ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
If you're just going to dodge the same question repeatedly then why are you even imon this forum?
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
But if conscription isn't being stopped, do you think women should be blocked from leaving the country like the men?
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
But in a scenario where conscription is already occurring, do you think it is proper to only require males to stay in the country?
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
The VA (James Arnold Taylor) has explicitly said it was intentional. FFX's real issue with the story (even though I love it) is that none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game, and even then you had to really be paying attention and piecing things together to make sense of it (and even then there are plot holes and nonsensical bits).
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
I've never heard of those games you mentioned
Marathon was basically a Doom clone but for Mac (apologies to any Marathon fans offended by this, but not really). In fact it was developed by Bungie, the same Bungie that went on to make Halo.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Nothingburger predictions are why I didn't believe the western intelligence community's claim that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. You can find similar claims of imminent invasion going all the way back to the annexation of Crimea, with nothing to show for it. The intelligence community has successfully predicted 8 of the last 1 Russian invasions.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Most places where pumped water would work well already have dams and reservoirs built there.
I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.
It was over a decade ago. I won't get into specifics because the country I served in already narrows down my identity far too much. But no, I was a little bit under the average for missionaries in the Czech Republic as far as baptisms go. That said, a significant source of baptisms (none of mine, but probably around 20% of the mission's) were Mongolia immigrants. In one of the cities with missionaries there was a member who had joined in Mongolia. She lived in an apartment building mostly full of other Mongolians and introduced the missionaries to a ton of them.
Regarding retention after baptism, the rule of thumb I've always heard (and have usually seen in regards to actual activity rates vs. membership on the rolls) is about 1/3 stay active. Not sure how this compares to, say, cultural Catholics that never go to mass.
everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites.
Eh? Even in the world capital of Godlessness (the Czech Republic, though Estonia might be slightly higher in percent that identifies as atheist) I had multiple baptisms.
Edit: it almost sounds like you've got it parts of it mixed up with an Amish Rumspringa to some extent?
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
I wouldn't put it past the same liars we've been dealing with for the last 20 years, lying about how puberty blockers or cross sex hormones are "completely reversible" might pull some similar nonsense word games about the amputations being "reversible".
Simpsons were way ahead of the curve on that one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SatdbVeP0Tw
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
To be fair, at least in the case of Japan, disputes over how much influence foreigners should have in Japan was a major part of both the Sengoku Jidai and the Meiji Restoration. And Japan enjoyed relative internal peace in the ~250 years in between.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.
This (combined with my experience as a professional dev) are why I'm sure similar crap is common in closed source code as well, even if the attack vectors are different. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that there is simply greater need/demand for code in the world than there are competent devs able to write it (and/or companies willing to fund development of it).
Median salary for a gen-Zer is about $38,000: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-age/
Assuming they have $40k for a down payment lying around, and ZERO debt, they can afford a $200,000 house. Townhomes in my semi-rural town in Utah are $250,000+. The numbers just straight up just don't pass the smell test.
Edit: Just checked Zillow, the cheapest listing I can find in my town (that isn't a trailer in a trailer park) is $265k, that's for a townhome.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
It'd be complicated, since women not having disposable income independent of their husbands would lower demand on the consumer side.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Arguably if women left the workforce en masse it would lead to an increase in men's wages due to lower job competition. You'd have to put in some protectionist regulations to keep companies from just outsourcing for cheaper labor, but part (and definitely only part) of the reason it's so difficult to raise a family on a single income is precisely because women entered into the workforce en masse to begin with.
Women's rights are not a suicide pact, but feminism and leftism generally seem deadset on making them such.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Indian devs are actually worse on average, it's not just that the bad ones get stuck in India:
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Offshoring already basically accomplished this. The big issue with offshoring is that 99% of Indian software devs are utter dogshit and produce utter dogshit code and don't even have the competence to understand what's dogshit about this. I write this as I sift through a pile of dogshit shat out by my offshore Indian coworkers. Any time I show basic competency at my job and do things I would expect any US CS fresh out of college grad to be able to do I come across as a miracle worker to my Indian coworkers because they're really genuinely just that incompetent.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Seeing as it's been an open dispute in philosophy for at least 2,500 years I'd say no?
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
No, chain of cause and effect doesn't stop at the neck, 45% of your fellow citizens becoming obese in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character.
Nonsense. Widespread availability of pornography may make it considerably more difficult to not become a degenerate coomer than it was a century ago, but it is still a choice to consume pornography or not. I'm more sympathetic to modern coomers than I would be to ones 100 years ago because it's much easier to access and fall into, but it still doesn't change the fact that it is physically possible to go without masturbating, or at least to not consume all kinds of degenerate porn to do so, and ultimately it is a choice to do so or not.
The same applies to obesity, there may be all sorts of factors like more easily available food, more fattening food, and even genetic disposition to pig out or to retain fat. But it's still ultimately a choice to consume too many calories.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Once again, only if you discount free will/individual choices/agency/whatever you want to call it. You're assuming that the same person in the exact same circumstances would always make the exact same choice.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Only if you assume first that free will doesn't exist (and if it doesn't then this discussion doesn't even matter but it's not like I could stop us from having it).
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
At least in the case of Waco it seems like the ATF and FBI wanted to generate publicity. Koresh made regular trips into town and they could have easily arrested him then, thry chose not to.
ChickenOverlord
7mo ago
Akhshually that's just the mechanism of triggering the nuclear detonation, it's still a bomb. Though directional nuclear weapons are a cool idea
Just some useful legal context to add to this:
In the 90's the Clinton administration cracked down on so-called "kitchen table" FFLs. A lot of gun enthusiasts became FFLs in the 80's because it allowed them to bypass a lot of the onerous gun control regulations that had been passed in previous decades, at the small small cost of a fee, record keeping requirements, and allowing the ATF to search your home without a warrant or prior notice. But hey at least you can own post-1986 machine guns!
The Clinton administration changed this by requiring that FFLs be "in the business" of manufacturing and/or selling firearms, eliminating the ability of these smaller gun enthusiasts to become FFLs. Even though my state can set clear limits for automobile sales to determine who needs a car dealer license, the ATF seemes unable to set clear limits/amounts for what determines whether or not someone is "in the business" of selling firearms.
They've intentionally left it vague for decades because it creates fear amongst gunowners who never know if the ATF might arbitrarily and capriciously decide to go after them for even a small number of sales. And in cases like OP's story where they seem to be intentionally flirting with that line it gives all the more power and justification to the ATF for overreach.
Source on the Clinton admin FFL changes:
Also for your consideration, my state's rules on who needs a car dealership license vs. the ATF's guidance on what counts as being "in the business" of selling firearms:
The sheer effort, technical skills, and dedication required to make that video are admirable and beautiful things (even if they're largely dedicated to something mundane and mostly worthless). I can't say the same for modern art, where literal trash piles left behind by accident by the janitorial staff are mistakenly assumed to be part of the exhibit (or the other way around, where art exhibits wre mistakenly assumed to be trash by the janitor).
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