Religion is a payday loan against reality. As someone that grew up in a religious household, I am certain that no matter how well-intentioned people are, someone is going to have to foot the bill.

This game seems to do weird things if you have a player able to disclose their choice in advance too. Stating that you will choose 42 is stronger than stating you will choose 1, assuming other players only maximize their own odds of winning. It's kind of like a convoluted game of chicken.

Leftists believe in egalitarianism, but this is very different from giving up personal freedom for collective values across the board. For one thing, leftists generally don't believe the collective values you've listed have value to begin with. It's also noteworthy that your examples target taking from those who already have less.

Perhaps an interesting piece of this is that high-level play is becoming so close to computer play that cheating is increasingly difficult to uncover. I feel that something in the sport has become lost from all this.

If you choose to troll you gotta pay the toll

That's understandable, but if that's the case then I believe the most likely scenario is that Magnus has lost legitimately to Niemann twice.

There is no way that this is possible. Niemann's performance has such a wide variance between: - his best days, where he is pressing for victory or easily winning against the very best players in the world (not only Carlsen, but also Aronian, Mamedyarov, Firouzja), and - his bad days, where he plays like an average grandmaster.

Someone who can play as bad as Niemann does on his bad days could never beat Carlsen legitimately in my opinion.

I think you're spot-on here. Authoritarian-made realities seem to be the historical norm. Just look at the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power. If anything, we were under a Dunning-Kruger effect before. We have more opportunity to realize now that truth is actually very difficult to pin down.

What is interesting about the Roman Catholic Church in this context is that its internal power was never as large as when its political power was at its lowest, and vice versa: the doctrin of papal infallibility was made official by the First Vatican Council that had to flee Rome when in 1870 the troops of Vittorio Emanuele II. concered the church state that had subsequently been dissolved (until the Vatican as a political entity was reinstituted by Mussolini in 1929). In contrast, during the Middle Ages, when the pope's political power was at its peak, papal power had always been challenged externally by secular powers and internally by antipopes, heretics, numerous reform movements and the majority belief that a general council is superior to the pope.

Easier account creation and file sharing, I believe.

AOL instant messenger, MSN messenger, Yahoo instant messenger, and Google talk didn't have issues with account creation or file sharing. You didn't really need an account for IRC and file sharing via DCC wasn't an issue in the dial-up days before firewalls were common.

I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an independent project right now! It got me thinking and researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far is Fog of War.

Have you looked at InfoChess? (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permu...)

I hadn't seen this before, thanks for the tip! Not being able to capture certain pieces sounds like a fun challenge.

I believe there are a significant amount of these people that won't actually argue that just because the Spanish flu was worse in this way that the Covid pandemic isn't a problem.