bhupy

I don't think you fully understand who you are arguing against.

I also think Olise's yellow card was unjustified. I think it should be overturned also. Even without overturning it, at least he still gets to play, so that's good for all of us as spectators.

The process sucks since it's arbitrary. In a better world there would be a universal appeals process.

It's not just a random player, it's a player whose red card was contested even by the commentators as it was playing out. You should just watch the replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuaS3jUAark.

"Does he endanger the safety of his opponent? You could argue it does, but I think it's slightly unfair because it's more of a stepping action that lacks force and intensity to create that red card."

"Is it the right call? I don't think it's the right call...I don't like that being the level that we're calling for a red card. I think that's a yellow card, I don't see that as a red"

After the match, there was continued debate as to whether it should have been a red. Messi didn't get a red card for a nearly identical incident.

FIFA has a rule to handle this sort of situation, and it's Article 27. In my opinion, that is a poor system as any process that's initiated by FIFA is bound to be arbitrary. It would be better to have a universal appeals process, and such a process might very well have resulted in an overturning of the red card nevertheless. Either way, the outcome was correct, even if the path to getting there was flawed.

And just taking a step back and taking stock of what we are arguing here; it's not as though Belgium were given a disadvantage, it is simply that they were being asked to play against the full squad. It was pathetic to complain about that, especially given that Belgium comfortably thrashed the USA's full squad.

As spectators of any sport, that's all we can hope for: take the best of 2 teams and pit them against each other. See where the chips fall. I don't actually enjoy watching an easy fixture, I want it to be a nail biter.

Belgium should have either said nothing, or just said "cool we don't care, we'll beat them either way, game on". Instead, they (and most Europeans) came across as sissies.

Looking ahead, for me personally, I'm hoping football comes home.

Yeesh, this conversation has run its course.

> I don’t see much controversy. It is a clear red.

You're entitled to believe it was a red, but it is objectively controversial. It's not just about what you believe, but what about others might believe. If there are enough people that disagree with you, then it is by definition controversial.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7415223/2026/07/01/folarin-...

> You play with the team you have in the game. Players get injured, suspended or has previous yellows that would leads to a suspension if another is gotten.

> That’s all part of the game.

Correct, and players can get re-instated (as happend with Cristiano Ronaldo in the very same tournament) by FIFA per Article 27. That is also part of the game.

The Belgians now need to man up and play the game with a full squad rather than whine about not getting an easy fixture. Seriously just take a step back and take stock of what we are arguing here; it's not as though Belgium are being given a disadvantage, it is simply that they are being asked to play against the full squad. It is rather pathetic to complain about that.

No, those are not at all contradictory, it is entirely consistent.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. There is no appeals process that USA (or any team) can initiate

2. There is a mechanism that FIFA can initiate to suspend a match ban at their discretion

That is why it's a bad system; as long as it's initiated by FIFA, it will always be arbitrary and capricious.

Correct.

Hence: “which in practice will be arbitrary.”

It’s on FIFA to correct for that governance failure by making it less arbitrary via a more universal appeals process.

In any case, the rules were followed to the correct decision. It’s just that these rules as written are arbitrarily applied.

You're right, it's a failure of governance that FIFA doesn't have a proper appeals process for everyone to use. It is unfortunate that the only rules-based mechanism to suspend the match ban had to come from FIFA, which in practice will be arbitrary.

It was the right outcome, but the wrong process.

> With respect, only an American would think that the competition ceases to be interesting just because the US loses

With respect to you, I'm a lifelong football fan.

And read more carefully, the argument I am making is not that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US loses. The argument I am making is that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US doesn't get to field its best squad on account of a highly controversial on-field decision (itself downstream of a mis-application of VAR).

Let the chips fall where they may, should the USA lose after this, at least they got to make their best attempt at it. That's all I want as a spectator.

> The goal is ultimately entertainment

This is something I see so many people forgetting.

The net result of this decision is simply that the USA gets to play with their full squad and you have an actually interesting competition. The reason we as a world spend hundreds of millions of dollars to let athletes play a game for a living is pretty much exclusively for interesting competition. It serves no other socially useful purpose.

Embarrassing for the Belgians and the Europeans to respond any other way than: "we look forward to beating your best team, game on".

This comment is a hilarious example of: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...

This has been a dream project of mine too, so happy to see that it exists.

One thing that I've also wanted was to be able to reason about the total timeline using the Holocene calendar[1] instead of the standard BC/BCE AD/CE timeline. It makes it easier to internalize how long ago (or how recent) certain civilizations were without having to do the wrap-around math in one's head. Would be nice to be able to maybe toggle that view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Censorship != moderation: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-fro...

Git operations are 503'ing for me.

To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias.

The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data.

A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.

The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).

Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.

The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

Yes, that's absolutely correct.

I'm a strong proponent of the right to freedom of speech (and I'm pro-choice), but we have to be clear about the fact that these are derived from axioms, which are by definition maxims derived from subjective leaps of faith and not evidence-based objectivity.

I think that's Rayiner's point; you can't admonish people deriving philosophical views from the theistic beliefs and value systems they practice when the opposing side of those views are essentially derived from secular/atheistic beliefs and value systems. At some point in the chain of derived arguments and justifications, you arrive at an axiom whose only justification is "because I believe this should be so" or "because my in-group believes this should be so" or "because <authority figure> believes this should be so" — it's still a leap of faith.

"Humanism" is just another subjective belief system, and its adherents are no more immune to the forces of tribalism and faith-based reasoning as adherents of older belief systems.

Right, the UCR is usually pegged at the 75th percentile price for that ZIP code (though that can vary from payer to payer, some can even go up to 90th percentile). It's basically a guidance that conveys "we've never met you before, but you're asking us to reimburse for a treatment, and we as an insurance company think this is the highest reasonable amount to ask for". In single-payer countries in which the state is a monopsony buyer, there is only 1 rate (sometimes a narrow range), often per location.

In either case, the goal is to try to keep prices down, and in many cases to prevent insurance fraud by providers. You'd be surprised how prevalent insurance fraud is among providers. I've been on the phone with a provider that included in a claim an $80 line item for "oral hygiene instructions", which is a fancy way of saying "instructing the patient to floss more". I've seen another claim that asked for $300 for sign language because the patient was deaf. I've seen yet another claim that asked for $200 for a swaddle for an infant patient. In all 3 of those cases, I personally informed the clinical administrator on the other end "this is not covered", and their response was something to the tune of "oh yeah that's okay, we just put that on there to see who covers it, you can go ahead and ignore that line item".

All of this is characteristic of the fee-for-service model, which is increasingly being seen as quite flawed, regardless of whether it's done by the public sector or the private sector.

I work in this industry and can provide some insight.

Every payer has the concept of "UCR Rates" or "Usual, Customary, and Reasonable Rates" for every procedure code, for every ZIP code. For example, the median cost of an X-ray should be a certain dollar amount in Topeka, Kansas and a different (higher) dollar amount in Manhattan, NY.

When a provider is out-of-network, they'll bill as much as they possibly can to see what the insurance company will pay — the insurance company will only pay up to the "UCR Rate" for the treatments (or in your case, apply that to the deductible before the payments start to kick in). Whatever the difference is between the UCR rate and the requested amount is almost always ignored, since the doctors' motivation for the high requested rate was to try and maximize payment from the insurance company. In your case, since you paid out of pocket, you're unfortunately on the hook for that difference. In other situations the provider might also invoice the patient for that difference, but it's relatively rare.

In contrast, when a provider is in-network, they have contracted rates for all of the procedures (also typically varies by ZIP code). These are called the "fee schedule" rates, and every payer (including Medicare/Medicaid) has their fee schedule rates defined and agreed upon with the physicians/providers.

Additionally, I've found that they're a bit less risqué than Western productions and that creates broad appeal.

Crash Landing on You was a heartwarming (and cheesy) story told in a very "PG" way. It not only appealed to me, my wife, and our friends, it appealed to my modest Indian in-laws.

Ex-Square chiming in (I fondly remember Project Franklin), he was also arguably the inventor of modern dependency injection as we know it!

https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=330

I saw an interesting tweet to this effect: https://twitter.com/waspmexicano/status/1633934987664957442

I would be very curious to see if there's data on whether replacing prison with caning (for certain crimes) reduces recidivism.

I like your examples a lot, because they illustrate the challenges well.

“there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system” is not particularly offensive to me; even if I may disagree, I’m still interested in commentary. Ditto deadnaming, it isn’t a dealbreaker for me, especially if it’s done within a post that is making some greater point that I find to be insightful.

In an ideal setup, there would be an off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to your needs, and another off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to mine (both updated on an ongoing basis), and neither of us have to do anything manually to get the experience we both separately desire. Pluggable spam filter algorithms, if you will.

Correct, and with blocklists / opt-in moderation, whatever system that is would do a similarly great job.

With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.

You already do this today with email for anything that isn't already swept away by your spam filter, i.e. by clicking "Mark as Spam". Over time, you end up having to do that less because the filter learns your preferences. You can also always go back into your spam folder and teach the system to unlearn something it shouldn't have in case it overcorrected.

It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.

> but I don't want to be a moderator. I prefer social networks like, say, Hacker News where moderation is handled for me.

I don't think we're disagreeing on that. Per my comment:

"I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so."

The implication of that statement is that Hacker News (or in this case, Facebook) handles moderation, but under the framework laid out by the GP commenter, one can opt out of that, or perhaps even opt into different moderation regimes. Political news outlets, for example, might be motivated to create their own moderation regimes if they feel that Facebook (or whomever else) is too biased against XYZ political group in their moderation.

> Most people only use email for work and don't particularly enjoy it. They prefer to spend their free time on other social networks.

I would be careful about speaking for other people. Perhaps this is true for you, but I (for one) love subscribing to email newsletters, and those are a part of my daily information diet. I'm free to subscribe and unsubscribe as I please, and others are unable to prevent me from doing so. As we can see with the continued existence of platforms like Substack, there's clearly a demand for that. Also, insofar as one might not "particularly enjoy" email, it's not particularly clear that the root cause of that is email's censorship resistance. It could also be because the email protocol is missing features that one might desire in the kind of decentralized protocol Facebook might create.

The GP comment’s proposal is not incompatible with what you (and typical users) want.

Moderation is very different from censorship.

I want strong moderation and “banning” for myself. I would ideally like this to be as automatic as possible, perhaps via default blocklists that update on an ongoing basis, that I can still opt out of if I really cared to do so.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that I have any kind of entitlement to prevent other people from seeing content once it’s been permanently hidden from my own view. I don’t really care if other people are able to see content that I don’t wish to see.

This article describes the distinction in a pretty clear and concise way: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...

Email works this way today and most people are perfectly fine with that.

Matt Levine has a pretty funny observation that stems from this with his now famous one-liner, "Everything is Securities Fraud".

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

100%. James B Donovan[1] was (in)famously admonished for defending a Soviet spy (as dramatized in the Spielberg film Bridge of Spies), but that's what set us apart from the rest of the world.

If the relative amorality of upholding The Law is unpalatable for some, then maybe they aren't cut out to practice law. Perhaps being made of sterner stuff is a key prerequisite, not too different from practicing medicine, where the hippocratic oath obliges one to medically serve even the most repugnant criminals.

[1] https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/metadiplomat-the-r...