They are. I’ve seen phones being on magnet mounts or held on the steering wheel with videos playing.

I’m seeing a lot more libs understanding what 2A is really for. Preventing success of things like January 6.

My favorite is the fan mounted to the boat blowing the sail causing the boat to move. I mean there are a shitload more experiments in fun episodes that are far better and more entertaining, but this one is my favorite because it flies in the face of logic. It shouldn’t work. My brain rejects the possibility. But physics and fluid flow work otherwise and I found it pointlessly infuriating only because I’d been unassailable in my confidence that it couldn’t possibly work. Yet there it is with a perfectly logical explanation. I still find it irritating even if I accept the reality of it. (Episode 165 if anyone’s wondering)

That said, I still follow Adam on various platforms. That enthusiasm and joy of discovery is all still there, along with some maturity and some life observations. Literally the only celebrity figure I follow.

Yep. That’s a good term. Assembly line health care, conveyor belt health care…you’re just a part moving along and the QC is perfunctory - no errors, but it doesn’t mean the part is good.

It’s the same setup as the states, and I’m simplifying quite a bit.

Imagine basic insurance in the US. You’re going to be restricted to hanging out at regular walk-in clinics, regular ER if you need it, long waits to see your primary care doc if you even have one. You’ll be dealing with overworked and understaffed facilities. Your tests get scheduled a week or a month or more out, unless it’s serious. Doctors do what they can in the short periods they can talk with you, but it’s mostly walk in, diagnose, leave. You get the same treatment plan as everyone else.

It’s not bad, you get treated, but you’re nobody special. Get in line and wait wirh everyone else.

Now get good insurance. Your PCP can always make a spot for you. Yoir tests may be done in-office, same day, or at a facility that can fit you in more quickly. Your treatment plans are more thoroughly examined and tailored, your doctors will spend time with you discussing your condition and treatment avenues. They’re available to talk to if you have issues with the treatment or at least their staff are.

That’s sorta the difference. I have a family member in Europe that passed recently but had a long battle with a disease. He had the “extra” private insurance. Pretty much what I described above. He was able to get seen and have medications adjusted quickly. I have an in-law in the same country who just had a fairly major health event. She had to go to two different facilities to get pushed up the line for her condition. She has normal public insurance. However, she was taken care of quickly and is doing great.

In a nutshell the extra insurance gives you quicker access and probably a more tailored and personal experience, you’re not lumped in with the “commons” at a public health service facility, you can “skip the line.”

You bleed rainbows when cut.

Once the hive mind takes over and the downvote train starts it’s all but impossible to turn your post positive regardless of contrition. It’s unfortunate because it removes some incentive to publicly self-correct.

So copying everyone else’s work and rehashing it as your own is what makes a PhD level intelligence? (Sarcastic comments about post-grad work forthcoming, I’m sure)

Unless AI is able to come up with original, testable, verifiable, repeatable previously unknown associations, facts, theories, etc. of sufficient complexity it’s not PhD level…using big words doesn’t count either.

Anyone else having trouble with the image? I can only see the first “Sumerians” line.

You said:

An interesting thing about what we have now in Christianity though is that it basically spawned as-is in the first century

The article says:

Little is fully known of Christianity in its first 150 years; sources are few.

So you’re making a huge, sweeping statement that Christianity as we know it today is based on something…we don’t know much about? There are 6 major Christian denominations, not to mention hundreds of smaller ones. Which one is the “as-is” one? The one that is exactly “as-is” from CE 100?

That’s the problem though. They want none of their pennies to go to anyone else for anything. Loosely they might pay for someone else’s whatever if it’s their choice, or maybe if there’s groveling involved. They use mental excuses like “someone that’s lazy, doesn’t meet my made-up standards, doesn’t look, speak, or think like me”… or any other metric by which they subjectively view others to judge whether or not those others get their money. Yet somehow they expect roads, water, schools and all the other services that keep their town and state to miraculously keep functioning and not look like a decrepit village on a dirt road in a destitute nation.

You mean besides a couple dudes running around telling us to be cool to each other?

You didn’t even read the wiki entry, did you.

It also doesn’t take into account rising property taxes, business tax, rising maintenance costs. I’m not arguing in favor of these dirty landlord companies that jack up the rent at every opportunity, however you’d have to control interest rates and the ridiculous home prices if you want to keep rents reasonable based on a percentage of mortgage costs.

I think profit and power, or the lack thereof, can be the root of a lot of these awful human traits. It can just be straight up greed driven by a few looking to gain power and/or money that push an agenda of [insert tried and true bogeymen here like xenophobia, religion, racism, etc.] to create motives and instabity to trigger the wars. It could be genuine problems like economic issues or severe agricultural deficiency, via real misfortune or more likely due to greed, corruption, and mismanagement by the country’s leadership. Even religion can be the rationalization, a tit-for-tat, but nonetheless the end result is to take what the enemy has. It doesn’t have to be formalized markets or capitalism.

It can both be about profit and genocide. They can exist at the same time. IOW, genocide can be profitable.

The former president has claimed the criminal charges against him will appeal to Black voters. In February, he told a group of Black conservatives that his indictments are “why the Black people like me.”

Holy hell…could he be more insulting? “They’re all crooks so they’ll like me because I’m a crook like them”.

Oh, they’ve lightly retconned it to mean “I’m persecuted for false charges like them” but that’s not what he said on the first go around. And he did exactly to the black community what he says they should relate to him for when he went after the Central Park Five.

I think “as-is” is a bit of a stretch.

No.

There’s lots of ambiguous information. There is no firsthand, historically agreed upon data that supports his existence in the form we know him today. In other words, there was no magical guy doing magical things.

There is no Roman record of “nailed 3 prisoners to the posts today; Bill, Roger, and Jesus the magic guy who was a pain in the ass.”

However, like Arthurian Legend, it doesn’t mean some guy like Jesus didn’t exist, or an aggregate of characters weren’t assembled to be him on story. Arthur was possibly just a chieftain of a group who fought a couple of hefty battles and made a name for himself, but he ended up being an almost magical figure with wizards and witches in the story and - guess what, he will “rise again” from the dead when needed. And no, rising from the dead isn’t owned by Christian religious figures, Osiris of Egypt did it, Dionysius of the Greek Pantheon among many others. So maybe some dude, who probably wasn’t named Jesus, caused a stir and got a few people to take note. That grew over hundreds and even thousands of years to what we have now.

Want to know why King Arthur isn’t a competitor to Jesus? He a) doesn’t offer the opportunity to control people in this life for the hope of an afterlife, b) he isn’t profitable.

The time after the meeting is spent not wanting to engage in tasks you can’t accomplish before end of day, and watching the clock knowing the meeting screwed up the day.

What constitutes “mysterious” when it comes to a billionaire? Common people usually don’t have particularly creative or unusual modes of death. We going to find him strapped to the outside of a Falcon 9 booster like some James Bond-esque supervillain’s assasination attempt of Musk, the Main Character?