being pushed (intentionally or not) by framing or omission, and get news from a variety of sources when possible. Instead, people tend to think identifying bias is advocating that the article should be disregarded, which is untrue.

    To your suggestion, I do think adding more sources for reliability and bias judgements is a good idea. It would give more credibility if multiple respected independent organizations come to the same conclusion. More insight into their methodology in the comment itself could also be nice. The downside of adding these is that it would make the comment even longer when people have already complained about its size.

    Other than that, I have seen people dislike using the American political center as a basis for alignment, but I have yet to see a good alternative. I expect a significant plurality of users are from the US, and US politics are globally relevant, so it seems to be a natural choice.

    Nearly every critic I have seen so far just thinks it should be removed entirely because they find it annoying. I would say even if it isn’t considered useful for the majority of users, the amount of value it provides people who do use it justifies whatever minor annoyance it is to others. Anyone who gets really tired of collapsing the comment or scrolling past it can block it in seconds.

    Thank you to the mod who created this thread. Even if it’s good to gather feedback, it’s obviously not easy to get bombarded with negative comments. I’m impressed with the patience you have shown in this thread.


  • 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.


  • KombatWombat@lemmy.worldtoReddit@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    But an upvote doesn’t mean “I like this”. It means you judge the post/comment to be high quality. There’s a correlation for sure, but quality is a holistic judgement based on context. It measured by the same spectrums as downvoting: to what extent is the post/comment relevant, original, funny, entertaining, informative, rule-abiding, respectful, etc. We don’t need separate buttons for all of these, the voting buttons just wear many hats. You’re generally going to think more highly of stuff you agree with or that makes you happy, but accurate bad news and unpopular opinions can still succeed score-wise despite these disadvantages.


  • I was using it almost daily from the start and felt worse for it, so I started dreading taking it and quickly preferred no medication. I eventually finished it off and instead of getting a refill, I switched to something that worked great from the start and was cheaper.

    I’m not saying it’s not a good medication, I even recommend it, but if it requires a strict schedule and that much of a miserable buildup just to still be worse than an alternative it’s simply not the right one for me.


  • I still can’t find anything about him being a pedophile. If you have something you can link about it I would genuinely like to know.

    He was never given a reason for his permanent ban, but it is thought to be for for his view on trans athletes. He was temporarily banned earlier for saying “the rioting needs to fucking stop, and if that means like white redneck fucking militia dudes out there mowing down dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at ten p.m., then at this point they have my fucking blessing…” in regards to a BLM protest, which was considered inciting violence. Not saying that’s a great statement but it’s pretty clear he’s talking about rioters specifically.

    But neither of these thing make him a nazi. That label shouldn’t just be thrown around casually.


  • It’s interesting that he seems to get a lot of accusations of being far-right by the far-left and far-left by the far-right. I don’t know if there was some controversy I missed that inspired the pedophile comment, but calling him a borderline nazi is frankly ridiculous.

    Here’s the introduction to his wikipedia page for anyone curious:

    Steven Kenneth Bonnell II (born December 12, 1988), known online as Destiny, is an American live-streamer and political commentator. He was among the first people to stream video games online full-time and received attention as a pioneer of the industry.[4] Since 2016, he has garnered further attention for streaming political debates with other online personalities, in which he advocates for progressivism and liberal politics.[5][6] The New York Times has described Bonnell as a liberal,[2] while Bonnell has described himself as “a very big social democrat”.[6]


  • I went through a month’s supply of strattera before switching to adderall. I also only took it on “need to be productive” days, which may have been the wrong approach. I was reluctant to take it otherwise because of the side effects. I felt like it did help me focus on tasks, but the benefit was essentially offset by the drowsiness it caused making it something of a wash for my productivity. I work at home so I would end up needing to take a nap most days I took it. Sleeping became very refreshing though, which was a silver lining.

    Other symptoms were a pounding head, a decrease in appetite, and an increase in anxious thoughts. None of the symptoms were intense except drowsiness, and all of them mellowed out after a few weeks.

    Adderall works a lot better for me now and has fewer side effects. But I’ve seen others in the community really appreciate what straterra has done for them, so it seems to vary a lot from person to person. Despite my disappointment with it, it may be worth trying if stimulants aren’t working well for you. My doctor recommended it initially because it was working well for some of her other patients.


  • I think you’ll be hard pressed to find someone progressive enough for lemmy to like that will also be interesting to a Joe Rogan fan. I would recommend Destiny though. I wouldn’t say he’s like Joe Rogan, but he frequently does debates with commentators of all politcal positions including those with similar beliefs to Joe. He has an aggressive, confrontational style that would be your best bet at trying to demonstrate the weaknesses of the views Joe would advocate for.

    If you’re not familiar with his views, Destiny could probably be described as a left-leaning liberal institutionalist moderate. His community can attract a variety of viewpoints and is relatively accepting of criticism for Destiny so your brother would have an easier time interacting with them than someone like Hasan.

    It’s nice you are trying to look out for your brother like this. Good luck!


  • It wasn’t my decision, but getting fired from an exhausting job was amazing for me. I wasn’t going to pull the trigger myself, but walking out of my boss’s office I couldn’t keep a huge grin off my face. I was in no rush to find a new job so the months of uneployment that followed were some of the happiest of my life. And I have a better job now that pays less but is so much less stressful.




  • If you want to learn how to code, can’t you just google “coding tutorial for beginners” or something similar? Probably you would need to pick a language, but that would similarly be solved with “recommended coding language for beginners”. Then it’s very easy to find a resource that starts with hello world and gradually introduces new things. And I’m sure if it moved beyond a browser toolbox, a guide for setting up whatever IDE would be included.

    Learning to code is by no means easy, but it’s possibly the best type of thing to learn when it comes to having a wealth of free, easily discoverable guides. The main obstacle is choosing to put in the time, and this comic removes that obstacle by forcing them to not put it off.