Posts by Anony Mous

656

Covid-19 (Coronavirus) - Status Update Thread

by Simon in

jw
friends

this topic is to focus on status updates & advice (no opinion or politics please).. status.

latest status is that it's serious, probably isn't going to be contained and most large companies are making contingency plans, cancelling large events etc... which i don't think would happen if it was just people being alarmist.

the incubation period means it may have already spread further and infected many more people than are currently known, so expect jumps in the numbers over the coming days and weeks.. tracking.

Anony Mous

I work at a hospital (IT leadership). We are anticipating cases to peak in ~2 weeks with mass panic setting in our community soon. We're locking down the place as of this weekend, we got officially 1 case, but more cases have been confirmed but aren't yet published. Our hospital system has sufficient supplies for ~3 months.

All nearby Universities are going online, school systems cancelled all events but guidance from the State is to continue public schools but prepare packets of work. They want to perform closures and extend schools past June, but there are regulations (bureaucracy) that require them to be open, the state has to change the law.

DHS is warning that China may reduce or block shipments of medical supplies (which is pretty much everything) in the near future and they are trying to spin up American production facilities which will take months. Supply lines are already interrupted, Dell-EMC, HP, Lenovo are heavily affected for spare parts, Dell (consumer line) not yet although there is a backorder for thousands of laptops.

I was aware of the rush to supplies this week, so we went shopping for 2 months of supplies 2 weeks ago, stocked an extra freezer with half a cow worth of meat and frozen veggies. Store shelves here have been empty this week, not even cans of soup.

10

3 More Letters Dated March 13th, From the UK on Coronavirus!

by Atlantis in

jw
friends

3 more letters dated march 13th, from the uk.

there are different mailing addresses at the top.. 2020-03-13https://docdro.id/pxmmef72020-03-13https://docdro.id/adfw87y2020-03-13https://docdro.id/u2tov1ppetra!https://docdro.id/qqtzami

Anony Mous

No more preaching, no more meetings, how many dubbers will be left after a taste of freedom?

60

Greta Thunberg, Worse than Plague

by Simon in

so greta thunberg thinks the world pollutes too much.

specifically, the parts of the world that pollute the least and have the cleanest industries.

she doesn't seem to care about india or china who are the biggest polluters by far.. "how dare they".

Anony Mous

No way you are having full energy capacity from your home solar panels in WNY. I heat with electric because we have cheap energy (nuclear and hydropower) and we consume about 5000kWh/month ($200-300). That'd take ~200-300 solar panels or about $300k installed to generate during winter. My roof has room for 10, maybe 15 panels.

So we need about 20x the space around my house clear cut of trees and shrubs just to provide energy for my house and the density for wind isn't much different. I do have a heat exchanger so I'm as efficient as can be but for geothermal; I'd once again need a space the size of my backyard to bury the mechanism.

I haven't driven to work yet (you want me to have an electric car) I haven't spent time in the office, I haven't produced anything useful. When just living takes up 10-20x the space currently reserved for every human we will run out of space very fast.

13

NWT released in modern Hebrew

by Wonderment in

on february 21, 2020, the wt society made the announcement in their website of the release of the new world translation in modern hebrew (hebrew scriptures - "tanakh") in haifa, israel.

now, the complete nwt is available in modern hebrew.. some time ago, a poster here said that releasing (in theory, i.e.

) the hebrew bible in a modern version, such as the nwt, would be irrational.

Anony Mous

People (primarily Orthodox Jews) that want to read the Tanakh do so in the original Hebrew language. The fact that the "average reader could not understand large parts of the Tanakh" is not because of old Hebrew but by religious design, Orthodox Jews use the Talmud for explanations of the Hebrew scripture because the God of the Bible and his actions in itself do not make a whole lot of sense. The Talmud is basically an apologetical commentary on the OT.

They could've just as well said, "The average reader of the Bible cannot understand large parts of the Bible" because that is also true, but they don't need JW to 'help' them with the understanding of the Bible by changing the meaning of scripture through their oversimplified English translations.

3

Any of you JW super linguists learn to speak Japanese? If so, how’d it go? ;)

by Diogenesister in

hi i’ve been learning to draw portraits, and one style i had a go at when drawing young children was a sort of kawaii or cute japanese style.

i wanted to make gifts of these drawings so looked into writing in japanese script to add to the aesthetic.. but oh wow!!

three types of script?!!

Anony Mous

I've been to the language classes for Russian. The JW's don't teach you to speak any language, they teach you the words to say to place the rags and lead a study.

62

Why do Americans have to pay so much for College???

by RubaDub in

jw
friends

i know there is a huge college/university lobby here in the us that lives off of students paying, in some cases, enormous amounts of money just to attend.. putting politics aside, if that is possible, (and i am not a bernie sanders guy by any means), but how can we pay for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, high school, and then throw a huge debt to someone who wants to continue learning?

can't the us (public and state universities) afford four more years for young people to get on a career path without having to, in some cases, take out a mortgage/loan more than the cost of some homes?

then, (and nothing against immigrants, i am married to one), but then the us has to "import" students from other countries to fill the needs that we should be supplying here.

Anony Mous

The reason college is expensive in the US for some is because the government pays for large portions of the population to go there. 85-90% of college students have some form of assistance which means they pay very little to nothing out of pocket. Only if you make significant income (>$250k), do your children not qualify for government assistance.

And for those in Europe and other places where we get 'free college' - full tuition out-of-pocket including room and board averages ~$50k/year at a government-backed guaranteed ~2% interest rates loan you're not obligated to pay back until 1 year after you finish college. And that's "high", $200k in debt to (if you choose well such as a STEM field), you typically can get a job starting between $50-100k with <18% effective income taxes. A few years later you should be making $100-250k/year. You should be able to pay back the loans with the tax savings alone vs your average European country.

Off course, when the government gives free money, there is no limit to the cost because the government will always pay more, they'll just take it out of your taxes, so the tuition goes up. And with free money, people don't make good choices either, you can get a degree in just about anything for free and as long as you take one class, you don't have to pay back any debts either. So people get degrees in the liberal arts, rack up debts and don't have to be responsible, until they need to get a job and they realize the degree in lesbian dance theory does nothing for them, so now they're demanding the government forgive their debt and give them MORE free stuff and guarantee a job?

I would suggest that public school for K-12 is not very useful either. The better option is to have school choice, vouchers for those that don't have the income to pay for private schools and reduce or eliminate the system of school taxes. In my area we pay upwards of $1B/year into the school system or ~$35k/student and we get dilapidated buildings, class sizes of ~20-30 and the school system has ~$500M in debt. You can pay a private tutor handsomely including supplies for every 4 children with that money.

American college, as European college is still very cheap. Even at those 'exorbitant' tuition rates, the government also pays ~50% of operating costs for any privately owned University through research grants and other funding. So your college should really cost twice as much as it does today, or without government assistance, it would probably cost about as much as it does now, just with less administrative overhead.

9

Are Watchtower/ Awake considered religious magazines by Christians?

by dydeonwl in

the watchtower and awake have been considered as the most read magazines by christians.

do you think that all christians agree on it?.

source:.

Anony Mous

I would take the numbers with a grain of salt. If the stats are true (93M Awake per issue and 42M Watchtowers), every single JW places an average of 15 Awake magazines and similarly large amount of 7 Watchtowers bi-weekly (which was 44/month/JW a few years ago and since they've gone monthly now it is 22/month)

Even as pioneer I didn't get anywhere close to 30 magazines per month, and they claim every JW turning in a report card does this?

Interesting is that the 'study' Watchtowers have a distribution of 14M, whereas they're only for JW's and there's only ~6M of those with half of the organization living in situations where it is not only hard to get the timely delivery of the rags, they are in areas where many people would have difficulty reading. Someone's seen counting with a fork?

10

Jehovah's Witnesses Mega Halls

by RolRod in

i was thinking about this recently.

the society owns all the kingdom halls and with desperate need of money, their closing down and selling off properties.

consolidating congregations seems to be the order of the day.

Anony Mous

They're already doing that, for the "foreign language field", circuit overseer visits and even for the memorial, they're now using the assembly halls (at a "voluntary donation" of course).

The biggest problem with the large assembly halls is visitors, the cost of heating and lighting giant spaces is huge.

109

Proportional Representation vs Electoral Collages

by Simon in

jw
friends

the craziness of first-past-the-post elections .... we'll no doubt have to now live through the scotts demanding another referendum, because we may take their lands, but we will never take their freedom!

and so they want to be free of the uk, where they have a disproportionate influence in parliament, and be a little dot that's part of the eu.

yup, freedom.. but anyway, as it stands right now they have 48 seats after getting 1.2m votes.

Anony Mous

The question is whether you want direct democracy, oppression of the majority so to say, or a representative government where each area of the country, typically divided into cities and groups of towns, gets an equal vote.

Good and long-term governments are built upon representative governments because each area (eg. farming, fishing, cities, ...) get a say in their policies. If you have a majority vote for everything, a majority can always agree to persecute the minority, whether the minority is rich people, black people, gay people. Hence why direct democracies usually lead to bad outcomes unless you can make every choice between two highly contrasting ideas (eg. kill all the blacks vs kill all the whites)

37

What’s Your Opinion of Adam Schiff?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i’ve heard some people praise him for his zeal against president trump.

others have not been so praiseworthy toward the california congressman.. today he was so concerned that trump might be so emboldened now that he has won acquittal, that he suggests that trump might make a deal with russia and sell them the state of alaska.

😐.

Anony Mous

He looks and talks like a politician, he's really good at it, he's a good lawyer I'd say from the arguments he made at the impeachment. But he comes across as a lawyer and not in the good way, more in the way of "that guy looks like he's defending a mafioso", the way he looks sideways all the time when he makes a statement about his case.

So you have good Schiff - on the stand, defending a legal argument, even if it isn't logically consistent, he'll stand there and defend it - and you have bad Schiff, when you know he's lying, he's looking left and right, and he did that for 2 days straight in the Senate and then he attempted to do it during Q&A time as well.