First thousand’s free. Yep, genius policy. (Which is why I doubt they do this).

I have heard this same story except with employers tracking employees who steal money. That one makes a lot more sense to me because they know the identity of the person involved.

Someone gonna tell me that the second I walk into Target their system is like “here comes Mr. Scara Bic, currently at $570.” ??

iMustProtest

I liked my jumbo iPhone for a while but it was too long to fit comfortably in my pocket. Making it foldable wouldn’t help though, because the main reason I got rid of it was I kept dropping it. Too big to use with one hand.

I could allow that some people would rather carry a thicker but shorter object in their pocket than a thinner one with larger surface area. But I can’t think of much more than that. It bugs me that all foldable now ALSO have a miniature screen on the outside. Like they immediately admit that their primary feature is a nonstarter and add bulk to the phone when bulk is a primary issue with foldables.

This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.

It is a position you hold until a belief system provides sufficient evidence for you to form and hold a belief.

Gnostic atheism is a specific form which nobody actually holds to, which says that there positively is no god and this is known to be a fact. Any reasonable person would admit you can’t know this. And so virtually all atheists are agnostic atheists.

Being an agnostic atheist does not mean you are “on the fence” or “undecided” or “accepting of all beliefs equally.” It means you are intellectually honest that you cannot prove the non-existence of a god any more than you can prove there isn’t a planet in the universe where it rains lemonade. But until you have a firm reason to believe that some god exists, you’re going to proceed as if they don’t, because that’s the conclusion, however perpetually provisional, that best matches the evidence.

I don’t know that Jesus asked for a church to be founded either, or left behind any guidance on how to organize it or run it properly. If SG specifically said “don’t do this” then wow that’s even worse that they did. But it seems like much the same deal all around.

There’s actually a nuance here that religious people love to make much of. They would say that just because everyone who’s ever lived has died does not mean you know we all will. They would say you are just generalizing from the examples you have to all cases, which is fine but is inductive reasoning and therefore involves faith. They will say you cannot conclude deductively that we will all die, you can only reason inductively that you think we will, therefore you are operating in uncertainty and therefore you are exhibiting faith. Therefore science and religion are the same thing. (They’ll say).

This seems to be the latest favorite philosophical whipping post among religious people trying to find some basis in the modern world for their magic sky fairy beliefs. The funniest thing about it, to me anyway, is that it is an argument that boils down to “you’re just making shit up as much as we are!”

aLL ReLigiOnS aRE reALly AbOuT tHE saME uNdeRlYinG tHinG!! ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶

Removed by mod

Well, I have a plan and I’ll tell you what it is.

This idea of a majority Jewish state, kept so through military occupation of Arab-dense territories, needs to simply go away.

I’m a one-state solution guy. Let everyone there practice their religion in peace and access their holy sites freely, and let democracy reign.

Israel’s big sin is that they want democracy BUT only with a majority Jewish population and an official state religion etc etc etc. It’s more than a Jewish homeland - it’s an ethnostate.

That is what needs to end. It doesn’t go somewhere else. No one gets pushed into the sea. We just stop pretending like we can use arms to carve out the “democracy” we want, and Israelis and Palestinians all live in a state that guarantees their freedom and safety.

Some fear that extremists will rise and take over that pluralistic society: build a constitution that prevents this. Embrace pluralism. Marshall Plan the fuck out of Gaza until the Palestinians see they have more to lose than their misery.

Iran’s last change in ruler was barely noticeable: one ancient dude in a turban for another with almost the same name. I’m sure the next will be similarly unnewsworthy.

Israelis have been much more open about dehumanizing their enemies since last October, arguing outright that they are “not human beings” in many cases. I feel sad for them because they do not see how dehumanizing others is eating away at their own humanity, and that this is probably the very intention of their opponents.

Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.

Uh yeah that definitely needed to be “spelled out” from your prior comment.

You said:

There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.

This might actually make sense. Borrowers can’t lose or destroy a digital copy, or bring it back late. Probably a digital copy enables more checkouts. Max of 26? Well think about he condition if the last library book you checked out that had 26 stamps on the list. Hard copies don’t last forever. Sad that they had to charge more based on these assumptions, but you can imagine some reasoning to them.

I mainly asked questions, positing only that lifestyle was simpler then, building codes were different, and materials were cheaper. What part of this are you having trouble with?

If the mars rovers can function on a fraction of a watt,

It doesn’t?

Perseverance’s power system works essentially like a nuclear battery. …The power system will reliably produce about 110 watts …The MMRTG also charges two lithium-ion batteries, … Perseverance’s power demand can reach 900 watts during science activities.

Source: NASA

I’d love to try an experiment to see what it would cost to build a simple home to 1950s median norms and 1950s building codes, with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry. Middle of nowhere town with one store and a highway going by. How much would that actually cost?

I’m sure it would still cost more now because of materials, and there really isn’t a way to get around building codes. But the living one could achieve with a simple job, back then, was definitely simpler than what people consider a typical life now. I don’t really have a point here - I’m just wondering how big the cost gap would really be at the exact same living standard as yesteryear.