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The ironic thing is that if the US government wanted people to stop using it because of the PRC, they should have just leaked some fake Snowden style documents saying that the NSA was using it. Everyone would drop it like a hot potato then.

This is like survivorship bias, but in reverse. Obviously almost everyone who killed themselves with a gun had access to a gun, but this doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have committed suicide by some other means if they didn’t have access to a gun.

This is something that is impossible to determine scientifically. If everyone in this study group killed themselves with a gun, how many of them would have not killed themselves if they didn’t have a gun? They can’t un-kill themselves and let us take away their guns so we can determine the effect.

What this study shows is that a gun is likely the first choice of gun owners who are trying to kill themselves. It cannot determine how much less likely they would have been to kill themselves had they not owned a gun, if at all. Intuitively I do believe that it would be less, because other means are likely more difficult, slower, or less effective. Whether this would result in slightly fewer suicides or much fewer I do not know, but this study doesn’t prove either.

This is a pretty good video explaining why the imperial system in the U.S. isn’t as bad as it seems: https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY?si=wcyG7yM150e71Rn4

I feel like you are doing Easter eggs wrong…mine are plastic and filled with candy thats made with only the highest quality high-fructose corn syrup. They do come in some fabulous colors, so I guess there is that…

How is it that legislatures can pass tax law which use %s that automatically scale with income/sales/property values, but they can’t figure out a way to pass wage laws that use %s to automatically scale with COL/inflation? Imagine hardcoding a taxable $ amount, and then not updating it for 30 years…

I know I’m about 6 months late with this, but this is all I could think of when I saw this:

This reminds me of the Confederation bridge between P.E.I. and New Brunswick

Why don’t we just… wait here for a little while… see what happens?

22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name…23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ Matt 7:22…, 23 NIV

I think I have a solution, hear me out: The penalty for missing a mandatory vote is you don’t get to vote.

A thought-provoking thesis, thank you.

Sure, thanks for the discussion.

What mechanism prevents a lack of faith, though, in your mind?

I think a lack of faith, in the sense of doubting what I believe or what I have placed my trust in, is a natural reaction to uncertainty. What I was clumsily trying to describe is that: Because I lack fundamental knowledge of the universe, I must constantly make decisions based on incomplete information. This requires me to place trust in something or someone external from myself.

Is it that not having some faith in something would lead to decision paralysis?

I think the point I was trying to make is that, even if I don’t consciously acknowledge my decisions, by just living life I am implicitly trusting in a truth about reality. To give an analogy, imagine three people are walking across a frozen pond covered in snow:

• The first person checks to see if there is ice underneath, and then measures the thickness of the ice, decides that it will hold them, and walks across
• The second person sees that there is ice underneath, but doesn’t measure it, and just decides to walk across
• The third person has no clue there is ice there, and walks across the frozen pond

The first person has faith in what they have observed and trusts that the ice will hold them. The second person just has blind faith in the ice and trusts that it will hold them. The third person is completely ignorant and doesn’t even realize they are walking on ice. While the third person isn’t technically “trusting” the ice, they are living their life in a way that depends on the ice just as much as the other two. What ultimately matters is the truth about whether or not the ice will hold. This truth matters regardless if I am ignorant of it, trust it blindly, or trust it because of my observations.

Do you not consider it possible to navigate life though statistical confidence/lack of confidence as opposed to conviction? Or is it that such an approach still falls under what you identify as a type of faith?

As a Poker player, I can appreciate this train of thought, but I wouldn’t want to try to live life based solely on some kind of statistical calculation. I think if I tried to calculate an expected value for living life according to the probability of a worldview, then I would end up in a Pascal’s wager type situation: Even if I was 99.99999% certain that the universe is finite and impersonal, bringing any percentage possibility of eternity into the calculation would swing the value completely in that direction.

As far as categorizing this as faith, I would place this in the same category as my statements about science: it would be foolish for me to ignore statistics and other branches of mathematics, but it would also be foolish of me to ignore the fact that even mathematics is based on axioms and may be incomplete.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think life must be lived by blind faith; my worldview is based on a combination of experience, observation, and intellection. However, I do want to dispel the notion that if I were an atheist, I could have a complete worldview that doesn’t require any faith. I don’t mean this as a slight to atheists, but rather an argument that both “religious” people an atheists share the same human condition which is surrounded with uncertainty.

Sure, thanks for asking. Sorry for the book, but I wanted to provide a thorough answer.

Let me start with religion. This can refer to some kind of belief in God or more vaguely in “the supernatural”. It can also refer to certain rituals and practices associated with those beliefs. I see many people associate it with “organized religion” which seems to have strong negative connotations (for good reason), as being, phony, disingenuous, a scam, manipulative, a power play, etc. You can find these definitions in various dictionaries, but I use the definition that dictionary.com provides: noun a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe…

I can’t speak for other people because I don’t know what it is like to be you, or know how you perceive the world. I can only assume that we have similarities based on a shared human condition. I don’t see how it is possible to live without either explicitly accepting a fundamental set of beliefs, or at a minimum, implicitly validating them with my actions (which may actually be a truer indication of what I really believe). Regardless, either ignoring a set of beliefs or espousing them isn’t going to make them more or less true, which is ultimately what matters.

In our current society, it seems to be accepted that science and religion are diametrically opposed and cannot co-exist. I have observed, especially on the internet, that if I espouse to be religious, then it is assumed that I believe in flying spaghetti monsters and think the earth is flat. I believe that intellectually honest people will find that they are actually in more similar circumstances than they realize. It would be foolish for me to disregard scientific observation and experimentation, but it would be equally foolish for me to disregard the limitations of those observations and experiments:

• It is impossible to take a zero-trust approach with science (never trust, always verify). I don’t have access to a Large Hadron Collider to observe the Higgs boson for myself. I don’t have access to the LUX-ZEPLIN to experiment with dark matter. I don’t have access to the LIGO Lab to observe gravitational waves. I trust that these experiments are conducted correctly and that their findings are correct, but by doing so I am placing my faith in the scientists performing the experiments. I do so also knowing that complete objectivity is impossible. I have a personal bias. My own life experience and observations skew the way I see the world. I assume this is the same of other people, scientists included.

• Even if I had access to all the equipment necessary, and dedicated my entire life to scientific experimentation, I would only be able to conduct a tiny fraction of experiments necessary to explore just a few of the questions about the nature of the universe. At the end of my life, I would likely have more questions about the universe than when I began.

• Even if I had the time, ability, and equipment necessary to conduct all necessary experiments to explore my questions about the universe, I would be making a fundamental assumption that I am actually able to observe everything. I have no idea if there are other dimensions that I will never be able to observe or experiment with. I simply have to accept by faith that these do or do not exist.

• Even if I assumed that everything is observable, and I had the capacity to conduct all necessary experiments, I would still have an impossible problem from a practical standpoint: I need to make decisions on a daily basis. I don’t have a lifetime to wait and scientifically determine the nature of the universe before I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I am living it right now. The fundamental truth about the universe matters in the decisions that I have to make right now.

This is why faith is a necessity. I look around, and I see that I am just one of over seven billion people on this Earth, and that Earth is just one of eight planets orbiting our Sun, and that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy that is so vast, even travelling at the impossible speed of light, would take me thousands of lifetimes to traverse, and that galaxy is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies in what is just the observable universe. One thing is for sure. I am very small, in every sense of the word. To sit here, and read this paragraph again, and then think that I really know-it-all would make me one of the most arrogant beings in the universe. I know very little, and I live by faith.

I have found that the definitions of “religion” and “faith” are so varied or vague that they are almost pointless to use anymore. The way I define them, everyone is religious and faith is a necessity.

I would be much more interested in asking about people’s worldviews. Wikipedia gives this description: One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven.

I have boiled this down to two essential questions about the nature of life/existence/reality that can be graphed on a quadrant:

Let me explain this a little: The horizontal axis is the duration of existence. The difference between a worldview with an infinite existence and a worldview with a finite existence is immeasurable. If I believe in an infinite existence, then my actions have infinite consequences. This still has some potential qualifiers. For example, I may believe that life/the universe will exist forever, but that I will personally cease to exist when I die. In this case, my actions may still have infinite consequences (for future generations) but I will not personally experience them. A purely finite/temporal worldview would mean that I believe that everything will end in the heat death of the universe or similar life ending event. In this case, it ultimately doesn’t matter what I do in life, everything will end the same way.

The vertical axis represents the nature of our existence. Is the source of life personal or impersonal? If I believed an extremely impersonal worldview, then I would believe that we are essentially just biologically pre-programmed to live our lives based on the DNA that we have been built from and that person hood/personal agency is a construct of the mind with no higher meaning. If I believed in an extremely personal worldview, then I would believe that I am created by a personal being that is also interested in a personal relationship with me, and I am created as a reflection of their person hood.

For the record, I believe in an infinite personal existence and an extremely personal nature of existence.

So why am I on c/Atheism?

• I don’t want to live in an echo chamber; I like to see what other people believe
• If my beliefs can’t stand up to scrutiny, then they aren’t worth having
• I would rather know the truth than believe a lie; I would take the red pill

I can tell you they aren’t just banning IPs for abuse. I have run an OpenVPN server on Linode for years. I am the only one using that IP and it was blocked at some point. They are most likely blocking all known VPS IP blocks. OpenAI does the same thing with Cloudflare for ChatGPT.

This comment assumes that someone other than God has the moral authority to define evil. If God doesn’t define evil, then who does? If I say what God does is wrong and therefore evil, what am I really saying? Aren’t I judging God? I dont even have the authority to judge other men, let alone God. If I had the authority to judge God, then between the two of us, which one of us is really God?

It has been my experience working with FOSS that if you really want a bug fixed, or a feature implemented, it is best to take the following steps:

1. Fork the repository
2. Implement the feature or bug fix in your fork
3. Open an issue (if one does not exist already) in the upstream repository describing the feature or bug
4. Submit a pull request with your implemented changes as a solution to the issue

I have had a 100% success rate with these steps.

I think that everyone is misunderstanding pressure and what psi (pounds per square inch) is measuring. This is force applied over a surface area. There are two ways to increase pressure: 1. Increase the force 2. Decrease the surface area.

I assume that 500 PSI is being measured at the very pointy tips of the Owl’s talons. This demonstrates their ability to pierce and grab their prey but it is misleading.

I can easily generate 5000 PSI by stabbing with a sharp knife. That is not the same thing as what everyone is thinking of as “grip strength” which is like closing the Captains of Crush grip trainers. There is no way an owl could close the No. 4 CoC (365 lb) note this isn’t 365 PSI, this is 365 lb. Meaning you can generate 365 lb of force with your closing grip. If you could apply that force to a talon that came to a point of .001 square inches, you would generate 365,000 PSI