shepherdless

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Posts by shepherdless

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  5

  Hurricane in the Bahamas

  by zeb in

  1. social
  2. current

  winds of over 300 k an hour my heart goes out to you..

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  shepherdless

  A bit of light humour:

  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-01/h-bombs-and-hurricanes/11468384
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  150

  Cause of Mass Shootings Mental Health?

  by blondie in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have been sad to see so many groups and individuals say that the cause of these events are the mental status of the shooters.

  i have looked over the backgrounds of these shooters, and few had medically identified mental health issues.

  it is too easy to think that people shoot or kill other people because they are mentally ill.. actually, many or most people with real mental illnesses are most likely to be the victims of others.. i have been a volunteer with the organization called nami (national alliance of mental lillness) for 25 years now.

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  shepherdless

  Or is there some other rational way you can define these types of weapons?

  In Australia, the solution was to ban private individuals from owning any semi-automatic weapon. Obviously there were many outraged at the time, but people soon realised that pretty much any legal use of a firearm could be done with a bolt action or lever action firearm. Problem solved.
  
  
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  14

  Evolution or Creation?

  by Doug Mason in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  what would the outcome be among people at this site if we were able to conduct a poll on belief in evolution or in creation?.

  what would the outcome be if at the same time we asked for religious affiliation (including formal, informal, or none)?

  doug.

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  shepherdless

  Evolution (ie theory of natural selection) for me.

  No religious affiliation. No superstitious beliefs.
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  7

  Great Australian Kingdom Hall Sell Off

  by gerry in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  balga kingdom hall western australia sells for au$3.3 million.

  https://www.onthehouse.com.au/property/wa/balga-6061/13-wallington-rd-balga-wa-6061-18287256.

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  shepherdless

  “Balga congregation of Jehovahs Witnesses” is still a registered charity. I guess it is hard to keep up with the wheels rolling away off Jehovah’s crumbling chariot.

  Last filing with the commission in March this year. It apparently has 128 “volunteers” which (given my past comparisons with other congregations) probably means it has, or had, around 128 publishers now up for redistribution.
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  13

  Tariffs and Taxes ... Which is it ? I want my $214 back !

  by RubaDub in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  (so as not to hijack the tariff thread, i thought this would be better to keep separate.).

  i guess my economics and finance classes in college have not prepared me to understand the latest round of tariffs/taxes that trump is instituting.. i really don't understand who is "paying" these fees and where they are going.

  first of all a tariff is a tax and anyone who doesn't believe that needs to invest in a bridge in new york city.. to keep this as simple as i can, i'm thinking of a $1,000 refrigerator that i am buying.

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  shepherdless

  Of course a tariff is a tax.

  A partial response to your (very good) refrigerator analogy is that (from memory) studies have shown that as a matter of practicality, not all of the $200 gets passed onto the consumer. Manufacturers and those on the supply chain will tend to absorb some of it, to the extent they can. The other thing that happens is that market forces will push down the currency of the country of manufacture to compensate, which is what we are seeing now.
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  7

  Tarriffs

  by truthlover123 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i am not a mathematician, so i have a question -- the dow dropped almost 900 points today due to china devaluing its yuan against the us dollar.

  what will the impact be on markets as well as the farmers, steel, etc.?

  - this is crazy and as dt is a tariff guy, the country is being devastated by the results.

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  shepherdless

  Initially, I could not work out why Trump was so popular, but I get it now. He is very conservative on all social issues, but on most economic issues he says and does all the things that a populist (usually a left wing one) would say and do. Tariffs and budget deficits are things that conservatives normally fiercely oppose.

  I think the above posts demonstrate that Trumps approach resonates with a lot of people; particularly the mentality that if China got rich, it means they must have taken that wealth from someone else (ie they can’t have created it themselves).

  Under Trump, USA is spending about $3.4 trillion per annum (making Trump easily the biggest spending President ever), $750 billion p.a. of which has to be paid for by future generations (also a record). Astonishing from a so-called conservative!

  In about March last year, Trump tweeted “trade wars are good, and easy to win”. (An astonishing comment, given trade history.) Ever since I heard that, I have taken an interest in how this slow moving train wreck, even though I live in a third country, and it has nothing to do with me.

  In answer to the question about whether it is time to put money under the mattress, I think you see the answer in the US yield curve. It has inverted, which is a classic sign of a recession over the horizon. (Almost every recorded inverted yield curve in modern history has been followed by a recession within 2 years.)
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  34

  If we could travel at light speed, would travel be 'instantaneous' for us??

  by Bad_Wolf in

  1. social
  2. current

  this might be confusing to think about.

  we know that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, if you were in a spaceship, time goes by quicker on earth.

  we also know that distances between planets and such are measured at 'light years'.

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  shepherdless

  Is that formula based on Earth and gravity or in space? I know it's possible though, big bang, black holes, utilizing other energy, may not be in our lifetime (the way for 'how' let alone the technology and means) but I think it will eventually happen.

  It is a standard formula to calculate kinetic energy, that many high school students might remember. Applies anywhere in the universe. I have actually oversimplified, but I don’t want to bore people with the details. The formula is still reasonably accurate at, say 95% of light speed, but becomes less accurate as you get close to the speed of light, and in fact the energy required to actually reach light speed is infinite. In other words, it is even more difficult than my back of envelope calc suggests.

  PS: I am no expert; I did a relativistic mechanics unit as part of Physics at Uni a very long time ago. I passed but it was probably my worst unit.
  
  
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  34

  If we could travel at light speed, would travel be 'instantaneous' for us??

  by Bad_Wolf in

  1. social
  2. current

  this might be confusing to think about.

  we know that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, if you were in a spaceship, time goes by quicker on earth.

  we also know that distances between planets and such are measured at 'light years'.

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  shepherdless

  Bad wolf is right (except that nothing, apart from light can travel at light speed). The friend travelling for 10 earth years at, say, 99% of light speed would hardly age at all, and a trip to the nearest star at that speed would pass quite quickly. The time taken can be calculated using Anders Anderson’s chart a few pages ago.

  It is all rather irrelevant though. The energy to accelerate a person to 99% of light speed is enormous. The formula is E(k) = 1/2 m v^2. Basically, to accelerate 1kg to that speed you need 0.5 x 1 x 9 x 10^18 = 4.5 x 10^18 Joules, which is the equivalent energy of about 71,000 Hiroshima bombs. (My calc, based on Wikipedia saying that bomb released 6.3 x 10^13 Joules.) So to accelerate a 100kg human inside (say) a 900kg spaceship to 99% of the speed of light, you need the energy equivalent of around 71 million Hiroshima bombs. That is a heck of a lot of rocket power.
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  65

  Now Canada's Turn

  by newsheep in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  just got a phone call this morning from a very upset anointed brother.

  he said he didn't believe me when i told him about the pedo problem and selling off of halls.

  he said he was disgusted with the watchtower and had to go to a special meeting last night.

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  shepherdless

  Last year, there was a leak of a lengthy internal financial webinar, that gave a substantial amount of info on the Borg’s financial woes. Some analysis of it by Cedars is here:

  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9r-4ToC8_fA
  

  That video analysis is over an hour long, and I am not sure everything in it is correct. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Borg has some significant financial problems, the cutbacks to date have not been enough, and the only strategy seems to be to keep selling what they can, in the hope that it buys them some time to increase revenue (ie increase donations). Late in one of the video extracts, the accountants are asked if the current round of sales will solve the problem. The oblique answer was gold!

  This thread suggests that not only are the asset sales continuing, but they are, if anything, a little more frantic in going about it.
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  17

  Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory

  by greek in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  the cult of yhwh as god of metallurgy originated among semi-nomadic copper smelters between the bronze and iron age, suggests biblical scholar: and he was not worshipped only by jews.. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.magazine-jewish-god-yahweh-originated-in-canaanite-vulcan-says-new-theory-1.5992072.

  according to amzallag, long before becoming the deity of the israelites, yahweh was a god of metallurgy in the ancient canaanite pantheon, worshipped by smelters and metalworkers throughout the levant, not just by the hebrews.

  where did the yhwh cult originate?

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  shepherdless

  I have been doing a bit of reading myself, particularly inter linear versions to work out what the early books of the bible actually say. (I don’t know why, given I think it is all complete fiction.).

  My amateur research causes me to broadly agree with Phizzy. I would go further and say that Elohim means “gods”, not “God”, and read that way, many passages make more sense. I note from a brief check on the internet that Jews agree that Elohim is a plural term (El is the singular), and Jews don’t really have a great answer why a plural term is used. The exact same word (Elohim) is used to describe other gods in the first of the 10 commandments, but a slightly different word is used to describe a statue to be worshipped, or a “molten god” etc. Further, whenever there is a phrase in English such as “Lord thy God” it seems to be always YHVH El (ie the singular El, not the plural Elohim).

  Add to that, some other observations, eg Balaam is sent on his way on his talking donkey by Elohim, but later stopped by YHVH; and Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac, again only to be stopped by YHVH. It seems to me that early Judaism was not monotheistic at all; it is just that YHVH became the national god, and those passages became slanted towards a monotheistic interpretation, over time.