I’m not actually here to argue this point, but since you asked I’m answering. Atheism is ultimately a very boring way of looking at the world. I prefer to talk about more interesting things.
Chyron knows there’s a God. He’s 100% certain of this. I know there aren’t any gods. I’m 100% certain of this as well.
How can you possibly know that? The only thing I find more unlikely than someone knowing for certain God exists is someone knowing for certain that gods don’t exist.
Basically via Occam’s Razor, but not even that philosophical. I am comfortable making the following statement:
There is absolutely, positively, not a giant pink-and-mauve duck flying in space, hidden in the dark side of the moon, with the capacity not only to survive in space, but also to be undetectable to any attempt to observe it.
Now, this duck, by its very definition, cannot be proven not to exist, yet I am absolutely certain that it does not.
Gods are far more implausible than the duck, so by extension I am certain that they also do not exist.
You do realize that the nature of God would be such that the odds are we can’t even conceptualize it, right?
As with the duck. It’s more of a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey astro-duck. And it ain’t there.
Chyron knows there’s a God. He’s 100% certain of this. I know there aren’t any gods. I’m 100% certain of this as well.
How can you possibly know that? The only thing I find more unlikely than someone knowing for certain God exists is someone knowing for certain that gods don’t exist.
Basically via Occam’s Razor, but not even that philosophical. I am comfortable making the following statement:
There is absolutely, positively, not a giant pink-and-mauve duck flying in space, hidden in the dark side of the moon, with the capacity not only to survive in space, but also to be undetectable to any attempt to observe it.
Now, this duck, by its very definition, cannot be proven not to exist, yet I am absolutely certain that it does not.
Gods are far more implausible than the duck, so by extension I am certain that they also do not exist.
EDIT: My mom is agnostic, and I totally get that viewpoint as well. But I’m pretty sure she doesn’t believe in the duck either.
Chyron, your presupposition, and refusal to elaborate on said presupposition, that God’s existence is completely evident and unquestionable can be frustrating. Your strong faith is quite admirable, but your behavior in this thread today is baffling.
IMO the danger of any mixed-company religious conversation is failure to couch terms appropriately, and that goes double for text-only formats. This whole “true for me” and “true for you” is ultimately sorta bullshit, but useful bullshit. Chyron knows there’s a God. He’s 100% certain of this. I know there aren’t any gods. I’m 100% certain of this as well. You don’t have to wade very far into a conversation with this level of un-couched honesty before you reach the obvious conclusion that one of us is wrong.
But that’s not a useful conclusion to any religious discussion. It neither helps nor informs anyone. Unless you’re in the conversion racket, I suppose, which I’m certainly not. So instead of saying “I know”, people say “I believe”, which ratchets down the conflict a bit. But really, for some people it’s the same damn thing. Chyron and me, we both know, we’re both certain. But to facilitate a more fruitful conversation, it’s “belief”, which is suitably equivocal, albeit sometimes less accurate.
Now sure, many/most have room for real doubt, and I’m not trying to downplay that. I think doubt is far more theologically interesting than certainty on the faith end of the spectrum (whereas hardly anything is theologically interesting about my end). I think the story of Doubting Thomas illustrates this quite well, how lack of certainty/evidence is precisely what gives value to faith. I’m not exactly sure how to approach absolute religious certainty in that respect, but I’ll keep reading and listening.
I wanted to thank Harmy and all who worked on this restoration.
Be sure to watch ESB 2.0 and ROTJ 2.5 while you’re at it. I’m sorry to say that those look so good now that they make SW 2.7 feel a little less amazing. And you will be similarly pleased with the audio on both (ESB has a one-frame audio sync issue which you are unlikely to notice, but it will be fixed in the next release).
Trump is very smart at branding and controlling the media narrative.
Media is politics, then do the math 😃
Also, if he’s so great with the media, then why is he so historically unpopular? And why was he barely capable of even coming within 3,000,000 votes of winning the popular election? I don’t even know why I’m asking these questions.
Because 8 billion illegal criminals voted for Clinton in California, duh.
I love how right-wingers claim to love the electoral college now purely because it gives Republicans an advantage. They say, “Well, if it weren’t for the electoral college then people in California and New York’s votes would count for something.” Yeah, that’s how the democratic election of a representative works.
Well we’re a democratic republic, which I guess means that if you live in a more populous area, your voice matters less.
I know I’m being pedantic, but over-representation of rural areas is not in any way a by-product of a democratic republic. I know people say that all the time but they are all completely wrong. The fact that votes cast by people who live in less populated areas have more weight than votes cast by people in more populated areas is mostly just a function of how we chose to implement federalism in the US. There are other ways to implement federalism, and you can also have a democratic republic with no federalism at all, so that this is a non-issue. Democratic republics and our electoral college mess are apples and unicycles. There’s no link.
Technically you still have a little over-representation of areas with lower (or negative) population growth in a democratic republic (which tends to skew rural, but not always), due to the fact that the census is not continuous and is instead based on snapshots in time. But if that were the only issue we were struggling with, our democracy would be in good shape today.
Good write up, though I hope you know I was joking.
Yeah, but it’s such a common statement I’m not sure you can deadpan it like that. I’m sure if elections were cancelled or votes were openly discarded, someone would say, “Well sure, if we were a Democracy this wouldn’t happen, but we’re a Democratic Republic so of course ballot boxes get dumped in the river.”
Not only that, but you know what familiarity breeds, right? Right now you can keep a lid on it. Right now you can go through the motions. What about another year of it? What about ten more years of it?
If you want to keep an amicable relationship going with your family in the long term, I’d say keep your bags packed and be on the lookout for escape opportunities. One way or the other, the way you describe things, something’s going to give eventually, and it might not be pretty.
On the bright side, you may yet find support from unexpected quarters in your family. It’s funny who ends up pulling through for you in a pinch, and it’s not always who you’d expect. Don’t burn any bridges you don’t have to.
Trump is very smart at branding and controlling the media narrative.
Media is politics, then do the math 😃
Also, if he’s so great with the media, then why is he so historically unpopular? And why was he barely capable of even coming within 3,000,000 votes of winning the popular election? I don’t even know why I’m asking these questions.
Because 8 billion illegal criminals voted for Clinton in California, duh.
I love how right-wingers claim to love the electoral college now purely because it gives Republicans an advantage. They say, “Well, if it weren’t for the electoral college then people in California and New York’s votes would count for something.” Yeah, that’s how the democratic election of a representative works.
Well we’re a democratic republic, which I guess means that if you live in a more populous area, your voice matters less.
I know I’m being pedantic, but over-representation of rural areas is not in any way a by-product of a democratic republic. I know people say that all the time but they are all completely wrong. The fact that votes cast by people who live in less populated areas have more weight than votes cast by people in more populated areas is mostly just a function of how we chose to implement federalism in the US. There are other ways to implement federalism, and you can also have a democratic republic with no federalism at all, so that this is a non-issue. Democratic republics and our electoral college mess are apples and unicycles. There’s no link.
Technically you still have a little over-representation of areas with lower (or negative) population growth in a democratic republic (which tends to skew rural, but not always), due to the fact that the census is not continuous and is instead based on snapshots in time. But if that were the only issue we were struggling with, our democracy would be in good shape today.
IMO the bind you’re in is exacerbated by proximity. If you were living (just coincidentally) on the exact opposite side of the frikkin planet, it’d be a lot easier to keep your life going one way and your family’s understanding of your life going another. Lots of people just assume things are going great unless they hear otherwise, so unless you say otherwise, their queries about your level of religious devotion will likely diminish, although it’s wishful thinking for them to go away entirely.
I happen to live pretty much on the opposite side of a major continent from my entire family. And I get along with my family just fine, and never actually had any particular need for the distance, it just happened. And it’s not bad. You? Maybe some distance would work for you even better.
Go west! Life is peaceful there
Go west! Lots of open air
Go west! To begin life new
Go west! This is what we’ll do
Hey, Groucho Marx is timeless.
Tell that to almost all the kids.
Most haven’t even heard of him.
Why do you have to do that? 😦
Sorry you don’t like a big bucket of truth thrown in your face, but I gotta be me.
I guess that’s why I’m on a forum with a bunch of 40 or 50 somethings.
I would venture most are human.
That was Frinkbait if I’ve ever seen it.
Hey, Groucho Marx is timeless.
Tell that to almost all the kids.
Most haven’t even heard of him.
Why do you have to do that? 😦
Sorry you don’t like a big bucket of truth thrown in your face, but I gotta be me.
I guess that’s why I’m on a forum with a bunch of 40 or 50 somethings.
Dude, enough with the buckets already!
I don’t think this even makes sense in context.
“forum with a bunch of 40 or 50 somethings” = larger bucket of unwanted truth
Hey, Groucho Marx is timeless.
Tell that to almost all the kids.
Most haven’t even heard of him.
Why do you have to do that? 😦
Sorry you don’t like a big bucket of truth thrown in your face, but I gotta be me.
I guess that’s why I’m on a forum with a bunch of 40 or 50 somethings.
Dude, enough with the buckets already!
I thought CatBus was about right. It’s tedious to complain about political bogeymen.
And that is of of the world’s most awesomely terrible tattoos?
He sure missed his chance at Rock and Roll immortality.
He’s already got it, man. He’s already got it.
Oh, wait. I forgot. Trigger warning.
not sure if this was shared here already but what the heck
If we discussed every time the Nuge demonstrated he was a loud racist idiot directly advocating murders and assassinations, there wouldn’t be room left to talk about anything else. I’m pretty sure the guy has figured out a way to eat loud racist violent idiotic waffles for breakfast. It’s the only schtick he has, but he keeps at it.
Projector support? I have a projector and it would take any thing hdmi
I meant CIH anamorphic lens support, 21x9 flag, subtitle shift, etc. Not for projectors that just display the same image you’d see on a TV on a different medium. Basically there’s an internal anamorphic scaler option in the Oppo so you don’t have to buy a Lumagen Radiance (which goes for a few grand), and there’s also lots of niceties so you can do things that the Lumagen or fancy projector could never do, like subtitle shifting.
EDIT: If you read that whole linked CIH article, there’s a head-scratcher in there regarding what to do about The Dark Knight. The problem is that the disc isn’t authored correctly, or at least not authored correctly for CIH, making you choose between a movie that changes height or cropping the film, both of which are undesirable IMO. The author suggests the crop method, but that makes me wince. The proper thing would be to rip and re-encode the movie properly for CIH, so that the height of all aspect ratios are the same. That’s the way other multi-aspect ratio films have been done (i.e. Brainstorm) and it works well.
I’ve never understood the rationale behind going overboard with audio/video equipment. I get spending a ton of money on a TV and speakers, but I don’t get spending hundreds on a blu-ray player or a thousand dollars on a turntable stylus.
Video and audio encoding varies from player to player.
No. Unless you meant “decoding”, and even then I’m doubtful unless the settings are just messed up on it.
In theory, you’re right. Taking bits on a disc and turning them into bits on a wire should be the same for all players. It should be a deterministic process, where input A always leads to output B. And for my part, what I like about Oppo has nothing to do with that, it’s more about other features (regions, outputs, projector support), so I’d buy the Oppo whether that was true or not.
But people who care more about this sort of thing than me have found not all players are the same in processing bits from the disc. First off, the video processors in many players apply some image cleanup routines automatically and in a way that can’t be turned off. Things like DNR, sharpening, etc. While it may create the appearance of a cleaner, crisper image for most consumers, the image displayed after processing does not match what’s on the disc bit-for-bit. Sharpening and DNR is fine for those who like it, but IMO it should be controlled at the endpoint, not introduced at the source, and certainly not in a way that can’t be disabled. Also, there are some colorspace conversions that are easy to get wrong without any obvious signs of issues. There was a comparison several years back of various players (I don’t think this was it, but it’s related), and the Oppos were the only ones outputting the correct RGB values. The others were only off by a bit, and probably not a noticeable amount either, but they were demonstrably wrong. And of course there’s your “this DAC is better than that DAC” argument on the audio side, which I think is pretty tedious because most audiophiles don’t want a flat response and therefore it’s completely subjective. So if you’re into this level of nitpickery, there are nits to pick. I’m firmly of the view that a measurable difference is not always a perceptible difference, and measurements can be abused to create the impression of difference where there really isn’t one, but no deviation at all from a reference value is nevertheless a pretty good sign – especially when your average video signal passes through two to three devices which can all alter the signal in a small imperceptible way which could add up to something that is perceptible in the end.
But again, I actually like other things about the player that are a bit more tangible than these minor audio and video differences.
Oleg Deripaska is on the list. An unhappy Oleg is bad news for Manafort.
Continuing my thought re: immigration: In my opinion, we have laws for a reason, and we should make use of them and enforce them. We should not overlook people breaking immigration laws because they’re in a bad spot or because they do jobs we don’t want to do; and we should not have lax gun laws because “criminals don’t obey them anyway.”
We have what I’d call a “nod-and-wink” economy regarding undocumented workers, basically meaning we have two labor markets. We have one above-board market where workers have protections, safety regulations, legal recourse, and so on. And we have another market where workers have none of those things.
Well, we’re certainly not going to establish laws that overtly create second-class citizens (or second-class because-they’re-not-citizens). Just to begin with, the Declaration of Independence itself says “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Words written without any irony whatsoever by a slaveholder.
So… we just throw them out then?
I’m saying some people today also see no problem between “all men are created equal” and the overt creation of an underclass, so the conflict does not necessarily indicate any sort of political infeasibility. Yeah, we had slavery before, and we don’t now, but I don’t believe the arc of the moral universe bends toward anything in particular unless we keep pushing it there ourselves.
I don’t like the attitude some on the left have toward the founding documents. I don’t like the way the right fetishizes them, but it’s completely sane and rational to accept and live by the great words of some of the Founding Fathers without ignoring the problematic aspects of their history.
It wasn’t about the words themselves, but how the words were being presented in a “this could never happen in America” defense. Frankly, I had a few things I was pretty sure could never have happened in America not so long ago, and the list is a lot emptier than it used to be.
Continuing my thought re: immigration: In my opinion, we have laws for a reason, and we should make use of them and enforce them. We should not overlook people breaking immigration laws because they’re in a bad spot or because they do jobs we don’t want to do; and we should not have lax gun laws because “criminals don’t obey them anyway.”
We have what I’d call a “nod-and-wink” economy regarding undocumented workers, basically meaning we have two labor markets. We have one above-board market where workers have protections, safety regulations, legal recourse, and so on. And we have another market where workers have none of those things.
Well, we’re certainly not going to establish laws that overtly create second-class citizens (or second-class because-they’re-not-citizens). Just to begin with, the Declaration of Independence itself says “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Words written without any irony whatsoever by a slaveholder.
Also it would be a political nightmare.
I’d certainly hope so.
In related news:
Farmers say they’re having trouble hiring enough people to work during harvest season, causing some crops to rot before they can be picked. Already, the situation has triggered losses of more than $13 million in two California counties alone, according to NBC News.
The ongoing battle about U.S. immigration policies is blamed for the shortage. The vast majority of California’s farm workers are foreign born, with many coming from Mexico. However, the PEW Research Center reports more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than coming here.
To make the jobs more attractive, farmers are offering salaries above minimum wage, along with paid time off and 401(k) plans, but even that’s not proving enough.
It’s unclear exactly how widespread the labor shortage is for farmers throughout the country, which would have a bigger impact on prices consumers pay. Ultimately, drought and flooding have a more significant impact on farms. Low oil prices could also offset any impact of the worker shortage.
But for farmers, who have seen net farm income fall 50% since 2013, any lost income could be potentially devastating.
“Salaries above minimum wage”?!? Wow, they’re really pulling out all the stops now… I wonder what they were earning before? That’s curiously absent from the article.
The story is California-specific, and the immigration policy driving this is not new, as the article seems to imply. It’s part of a decade-long trend of what happens when that secondary labor market you relied on for cheap labor goes away, in this case due to the aggressive deportation policies of multiple successive administrations.
I used to be a lot more certain it was #2.
I felt that if I hadn’t reported him, I would be validating it. If he didn’t want to risk people reporting him, he shouldn’t insist on cash. Let him take up the ethical violations with the IRS.
My point was not about whether you made the right call or not, but that the law itself is a problem if the point of it is to be loosely enforced. Individual enforcement actions aren’t really relevant in the big picture when the law itself is the primary problem.
It’s hard to imagine in today’s world of completely imaginary immigration crises, but there was actually a time when there was a non-imaginary illegal immigration crisis of sorts in the US. Before Reagan tightened up immigration laws, we had something more akin to migrant labor. People would come across the border, work for a season, and go home. But then crossing the border became a non-trivial endeavor, and migrant workers who were in the country decided it was less risky to live in the US year-round than to cross the border every year. So, under Reagan, the ebb and flow of undocumented workers turned into a more static environment, where once you got across, you stayed.
And this, more than anything, led to your Trumpite boogeymen of “anchor babies” and “chain migration”. Reagan. And of course illegal immigration has declined quite a bit since, and pretty much effectively stopped ten years ago before Obama even took office, so those boogeymen are more of a racist dog whistle than fact these days anyway.
Continuing my thought re: immigration: In my opinion, we have laws for a reason, and we should make use of them and enforce them. We should not overlook people breaking immigration laws because they’re in a bad spot or because they do jobs we don’t want to do; and we should not have lax gun laws because “criminals don’t obey them anyway.”
Well, IMO there’s a problem with that. Not in the abstract, but in practice, because our laws in this area don’t align with what we actually want in a practical OR ethical sense.
We have what I’d call a “nod-and-wink” economy regarding undocumented workers, basically meaning we have two labor markets. We have one above-board market where workers have protections, safety regulations, legal recourse, and so on. And we have another market where workers have none of those things. The benefit of having that second market is we get cheap labor-intensive products, such as food, construction, etc. The point of the laws, in my opinion, is not to prevent certain people from entering the country. In my view, the point of the laws is to prevent those people from getting decent wages and working conditions once they’re here. So I agree we have laws for a reason, but sometimes that reason isn’t straightforward.
This is a trade-off: we give up a little ethical high ground and in return we get cheap stuff. Now, if we didn’t have this secondary labor market, either via booting people out (R) or path to citizenship (D), the result would be the same: higher prices. I’m not saying some people wouldn’t be willing to choose this path, but I don’t think most are. And sure, the two-tier labor market is deeply unethical. I’m not arguing against that point at all.
Apparently 203’s and 205’s are flying out the doors from all resellers – the less-popular 205’s may already be gone, 203’s may last a few more days. IMO this probably includes a lot of people buying in bulk to resell at a profit once they’re completely unavailable.