Indeed. Cal almost stealing MVP from Judge last year was annoying, so I can’t help but enjoy his recent downfall in the eyes of fans. But it’s also quite dumb tbh, people really overreacted to the WBC drama.

Regardless, he was way too close in the voting for MVP and he will probably never sniff 50+ HRs in a season again. Even 40 seems like a stretch given his 2nd best season was a 34 spot.

Censorship is always going to exist to some extent, but Lemmy has the potential to balance it out because there is no central authority. So you could have censorship of different stuff on different servers, but if you take the network as a whole you would still get a diversity of information.

I remember everybody celebrating Luigi the whole time, I guess some mods and admins were wary of threats of violence being hosted on their servers but overall it’s impossible to criticize Luigi on this platform without getting heavily downvoted, and celebrating him is free upvotes.

So I feel like you’re being pretty overdramatic and also not really accurate with this comment.

Dangerosity*

Never forget what they took from us

#remember_doggerland

Logically it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that you can. You could simply let someone experience a work of art, and never reveal any information about the creator. Boom, that person can experience the art completely independently of who the creator is, because they simply don’t have any information about the creator. In fact, that’s more or less how most people have experienced art for the majority of human history up until the past few generations.

Basically there were a lot of lawsuits going back and forth in the pre-production that ultimately resulted in Guillermo Del Toro leaving the as director after nearly two years of planning and developing the films according to his vision. Then Peter Jackson had to step in as director with minimal preparation time and he essentially winged the whole thing. It was originally planned as two films but was expanded to three at the last minute. They were also using all sorts of cutting edge technology in the filming process and the sheer scale of the films would have been daunting enough even with adequate time to prepare.

As per Jackson

Because Guillermo del Toro had to leave and I jumped in and took over, we didn’t wind the clock back a year and a half and give me a year and a half prep to design the movie, which was different to what he was doing. It was impossible, and as a result of it being impossible I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all. You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot. I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it. Even from a script point of view, Fran [Walsh], Philippa [Boyens] and I hadn’t got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction, so that was a very high pressure situation

You can read a slightly more detailed explanation in the wikipedia article.

The article you linked mentions a litany of active lawsuits against UHC, many of which were already initiated prior to the murder of Brian Thompson. UHC was already on the legal chopping block prior to Luigi’s actions; in fact it seems fairly obvious that the preexisting lawsuits and bad publicity were the reason he chose to target Thompson specifically.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the article. Right off the bat, I’d like to point out this tidbit, which perfectly supports the argument I was already making in this thread, namely that nothing has been changed by the murder.

Still, Potter warned that UnitedHealth Group’s own claims about reforms to its denials process should be treated with skepticism. “In my view, I think this is mostly for show,” he said. “It’s mostly for PR.”

As for the lawsuit in question, it was filed by some random shareholder from NY, who has no more access to the hard data than we do. He was concerned that

the company’s new projections for 2025, released in April, forecasted a significant cut in earnings.

And in an attempt to explain said concern, this talking head speculated

Wilkes, in an April media appearance, attributed the stock value drop to “probably United, and maybe the industry, pulling back on prior authorizations” — i.e., denying care to patients less often.

That’s not any kind of proof or data, it’s just speculation. Furthermore,

Shortly after the new investor case was filed, attorneys for CalPERS intervened in the new investor lawsuit, and last week, the plaintiff agreed to drop the suit and consolidate it with the larger case.

The lawsuit in question was promptly rolled into the comprehensive legal action which had already been initiated prior to the murder. And in case you didn’t read the whole article, they also mention that

On Monday, shareholders greenlit a $60 million pay package for the company’s CEO and shot down a proposal that would have increased investor scrutiny of executive payouts.

Bottom line is, your characterization of the legal action as “UHC investors suing to increase the denial rate” is reductive and inaccurate, although to be fair to you, it simply mimics the editorialized perspective of the journalist who wrote the article. The parts of the article which emphasize that interpretation of the lawsuit are basically just the journalist pandering to the lowest common denominator which comprises the majority of their audience. In other words, the writer of the article intentionally sensationalized the nature of the lawsuit, which is really quite a boring legal footnote that doesn’t make any of the claims implied by the article. I.e., it’s clickbait, and it’s obviously working.

I do appreciate you providing a relevant link that at least attempts to answer my request for evidence of the previous commenters’ claim, but unfortunately it’s not a very strong piece of evidence.

Lastly, I’d just like to point out that even if UHC does end up changing its practices and extending more coverage, all that ultimately means is that rival health insurance companies under less legal scrutiny will expand their market share proportionally and it’ll simply be a situation of new boss, same as the old boss.

Damn, you’re a real tough customer, I should have known I couldn’t get one over on you 😂

Where do you stand on Osama bin Laden, pray tell? Terrorist or freedom fighter?

Oh, the world is a better place now, and it’s all thanks to Luigi? I must have missed that part

Keep telling yourself that, it’s a nice story to fantasize about but I don’t personally buy it. I wonder if you have any hard data supporting that claim

The deification of Luigi really pisses me off because he didn’t do shit to help anyone. Robin Hood wasn’t a deranged murderer, he stole from the rich to help the poor. What the fuck did Luigi actually accomplish with his idiotic “plan”? It just shows how dire the current situation is that people are desperately latching onto that assclown as some kind of revolutionary, when in reality he is nothing of the sort.

Future cyberpunk dystopias be like

It’s so frustrating that they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a series, but they end up basing it on a moronic script so all that money is essentially wasted. And I’m not even blaming the scriptwriters because I’m sure it’s ultimately the fault of the businessmen who have no conception of what constitutes good and meaningful art, but insist on meddling with the creative process anyway.

Ya WBC was great in so many ways, very cool to see players from all different levels of professional play mixing it up

All of the streaming services (and national broadcasts) do that crap. I hate the on field interviews. And then when the player makes an error while trying to do an interview in the middle of the fucking game… So dumb

Local broadcasts are always far superior. Yankees booth is usually great with Cone, O’Neill, and Kay. And they’ve been bringing in Girardi more lately, he’s really insightful too.

Well, I heard your scream into the void anyway. Baseball is really hard because people mostly just follow their own team and there’s so many games, but I feel like we could at least have a community on the fediverse to talk about the major events/plays/games through the season and hopefully it might grow in activity from there. I just don’t think this is the best server to set that up for various reasons, but there aren’t any great alternatives either. I’m brainstorming 😵‍💫

True. He did make some good defensive plays though.

I feel like baseball fans on Lemmy need to consolidate and make a concerted effort to sustain some regular discussion this season. Idt this community is the answer but honestly I haven’t been active in a long time so I’m still trying to get my bearings back. I’ll message you if I come up with a good plan

Judge with the golden sombrero. Even gods can bleed

In more relevant news, that’s my Ace! (until Gerrit comes back 😎)

I just cancelled my Netflix last month without realizing they somehow bought MLB games for this season. But I ain’t even mad, I’ve been sailing the high seas forever so it’s nbd. For the record, Netflix should have absolutely nothing to do with live sports, and they’re overpriced as fuck. And Stranger Things 5 was complete dogshit 😤

He passed across the great sea into Valinor. He eventually dies there, but he’s presumably still alive at the time when the movie is set, 14 years after he left Middle-Earth.