scarabic

I find Macedonian is close enough to English that I can get by /s

Yeah are they talking about themselves? Someone else? No one in the region is restraining themselves whatsoever.

Sadly it’s probably also the case that publishers’ ebook pricing to libraries is based on paranoia about them destroying all book sales, plus the usual corporate greed.

First thousand’s free. Yep, genius policy. (Which is why I doubt they do this).

I have heard this same story except with employers tracking employees who steal money. That one makes a lot more sense to me because they know the identity of the person involved.

Someone gonna tell me that the second I walk into Target their system is like “here comes Mr. Scara Bic, currently at $570.” ??

iMustProtest

I liked my jumbo iPhone for a while but it was too long to fit comfortably in my pocket. Making it foldable wouldn’t help though, because the main reason I got rid of it was I kept dropping it. Too big to use with one hand.

I could allow that some people would rather carry a thicker but shorter object in their pocket than a thinner one with larger surface area. But I can’t think of much more than that. It bugs me that all foldable now ALSO have a miniature screen on the outside. Like they immediately admit that their primary feature is a nonstarter and add bulk to the phone when bulk is a primary issue with foldables.

This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.

It is a position you hold until a belief system provides sufficient evidence for you to form and hold a belief.

Gnostic atheism is a specific form which nobody actually holds to, which says that there positively is no god and this is known to be a fact. Any reasonable person would admit you can’t know this. And so virtually all atheists are agnostic atheists.

Being an agnostic atheist does not mean you are “on the fence” or “undecided” or “accepting of all beliefs equally.” It means you are intellectually honest that you cannot prove the non-existence of a god any more than you can prove there isn’t a planet in the universe where it rains lemonade. But until you have a firm reason to believe that some god exists, you’re going to proceed as if they don’t, because that’s the conclusion, however perpetually provisional, that best matches the evidence.

I don’t know that Jesus asked for a church to be founded either, or left behind any guidance on how to organize it or run it properly. If SG specifically said “don’t do this” then wow that’s even worse that they did. But it seems like much the same deal all around.

There’s actually a nuance here that religious people love to make much of. They would say that just because everyone who’s ever lived has died does not mean you know we all will. They would say you are just generalizing from the examples you have to all cases, which is fine but is inductive reasoning and therefore involves faith. They will say you cannot conclude deductively that we will all die, you can only reason inductively that you think we will, therefore you are operating in uncertainty and therefore you are exhibiting faith. Therefore science and religion are the same thing. (They’ll say).

This seems to be the latest favorite philosophical whipping post among religious people trying to find some basis in the modern world for their magic sky fairy beliefs. The funniest thing about it, to me anyway, is that it is an argument that boils down to “you’re just making shit up as much as we are!”

aLL ReLigiOnS aRE reALly AbOuT tHE saME uNdeRlYinG tHinG!! ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶