I hope so. Textual analysis suggests a “2 Q” theory where the earliest posts were mostly one author on 4chan (interestingly not all, several early drops are believed to be from different users) and then another person (who I believe wholeheartedly is 8chan administration Ron Watkins) started posting as Q and moved to 8chan. I’m interested in knowing who the earliest Q was and what the content of the very first Q drops was, given that there are believed to be several that didn’t get archived. Several people have claimed to be 4chan Q but none of their stories are particularly convincing. My guess is that it was a bunch of random trolls at first and then one of them just went with it when they started getting a following.

I suppose it depends on what you’re making but in my experience new plants are incredibly automated. Then again, I work in chemicals and not consumer goods, which probably has a bias towards automation

I feel like there are a lot of dimensions to this. I am a huge proponent of manufacturing, but yeah a lot of factory jobs suck. The problem is, they don’t have to. Modern factories are way better than old ones, and could be even better if we as a culture prioritized making jobs less soul crushing rather than access to cheap shit. I also feel like people who haven’t worked in manufacturing don’t really understand what it’s like in a modern facility. I think there’s this idea that it’s working at an assembly line or going out and turning a bunch of valves all the time but nowadays 99% of it is just sitting at a computer watching numbers. I wouldn’t want to be on the floor at my current job but I’ve worked other places where it seems a hell of a lot better than most other jobs available to non college grads.

Another issue is that modern manufacturing sites are super automated. Very few people actually work at them, at least the ones in America. You can have a plant that makes millions of pounds of plastic a year that employs 60-70 people, which is less than a typical Walmart.

Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.

This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.

Is the Chaplain distinct from other classes like priest, cleric, or paladin? If so, I would think the Chaplain is more of a ranger with a holy flair. However, if it’s in a setting where it’s the only holy class I would say they should have healing magic, faith based spells, and high charisma. The first thing that came to mind, however, was like a WWII military chaplain and I thought that would be pretty cool, basically a D&D style cleric but in WWII era tech, acting as a field medic, religious guide, and clairvoyant all in one.

There are no truly successful talks with Trump. Even if you make a deal he’ll decide he doesn’t like it next week.

I disagree with the whole premise of this post as well, but yeah the early history of the spread of Buddhism actually does contain a lot of this. The emperor Ashoka, who ruled most of India at one point, spread Buddhism across his empire by force, which was a major factor early on in its trajectory. Buddhism and Christianity actually have pretty similar early histories, complete with councils to determine doctrine, early spread among lower classes, and eventual adoption as state religions of powerful states. Even today there is still a lot of sectarian violence committed by Buddhists, particularly in the Myanmar/Burma civil war.

A lot of atheists in the west think of Buddhism as being more of a moral philosophy than a religion but that’s not really true. Buddhism has gods and demons and heavens and hells, and rules one has to follow. It is often said that Buddhism doesn’t believe in “God” but this is kind of misleading because there are definitely beings pretty much everyone would agree are gods even if they are technically mortal or are seen differently, such as the Buddhas.

$25k and climbing but thankfully that’s pretty much all in my retirement and I’m not touching it for several more decades.

It’s more complicated than that since I do believe God exists but in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, and, according to all evidence, doesn’t “intervene” with the universe. I say “intervene” because God, as classically described, is simultaneously incapable of intervening and incapable of not intervening. If we define God as “an omnipotent being”(which, for the record, I do not), then He is necessarily also all knowing and exists outside of the limitations of time and space. Such a being would be perfectly optimized as well, and so it would be impossible for anything to occur without its express permission and cause. Therefore, under classical theism, it seems impossible for God to say, answer prayers, because this would imply that He could possibly change His mind or that what was happening wasn’t already what He wants to begin with.

Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic “church” where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I’d probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it’s good to do something like this. Plus I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.

It’s complicated but I used to be essentially atheist but now believe that there is something one might as well call “God” after studying philosophy. Essentially everything has a cause and something must be at the end of that chain, and we might as well call that “God.” I also practice Christianity because I feel that it is good to have the community and structure that a religion can provide but I don’t think that “God” necessarily exists in the way Christianity typically presents it.

I’m currently trying out Lemmy because reddit is killing the Old Reddit interface and I refuse to use their shitty app or new interface website. Plus after using it I think it’s kind of fun to have reddit but smaller and more curated. It’s like Reddit used to be back in like 2012.