I think those are mostly for super obese people because seat belts are really uncomfortable if you’re really, really fat. At least that’s what I always assumed because everyone I know who has one is really fat.

You seriously misread that if you think it’s about Christmas trees in anything but maybe an abstract way. It’s about wooden idols. Who tf is chiseling their Christmas trees into shapes? I thought maybe this would be about Asherah poles or something at least kind of similar but this is a pretty obvious passage about idolatry.

Lmao 35% of the country loves this shit, 15% are on the fence whether it’s bad or not, and 50% dislike it but a lot of those don’t dislike it enough to actually do anything about it.

Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.

This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.

Is the Chaplain distinct from other classes like priest, cleric, or paladin? If so, I would think the Chaplain is more of a ranger with a holy flair. However, if it’s in a setting where it’s the only holy class I would say they should have healing magic, faith based spells, and high charisma. The first thing that came to mind, however, was like a WWII military chaplain and I thought that would be pretty cool, basically a D&D style cleric but in WWII era tech, acting as a field medic, religious guide, and clairvoyant all in one.

I may legitimately lose my supposedly magical and highly important American manufacturing job because of this shit and these dumbasses think that this is all a genius move that will finally Make America Great Again. Everyone else I know who works in manufacturing is feeling the same way. One of my coworkers is mildly Trumpy and was talking about how he thinks it’s a negotiation tactic and was shocked when I said I think the people in charge are just legit stupid and think tariffs will magically make things better in their own right. He didn’t have anything to offer as a rebuttal he just seemed surprised that anyone would think Trump isn’t a turbo genius who is secretly making 5000 IQ negotiation moves.

There are no truly successful talks with Trump. Even if you make a deal he’ll decide he doesn’t like it next week.

The historical Arians were a pretty diverse group, much like the early Christian church in general. Arius, the person whose teachings the Arians were named after, was North African, and there were Arians throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

FYI “Aryan” is the word you’re looking for. “Arian” is an early Christian sect decried as heretical in the later Roman Empire

$15 a month is a lot of money for poor people. Minimum wage at 40 hours a week is only $1160 a month. If rent is $700 a month (and that’s cheaper than any apartment I’ve seen lately that only leaves $460 for everything else. Sure the rec center is nice but is it worth spending 3-6% of your post-housing expenses on?

Trump thinks inelastic demand is when people want non-stretchy pants. I think he legitimately thinks this will happen and is just stupid.

I specifically chose a fee that was higher than the actual cost so dumbasses wouldn’t nitpick about greed and profits and yet you still somehow did it, so I’ll take the bait- please explain to me how a business can operate selling an item at $10 when they have $100 in guaranteed costs? Do you understand that this means they lose at least $90 on every transaction at that price? I get that companies are greedy and skim more off the top but this is pure idiocy to make this argument in this hypothetical.

The dumb thing is that it doesn’t matter who pays the tariff, it still will get passed to the consumer. Consider a scenario where the government starts taxing Amazon $100 per order no matter what’s in it. If you buy a $10 item on Amazon, how are they going to pay the $100 tax on that? Amazon will just add a $100 tax fee to your order because they can’t keep running a business if that cost isn’t baked into the final price. It doesn’t matter who actually delivers money to the government, the tax gets paid by all parties involved.

FYI, sales tax is already done this way. Sales tax is collected from businesses, not customers, but customers still pay sales tax because that’s just how economics works.

Lmao OP just described a public pool. I’ve never been to one that wasn’t like this and I grew up in a town that’s like 90% white. Turns out race doesn’t have anything to do with it

$25k and climbing but thankfully that’s pretty much all in my retirement and I’m not touching it for several more decades.

It’s more complicated than that since I do believe God exists but in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, and, according to all evidence, doesn’t “intervene” with the universe. I say “intervene” because God, as classically described, is simultaneously incapable of intervening and incapable of not intervening. If we define God as “an omnipotent being”(which, for the record, I do not), then He is necessarily also all knowing and exists outside of the limitations of time and space. Such a being would be perfectly optimized as well, and so it would be impossible for anything to occur without its express permission and cause. Therefore, under classical theism, it seems impossible for God to say, answer prayers, because this would imply that He could possibly change His mind or that what was happening wasn’t already what He wants to begin with.

It kind of fell apart when Trump lost in 2020 and Q (a.k.a. Ron Watkins) stopped posting after Jan 6. QAnon style beliefs are pretty mainstream in conservative circles now, but QAnon as an organized set of beliefs kind of fell apart without continuous revelation from Q himself. It’s kind of funny, Q actually posted again a couple years after and nobody really cared because they had sort of moved on. The QAA podcast (formerly QAnon Anonymous) put forth a theory that QAnon arose as a way to explain why Trump wasn’t actually making America great again even though he was president, and so it’s possible that it will come back in the second president. I think it’s definitely possible.

Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic “church” where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I’d probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it’s good to do something like this. Plus I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.

It’s complicated but I used to be essentially atheist but now believe that there is something one might as well call “God” after studying philosophy. Essentially everything has a cause and something must be at the end of that chain, and we might as well call that “God.” I also practice Christianity because I feel that it is good to have the community and structure that a religion can provide but I don’t think that “God” necessarily exists in the way Christianity typically presents it.