Posts by TonusOH

6

Court Cases Costs?

by LostintheFog1999 in

watch tower is in court all the time.

it wins some.

it loses others.. we know it costs £££££ to go to court, pay barristers, expert witnesses, etc.. with wtc going to court for so many diverse reasons these days, from challenging laws to defending wt practices and paying out to csa victims, how much do you think wtc is spending annually on court cases?.

TonusOH

If the bulk of the outgoing money is settlements, then there can't really be a simple annual average. They probably have some consistent year-to-year costs in keeping non-JW counsel (probably on retainer, if there are enough cases to deal with each year). But legal costs are likely to be all over the place, when you are talking about protecting themselves from CSA accusations or dealing with issues related to policy (eg: Norway).

I do wonder how much of the legal work is being done by lawyers who are JWs and 'donate' their time and expertise. The savings there could be huge, on the order of hundreds of dollars-per-hour for one lawyer. These are probably the ones who write cease-and-desist letters to bloggers and YouTubers, or make DMCA and similar challenges to anti-JW content.

7

Jesus could not have died on Friday Nisan 14

by Hacche in

another reason that jesus trial before pontius pilate and his being nailed to the stake was not on the same day, as watchtower teach, is found in two scriptures.

john 19:14 says, now it was the day of preparation of the passover; it was about the sixth hour.

and he said to the jews: see your king.

TonusOH

If there is a god: please... write the book yourself. That should avoid centuries of interpretation, reinterpretation, and general confusion. Thanks.

3

Shunning

by Hacche in

can a jehovah's witness please answer me this question - why do you shun those that are disfellowshipped or disassociated?.

jesus never shunned anyone.

if you remember, the pharisees rebuked jesus for eating a meal with sinners.

TonusOH

The WTS has a page referring to the shunning practice:

https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/shunning/

They use 1 Corinthians 5:13 as the basis for it.

As for why they do it, their explanation is that it helps protect the congregation from those who may be unrepentant and would stumble others. They also consider it a loving provision, in that it can pressure a disfellowshipped member into returning to the fold.

In a more practical sense, it --in combination with their policy of avoiding socializing with non-JWs-- puts tremendous pressure on members to return if they are DFed. It can also keep those who have doubts from expressing them or acting on them, out of fear that they will lose their social circle. It can also rip families apart and creates immense suffering, especially in close-knit families who are suddenly forced to turn their backs on one or more members.

50

To All Those Keen To Tell Us About Their Beliefs

by Simon in

we seem to have had an influx of religiots - the people who want to tell us all about how we / the wts / whoever are wrong, wrong, wrong about everything and how right they are.

they obviously have special insight, or voices (probably voices, right?

) telling them the real truth.. as proof, there is inevitably a wall of random scripture references and quotes.. sorry, but we're not here for that.

TonusOH

I don't mind the use of the Bible to make points, especially for religious discussions. I've become wary of the use of YouTube videos, because anyone can make those and some even have good production values, but the content is misleading or just plain wrong. Wikipedia and YouTube can be very useful, but they also are easy to use to spread stuff that is wrong or downright insane.

But neither is as bad as the extremely long posts that are used as a reply to any response they receive. You reply to a point using one or two paragraphs, they reply with thousands of words. You make another short reply, they make another novel-length post. I lose interest because you can't keep the points in mind when someone is monopolizing the discussion like that.

I suspect a lot of it is cut-and-paste, and possibly not their own stuff, just clipped from other sites. Which is even worse, because it demands that we spend a lot of time reading and considering something that they didn't put any work into.

97

It is now 2003.... Where is Armageddon?

by Nosferatu in

jw
friends

i find it extremely amusing how each year is passing without armageddon.

"for the year 2000, i visualize a world transformed into a beautiful paradise!

but i don't think that either the present world or its rulers will live to see that day.. we are living in the last days of the system of things.

TonusOH

I think there is a list (on Wikipedia, maybe?) of dozens of end-of-world predictions dating back more than a thousand years. The fact that we have been interpreting the same books and texts for centuries and never ever gotten it right does not deter people from continuing to do it to this very day. Don't we have a topic where someone is predicting that the UN will take over the world and start WW3 soon, based on an interpretation of Bible passages?

Here's the correct prediction: when will the world end? Not today.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

TonusOH

Simon: He's trying to set himself up as a gatekeeper / rent-seeker - eventually, for anyone to get to perform, they will have to pay a "fee" to be approved.

Looks like he is trying to become the Croatian underground music scene's version of Harvey Weinstein. That should end well.

25

All UK telephone landlines being phased out.....

by BoogerMan in

.....and replaced with voip by 2025. https://www.pmctelecom.co.uk/blog/are-landline-phones-being-phased-out-in-2025/.

just heard this on a radio station's advert..

TonusOH

We only have a few remaining copper lines (landlines) at my job, and are working to replace those with VoIP lines before the end of the summer. If we do it by then, we won't have to renew the contract for those few (almost unused) lines.

At home, I can't remember when I last had a copper phone line. In the 2000s the cable company offered phone service packaged with their cable TV and internet, so we started using that instead of copper. I last had such a phone line in 2015 or 2016. It just wasn't worth the cost, since I used my cell phone for any calls (not because I'm a technophile, but because I hardly ever use the phone!). Honestly, I'm wondering how many copper lines are still in use.

77

Biden running in 2024 🤣

by LoveUniHateExams in

i've filed this under news and world events, although i could've posted it under entertainment, lol.

apparently, joe biden will be seeking re-election for another term in the white house.. this, despite a recent poll showing that 70% of people don't want him to run again.. biden just has to be the worst president i've seen.

his gaffes, over-relience on a prompter, and, more than any other president, his refusal to answer journalists' questions, all go to make him top of the list in terms of bad presidents.. it will certainly provide entertainment, if nothing else..

TonusOH

I believe that a civil suit can be filed against someone for crimes such as rape or murder. The family of Ronald Goldman sued OJ Simpson and won a large settlement, even though he had been acquitted of the criminal charges. Civil suits have a lower burden of proof ("preponderance of evidence" versus "beyond a reasonable doubt"). Why Trump was not charged with rape in the case of Ms. Carroll, I don't know. Was the crime reported at the time? Was there enough evidence to take it to trial, in the mind of the DA? There can be lots of reasons why a crime will not be prosecuted in criminal court.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

TonusOH

I'm sure he'll go far with his work ethic, based on a tweet where he picks up his guitar for the first time when he has a gig the next day. Then again, I don't think this is his way of branching out in order to make more money- he's trying to get laid. He might be wondering why there are so few 20-year-olds at the local bar.

78

Top AI inventor Geoffrey Hinton reluctantly concluded that AI will probably humanity fairly soon

by slimboyfat in

geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .

“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.

there’s no way to make that happen.

TonusOH

That's a good question. I think that chess computers win by 'studying' thousands --possibly millions-- of matches, including many classic moves and beginning strategies. The one thing a computer does better than a human brain is calculate large and complex probabilities in nanoseconds. They are hyper-fast pattern-recognition engines.

I mentioned elsewhere an article about a Go master who beat a champion-level computer in 14 of 15 matches by using a strategy that was so simple and basic that no player worth his salt would ever use it. To a human, the strategy was both obvious and blatant, and very easy to counter once you recognized it. But the computer had no matches to study, and struggled to find a way to counter it.

Now, I think that this is partly lazy programming. And experiences like that can teach AI programmers how to better prepare an AI bot to learn and improve. And that might be the real random factor here: we don't know how well any AI has been programmed until we have enough experience working with it to see what it does. Which is probably a scary prospect once we start giving these AI bots important jobs to do.