I’ve seen Highlander, you can conceal a full size katana in the inside breast pocket of a trench coat. You can even go for a run with it there and the coat will flap and move like the sword isn’t even there.

Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen. He was born in Canada but his mother was an American citizen who met residency requirements to pass citizenship to him so he was a US citizen at birth.

A Martha Stewart/Snoop Dogg ticket would be interesting. I kinda want to see Snoop in the debate though so maybe a Snoop Dogg/Martha Stewart ticket.

If you want to guarantee a win though Oprah is the answer. Just to maximize Trump’s rage I say we need Oprah/RuPaul 2024.

It will be a little heavier. For the average rider it won’t make much difference.

You don’t think information about the effects of free roaming cats is relevant to a question about transitioning cats to outdoor roaming?

https://academic.oup.com/jel/article/32/3/391/5640440

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.13745

Roaming domestic cats are a global problem.

Pet cats that are allowed to roam outdoors are extremely destructive to local wildlife and live shorter lives. Cat should only be kept as indoor pets.

https://www.americanhumane.org/fact-sheet/indoor-cats-vs-outdoor-cats/

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Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, did not have wmd’s, and was the only major Sunni power in the region. Saddam Hussain was not a good guy by any means but he actively worked against Iranian influence and was a stabilizing presence on the middle east after the first Gulf War. Pre-invasion Iraq was good for US policy. The invasion led to the growth of Iranian influence in the region and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization. We should not have attacked Iraq.

I was in support of attacking Afghanistan at the time and still think military action to go after Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin was warranted. The diversion of resources from that conflict is another reason we shouldn’t have attacked Iraq. We probably should have extended that conflict into northern Pakistan where we knew Al-Qaeda’s leadership and the bulk of their fighters were hiding.

We definitely should have invaded Saudi Arabia. They provided training, equipment, travel, and money to enable the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 would not have been possible without Saudi Arabia’s support. Saudi Arabia was(is) in the curious position of publicly allying with us while plotting terrorism against us. Curious because by siding with us publicly they gave up Iran’s advantage of attacks against them potentially leading to conflict with Russia. Iran had some part in 9/11 but between their having a lesser role and the risk of Russia coming to their defense it would not have been worth it to attack Iran. Saudi Arabia had our backing instead of Russia’s. When they used proxies to attack us we should have leveled their royal palace. So far we haven’t even pulled our support.

The USB-C set a new benchmark for the popular Apollo 11 comparison. With the release of the USB-C, your phone’s charger now is about 563x faster, can store about 75% more commands, and has about 2x the RAM vs the Apollo 11.

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/2/11/21133119/usb-c-anker-charger-apollo-11-moon-landing-guidance-computer-more-powerful

Egypt has the longest unbroken record of it’s history. It may or may not have been the first civilization to begin keeping a written record of it’s major events. The other 2 contenders are Mesopotamia and Sumer but most records from those are lost. Egypt’s records were also lost but large portions have been rediscovered in burial tombs. Egypt began it’s chronology (~3500BCE) at least a thousand years before China(~2500BCE).

Hexbear seems a little passive, they could be a little more aggressive in their interactions. Also they don’t include enough random spam and shit posting when they find a thread they want to interact with. What’s really sad though is that they only tend to engage with one or two representatives instead of sending every user on their server into the thread.

Arkham Asylum was great, Arkham City was good, and Arkham Knight was ok. Based on the trajectory the series was going I was fairly ambivalent when I saw the next one was coming. I definitely won’t be getting it if it is a quest exclusive but I’m not sure I was getting it anyway. Maybe I’m an outlier on this series and most players didn’t see a decline from game to game but if not then this seems like a bad series to make an exclusive. Seems like it will do more to hurt the series than help the platform.

Socrates answered this. If morality is objective or has an objective basis then it is necessarily independent from any God or god’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

Edit to add: If you’re interested in the concept of an evil God in the context of Christian beliefs I recommend reading “Answer to Job” by Carl Jung. He doesn’t exactly make the Christian God evil but ascribes moral failings to God and frames Jesus as the redemption of God instead of the redemption of man.

You are comparing apples to apples but I think there is an issue of scale. It’s like the apples that are produced by the tree out back (Cuba) vs the apples that are produced by the little stand the vineyard keeps for their fall cider (US). I don’t have a lot of fruit trees out back so the couple basket fulls that apple tree produces is a huge portion of my fruit production but the vineyard’s couple ton of apples is only a small portion of their fruit production.

For rice, the largest rice crop Cuba has ever produced in a single season is estimated to be 465k tons in 03/04. The US produced 11m tons and exported 3m tons of rice last year.

Edit: overstated US rice production do to not noticing a unit difference.

Scaled

That’s certainly possible. LLMs led to these questions for me but I think they will equally apply to any communicative AI that sees wide adoption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism

You probably don’t want to read all that so here’s a what I think is the important take away as far as your question is concerned. American Christians have always been a bit different from the mainstream religion elsewhere. The largest Christian group to come to America in the early colonial period were called the Puritans. They believed that the English Reformation did not go far enough. They were staunchly anti-Catholic and were very upset that the Church of England had adopted so much theology and tradition from the Catholic Church.

The Puritans believed that the Bible is the complete revelation of God rejecting the papacy, the concept of continuing revelations, and the related concept of the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that individuals forged their own covenant with God and that their belief and acceptance was all that in required for their salvation. That sin is so pervasive in our corrupt world that it was unavoidable, no person can be “good” or worthy of salvation and so salvation is only available through God’s mercy. They believed that it was their role as Christians to fight against the corruption of the world by spreading their theology and enforcing their concepts of sin and redemption on each other and on the greater community. The narrative is that they fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. The persecution that they faced was that they were not allowed to make laws banning things like alcohol or “revealing” clothing that they considered sinful or forcing people to go to their churches.

They adopted most of there theology from a reformist movement called Calvinism that sought to expand the Protestant Reformation further stripping away the power of the clergy and empower believers to enforce theology. Calvinists adopted an extremely socially conservative interpretation of the Bible and supported strict adherence to their moral ideology and severe punishment for violations of their concept of morality.

The modern Christian movements that trace themselves back to that foundation are still the largest Christian groups in the US. In the 1960’s the Republican party began the “Southern Strategy” which was shift of political focus to conservative social issues and attacking secular institutions. Republicans used this strategy to unite the philosophical descendants of the Puritans under a political ideology that is strongly focused on conservative social issues and on pushing their concepts of religion and morality into all aspects of society enforcing adherence through government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Prosperity theology is a newer theological concept that was popularized by Oral Roberts, has been embraced by the Republican party, and allowed the rise of the megachurch and celebrity preachers. Basically Prosperity theology gives an answer to the question of how you know that that someone is “living right” and a solution to the problem of evil. You know that someone is “living right” because God rewards their righteousness with material wealth. Evil exists as a punishment for the corruption of the secular world. Bad things primarily happens to the unholy but evil spills over to the righteous because secular corruption is so pervasive as to make sin unavoidable in our fallen world. Poverty is the primary form of punishment God visits upon the unholy.

You say you are from a predominantly Christian country so I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to recognize that this is a significant departure from the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Bible. I dare say that the departure is significant enough to be called an outright rejection of the teachings of the purported source of their morality and salvation.

To throw an add on to your comment in case readers have the ideal that the Navy’s mostly flying cargo planes, Top Gun is the Navy Fighter Weapons School. The Navy is flying a decent number of cargo planes but they also have some of the best fighter pilots in the world. Also flying a Space Shuttle would be a lot closer to flying a cargo plane than a fighter jet. Space Shuttles weren’t designed to maximize speed and maneuverability so that kinda makes pointing out that the Navy has amazing fighter pilots irrelevant, but they do.

I commented that I wanted to move Discovery out of main cannon a few days ago. It was controversial but the comment is still there and it has positive karma.