If you think the RNC is significantly better just because you haven't seen their emails, you're naive.
Sanders had a chance. Under the circumstances, he had to do considerably better than Clinton to get the nomination, and that's pretty much as it should be. He's less electable than Clinton, would be less effective in office, and isn't actually a Democrat. I supported him primarily to try to push the party to the left. It was reasonable to want him to perform a lot better than Clinton in order to get the nomination.
The first election I voted in was 1972. I do NOT want a repeat of someone like McGovern getting nominated.
Clinton didn't have thousands of classified emails on her server. She turned over the work-related stuff and purged the personal stuff, except that she continued the pattern of trusting her IT people more than she should have.. Over the course of the campaign, she ranks with Kasich and Sanders as by far the most truthful (the fact-checking I've seen is insufficiently methodical to distinguish between those three, but it does set them apart from the rest of the Republicans).
You're making up the Seth Rich story, aren't you? It's true that he was murdered, but it appears to be an ordinary murder. Accusing people of murder is serious, and you really should have some evidence. He probably had nothing to do with the leak, which appears to be external.
Johnson is ideologically acceptable to the Libertarians, which means he has no demonstrated ability to run the country, and is probably deluded as to how things work.
And, yes, it is a two-party system, and the structure of US voting makes sure of that. Every race is first-past-the-post, every member of Congress is individually elected, and almost all elections are single-vote rather than something like approval voting or instant runoff.
Give him a little credit for maintaining tradition. In the 1930s (IIRC), a US Secretary of State disbanded the State Department code-breaking organization because gentlemen don't read each other's mail. The person in charge, Yardley, wrote "The American Black Chamber", probably to replace his income, probably also because he was angry about it. The book sold very well in Japan, since it had a lot about the US codebreaking activity in the Washington Naval Conference and how it helped the US push the Japanese allotment of battleships in the naval limitation treaty down a touch. It contributed significantly to US-Japanese tensions before WWII.
In the meantime, do you have any reason to think the RNC isn't about the same? If you say the DNC is corrupt because you saw their internal emails, and don't at least wonder about the RNC, you're being played for a dupe.
Politics is a dirty game. Always has been, always will be.
I'm going to argue with "Men are more natural leaders than women" on the grounds of how you're sure of that. We don't know what's natural and what's nurture. Things that look entirely natural can wind up varying from culture to culture.
We've got a lot of history of men running things, and very little of women running things. We've got cultural expectations that men will lead.
So, I don't know. There's likely a difference in leadership between men and women, but I don't know what it is.
The odds are that any given third-party endorsed candidate would do a crappy job as President. It's possible to pick a more attractive candidate if you don't have to worry about what happens after your guy is elected.
As it happens, the corrupt, incompetent, career-long liar isn't a woman. Given the fact that you keep spouting nonsense despite being corrected numerous times, I'm thinking you might well be a misogynist. I'm not going to accuse you personally, but there are plenty of them out there, and I believe that leads to numerous attacks on who is probably the uppitiest woman in US history. Similarly, I believe that a very large amount of the vituperation directed at Obama is due to racism, but your political views probably lead you to oppose Obama and Clinton on political grounds.
Personally, I'm voting for her because I generally like her policies and think she'll be a good President. I like the idea of a woman being President, since we haven't had one, but that's in general and I don't judge politicians on their race or sex. I get that you have very different political views, and probably believe most of the nonsense said about Clinton, but that doesn't affect the validity of my decisions.
Objectively, me voting for her for considered political reasons is exactly the same as me voting for her because she's a woman, so it appears to me that voting for her because she's a woman can have good results.
In the US, s contract signed by a minor can be voided by the minor. I'm not completely sure whether the other party to the contract can void it. It may be that the kids were the ones who could get out of contracts, and they chose to get out of only one.
You left out the scenario where the developer does something that's against Apple policy, and the developer should have known better. I'd suspect that's the majority of apps being pulled, along with developers not renewing their memberships.
I'd bet that the large majority of App Store developers don't make a profit on their apps, and some cash in big time. Developing iOS apps doesn't mean you get an almost negligible amount of money a year, it means you have a shot at making some real money.
It's possible to be active in one of those. There are some who simply vegetate, but others who are reasonably physically competent and mentally competent. My mother was playing cards well long after she was first incapable of unattended living.
There's plenty of room between "Christianity is false" and "God doesn't exist". There's over a billion Muslims, for example, who believe in God, but not that Jesus was anything except another human prophet. I myself find the world as I observe it to be incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God. (Theologians tend to refer to the "Problem of Pain", which looks to me to be a phony patch in a world view.) In particular, I can't imagine such a God alongside eternal torment in Hell, and Hell was the first thing that I found wrong about Christianity. More recently, I was hit with the belief that we deserve eternal torment, which I find ludicrous, for being as God made us.
None of this says there is no God. I can ditch the idea of Hell and eternal torment, and put myself at odds with a great many Christians, and that starts seeming more sensible. If I drop, say, omnipotence from the omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, I find that the idea of an omniscient loving God is compatible with the world as observed. (I can also drop omniscience and loving and get something believable.)
There are things we've assumed without independent and objective evidence. My doctors sometimes use my reports of pain as a diagnostic tool, for example. Although we know the physiology behind pain (at least to some extent), they never check what's actually happening in my brain and nervous system when I complain about (say) a sore hip. For most of human history, we didn't understand the physiology, and just assumed that pain existed, and wasn't something that other people were making up.
There is evidence of the existence of a God. Plenty of people will claim personal experience. This isn't objective evidence, but we don't have any for pain or humor. It's just that pain and humor is more universal, and we have some knowledge of their physiology.
Now, it's quite possible that religious feelings are based on oddities of human brain structure, as opposed to sensing anything real, but I do have to consider the testimony of thousands of people to be evidence.
I did read the Lancet article about NDE. It concluded that some people have them near death, and it's really hard to predict who will. It said nothing about correspondence with anyone's religion. It mentioned some cases of when people who had NDE knew things they shouldn't have been able to, such as things the patient couldn't see or conversation when the patient's brain flatlined, but didn't really go into them.
There is nothing in the Lancet article that contradicts the hypothesis that NDEs are functions of the brain going cuckoo when it's about shot. The only comment on NDEs and medical conditions is that medical conditions don't seem to have much predictive power as to who will get NDEs.
Speaking in Bayesian terms...you need to figure what the probability is that a man would be 145 years old, and the probability that documentation dating from shortly after the American Civil War in Java is inaccurate, and then you can calculate the probability that he is 145 years old.
Reminds me of the introduction of lightning rods in Boston in (IIRC) the Eighteenth Century. Some preachers insisted that it was defiance of the will of God, and He flattened Lisbon with an earthquake in retaliation. Other people had thought God's aim was a little better than that. This crap has literally been going on for centuries.
If a program can "break out" by exploiting outside knowledge, it can do so without outside knowledge. It's just a whole lot less likely that any particular exploit would work.
Then there's the question of what "breaking out" would be. It's possible that magic is real in this simulation, and is based on blowing stacks with particular complex thoughts. Would we be able to perceive a breakout as something other than getting cheat codes for the Universe?
For that matter, part of the Babylon 5 episode "Deconstruction of Falling Stars", the weird episode at the very end of Season 4, played with the concept. A warmongering scientist created simulations of Sheridan, Garibaldi, Franklin, and Delenn to use in creating propaganda. Delenn says there has to be some way to stop him, and Garibaldi, while looking normal, hacks into the system and makes sure the entire thing, including attack plans, is transmitted to the enemy. (Five hundred years after, there's a segment with a post-apocalyptic Earth.)
We have neither unlimited energy, unlimited computrons, nor unlimited time. The simulation would have to shut down after enough stars burned out, and that's not necessarily enough time when you're simulating everything on a planet.
I exist because of the result of biological processes that seek to procreate that have over time evolved into much more complex lifeforms that have self awareness.
In other words, you're not answering the question. You're putting it back a few steps, because "Why do I exist?" is not particularly different from "Why is the Universe something that would produce me?" You really aren't asking "Why am I here?", because you're talking about some details of your physiology and how they got to be that way. "Why am I here?" has essentially nothing to do with general biological functions, philosophically.
I'm not saying you should have answers to those questions, just that you don't.
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If you think the RNC is significantly better just because you haven't seen their emails, you're naive.
Sanders had a chance. Under the circumstances, he had to do considerably better than Clinton to get the nomination, and that's pretty much as it should be. He's less electable than Clinton, would be less effective in office, and isn't actually a Democrat. I supported him primarily to try to push the party to the left. It was reasonable to want him to perform a lot better than Clinton in order to get the nomination.
The first election I voted in was 1972. I do NOT want a repeat of someone like McGovern getting nominated.
Study the facts a bit.
Clinton didn't have thousands of classified emails on her server. She turned over the work-related stuff and purged the personal stuff, except that she continued the pattern of trusting her IT people more than she should have.. Over the course of the campaign, she ranks with Kasich and Sanders as by far the most truthful (the fact-checking I've seen is insufficiently methodical to distinguish between those three, but it does set them apart from the rest of the Republicans).
You're making up the Seth Rich story, aren't you? It's true that he was murdered, but it appears to be an ordinary murder. Accusing people of murder is serious, and you really should have some evidence. He probably had nothing to do with the leak, which appears to be external.
Johnson is ideologically acceptable to the Libertarians, which means he has no demonstrated ability to run the country, and is probably deluded as to how things work.
And, yes, it is a two-party system, and the structure of US voting makes sure of that. Every race is first-past-the-post, every member of Congress is individually elected, and almost all elections are single-vote rather than something like approval voting or instant runoff.
Give him a little credit for maintaining tradition. In the 1930s (IIRC), a US Secretary of State disbanded the State Department code-breaking organization because gentlemen don't read each other's mail. The person in charge, Yardley, wrote "The American Black Chamber", probably to replace his income, probably also because he was angry about it. The book sold very well in Japan, since it had a lot about the US codebreaking activity in the Washington Naval Conference and how it helped the US push the Japanese allotment of battleships in the naval limitation treaty down a touch. It contributed significantly to US-Japanese tensions before WWII.
That's the standard of naivety to use.
Appalling corruption? Can you point me to some?
In the meantime, do you have any reason to think the RNC isn't about the same? If you say the DNC is corrupt because you saw their internal emails, and don't at least wonder about the RNC, you're being played for a dupe.
Politics is a dirty game. Always has been, always will be.
I'm going to argue with "Men are more natural leaders than women" on the grounds of how you're sure of that. We don't know what's natural and what's nurture. Things that look entirely natural can wind up varying from culture to culture.
We've got a lot of history of men running things, and very little of women running things. We've got cultural expectations that men will lead.
So, I don't know. There's likely a difference in leadership between men and women, but I don't know what it is.
You're making the assumptions that the men and women are equally competent, which isn't a given. Why are the managers mostly women?
The odds are that any given third-party endorsed candidate would do a crappy job as President. It's possible to pick a more attractive candidate if you don't have to worry about what happens after your guy is elected.
As it happens, the corrupt, incompetent, career-long liar isn't a woman. Given the fact that you keep spouting nonsense despite being corrected numerous times, I'm thinking you might well be a misogynist. I'm not going to accuse you personally, but there are plenty of them out there, and I believe that leads to numerous attacks on who is probably the uppitiest woman in US history. Similarly, I believe that a very large amount of the vituperation directed at Obama is due to racism, but your political views probably lead you to oppose Obama and Clinton on political grounds.
Personally, I'm voting for her because I generally like her policies and think she'll be a good President. I like the idea of a woman being President, since we haven't had one, but that's in general and I don't judge politicians on their race or sex. I get that you have very different political views, and probably believe most of the nonsense said about Clinton, but that doesn't affect the validity of my decisions.
Objectively, me voting for her for considered political reasons is exactly the same as me voting for her because she's a woman, so it appears to me that voting for her because she's a woman can have good results.
In the US, s contract signed by a minor can be voided by the minor. I'm not completely sure whether the other party to the contract can void it. It may be that the kids were the ones who could get out of contracts, and they chose to get out of only one.
You left out the scenario where the developer does something that's against Apple policy, and the developer should have known better. I'd suspect that's the majority of apps being pulled, along with developers not renewing their memberships.
I'd bet that the large majority of App Store developers don't make a profit on their apps, and some cash in big time. Developing iOS apps doesn't mean you get an almost negligible amount of money a year, it means you have a shot at making some real money.
It's possible to be active in one of those. There are some who simply vegetate, but others who are reasonably physically competent and mentally competent. My mother was playing cards well long after she was first incapable of unattended living.
There's plenty of room between "Christianity is false" and "God doesn't exist". There's over a billion Muslims, for example, who believe in God, but not that Jesus was anything except another human prophet. I myself find the world as I observe it to be incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God. (Theologians tend to refer to the "Problem of Pain", which looks to me to be a phony patch in a world view.) In particular, I can't imagine such a God alongside eternal torment in Hell, and Hell was the first thing that I found wrong about Christianity. More recently, I was hit with the belief that we deserve eternal torment, which I find ludicrous, for being as God made us.
None of this says there is no God. I can ditch the idea of Hell and eternal torment, and put myself at odds with a great many Christians, and that starts seeming more sensible. If I drop, say, omnipotence from the omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, I find that the idea of an omniscient loving God is compatible with the world as observed. (I can also drop omniscience and loving and get something believable.)
There are things we've assumed without independent and objective evidence. My doctors sometimes use my reports of pain as a diagnostic tool, for example. Although we know the physiology behind pain (at least to some extent), they never check what's actually happening in my brain and nervous system when I complain about (say) a sore hip. For most of human history, we didn't understand the physiology, and just assumed that pain existed, and wasn't something that other people were making up.
There is evidence of the existence of a God. Plenty of people will claim personal experience. This isn't objective evidence, but we don't have any for pain or humor. It's just that pain and humor is more universal, and we have some knowledge of their physiology.
Now, it's quite possible that religious feelings are based on oddities of human brain structure, as opposed to sensing anything real, but I do have to consider the testimony of thousands of people to be evidence.
I did read the Lancet article about NDE. It concluded that some people have them near death, and it's really hard to predict who will. It said nothing about correspondence with anyone's religion. It mentioned some cases of when people who had NDE knew things they shouldn't have been able to, such as things the patient couldn't see or conversation when the patient's brain flatlined, but didn't really go into them.
There is nothing in the Lancet article that contradicts the hypothesis that NDEs are functions of the brain going cuckoo when it's about shot. The only comment on NDEs and medical conditions is that medical conditions don't seem to have much predictive power as to who will get NDEs.
Speaking in Bayesian terms...you need to figure what the probability is that a man would be 145 years old, and the probability that documentation dating from shortly after the American Civil War in Java is inaccurate, and then you can calculate the probability that he is 145 years old.
Reminds me of the introduction of lightning rods in Boston in (IIRC) the Eighteenth Century. Some preachers insisted that it was defiance of the will of God, and He flattened Lisbon with an earthquake in retaliation. Other people had thought God's aim was a little better than that. This crap has literally been going on for centuries.
If a program can "break out" by exploiting outside knowledge, it can do so without outside knowledge. It's just a whole lot less likely that any particular exploit would work.
Then there's the question of what "breaking out" would be. It's possible that magic is real in this simulation, and is based on blowing stacks with particular complex thoughts. Would we be able to perceive a breakout as something other than getting cheat codes for the Universe?
For that matter, part of the Babylon 5 episode "Deconstruction of Falling Stars", the weird episode at the very end of Season 4, played with the concept. A warmongering scientist created simulations of Sheridan, Garibaldi, Franklin, and Delenn to use in creating propaganda. Delenn says there has to be some way to stop him, and Garibaldi, while looking normal, hacks into the system and makes sure the entire thing, including attack plans, is transmitted to the enemy. (Five hundred years after, there's a segment with a post-apocalyptic Earth.)
We have neither unlimited energy, unlimited computrons, nor unlimited time. The simulation would have to shut down after enough stars burned out, and that's not necessarily enough time when you're simulating everything on a planet.
Religion has been re-invented poorly lots of times in human history. I think good implementations are metastable at best.
We also don't know that the "why" questions have real answers.
In other words, you're not answering the question. You're putting it back a few steps, because "Why do I exist?" is not particularly different from "Why is the Universe something that would produce me?" You really aren't asking "Why am I here?", because you're talking about some details of your physiology and how they got to be that way. "Why am I here?" has essentially nothing to do with general biological functions, philosophically.
I'm not saying you should have answers to those questions, just that you don't.