You misunderstood my post. You used the term "absolutely." That's a high degree of certainty for someone who is implying that know one can know for sure.
I thought you'd done it on purpose, as a bit of humor. Now, I'm not so sure...
TonusOH
JoinedPosts by TonusOH
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85
Physically in mentally agnostic ie sitting on the fence
by ExBethelitenowPIMA inhi everyone i’m not pimi or pimo i’m pima.. i don’t think the gb have everything right but i’m sitting on the fence that maybe they do some things.. if the great trib starts i will jump that side of the fence.. this is a definite little sneaky advantage dodging but even by their own doctrine last min some could come in.. i suspect many are like me.. i spent years in bethel and am very disappointed and disillusioned by it all.. but at the end of the day i love the bible and think it is the word of god and i don’t see any other religion that comes as close to what jesus describes his true followers or who are fulfilling mat 24:14..
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Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy....
by mikeflood indidn't know silicon valley bank was so important for start-ups....now there's some sort of contagion, people taking their money from regional banks to the big banks.
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system seems pretty resilient and different from 2008. thoughts?.
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TonusOH
The similarity to 2008 is that banks tend to do a poor job of risk-management. Which is always a concern, given their role in the economy.
In 2008, banks leveraged themselves to extreme degrees in the hopes of riding a financial wave before it crashed, and their timing was wrong. In 2022/3, SVB did not properly prepare for interest rate hikes that they had to know were coming.
Another similarity- the government is stepping in with taxpayer dollars to rescue a bank from its bad decision-making or poor preparation. This can help avoid some pain, but it also encourages the kind of poor preparation and risk-taking that caused the problem in the first place. If you know you are "too big to fail", why not take dangerous risks?
At the same time, this isn't the same as 2008, in that SVB took a pretty common approach to managing customer funds, and individuals with $250,000 or less in their accounts will be made whole under existing federal regulations. But SVB had a lot of investors with millions in their accounts, and without government intervention those investors and companies would have lost vast sums of money. They should have hedged for the coming rises in interest rates, and as a financial institution managing billions of dollars, this is inexcusable. But there are definite differences between this event and the crash of 2008/9.
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11530
It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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TonusOH
Evans: it needs to be a business, it needs to be something where I can actually hire someone to edit videos I hire someone to do the admin and arrange interviews…
He seems not to understand how the subscriber model works. His patrons are not his employer. He is not drawing a salary from them. They do not owe him a living. There are plenty of people who work a job and use Patreon only to support their creative work. His patrons should be asking him how much does it cost only to produce videos. That's it.
In any event, if his content and reputation are insufficient to get enough people to support him month-to-month, begging won't work. Guilt won't work. Threats won't work. These short-term band-aids will only hurt him, since they're being used to patch ongoing shortfalls- next month, he'll need to beg/threaten/cajole again. And people will tire of that act quickly. I mean, how are his existing patrons supposed to react to the news that he needs around 100-220 more of them to stay afloat? Do they increase their own payments? Do they find others and get them to join? That doesn't work.
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11530
It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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TonusOH
KIMSILVIO: I don’t think PB had ever spoken to dijana before that time and dee would never have told me no matter what unless lloyd had ok’ed it with her.
Thanks, Kim. I had thought that way because it seemed like the most logical reason for him to talk about something so ugly. That makes me think that the other, less charitable, explanations are the correct ones.
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11530
It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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TonusOH
I had the impression that he told Kim and Bob about it because he figured Dijana would tell them, and he wanted to get ahead of it and have some control of the narrative. Or perhaps soften the blow a bit, so that they weren't hearing it from someone else. His version of honesty. -
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Pawn to Queen 2034 anyone?
by Fisherman innot a hint of a new date for the great tribulation.
the attitude of jw is that they expect it immediately although the inter-lapping anointed allows for any additional extended time.
given the time of the end, the end comes after the good news is preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations with the internet and 108 years and tons of publications even in finnish.
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TonusOH
The impression I always got was that "soon" referred to the next few years. And even that stretches the definition as we typically use the word. I knew many JWs (and heard of many more) who felt that way. I was in high school in the early 80s, and did not expect to graduate before the end came. Then we were expecting it at any time before the year 2000, as the WTS appeared to. After that, it became more of a general expectation, but I am not sure because by then I was well into my fade. Every time I've spoken to my mother in the last 20 years, she has tried to impress on me that the world situation is so bad that things cannot continue much longer and the end is close.
I'm not sure she even realizes how often she has been telling people how close the end is. Forty or so years at the very least. If you had approached her in the 1970s and told her that the end was close, but would not arrive for another fifty years, she likely would have dismissed such a statement as nonsensical and idiotic. How could one have a sense of urgency for events that were still a half-century away? Each passing year makes it more nonsensical and idiotic. But since they've been waiting for "soon" all of this time, it is difficult to recognize the larger picture. Imagine deciding not to have children because the end will come in 50 years? Or putting off a college degree? Or a career?
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“Lazarus, come out!”
by Fisherman inmany people here have expressed faith in evolution and in other theories—but in all honesty, do you have any hope whatsoever in your heart or in the back of your mind ?
truthfully..
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TonusOH
slimboyfat: I’m not saying it’s improbable that the universe arose by itself. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense.
I feel much the same way. There seem to be two approaches:
1. The mass of the universe --which is an amount I cannot comprehend-- was once reduced to a pinpoint that was many times smaller than an atom --a measurment I cannot comprehend. At some point, it began to rapidly expand outwards, allowing the universe to exist and begin to take the form it has today.
2. A being --who exists on some plane of reality outside of our physical universe, and who has always existed (cannot comprehend!)-- created this universe and everything in it.
Neither of those make intuitive sense. I recognize that I lack the requisite education in astronomy and physics to understand the first concept. I accept that scientists have come to some general agreement on it, and that they must show their work in order to support any claims made in that direction. But, at my level as a layman, I do not comprehend it.
As for the latter, while I am willing to accept that a God could exist, I cannot accept the concept of a caring interventionist, given what I do understand. This being creates this universe, and creates an infinitesimally tiny speck within it which harbors even tinier beings who dwell upon its surface. And this being is concerned with demanding the respect and adoration of these beings, threatening them with eternal joy or pain as a result of their choices. How does someone create something as magnificant as the universe, then become so petty when dealing with the tiniest speck within? I cannot comprehend this.
If God exists, I think it's an unemotional scientist. Or at least it has no emotion towards us- we're the crud growing in one of his petrie dishes, which he'll eventually flush down the sink after making a few notes and trying again. If God doesn't exist, then the universe apparently came about this way through a mechanism that is not yet completely understood. And that would be the truth, whether it made any sense to me or not.
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Physically in mentally agnostic ie sitting on the fence
by ExBethelitenowPIMA inhi everyone i’m not pimi or pimo i’m pima.. i don’t think the gb have everything right but i’m sitting on the fence that maybe they do some things.. if the great trib starts i will jump that side of the fence.. this is a definite little sneaky advantage dodging but even by their own doctrine last min some could come in.. i suspect many are like me.. i spent years in bethel and am very disappointed and disillusioned by it all.. but at the end of the day i love the bible and think it is the word of god and i don’t see any other religion that comes as close to what jesus describes his true followers or who are fulfilling mat 24:14..
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TonusOH
Does anyone know the entire truth? Absolutely not.
It's lines like this that make me wonder if you're having a bit of fun at our expense. But it did make me chuckle.
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11530
It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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TonusOH
pr0ner: The whole thing is kind of a lesson in being patient.
I agree, though with Lloyd I think there are a couple of related issues that affected his response.
1. His desire to control the narrative. That meant villifying anyone who had leaked the info and anyone who might spread it, then giving his own version of events. The problem with this is...
2. ...he doesn't seem to think that his actions were wrong. So his livestream, which was meant to get control of the situation, instead made things worse because he freely admitted to cheating on his wife with prostitutes on a regular basis for years.
3. This was exacerbated by his arrogance. He made it clear that he felt it was no one's business what he did with his private life and with the funds donated to him, even though these were given to him by people who wanted to support his efforts in making exJW video content and not in support of his desire to buy sex from street workers. He seems to believe that he is doing his supporters a favor by making exJW videos, and he finds it incomprehensible that they would care about his personal life.
4. This was also made worse by his approach to criticism. And that means criticism of any kind- even if a supporter is trying to make a minor point, he sees it as an attack. And he only seems to know one way to respond: with full aggressiveness and no quarter given, until his target is crushed and humiliated. I don't think he was able to sit down and make a sober assessment of the situation, because destroying Kim was all he cared about.
I think it is to be expected that his sense of self-preservation did not fully kick in until he'd blown everything up. So he has been attempting damage control ever since. But, due to the above factors, he's doing this the way he does everything else-- aggressive, unrelenting, unapologetic. No surprise, then, that it's not going well.
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Where is Jehovah
by JohnTron7 induring the massacre of many witnesses at a kingdom hall in germany the other night, where was jehovah's holy spirit ?
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TonusOH
As I recall, in moments like this the organization would say that unexpected circumstance can overtake us at any time, based on a Bible verse from Paul. I can recall them saying it after a particuarly horrific incident (in Japan, I think it was) where an angry husband set a fire at the entrance of a KH which did not have another exit. 87 people died that night. I often wondered about that. Ever single meeting where we had a prayer, we prayed that Jehovah would watch over our brothers around the world and protect them. Those prayers were not always heard.