I had a 'pastor' try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.
Doesn't have to be in the bank either; if you're traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that's why.
I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.
My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won't process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is 'fraud', even when you're dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won't go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I'm buying something for $1000 from China (and we're going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I'm buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn't care where it's going, and--assuming you don't care about speed of confirmations--transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it's just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)
Speculation doesn't play a role in it for me.
I have no direct use for gold; I can't plate connectors.
But many people--and I'm not saying you do this--but many people get gold, silver, and diamonds confused, and think that their intrinsic value is linked to their perceived value. does that make sense?
...Except that gold, like the dollar, and like bitcoin, has the value it does because people believe it does. Sure, gold's a great semiconductor. But if that was all we used it for, the price of gold would be a tine fraction of what it is. Diamonds are great as abrasives and in certain cutting applications, but that's all synthetic now. Natural diamonds only have high value because of artificial scarcity and advertising.
They are absolutely civilians, although they no longer believe they are. Technically the military is supposed to be under civilian control as well (e.g., the governor is supposed to have control of the national guard in their state, the president is supposed to control the six branches of the military).
Look at it this way: the military is not supposed to be used for civilian law enforcement. That very, very strongly implies that police are not military, and are hence civilian.
Remove the bag limit, put a bounty on them. Anyone that murks a billionaire wins a 2000 ft^2 home (or condo, whatever) in the location of their choice, with all taxes, fees, and utilities paid for as long as they live there.
Except you didn't. You rationalized, and thought that someone else would save you, instead of you and the people you care about saving yourself. The floodwaters are rising, and you're on the roof; you either have to get your own ass to safety, or drown, because FEMA's been defunded, and no one is coming.
I think that the left should absofuckinglylutely be getting strapped.
The good news is that leftists have been strapped for years. The bad news is that, 1) they're mostly using Mosin-Nagants and Makarovs because they're red fudds, and 2) most people that are politically left of center are not leftists. (I'm a leftist; I do have a Mosin-Nagant, but it was a gift, and I hate shooting it. I prefer my AR-15 and AR-10.)
I think that if the police are allowed to have it, everyone should be allowed to have it. Police are not the military; they're civilians. So all other civilians should have the same access cops get, or cops should get the same access that everyone else does.
Yeah, that's actually kind of true. When you're working, you can shut off a lot of that stuff for a while, and power through. Then that's nine hours that you don't have to think about X, Y, or Z. It gives you space, so that emotions aren't as raw, and it gives you a structure. I would never suggest work instead of therapy, but I know a lot of people that went to work the day after their spouse died because they couldn't stand to be alone with just their thoughts.
Getting fired for being in a 'bad mood' when my ex-spouse told me that they wanted to separate took me from deeply depressed to suicidal, and I got to spend the next four days, three nights in a hospital. If I hadn't been fired, I would have... Coped. Not well, but I wouldn't have tried to taste-test a shotgun.
Have you tried just not exploding? Like, maybe turn your emotions off so that instead of exploding in rage you just feel a vague annoyance? It's called alexythymia, and I highly recommend it; it makes shitty things much easier to deal with.
I'm a fan of old-school Shadowrun (2nd ed.); it didn't matter how bad-ass your character was, you could get killed by a lucky shot from a punk with a zipgun. It kept the grime of Cyperpunk, and added fantastical elements to it. IMO, it required more role-playing than is strictly necessary in a lot of D&D games, because going in guns blazing all the time was almost certain to lead to death; properly played (IMO), the GM should be brutal in how they handle stupid players.
That's really, really fuckin' suspicious. If the sexual violence was systematic, the way that the Israeli gov't claims, how is it that not even one person is willing to personally talk about it with a UN team?
That's so wonderfully tacky. I kind of love it. It needs to be in a room that has a circular bed that slowly rotates, and has mirrors on the ceiling. Oh, and a hot tub, right next to the bed.
IIRC, this hasn't been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn't really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you're talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it's useful in some instances--like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future--but isn't even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there's strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.
FWIW, I was casually--but quite virulently--homophobic when I was younger. I'd been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I'd heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I'm neither gay nor bisexual (and I don't believe that I am), but it fits with what I've seen from conservative thought.
I had a 'pastor' try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.