The bottom line is that people are leaving the catholic church in droves as they realise there's less and less credibility and need to explain things with "magic"
I'm sorry to say this is wrong. Lots of (maybe even most of) the people leaving the Catholic Church in droves are converting to other sects of Christianity, ones which are arguably even worse (Prosperity-doctrine megachurches for instance, and other forms of evangelicalism).
I'm not sure of the numbers, however; there's probably lots that are leaving religion altogether, but I would suspect most of those are young people (like me when I was in college and gave up on Catholicism), and that most over-30 adults leaving the Catholic church are simply going to other sects.
I think more thought about consequences needs to be done by the people making this software/hardware and not just pushing moral authority/decisions on middle or upper management
The people making this stuff don't have that authority. They're nothing more than hired guns. If they don't do the job the way management wants, someone else will. That doesn't quite excuse them in extreme cases, but most of the things you complain about are things that low-level engineers have no control over or even any visibility into; they have to be part of the requirements, and that's something that only management has real control over.
The things you complain about are products of hierarchical organizations. The only power people at the bottom have is to leave, and generally that only happens when the wrongdoing is blatant or illegal. Making something less secure against hacking than someone thinks it should be really doesn't qualify here. If you want things done better, you either need to do a better job as a consumer, or you need to advocate for governmental policies to effect change.
Not exactly, only partially. Those mega churches didn't exist a couple decades or so ago. Huge numbers of born-again/evangelical (esp. mega-church-going) Christians were not raised that way at all, they were raised in more traditional, "mainline" protestant sects or as Catholics. In fact, in Latin America from what I've read, there's a huge number of people converting from Catholicism to Evangelicalism. And today's "Prosperity Doctrine" is entirely new; it didn't exist a few decades ago.
So you can make the case that these people were all brainwashed into religion from an early age, and then have merely changed to a different (and usually more extreme I believe) flavor of it in adulthood, but many/most of them weren't fed this particular kind of bull as children.
They should make video games of certain parts of the Bible. How about a game where you get to invade some other tribe's territory so you can take it for your own, and God tells you to murder everyone in the tribe except for any desirable women who you then get to take into slavery?
It's too bad the Christian media companies haven't made any movies about these parts of the Bible.
If you consider each nation as an internal system religion beat areligion in every case, and the Catholic Church is still here after 2,000 years.
Religion beat areligion because religionists are violent and enforced their delusional views on everyone, with the penalty for nonconformance frequently being execution. The Catholic Church was a big instigator of this: they frequently burned people alive who didn't agree with their theology. Remember the Spanish Inquisition?
The religionists are also the instigators of many, many wars. In the past, it kinda worked out because humans didn't have that much destructive power. Nuclear weapons change that equation.
Finally, as for areligious people not having any kids, China seems to contradict that assertion. They're becoming more dominant in the world every day, and they're not religious at all. They sure aren't in danger of being rendered irrelevant by Africa.
Turkey IS in Europe. Well, a little tiny bit of it is. Even Americans like me know that much.
But I'm under no illusion that most of my countrymen know even this. Apparently there was a poll a while back where Americans were asked if they were in favor of bombing some place (I forget the name now). The place was a fictional location in some Disney movie or something. A majority of Republican voters said yes, and a minority (but still decent number) of Democrat voters agreed. The vast majority of those polled, from both parties, either agreed or disagreed with bombing this place, rather than asking what this place is in the first place, just to find out it's fictional. Another poll asked whether the US should get involved in Ukraine after the Russian involvement there, and found that many Americans thought the Ukraine was in South America!
Sounds like it's the EU that needs to build a "big, beautiful wall".... It shouldn't be that expensive, because the Greece/Bulgaria border with Turkey isn't that long; it looks like roughly 200 miles judging by a map. Or they could just invade Turkey and seize most of the European part, short of Istanbul; then they'd only need a wall about 25 miles long.
It's your own fault of course, but I wouldn't call that person a friend either.
If you continue to call that person a friend, and keep them as a friend, even after they talk you into dumb decisions, then yes, they really are your friend, even if they're not good for you. And what does that say about you when you continue to keep them as a friend and follow their advice?
And the EU has been seriously entertaining the idea. It's not America's fault: this is like one on your friends talking you into marrying some alcoholic loser. Who's fault is it? Your friend's, or yours for doing it? Sorry, but you're responsible for your own decisions and actions.
It seems like the powers-that-be in the UK read "1984" and thought it was a great idea. They're making Trump's vision of America look like a great place.
Sounds like it can help mitigate problems like this: if I understand you correctly, the initial cause of the problem was storms which disconnected wind farms, which presumably are remotely located. This sudden loss then caused a cascading failure. Having backup batteries close to the point-of-use (namely, urban areas that use the bulk of the power, which probably are not located near the wind farm) seems to me to be a good insurance policy against something like this happening in the future.
Importing from neighbors in peak times can result in the same failure, if storms take out those long-distance power lines, like they did the lines to the wind farm.
Of course, I'm not a power engineer (though I did get an 'A' in my one power engineering class in college, but I'd have to go study for a while to remember how to do 3-phase calculations now since it's been so long), so maybe having a backup battery still wouldn't help in this case, I dunno. But on the face of it it does seem like a good idea when one of your important connections goes down suddenly due to storms, to provide a buffer to the network and give you time to spin up some other generators to handle the load.
What do Democrats have to do with anything? You're the one trying to claim the 60s were some kind of wonderful time when "people cared about each other". I simply proved you wrong.
This idea is about solving blackouts, which as I understand it result from the peak load being too high for the current generation level.
Nuclear power doesn't help here: nuclear power is used for baseload because it can't increase or decrease its output quickly. For that, you need peak load generators, which usually run on things like natural gas, or various stored-energy schemes such as pumped hydro.
No, make the promises, but make them contingent on promises from the hiring manager to "be loyal to the employee" (you).
Then when you leave and the manager complains, point out that you only promised loyalty if the company was loyal in turn. And by not keeping your salary at market-rate, they broke that promise, so you're not actually breaking yours.
The 60's were an unusual time where people believed in Jesus, did what he told them to do, worked as if they were motivated, and cared about each other.
So the way they kept black people from voting, and beat them mercilessly when they tried to peacefully walk across a bridge, that was people doing what Jesus told them to do and caring about each other?
60s-era NASA astronauts couldn't be any taller than 5'11". Gus Grissom was only 5'5"; quite tiny if you ask me. Americans in general back then weren't that tall, and looking around me (I'm over 6') they still all look short to me, especially on the east coast.
I actually tried to subscribe to the HBO web service in Canada and discovered that I could not get "Game of Thrones" without paying an extortion fee... So..I wait for DVD's from the library.
Tractors cater to a market that expects high reliability, ease of use, and ease of maintenance,
You think car buyers don't care about these things too (except maybe the last one)? Most car buyers I've ever heard of want cars that are extremely reliable, and easy to drive. People who DIY also value cars that are easy to maintain.
It seems like, with a little reverse engineering, it should be possible to make aftermarket products that interface with these machines, or let different brands interoperate. I wonder how lucrative that would be.
I think it's already pretty obvious that John Deere makes it hard to impossible to repair their equipment; there's been plenty of articles about this, and I'm sure the customers already know what the situation is. So I don't see how the "good experiences" bit even applies here; JD customers are now having plainly bad experiences. On top of that, there's other brands out there (CAT, Kubota, etc.), from large and established manufacturers, and these are very expensive pieces of machinery, not cereal: are these farm equipment buyers not doing any research at all? Or seeking out other farmers and finding out what their experiences are?
This is not like Microsoft; John Deere does not have a monopoly, or anything close to it. There's a bunch of ag equipment makers out there worldwide.
I'm sure it's just as stupid as brand loyalty for any other brand: it's religious and has zero basis in rationality.
There's a certain logic to preferring a certain brand if you're actually getting a great customer experience from that brand (for now, things change over time), and you can cite valid data as to why this brand's products and experience are better than competing brands. But this can only last as long as that brand's products and user experience stay good; if you continue to support and evangelize a brand that has long since turned user-hostile and/or is much worse than the competition, then you're just a religious idiot.
You don't need to be a farmer to understand; blind and unwavering brand loyalty is stupid, no matter who you are.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line is that people are leaving the catholic church in droves as they realise there's less and less credibility and need to explain things with "magic"
I'm sorry to say this is wrong. Lots of (maybe even most of) the people leaving the Catholic Church in droves are converting to other sects of Christianity, ones which are arguably even worse (Prosperity-doctrine megachurches for instance, and other forms of evangelicalism).
I'm not sure of the numbers, however; there's probably lots that are leaving religion altogether, but I would suspect most of those are young people (like me when I was in college and gave up on Catholicism), and that most over-30 adults leaving the Catholic church are simply going to other sects.
His predecessor helped pedophile priests avoid prosecution. You support this?
I think more thought about consequences needs to be done by the people making this software/hardware and not just pushing moral authority/decisions on middle or upper management
The people making this stuff don't have that authority. They're nothing more than hired guns. If they don't do the job the way management wants, someone else will. That doesn't quite excuse them in extreme cases, but most of the things you complain about are things that low-level engineers have no control over or even any visibility into; they have to be part of the requirements, and that's something that only management has real control over.
The things you complain about are products of hierarchical organizations. The only power people at the bottom have is to leave, and generally that only happens when the wrongdoing is blatant or illegal. Making something less secure against hacking than someone thinks it should be really doesn't qualify here. If you want things done better, you either need to do a better job as a consumer, or you need to advocate for governmental policies to effect change.
Not exactly, only partially. Those mega churches didn't exist a couple decades or so ago. Huge numbers of born-again/evangelical (esp. mega-church-going) Christians were not raised that way at all, they were raised in more traditional, "mainline" protestant sects or as Catholics. In fact, in Latin America from what I've read, there's a huge number of people converting from Catholicism to Evangelicalism. And today's "Prosperity Doctrine" is entirely new; it didn't exist a few decades ago.
So you can make the case that these people were all brainwashed into religion from an early age, and then have merely changed to a different (and usually more extreme I believe) flavor of it in adulthood, but many/most of them weren't fed this particular kind of bull as children.
They should make video games of certain parts of the Bible. How about a game where you get to invade some other tribe's territory so you can take it for your own, and God tells you to murder everyone in the tribe except for any desirable women who you then get to take into slavery?
It's too bad the Christian media companies haven't made any movies about these parts of the Bible.
If you consider each nation as an internal system religion beat areligion in every case, and the Catholic Church is still here after 2,000 years.
Religion beat areligion because religionists are violent and enforced their delusional views on everyone, with the penalty for nonconformance frequently being execution. The Catholic Church was a big instigator of this: they frequently burned people alive who didn't agree with their theology. Remember the Spanish Inquisition?
The religionists are also the instigators of many, many wars. In the past, it kinda worked out because humans didn't have that much destructive power. Nuclear weapons change that equation.
Finally, as for areligious people not having any kids, China seems to contradict that assertion. They're becoming more dominant in the world every day, and they're not religious at all. They sure aren't in danger of being rendered irrelevant by Africa.
Turkey IS in Europe. Well, a little tiny bit of it is. Even Americans like me know that much.
But I'm under no illusion that most of my countrymen know even this. Apparently there was a poll a while back where Americans were asked if they were in favor of bombing some place (I forget the name now). The place was a fictional location in some Disney movie or something. A majority of Republican voters said yes, and a minority (but still decent number) of Democrat voters agreed. The vast majority of those polled, from both parties, either agreed or disagreed with bombing this place, rather than asking what this place is in the first place, just to find out it's fictional. Another poll asked whether the US should get involved in Ukraine after the Russian involvement there, and found that many Americans thought the Ukraine was in South America!
Sounds like it's the EU that needs to build a "big, beautiful wall".... It shouldn't be that expensive, because the Greece/Bulgaria border with Turkey isn't that long; it looks like roughly 200 miles judging by a map. Or they could just invade Turkey and seize most of the European part, short of Istanbul; then they'd only need a wall about 25 miles long.
I guess in that case the best course of action is to try to seem friendly to the "friend", and find a way to secretly poison the sister.
It's your own fault of course, but I wouldn't call that person a friend either.
If you continue to call that person a friend, and keep them as a friend, even after they talk you into dumb decisions, then yes, they really are your friend, even if they're not good for you. And what does that say about you when you continue to keep them as a friend and follow their advice?
And the EU has been seriously entertaining the idea. It's not America's fault: this is like one on your friends talking you into marrying some alcoholic loser. Who's fault is it? Your friend's, or yours for doing it? Sorry, but you're responsible for your own decisions and actions.
Yep, sounds about right.
It seems like the powers-that-be in the UK read "1984" and thought it was a great idea. They're making Trump's vision of America look like a great place.
Damn son, you really still think America is all that? Nope. There's plenty of decent legal systems in the world. Yours ain't one.
Apparently, the UK isn't one either.
So is the rest of Europe as bad as the UK, or are we to believe that the UK is somehow a big exception in Europe?
And what we're seeing in Turkey isn't looking too hot either, and the Europeans have long been trying to make Turkey out to be a European nation.
Sounds like it can help mitigate problems like this: if I understand you correctly, the initial cause of the problem was storms which disconnected wind farms, which presumably are remotely located. This sudden loss then caused a cascading failure. Having backup batteries close to the point-of-use (namely, urban areas that use the bulk of the power, which probably are not located near the wind farm) seems to me to be a good insurance policy against something like this happening in the future.
Importing from neighbors in peak times can result in the same failure, if storms take out those long-distance power lines, like they did the lines to the wind farm.
Of course, I'm not a power engineer (though I did get an 'A' in my one power engineering class in college, but I'd have to go study for a while to remember how to do 3-phase calculations now since it's been so long), so maybe having a backup battery still wouldn't help in this case, I dunno. But on the face of it it does seem like a good idea when one of your important connections goes down suddenly due to storms, to provide a buffer to the network and give you time to spin up some other generators to handle the load.
What do Democrats have to do with anything? You're the one trying to claim the 60s were some kind of wonderful time when "people cared about each other". I simply proved you wrong.
This idea is about solving blackouts, which as I understand it result from the peak load being too high for the current generation level.
Nuclear power doesn't help here: nuclear power is used for baseload because it can't increase or decrease its output quickly. For that, you need peak load generators, which usually run on things like natural gas, or various stored-energy schemes such as pumped hydro.
No, make the promises, but make them contingent on promises from the hiring manager to "be loyal to the employee" (you).
Then when you leave and the manager complains, point out that you only promised loyalty if the company was loyal in turn. And by not keeping your salary at market-rate, they broke that promise, so you're not actually breaking yours.
The 60's were an unusual time where people believed in Jesus, did what he told them to do, worked as if they were motivated, and cared about each other.
So the way they kept black people from voting, and beat them mercilessly when they tried to peacefully walk across a bridge, that was people doing what Jesus told them to do and caring about each other?
60s-era NASA astronauts couldn't be any taller than 5'11". Gus Grissom was only 5'5"; quite tiny if you ask me. Americans in general back then weren't that tall, and looking around me (I'm over 6') they still all look short to me, especially on the east coast.
Of course, it would be nice if the US was hitting the moon again, rather than wasting cash on walls, private prisons, and no-bid contracts
Spending money on those things is Making America Great Again. Spending money on the Moon is not. If you disagree, you're unAmerican.
I actually tried to subscribe to the HBO web service in Canada and discovered that I could not get "Game of Thrones" without paying an extortion fee... So..I wait for DVD's from the library.
Or you could just download it on BitTorrent.
Tractors cater to a market that expects high reliability, ease of use, and ease of maintenance,
You think car buyers don't care about these things too (except maybe the last one)? Most car buyers I've ever heard of want cars that are extremely reliable, and easy to drive. People who DIY also value cars that are easy to maintain.
It seems like, with a little reverse engineering, it should be possible to make aftermarket products that interface with these machines, or let different brands interoperate. I wonder how lucrative that would be.
I think it's already pretty obvious that John Deere makes it hard to impossible to repair their equipment; there's been plenty of articles about this, and I'm sure the customers already know what the situation is. So I don't see how the "good experiences" bit even applies here; JD customers are now having plainly bad experiences. On top of that, there's other brands out there (CAT, Kubota, etc.), from large and established manufacturers, and these are very expensive pieces of machinery, not cereal: are these farm equipment buyers not doing any research at all? Or seeking out other farmers and finding out what their experiences are?
This is not like Microsoft; John Deere does not have a monopoly, or anything close to it. There's a bunch of ag equipment makers out there worldwide.
I'm sure it's just as stupid as brand loyalty for any other brand: it's religious and has zero basis in rationality.
There's a certain logic to preferring a certain brand if you're actually getting a great customer experience from that brand (for now, things change over time), and you can cite valid data as to why this brand's products and experience are better than competing brands. But this can only last as long as that brand's products and user experience stay good; if you continue to support and evangelize a brand that has long since turned user-hostile and/or is much worse than the competition, then you're just a religious idiot.
You don't need to be a farmer to understand; blind and unwavering brand loyalty is stupid, no matter who you are.