Exactly. RIP, George.

The idea of “the power of prayer” is stupid on the face of it. First, you’re presupposing a omnipotent diety that can and does directly effect the universe, changing the outcomes of events based on it’s desires, whims, plans, whatever. And you think THAT diety is taking requests? When “God answered my prayers”, you think that had you not requested it, it wouldn’t have happened. You think that God answers to your puny human concerns? That shit is arrogant as hell.

But furthermore, it also flies in the face of two other common beliefs about God, at least in Christianity. “God gave man Free Will” and “It’s All Part of God’s Plan™” (don’t get me started on how those are already two mutually exclusive ideas and hundreds of millions of believers just ignore that cognitive dissonance). Many of the things that one prays for, like “getting that job”, “winning that award”, “ending the war”, etc. directly involve altering the decisions and actions of others, which means that God would be stripping them of free will. Also, the most classic call to prayer is to heal the sick, or preserve one’s life. But surely if God has a plan for everyone’s life, at minimum everyone’s birth and death must also be planned. How can he answer your prayer to save your life if it’s his plan for you to die, yet still have an plan he’s always been following? The irony is that people like to pull the “all part of God’s plan” platitude particularly when someone has died before their time.

The one that really makes me annoyed, or even angry, is when something terrible happens, people are hurt or killed, and someone who was supposed to or had almost been there says something like “God was watching out for me”. It’s so self-centered and arrogant to attribute your simple dumb luck to God’s will in that situation. Because, not only does it assume you are God’s most special little guy that he’s constantly paying attention to and protecting, but also that God willfully condemned those others who did fall to this terrible fate that he supposedly saved you from. It’s all arrogance. I can’t stand it.

That was pretty clear. The apparent player character was a misdirect. The figure that comes in at the end seems to be the “her” referred to, and potentially the main antagonist of the game. I’m sure, just like in all other iterations, you’ll have a custom built player character of any sex/gender.

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

?

It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

Is this guy Tom Segura’s cousin, the inventor?

I agree with this. Correcting one’s grammatical error is fine. However, additionally, correcting one’s grammatical error as a means to disregard the content of the comment in an argument and/or deem their opinion or perspective false because of said error? Not fine and asinine.

Lol no. But it did have a couple bathrooms without dividers between the urinals (I suspect broken off by rowdy guys at some point). And one lecture hall had the biggest gaps around stall doors I’ve ever seen.

aka, my freshman year of college? Well, except the food part. I actually ate pretty good in the dining halls.

I do it as well. If I’m not actively speaking and the person speaking isn’t presenting something that I need to look at, I usually end up bouncing back and forth between the speaker and my image.

I don’t want to necessarily apply logic to it because I don’t think it’s a conscious, logic decision I’m making. But if I had to try, I’d say that the reasons are A) I cannot “look them in the eye” as I would in person without looking directly at my camera, which is both weird and means I’m literally looking away from them. That is the paradox of video calling. B) Looking at them, versus looking literally anywhere else on your screen makes no tangible difference to anyone else looking at your video feed. C) I want to make sure I am not looking ridiculous while blasting my image to a dozen people. No double chin, no resting bitch face, no glazed look, no boogers, etc. D) Staring at anyone else would feel weird, invasive, and distracting to me, including the speaker, if they are not actively speaking to me. It feels like I’m eavesdropping when I’m not actively being addressed. E) Gotta take advantage of having eyes on the back of your head. Never turn your back on your enemy. Stay vigilant. The cat will not pounce me and claw my back mid-meeting again.

I am a software engineer and I also have a PC with RGB vomit. But not because I’m a software engineer. Because I’m also a dork, and the icy blue color keeps my cpu cold.

10+ years ago, it was very common to get an upgrade to your phone ever two years (or less). And at the time, there was a lot more variability in phones. And I mean in more than just battery life, storage capacity, camera quality, processor, etc. There used to be a variety of form factors to consider, sizes, genuinely different features and functionalities. The iPhone came about in 2009, and other smart phones soon followed, but even then there were still phones with physical keyboards, digital keyboards with stylus typing, flip phones, etc. Once smart phones completely dominated the market and all the manufacturers started just copying each other’s features and designs, eventually we got to the status quo of today where they’re all essentially the same. The only major difference now is the OS, and that’s largely just down to iOS vs Android.

On your chest. Much more macho.

Now do '0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0001" across both knuckles like the classic “LOVE HATE” tat.

https://youtu.be/OpLU__bhu2w?si=ZXToQKl8SbhZni5O

If we’re talking deities, as in supernatural creator beings, the answer would be yes when they want to be made of atoms and no when they don’t want to be. If they have the power of creation and form reality itself, their nature, both physical and spiritual, would be whatever they choose, right?

If we’re talking non-infinite mind creating a simulated universe that we live in, then it’s more likely that they are made of something, though it may not be atoms or matter as we understand it. They would presumably occupy some sort of physical universe with laws and something like matter to give it physical properties, but there is no reason to assume that the nature of the universe would resemble our own or follow the same laws. Atoms and other forms of matter that we have in our universe may be a construct of our simulation, rather than a constant truth in all universes. And honestly, their universe may not even be physical at all in the sense that we all understand it. The answer is that we don’t know, have no way to know, and may not even have the capacity to understand even if we were given the answer.