10A

You've got your parties backward, but thank you.

Funny, that image link is 404 Not Found.

I'd love to see an option made available for magazines saying, "Voters must be members", and perhaps "Hide content from /all".

This is part of a larger discussion on moderator pruning.

I think it'd help to start emailing notifications if they're not checked within a certain period of time.

I am criticizing a fictional, human made character. As a result of being human made, there is no such infinite wisdom.

Imagine for once that you are completely wrong about this belief of yours. Yes, it's the height of hubris. If we know nothing else, we know at very least that our Creator lives.

How have you determined that you aren't worshiping an evil god if you haven't questioned god? How do you know that it isn't the case that both god and satan are evil?

Psalm 100:5:

For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

To choose just one of many possible answers.

Nobody is whispering anything in my ears, metephorically or literally, whichever way you mean. And I question everything before I believe it.

I mean literally. You may look at your shoulder, expecting to see no demon, while maybe picturing the cutesy BSD mascot, and sure enough you don't see one sitting on your shoulder. "See?" you reassure yourself, "no demon." You then recall that you've never seen the BSD mascot running around anywhere IRL, and conclude that demons must not exist.

How sure are you that you do a good job questioning everything before you believe it? Is it possible that you've made an error?

Demons do not look like cutesy cartoon characters, and indeed they're not visible to the human eye (at least not to mine). As with all extant spiritual entities, we can know they exist despite our inability to see them.

Are you just as quick to deny that dark matter exists?

That's not true. [Re: "it's self-evidently true, as anyone who denies God cannot be said to be very intelligent."]

You said you were willing to question your beliefs, so I urge you to question this. I think it underlies the rift between us.

You want to see yourself as a reasonably intelligent person, and you want to cling to a state of mind which you believe to be shared by other intelligent people.

But I ask you, are you so sure that it's intelligent to reject God? Consider the following:

According to Pew, actively religious people tend to be far happier. Is it intelligent to want to be happy? Could this effect possibly be a quantitative measurement of God's blessings? And is it intelligent to want to be happy?

Again, I ask you: is it intelligent to want to be happy?

As a result of all of this, this industry is a zero sum game.

I doubt any economists would agree with this. Even with declining demand, the addition of every grain of rice is a contribution to the economy.

One is the cost of startup the other is the cost of loss.

The cost of business loss is equivalent to gained experience. Let's say you extract clay from your backyard and use it to make pottery, which you then sell at your local market. Startup cost is $0, as you hand-made your own kiln and your own cart to transport your pottery.

You have a few sales, but not many. When you see people walk away from your table without buying anything, you stop them to ask them why. Several of them tell you that your products are all too small for their taste.

So you close down your shop, head back home, and get to work rebuilding your kiln to be ten times larger. Two months later you open up a brand new shop, based on your gained experience, and now your pottery sells like wildfire.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

You seem to misunderstand that phrase. It is commonly used to express the limitations of government provision. But I was talking about God's provision, and there's no limitation to that.

It is the business of the government to protect the people, and greedy corporations who pay poverty wages is one such thing that we need protection from.

Where did you get that idea? Nowhere in our Constitution does it say that government is supposed to protect the people.

Every time you imply that corporations are "greedy", you sound out of touch and inexperienced. Please start your own company. You will learn so much about the real world. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Sell an old book on ebay. You will learn so much.

These companies absolutely have the money to pay

You make it so clear that you've never run a business and hired anyone. You're completely out of touch. Businesses have tight budgets. Sell that old book on ebay, and grow your nascent business enough that you want to hire someone to help you out. You will quickly learn that you can afford very little to hire someone, yet you're overburdened with work so you need to hire someone as cheap as possible.

The 1st amedment explicitly states otherwise, that our government shall not enforce religion.

I don't want the Senate to declare that the Pope has legal authority over Americans any more than you do.

But freedom of religion is not freedom from religion. In America, we have the former. Not the latter.

You are either with God or against God. The US is one nation under God.

And a light bulb doesn't serve anybody which makes it a bad comparison.

It's a good comparison because I'm trying to make a point about possible states. When you reject God, you embrace Satan, because there are only two possible states. Just like a light-bulb.

Just know going forward I don't really see free will as something that makes sense.

You don't need to understand something in order to accept that it's true, or that it exists.

Did you ever think that maybe god wants us to fix the problem? Have you considered that you might be going against god's will when you say we should do nothing to prevent further damage to the environment/god's creation? It seems pretty straightforward to me that if god exists and created us and this planet, that such a god would want us to take good care of the planet.

Once you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, and you live in a state of perpetual prayer, you will know what God wants from you personally. You will learn that His will often goes against your own, and that it sometimes makes no sense to you.

I think half to two-thirds of the current push for Trump is coming from Democrats who actually know a thing or two about strategy. I echo the author's sentiments:

I greatly appreciate everything Donald Trump has done for our cause, but putting this guy out there as our nominee isn’t just insane; it’s political suicide.

Ramaswamy's response to the pansexual women is about as out of touch as one can get.

I wasn't referring to that in particular. I was referring to the big-picture point he made in the whole last 11 minutes of the video. The point was about western civilization, the insidious project to undermine it, and our duty to defend it. That point is foundational to much of our disagreement. It sounds like you stopped watching before he even got to the point.

"The decline of christianity"

Yeah, but that misses the bigger picture. It's not as if people are rejecting Christ and converting to Judaism. Rather it's a secular movement driven by Satan's success at convincing a vast swath of the populace that God is imaginary.

I disagree that the foundation of western civ is solely placed on god.

This is one of those ways in which Wikipedia tends to be secular. It says in the intro that Western civilization is "linked" to Christiandom. That's misleading. Western civilization is Christiandom. The only difference is we don't call it that anymore. But everything that followed from Christiandom is built upon Christiandom as an extension of Christiandom. Though to the article's credit, it does later state that:

[…] Western civilization, which throughout most of its history, has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture.

That's close to accurate. In truth the two are inseparably identical, which is why Satan hates Western civilization, that that in turn is why you've been convinced to believe you want to contribute to the project of undermining Western civilization.

If you're going to look through this, I recommend spending extra time on the section explaining the enlightenment.

I'm not sure exactly what points you're referring to here. Skimming through it, I'm pretty sure I already know all of these details. The only change I'd make is to emphasize God's role in all of these things, and His importance to all of these historical figures.

Sure I can, god, according to your worldview, created a world in which children get cancer.

It is the height of hubris to criticize God. His wisdom is infinite, and if yours was too then you'd understand why certain children are given cancer. It's not for us to try to understand. It's for us to accept in our worship and prayer.

And before you say I think I know better than god, in reality I know better than the humans who made god up.

At some point, immanently I hope, you'll realize how absurdly wrong you are about this. You have demons whispering lies into your ears, and you believe them unquestioningly. I know they make it feel good when you believe them, but they're lying to you.

In the end it wasn't Zeus who causes lightning, it is a build up of a difference in energy between clouds and the ground.

Comparing Zeus to God is far worse than apples and oranges, because at least apples and oranges are both fruits. It's like comparing icebergs to smartphones. They have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common, to the point that it's nonsensical to even try to compare them.

Let's say you were to throw a basketball, and make a basket. Some scientists observe it, and say "That's interesting. Let's figure out what that's all about." So they observe you throwing the basketball. They measure your movements, the wind movements, the ball's PSI, the height of the basket, the material compositions of the ball and basket, just all of it. And then they formulate a theory which postulates how the ball goes through the basket. And then people start to deny that you exist because they have the theory of how the basketball goes through the basket. The whole idea is absolutely ridiculous. God is in control, no matter what your demons tell you.

Not only is that not true [that the most intelligent scientists all believe in God] (because you added the "most intelligent" qualifier), but given that scientific literacy is correlated with atheism, I find it to be rather damning for religion:

First off, it's self-evidently true, as anyone who denies God cannot be said to be very intelligent. I'm trying to word that so as not to offend you, and it's hard. Sorry. My point here is not to insult you, but just to explain my statement about the most intelligent scientists.

Secondly, the scientific disciplines are certainly attractive to atheists who want to devote their lives to pretending that they're disproving God by collecting the evidence of the basketball. So yes, atheists are more likely to become scientists than pastors. We don't need to consult any studies to know that's true.

Go for it! It's pretty easy to play against others nowadays now that there are so many popular chess sites. chess.com and lichess are pretty decent.

Maybe eventually, but not today. I have too much else on my plate. But thank you for letting me know it's easy to play online. That's something I hadn't considered.

But when they do that it doesn't change the demand for nuclear fuel pellets. The demand is largely static, so in order to sell X more pellets, X pellets from other producers must go unsold/not made. Somebody else has to lose, which makes it a zero sum game.

The production of anything means it's not zero-sum. Demand can expand and contract over time in any market, but that doesn't matter. If you grow an apple or produce a nuclear fuel pellet, you add value to the economy. Now if there are multiple sellers competing, then it'll drive down the price. But we're not discussing prices here.

It does. Not everybody is an MIT grad or has the skills to be one, and yet you say that just anybody can compete with google. That is a contradiction.

It's a matter of drive. Anyone can try to compete with Google. Someone must be adequately driven, and reasonably intelligent to succeed. But everyone who fails will gain the opportunities to build on those failures and start a more successful venture.

60% of the country cannot because they are living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford it.

Again you can start a business for $0 or next to nothing.

Basically every other developed nation seems to think otherwise. For example, we are more or less the only one without universal healthcare, that's what's naive.

Why would we Americans care what other countries think? We're blessed by God to be the greatest country on Earth. People flock from around the world to live here, and they want to so badly that they're willing to become illegal just to live here. It's very rare that you can find a principle applicable to other countries which also happens to be applicable to the US. If some other country wants to give out "free" ice cream to all of its citizens (in exchange, of course, for an obscenely high tax), they can have at it, for all we care.

literally just the basic necessitites, not cable. Etc.

My point was that it's subjective what the "necessities" are. Some people like me will say it costs $0, while others may insist it's a minimum of $250k. This is complicated by the fact that the dollar is worth dramatically different values in different parts of the country, a fact often ignored. Generally speaking it's worth much less in urban areas.

Nobody can survive on $0. You need to have food water and shelter.

Again, grow your own food, haul your own water up from the stream, and build your own shelter out of logs you felled yourself. $0, just like our forefathers.

If it is unrealistic for everyone then it isn't a reasonable answer to what the minimum wage should be.

Whoa, I thought we were discussing your notion of a "livable wage" as an abstract concept, but now you're changing it to minimum wage. The concept of a minimum wage is evil for multiple reasons.

First and foremost, it's a free country, and so we're all allowed to negotiate our own terms of business. If I want to hire someone for $1 a day, and that person agrees to the compensation, it's nobody else's business. Not yours, not the government's, nobody's.

Secondly, minimum wages are absolutely disastrous for the economy, and that has been shown time and again. When you run a business, you have a certain budget to spend on compensation. Let's say you want to hire two people to help you, and you can afford a maximum of $100 per day to hire them. That means you can pay them about $6 per hour maximum. Now some busybody steps in, and introduces an oppressive law that you have to pay more than $6. Well that sucks, doesn't it. That means you can't hire two people after all. You can still hire one person up to $12 per hour, but you'll have to overwork him to produce the results of two workers. Meanwhile somebody else will be jobless. Now let's say the busybody comes back and says $12 is still too low! Well fine, that means you can't hire anyone at all. So now we have two people out of work who would have had jobs. And it also means you'll need to find a robot that's cheaper than $100 per day, because if you can't then the busybody just drove you out of business.

The concept of minimum wage is un-American and downright evil.

Blaming individuals for the failures of a system, and suggesting individuals change to deal with that defect in the system is irrational.

What system? We're all individuals.