The mod isn’t banning people for debating in the comments. A lot of people the mod is banning (myself included) are people who only downvoted posts. Considering that a large portion of the posts are blatantly antagonist things like this, it easy to see why they’re getting downvoted. If you’re going to insult 90% of the users on an instance, then you’re going to get downvoted.

The mod could have made the community private so they could insult people without consequences, but instead, they decided to remain public while banning anyone who downvotes their insults. They want to continue to antagonize the instance while removing the instance’a ability to respond. They want to artificially lower the number of downvotes they get, so it doesn’t look like their antagonistic bullshit is as unpopular as it is.

Everyone could block the community, and if you choose to do that, that’s a reasonable response, but it shouldn’t be the only response. We should be able to express our opinion about the content in our feeds, even if it’s just downvoting it. Why should an entire instance be expected to hide from one abusive community?

Yeah, Hoffman is great, but he’s not some infallible authority on every brewing method, though people treat him like one. In his video on specialty moka pots, he covers the Bialetti Brikka, the only moka pot that produces crema. He ignores all the very specific instructions that come with the Brikka, like use only 280 mls of water and don’t pre-heat it, then uses a random base rather than the special-sized base that comes with it, and fails to get it to produce crema. I still see coffee snobs claim that the Brikka doesn’t work because of that video.

I’ve said this before, but create a new license requirement for these, “light duty trucks,” that are causing all these problems. Right now a standard Class D allows any chud to drive one of these things. If you want to drive something that weighs more than 5,000 pounds, you should have to get a special license that teaches you about how huge their blind spots are and why they aren’t crash-compatible with normal cars.

Oh, I thought it was going downhill once he went to rehab. I stopped watching after he went to prison.

Oh I see, that makes more sense.

Damn, Seinfeld didn’t even make the cut. At the time, it was considered one of the worst of all time, especially for a show that was choosing to end while it was still going strong.

The thing about House is that it had been bad for 3 seasons (and that’s being generous) before the finale. Does it really count as a bad finale if the series was already falling apart?

Fair enough, I’ll adjust my search terms to see if I can find anything on that. I agree that Assange is a PoS, and it does seem like his Kremlin ties are genuine. I tend to be skeptical when the security agencies tell us someone is secretly a Russian asset (like when the state department revoked Snowden’s passport while he was stopped in Russia on his way to Ecuador, then accused him of going there to aid Russia, even though they literally forced him to be there), but it certainly seems like Assange had or developed an interest in aiding the Russian government.

Wikileaks was unfortunately too centered around Assange himself, and only had a non-governing advisory board as it’s infrastructure, so there really was no way to separate the organization from the man. It’s a shame, because I think the work they did (especially early on) was very important, and I think the world is worse off without an organization like them.

I’m like…80% sure that’s not true. I don’t remember any story about GOP emails, and I can’t find any reporting on it now.

That being said, I’m not giving Assange a pass. At the time he was getting Podesta’s emails from Russian hackers, he was declining to publish a cache of Russian government documents. It’s possible that dropping those leaks was part of his negotiations to get the Podesta emails, or that he had just developed a strong anti-U.S. bias after being imprisoned in an embassy for 4 years, but that’s still no excuse for violating the Wikileaks’ founding principle of holding all power accountable. Also, beyond the bias problems, I think the sexual assault allegations against Assange are credible, and he should have been prosecuted in Sweeden. Wikileaks was a very flawed organization, and Assange is a complete piece of shit.

However, the U.S. didn’t want to prosecute Assange for the Podesta hack, or Russian espionage, or sexual assault. They wanted to prosecute him for telling the world that the U.S. military murdered two Reuters journalists. For all of Wikileaks flaws, they did some important work, and there’s no one willing to do that work now that they’re gone. A great example of that is all these legacy media groups sitting on Trump’s emails but being too scared to publish them.

We feed out cat wet food every day, but not a lot. Wet food is much better for cats because dry food has a lot of carbs, which cats really shouldn’t have in their diet. Our cat is a pretty picky eater though, and we don’t want to put down wet food just to watch it dry out and get thrown away, so we give her a small amount of dry food in the morning, and a little more dry food at night with a tablespoon of wet food.

Easy mistake, especially when it all gets conflated to, “But her emails!”

You’re correct about Wikileaks, but you are conflating the scandal around Hillary’s emails (she maintained a private email server while she was Secretary of State, and deleted many of those emails when she was meant to retain them) with the Podesta emails (which the user in the image incorrectly identifies as Hillary’s emails). The hacking of Podesta’s emails is actually very similar to the hack of the Trump campaign, except there’s no Wikileaks or equivalent organization willing to publish them this time.

Jesus Christ, I can’t believe how dense people are being about this. First of all, they weren’t Hillary Clinton’s emails, they were John Podesta’s emails. Second of all, and more importantly, the, “Mainstream Political Media,” didn’t publish those emails, Wikileaks did.

In 2016, Russian hackers got Podesta’s emails, Wikileaks published them, and the media reported on them once they were already exposed. In 2024, Wikileaks is functionally dead, so Iranian hackers sent them directly to mainstream media outlets. Mainstream outlets don’t want to deal with the legal issues associated with releasing hacked information, so they sit on them.

This isn’t some conspiracy by the media to ensure Trump wins. This is a direct result of 20+ of allowing our government to persecute whistleblowers and leakers.

Most good platformers from the 80s and 90s still hold up: Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, the Donkey Kong Country Games…

The Atari 2600 was before my time, but I bought one at a flea market when I was a kid and was actually impressed by how fun a lot of those games were: Laser Blast, Outlaw, Warlords, and Missile Command, to name a few. The problem is that the hardware is pretty important to the experience. The responsivemess (or lack thereof) of those old controllers is part of the design, so I’m not sure they’d emulate well.

Once you get into the early 3D era, it’s hard for me to say what’s actually good and what’s nostalgia. I love Goldeneye, and it revolutionized the FPS, but it’s probably a pretty bad experience if you didn’t grow up on it. I’m pretty sure Mario 64 is still a legitimately good; it seems like it was still well received on the Switch, and it’s core mechanics have remained basically the same through Sunshine, the Galaxy games, and Odyssey. I think Legend of Zelda: OoT is still legitimately good, but it’s hard to tell. I certainly still enjoy playing it, and it think it’s worthwhile just to see the origins of Z-Targeting, but I’m sure it does feel dated. Either way, you should play the N64 version of Majora’s Mask for sure. It’s still the strangest, darkest Zelda game, and the 3DS version was shit.

Finally, most turn-based RPGs are going to hold up, but I want to make special mention of Pokémon Gold, Silver, and (especially) Crystal. It’s become trendy in the last few years to say these games are actually bad because of a bad level curve, a bad post game, and some other assorted complaints. The level curve criticism is fair, but the post game is great, and most of the other issues are just people who are upset it didn’t follow some of the conventions set by later games. I could say a lot about it, especially if I got into it’s connectivity with RBY, Stadium, and Stadium 2, but I’ll just say it’s still one of the highlights of the franchise, and a contender for greatest sequel of all time. Every fan of the Pokémon should play Crystal at least once.

I’m so happy I wasn’t the only one who saw this.

Yeah, I meant people generally give away this data, not you specifically, and again, I can see the potential for abuse, but alcohol isn’t like other goods and services. When a bartender serves you alcohol, they become legally liable for your actions if you overconsume, in civil and (in some states) criminal court, and for good reason; irresponsible alcohol sales can kill people. Regulating how this data can be used is one thing, but sharing data on what customers are liabilities is objectively good, not just bars, but public safety.

Your email app will give your messages to other companies, your navigation app will share your exact location with marketers, and your dating app will sell your sexual preferences to the highest bidder, but sure, bars having a way to warn each other which costumers tried to assault a waitress is a bridge to far.

Yeah, and a lot of this will depend on how it’s used. If I were still in the service industry and I saw that a guy had been to 20 bars in the last year, and I saw he got flagged at one for violence, I would think, “Well, this doesn’t seem to be a pattern of behavior, maybe he wasn’t the instigator, I’ll keep an eye on him but I’m not too worried.” But I could see a lot of larger places, like clubs, who aren’t hurting for business, just rejecting people who are flagged out of hand. The information seems objectively good to have, but the application could be really problematic.

That’s very true, although I think it’ll be unlikely that an individual bartender will get blamed for overserving in a large venue. I worked at a relatively small venue (280 at capacity) and on a busy night it would be difficult to tell you who served an individual customer, much less who gave him the drink that, “overserved,” them.

Possibly controversial opinion, but this sounds reasonable. The flags they can put on customers are, “violence, assault, destruction of property, sexual assault, fraud, and theft.” Those aren’t petty gripes like, “rude,” or, “poor tipper.” I was bar staff for a while, and I’d have wanted to know if the guy I was serving got violent the last time he went out.

That being said, I could see how this system could be abused. If one power-tripping bouncer claims you sexually assaulted someone, and no one will serve you anymore, that’s bullshit. Some regulations around how businesses use these databases would be good.