If they had just not done anything when blitzchung made his statement in support of Hong Kong, it likely would have gotten essentially zero media play.
1,084 karma · joined February 19, 2014
It turned out that until recently, that was not the case; drivers would get a wage to deliver food to you, and if you specified a tip through the application, then the driver would have money deducted from their wage equal to the amount of the tip up until tips made up one hundred percent of their wages, at which point tips would increase their take-home.
So in effect, Doordash was using tips to subsidize worker pay as opposed to augmenting worker pay, and this was in no way communicated to customers who reasonably expected that a tip would increase the worker's compensation.
> a claim or assertion that someone has done something illegal or wrong, typically one made without proof.
But I like the rituals around it: taking the album out of the sleeve and looking at the artwork; placing the album on the table and setting it to spin; lowering the needle. I like how I have to purposefully listen to the music - you can't just set up a playlist and walk away, you have to pay attention to the songs and flip over the record once the side is finished, or put the second disc on.
What? Jurors aren't volunteers. Jury duty is mandatory; if you get called, you have to show up or provide justification for why you can't be a juror. If you get selected, you can't just say "no sorry, this case actually sounds boring and I'd rather not". Also, jurors get paid. They are volunteers in no sense of the word.
Court is generally considered to be a professional setting; I agree that it's non-commercial but I disagree that there are only two options where one is "commercial" and the other is "if you're getting paid you have to disclose it". Who would you think is paying an expert witness for their time, if not the person who wanted them to testify?
I legitimately do not understand why you feel like this is a conflict of interest.
But paying a consultant to consult for you doesn't become a bad thing to do, even if you are a bad person.
Like, consider the opposite question: Why should expert witnesses, people who have absolutely no connection to a case beyond a level of expertise in some component of it, _not_ be compensated for the time it takes them to prepare their testimony? This isn't an employee of the city; imagine you're a construction foreman and you're asked to appear as a witness to describe your experiences on a typical job site.
Why should you not get paid for preparing and giving your testimony?
The second scenario you describe is clearly corrupt, but I don't see how paying a consultant for their time is the objectionable part; when you stack that against a DA on the take, a police force on the take, and a rich man fabricating evidence, that all seems like a larger problem to me than "the rich man can pay an expert to testify about their expertise", especially given that the testimony of the expert witness can be challenged.
Edit: I could see an argument that normal witnesses are not compensated for their time, and so a layperson might assume that an expert witness is not? But normal witnesses are appearing in their capacity as a witness; expert witnesses are appearing in their capacity as an expert. They're consultants; consultants get paid for consulting.
I feel like it's generally understood that when expert witnesses get called to the stand, they're being compensated for their time by whoever is calling them.
If withholding evidence that might prove your customer's innocence is a necessary part of the business, I submit that your business is bad and should not continue in its current form.
See also: The common scam where somebody purchases an item from you and sends you a check, but the check is for more than the item cost; they ask you to send them the item plus the extra money the check was for. You deposit the check, pull out the extra, send it along with the item, and a week later the check bounces (or is discovered to be fraudulent), and the bank removes the money from your account, and they obviously don't refund the amount you withdrew to send to the scammer.
It doesn't normally happen with payroll checks, but it's not an unknown mechanism. If there's no money in the account that the check is drawn on, the bank won't furnish money out of the goodness of their hearts for the recipient.
The issue, in my opinion, is that getting good at something is _hard_. When you're a kid playing pickup basketball with your neighbors, that doesn't matter; you're all in the same pond and sure, while you can watch pro ball on TV and see what the pro players are like, you're never going to play against them. You're only playing against your local friends, and the skill level is probably going to be a bunch of people in the same order of magnitude. Maybe on occasion you'll get to a live tournament and run into somebody who's way better than you, but they're not local; after the tournament, they'll disappear back into their own pond and you don't have to worry about them.
With esports, there's no such thing as a pond; everybody's in the same ocean, and while the game will try to matchmake you with somebody around your skill level, that won't always happen. So when you beat your friends and think "huh, I'm pretty good at street fighter, aren't I?", you can immediately hop online and get double perfected by somebody using the worst character, and you realize that no, you're actually not good at all. And if you're not good, you can either put in the work to get better (which is hard) or you can play some other game where you don't have to confront the fact that you're not good at it (like basketball).
My freshman year of college, 06/07, my roommate spent a boatload of time on his laptop at his desk; he'd sleep in, skip class, and stay up late, spending all his time on his laptop. I peeked over his shoulder a few times, and he was just browsing YTMND constantly.
Anyways, at the end of the year in the start of finals week, somebody started knocking on our door at like 7am or something, some time that's ungodly early for a college student. As soon as I stumble over and open up the door, somebody says, "This is the FBI, we have a warrant to search your room" while naming my roommate.
Turns out it wasn't a prank, the actual FBI was raiding my dorm room to find my roommate. They took me into a lounge "to ask some questions" and I was too young to have fully developed my "don't talk to the cops" senses, so I went along with it. They asked me a bunch of questions about my roommate (what classes is he taking, what's his major, what are his hobbies, how does he spend his time) and when they asked about his hobbies I had to say "well, he mostly spends a lot of time browsing You The Man Now Dog online".
The fbi, of course, asks for clarification. I don't know if you've ever had to explain the idea behind YTMND to the FBI when you're a 19 year old college student at 730 am on a wednesday during finals week, but let me tell you: it's not fun.
"It's a website where people make other websites that feature a tiled image background, a looping sound clip, and some kind of word art over everything."
They look at each other, shrug, and continue with the questions until we get to "Have you ever seen your roommate do anything inappropriate near a child", which is probably the closest i've gotten to an actual record-scratch moment in real life. I explain that i've never seen my roommate outside of our dorm room, let alone off the college campus, and there just aren't that many kids around. After that, they conclude the questioning and let me know that they believe there's evidence of federal crimes on my roommate's laptop.
So we go back to the room, the other agents have finished confiscating his laptop, it's around 745am, and my roommate rolls over and goes back to sleep. So I'm like, "dude, do you want to explain to me why the fbi felt the need to come to our room at 7 in the morning and take away your laptop?"
He says, "Oh, I was posting links to child pornography on YTMND and so now they think there's child porn on my laptop."
I say, "Did it ever occur to you that that was a really fucking stupid idea?"
He goes, "yeah well I know that NOW", in the most incredulous tone of voice, like he couldn't believe the FBI agents didn't understand that he was doing this as a joke and not out of an earnest love for CP.
Later that day he called his parents and left without packing up his stuff, and I never heard from him again; he did not continue to matriculate and I have no idea how his whole saga wrapped up.
But now it's impossible for me to think of YTMND without a) wondering what the fuck my roommate was thinking and b) remembering the time I had to explain the idea of stupid internet memes to federal agents.
Also neither of those are in standard right now.
Looking through the one-drops in Standard right now, I don't see any vanilla 2/2; which one are you thinking of?
Another interesting one is that it changes all of the blocks to be monochromatic, including in the "Next Block" preview. It turns out that mode is actually more challenging than you might think; at the speed the blocks are dropping, you depend on peripheral vision to tell you what blocks are upcoming, and now you have to actually examine the block to figure out what it is instead of just knowing from the colour.
Regulations like "Maintain your equipment to keep it in good working order" and "Follow policies in place to prevent disasters"?
I hadn't tried throwing traps, although I know you can throw everything else; I've definitely done the "assault a room with six people and two weapons; shoot person A, throw weapon at person B, wrench person C, throw wrench at person D, grab a weapon that somebody dropped, shoot E, and throw weapon at F" before. Feels great when it all comes together.
The ship I was assaulting had about thirty people on it, a fairly large crew, but in my first attempt at breaking in, I was able to kill the captain of the ship. This is significant because if the captain is dead, the ship can't flee to an enemy station.
Everybody on the ship had electronic shields and armor, but they were only armed with concussive weapons; a concussive weapon will knock you out, but not deal any permanent damage.
It ended up being a horror movie in space. I'd attach my pod to the ship and board them, drop the glitch trap at my feet, and then get spotted by an enemy. They'd knock me out, pick up my body, and eject me into space, and I'd have to remote-control my pod to pick my body up so that I could board again. But crucially, when the enemy picked me up, the glitch trap disabled their shield! So now I'd board the ship, stalk and skeletonize the poor crewmember who found me last time, and then go get seen by another person so that I could glitch trap my body.
Eventually, people are carrying my unconcious body past like fifteen skeletons of their former crewmates, futilely dumping my body into space in the hopes that they'd be rid of me, and then I'd return to kill again, like the horror monster that just won't die.
When I finally killed everybody on the ship, I took what i came for and left a derelict ship filled with skeletons floating in space forever, and then retired and passed on the acid gun to somebody else.
Heat Signature is a fun game.
Being more concerned with what you believe about people over facts about them seems pretty selfish, but at this point if I haven't convinced you that perhaps people are a better judge of their identities than random strangers, I don't think I'm going to, and I agree that our positions are irreconcilable.
I'd point out, however, that your position doesn't really leave possibility to foster understanding between people who believe differently either; if I say I'm a man and somebody disagrees, they're ignoring the most primary of primary sources. That's not the position of somebody who's open to compromise; that's the position of somebody who's already made their decision and refuses to consider any other factor.
It seems only intuitive that if I get to define my own gender identity, as I have and as the world lets me, then everybody else should get that same privilege. And yes, I would say that denying that privilege from some people while granting it to others is inherently hateful.
You can swing your fist all you like, but you can't punch me in the face and claim that I'm infringing on your right to swing freely. You can have all the personal beliefs you like, but as soon as you start imposing them on somebody else's identity, they're not personal beliefs anymore and you don't get to enforce them on other people. When you misgender somebody else, you're imposing your own personal beliefs on them, and that's wrong.
And again, why does your opinion have anything to do with my gender? You can call me a female, and you'd be incorrect; whether or not you think I'm a woman has nothing to do with whether or not it's correct to refer to me as such.
How am I making them falsify their opinions? My identity is not an opinion-based phenomena; you can refer to me by female pronouns and be incorrect, or you can refer to me by male pronouns and be correct. Your opinion on whether or not I'm male or female seems entirely beside the point.
Imagine a dialogue where Marcus introduces his colleague Sam to somebody.
Marcus says, "This is Sam, he's a real hard worker." Sam says, "Excuse me, I'm a woman and prefer female pronouns". Marcus says, "Uh, yeah right. I don't believe you."
Who's the unreasonable party, here? Is it Sam, who's stated their identity and preference? Or is it Marcus, who feels like Sam needs to do something to convince him of her femininity? Why is Marcus's belief about Sam's identity the record as opposed to the statement from the primary source?
You've said that your issue here is that people get corrected in impolite ways, but if people just _believed everybody when somebody stated a pronoun preference_, that problem would go away.