Yeah I worked in a grocery store making minimum wage about ten years ago. They paid employees as little as they could without breaking the law. During the pre-hire training session they were transparent that they were legally required to pay us for it. It wasn’t even normal work duties, just going through an online test.

I took a look and I see their point. Rule 3 sounds like there’s effectively a black list of known unreliable sources. And even then, it sounds like there would be exceptions based on the mods’ discretion. I wouldn’t expect a blanket ban on blogs from reading that.

Personally, I think requiring a reputable source for an article is a good policy for the community, at least when one is available, as in this case. And it does sound like it is being enforced objectively. We are in an age where information is weaponized and fake news and engagement is manufactured maliciously. It makes sense to be skeptical of sources with no reputation on the line.

But I do think the requirement should be clarified in the rules better to match what it means de facto. If nothing else, it would simplify things when someone complains again in the future. And including a list of repeat offender sites could be helpful so long as it’s clear that it is not exhaustive. Just mentioning that MBFC is used to judge sources could reduce the amount of unreliable posts in the first place.

For reference, these are the rules I see:

Rules:

1. Be civil. Disagreements happen, that does not give you the right to personally insult each other.

2. No racism or bigotry.

3. Posts from sources that aren’t known to be incredibly biased for either side of the spectrum are preferred. If this is not an option, you may post from whatever source you have as long as it is relevant to this community.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article title.

5. No spam, self-promotion, or trolling.

Instance-wide rules always apply.

We spec’d for stamina, which turned out to be a hard counter to the current meta. We also have a flexible diet, fine motor control, excellent heat regulation, intricate vocalizations, and arguably best-in-class intelligence (although neanderthals did have larger brains, and other apes have better working memory).

But we are suffering from our success really. We were able to dominate even with an unoptimized build. So we have things like an appendix and other vestigial structures. Our spines are serviceable for bipedalism but are prone to developing issues and stress points. And our teeth don’t last nearly as long as much of the rest of our body without frequent external maintenance. And our young take a very long time to develop, to the point the actual birth happens basically as late as possible without being a guaranteed death sentence for the mother rather than when the child is ready for the world. Also, humans have a tremendously high ratio of penis to total body mass among primates, making you wonder what kind of freak was behind our character creation.

I haven’t played it and hate nearly everything I have seen about the age system, but they did make the map generation more varied in the latest patch. They’ve called the map inadequacies a priority to work on, so it will probably get better if you return to it down the line.

The channel is Jubilee. The format is that 1 fairly prominent political activist debates 20 people with an opposing position for a few claims the 1 has given beforehand. The 20 swap out who gets to debate at any particular time by voting them out.

I’ll admit it is ragebaity sometimes, but I also find it educational and entertaining. There’s typically about two among the 20 that have gone off the deep end, but everyone else is respectful and appreciative of the opportunity to engage the other side. Also, it does have good fact-checking so the crazies are at least recognized properly.

This is the video the image came from.

I also picked this up recently and am enjoying it a lot. Can’t speak for the multiplayer, but the singleplayer is very good. There are a lot of meaningful choices and variety that keep things fresh throughout and between runs.

The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.

If anything, it weakens their argument. To try to support their claim that supposed examples of antisemitism are frequently false flags, they show an example of someone making a roundabout claim that an arson attack on a mosque was a zionist false flag. And then that person was forced to withdraw their accusation from the backlash with an admission that it was “intended to be an academic exercise” and not substantiated by evidence.

People are linking good guides to inventing the important stuff, but you should also know that you can download wikipedia. The text-only English snapshot as of 2025-03-01 was 25 GB, so fairly reasonable to include on a flash drive, laptop, or phone. Just make sure you charge your device before time travelling.

My friends and I really like Civ 5, but we didn’t get into 6 much and had some reservations about the changes in 7. I think we’ll get it at some point, but it will probably be during a sale after some more polish (and maybe some mods to adjust some of the controversial changes).

But I’ve had the itch from the hype and I’ve been wanting to try some other turn-based 4X games. Old World is 75% off on Steam at the moment so I pulled the trigger yesterday. I’ve seen gameplay but I’m eager to try it myself. The narrative choices seem like they add a lot of meaningful decision-making that I want to explore. I also played some Age of Wonders 4 and have enjoyed that too, but there’s a lot to learn with all the combat mechanics. It means there’s a lot of replayability though.

When you give blood, often the “wrong” answer will just have them ask a followup after you submit the questionnaire. Like there is one asking if you had recently visited any of a list of countries of concern. I selected that I had because of a trip to Mexico, but I was still able to give blood that day because when they later asked which region, the one I had visited was considered safe.

I expect if you had been bitten by a mosquito in a place where that isn’t a significant concern and developed no symptoms other than the itch, you would probably be approved to donate. Receiving plasma is less dangerous than receiving blood so I would be surprised if the safety evaluation is more strict.

Rent is a pretty good measurement for cost of living for an area, and if you’re only paying $500 a month while making $50k a year I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Most people spend around a third of their pretax income on rent/mortgage and 10-15% on food. Transportation is going to vary a lot on your needs and what you have, but 20% would be on the high end. If you want to be sure, you could start tracking expenses and start an emergency fund to cover unexpected issues when things are most volatile. Most other things like entertainment can be pretty flexible.

When people criticise me or my actions, I have at least as much right to defend myself as you do to cast judgement and voice it in the first place. But the magnitude of the condemnation you expressed by your word choice is greatly at odds with what I have done.

I bought a game because I thought its value would be worth the price for me. Having used it, I’ve found my early assessment was right. You clearly have different expectations for a game to be worth buying, and my purchase makes it less likely that companies will have to cater to you in the future. I understand your frustration, but I have not wronged you or anyone else.

I bought it the night before it released so I could download it and have it ready to play. At that point, I had played hours of the betas, had seen interviews with the developers, and had read various reviews that were overall very favorable. And just from playing it one day I’m very happy with my purchase.

I understand people disagreeing with it being a worthwhile purchase but calling it “shameful”, “disgusting”, or “disturbing” is actually really disappointing for me to see. It’s just buying a video game when it releases. You can have a complaint about a product without being so judgemental about people who find it valuable enough to buy even with its faults. Let people enjoy things.

They did the same thing with MH World too, and that’s one of my favorite games of all time. Capcom shouldn’t charge for things like appearance changes, but even so, they create games with huge amounts of value for the price tag. And most of that came from years of free post release added content. A feature-complete game with cosmetic bonuses available as paid dlc is not a problem. Failing to achieve that would be the reason to be concerned over microtransactions. I understand why microtransactions are unpopular, but they can be done well and without them existing, many great games would either not exist or have to be much smaller.

Also, for this specifically, there is a nexus mod that lets you change your appearance for free. There will very likely be a similar workaround with the new game if you have the pc version.

During the betas at least, it was mentioned in at least one of the interview/preview videos that you could adjust your character whenever before release but after release it would cost money. Not sure how accessible the information was but it wasn’t a total secret.

Riot actually has short stories, comics, and a few books on the lore of the world. It doesn’t show up in the game beyond voice lines, but some of the broad strokes of the Arcane story had been all but confirmed for years. Legends of Runeterra is also a card game set in the same world that expanded on things by letting champions talk to more minor characters (other cards in that case). And they are working on an mmo that will probably dive into the lore much more.

OP is not a man, and has yet to post the rock after 2 days. They’re playing us for absolute fools.

Wait, are you actually Beaver on an alt? Because if so, it is very uncool to secretly ban people just for downvoting vegan comments. And using alts to dodge the consequences of your actions or do vote manipulation sucks too. And also in the future please think about how it reflects on the community when doing things like banning admins, even when they are being a dipshit. At least give a good faith effort to talk it out. Although honestly that led to some nice reform for the instance so I guess I won’t hold that against you.

Here’s some of the context for anyone else, although it’s brief about the initial drama on the vegan cat food thread. https://lemmy.world/post/19731457

The ACA (Obamacare) requires that health insurance companies spend at minimum 80% of their revenue on paying out claims, meaning profit is only what’s left over from the remaining 20% after all other operating costs are addressed. They also need to reserve a certain portion of money to be available at hand for claims in case they exceed revenue for a period, similar to a bank. So unfortunately even a nonprofit health insurance organization is going to have high costs to its members simply because medical expenses are so high in America.