her response is insanely tone-deaf too lol
"Well, no one can be perfect". 100% true, but everyone can choose to not fly in a private plane lol
bitsplease
joined 2 years ago
I'd love to see a study where someone takes the teachings of Jesus, anonymizes and modernizes the stories and just presents them as hypotheticals with a "Strongly Disagree -> Strongly Agree" choiceset and see what most modern evangelicals actually think of Jesus when taken out of context.
I'll bet that the majority would say they disagree with Jesus on most points
not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.
Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
- Write the code
It would be
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
- Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
- Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
- Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself
idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.
I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot's ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django's ORM), so if you're just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets
EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form
Again - I'm not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I'm willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you'll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they'll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you've got "holy men" living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It's just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
nothing conspiracy theorist about it at all. If anyone gives you sideways looks when you mention that insurance is a scam, just point out the very simple and undeniable fact that insurance companies are (very) profitable. That means, by definition that the average customer pays more in premiums than they get in payouts, and not just a bit more, a lot more, as that profit they make is after they pay their thousands of employees, award multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives, pay for their bigass skyscrapers, and all that other shit. If insurance was a "fair" deal, they'd be losing money from the administration costs
Always self-insure if you can afford it
Travel insurance is especially terrible, because a lot of the time it's a pretty substantial premium, and actually filing a claim on it is a HUGE PITA.
I worked for a traveler insurance company before, and we denied most claims that came in. People would buy insurance on a $100 concert ticket, paying a $10 premium for the insurance, then when they'd go to file the claim, we'd require a doctors note, so now they also have to cough up a $20 copay and a whole afternoon just to get a note saying "yup, this person is sick". And that's just one of the many ways people got fleeced. During COVID, a lot of travel insurance claims got denied because illnesses resulting from pandemics aren't covered in some policies as well
Yeah, going to a chiropractor for joint pain is like going to a witch doctor who has you drink willow bark tea for your headache. Yeah it might help, but a real doctor could have just given you an aspirin, and they'd actually be able to tell if there was more going on that needs treating.
There are a lot who have an extremely positive impact. It’s a small minority that causes a huge number of issues.
I would argue it's the other way around frankly
This isn't really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons
Wouldn't they have noticed that there were only 3 stories of windows on the blueprint?
Having said that, I don’t conisder it as a scam in itslef
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Pretty much for all the reasons I said in my comment - you'll almost certainly spend more on premiums for travel insurance than you'll ever claim (this is true of all insurance) and the expenses incurred by self-insuring are generally manageable. Even in the two situations you refer to, we're "only" talking about costs of a few thousand, and both of those are highly unlikely events that most people go their whole lives not dealing with. you're much better off putting the money you'd spend on that travel insurance into an emergency fund to cover those kinds of unexpected expenses.
Insurance is only a good financial call if you risk completely bankrupting yourself by not having insurance, otherwise you're just trading potential lump sum costs for small continuous costs, and the premiums will generally always wind up being more than what you're saving (because if they weren't, then the Insurance companies wouldn't be making so much money).
That being said, it's your money, if you'd rather accept that you're paying more over a lifetime on travel insurance than you're saving just to have the peace of mind that you won't have to dip into savings for any incident that happens before or during the trip (assuming your incident doesn't fall under one of the many carefully crafted exclusions that the insurance companies add to their policies to prevent paying out, which it probably will), then by all means, buy it - but if you're buying it because you think it's the financially savy move, and you have at least a few grand in your bank account for emergencies, then you're kidding yourself.