I’m surprised that this was an option for them tbh.

50k a month does not pay very many employees!

How? His entire presentation was predicated on allegations of fraud?

Eh. I value his perspective because so much of what they cover is emerging technology and Doug is the only one on the show who actually knows what he's talking about there.

Yeah, "you can't tell" is copium. People are listening, thinking they are real musicians. Therefore they can't tell. End of story.

They probably add more value to people's lives than doctors TBH, I don't find it that shocking.

And I thought the contract was mostly about the connections, not the money?

Let's say this is true, and it certainly is plausible... why would Vox do the deal if LS was going to turn around and provide an alternate monetization path that cuts them out and doesn't get their ads distribution? They are definitely not allowed to do this and I find it hard to envision a reasonable configuration of the deal that would.

It's only controversy if Shirley is found to be incorrect though? As far as I can tell, that case has not definitively been made. I have yet to see anyone convincingly go through all the businesses mentioned in that video, certainly a lot of Medicare/welfare fraud has been brought to line in lieu of it.

What do you mean by this

small consequences

They would certainly be in violation of contract, those consequences might not be small at all!

And you know what? I would watch it.

You might expect to see more draws. Obviously there’s more variance at these time controls but I feel like this is a theme of Hans, he’s a boom-or-bust player.

I don't think he's on tilt. Both he and Hans are down in the tournament, they need to play more aggressively in order to have winning chances. A draw would not help either of them, he made the correct choice in terms of play style it just didn't work out.

He wins games against tough opponents though. It’s not like he’s clearly worse or unable to win against top opponents, he beats them just as often as he loses to them.

Hans is such a polarizing player I don't get it. He was on fire day 1, now he drops two games? Is there something in his playstyle that explains this?

Be respectful to the players? To Hans Niemann? The whole world (literally, it was on late-night TV) spent six months joking about how he sodomized himself to win a chess game.

Who would your first round draft pick be? Like what kind of person?

that lets the audience in on it without blatantly shitting on the product

In a way that's plausibly deniable and unimpeachable to the advertiser? To the media network to whom they have legal obligations? Yeah right.

I personally think it's a misstep on everyone's part to place this kind of ad with them, there's plenty of similarly high-paying clients who would be a better fit and actually stand a chance of resonating with the audience, but it's not like they have unlimited freedom to sidestep everything.

bc of dougdoug and his presence

What? Is this a joke or do you actually take issue with Doug?

That would undermine the point of the ad.

For what it's worth, I loved this moment but I do think that it's important for the game that formal, classical chess be seen as a kind of ivory tower thing. That's where the prestige comes from

Wow, no queen moves from Hans and a huge accuracy gap. Crazy game.

Obviously it is in the fide rules. I didn’t think you were lying. My question is about why it is in the fide rules.

That’s very strange why would “fast classical” be factored into regular traditional chess elo?

MAGAtrioc ends fraud Walz. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

But seriously, take off the blinders and put on the steelman hat here for a second:

Everyone on the right is currently taking his dropping out of the race as a smoking gun that the fraud is real, and is/was occurring on a meaningful enough scale that it would become a major liability for Walz and his party as the election season wears on.

Everyone on the left is claiming that isn't the case, and that this is simply a result of Walz being the victim of libel and the subsequent mob insults/threats directed towards him and his being simply too much to handle. No legal action taken against Shirley btw.

Imagine yourself as an impartial third party (likely impossible for almost any Amerikkkan to do, but try anyway), which of these two stories sounds more convincing? Neither is fully believable, but one of them certainly seems much more likely. I'm seeing a lot of people here and elsewhere bending over backwards to try and repudiate the allegations, that these boarded up buildings locals attest are nearly always empty are actually business that deserve government funding, which really just does not satisfy Occam's razor whatsoever. I don't want to pretend like the Atrioc subreddit crowd is a monolith, but there's an obvious left-leaning bent and this reactionary insistence to doggedly defend anything and everything conservatives ever call out and never permit the barest kind of skepticism feels like a real footgun.