What are they going to do with oil? Does Cuba have any working refineries? Ñico López is down due to a fire the other day. Hermanos Díaz refinery is entirely offline, retooling for capacity to refine heavier oil. It won’t be online again for months. The only other refinery I know is only does coking to produce non-fuel chemicals and lighter grade oil that’s fed back into Ñico López.

It depends how it is done. Instead of denials, it could be used to “approve without review” all the easy cases and then forward to a human all the rest. This would speed up approval for lots of situations and focus human effort on more difficult cases.

I think more likely the SSN becomes less valuable as an identification tool. For a lot of places, your phone number has already become the default qualifier, including in credit profiling. Everyone else is relying on phone companies to vet your identity.

If you want to get technical, all the games are bad because they extract vast amount of resources from people who live in the host city and leave behind unusable infrastructure. Also, the corruption. So much corruption.

I’m going to bet the vast majority of cases involve an adult predator.

The video skips a very important step. It isn’t just human vs. AI. It is human vs. human+AI. If a human can do 10x the work with an AI assistant, we only need 1/10 the humans in that job for the same output. So then the question is, does the added productivity grow that market, retaining those jobs, create new market opportunities, shifting those jobs, or just produce a bunch of unemployed people?

Aside from direct vandalism or persuasion, is there something I can do to combat the Ring cameras on nearly every door in my neighborhood?

Charts without Solus is kinda like Maps without New Zealand.

Canon law provides for automatic excommunication. In 1988, the excommunications were also manually confirmed by the Vatican. We have a lot of time between now and July 1st for a compromise to be made between the Vatican and SSPX, but if one is not found, I suspect it will result in a blanket excommunication of all who remain within the SSPX but that a window will be opened elsewhere for traditionalists who remain faithful to Peter.

If this is your first pregnancy, usually around 5 months it becomes impossible to hide. If you want to show, however, you can wear clothes that make it more obvious and show around month 3.

IMO, the purges are really about Xi’s desire to go to war against the US and invade Taiwan. The purged leadership didn’t want to go along with these plans. I keep reading that China plans to be ready for war by 2027, but I worry that plans might be autumn 2026, just a few months from now.

You say you don’t want to have a conversation, but your persistence is evidence against this. When addressing the Catholic view of anything, none of it is one-dimensional. We can discuss dogmas, sure, but there are several different competing schools of philosophy, historic analysis, pragmatism, and how these things impact modern culture, science, law, etc. Large swaths of Catholic philosophy do not require Catholic dogma to stand on its own and much of what you don’t like is rooted in philosophy more than it is in dogma.

You don’t want me telling you how to live, that’s fine. I’m not. But you don’t live in a vacuum. People are going to tell you how to live. People are going to make laws for you and they are going to enforce them, like them or not.

If Catholics achieve some level of political power, enough to enact some laws, maybe your best bet is to learn to argue your point with a Catholic. To give you an example on a topic different from the one that brought your concerns here, we have the historic example of St. Thomas Aquinas arguing for the tolerance of prostitution. For someone who wants to not regulate certain internet websites, turning to the example of Aquinas might be a source of argument against internet regulation.

Throwing your hands up in the air and saying Catholics should not have political power is not very pragmatic.

The history of the Church is deep. If you want to argue something about biological males who identify as female participating in sports designated for females, come up with an argument. Just telling us we shouldn’t exist isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Big tech wants Europe’s money. The decision would be reversed within minutes.

The indulgence will be granted to those who participate in a pilgrimage “to any Franciscan conventual church, or place of worship in any part of the world named after St. Francis or connected to him for any reason,” it stated.

You think the US cares about European feelings? Greenland has the population of a small town and already hosts a US military base. She doesn’t need a test case to test the waters.

There’s probably more than one reason, but an important reason I want to outline is the war that’s predicted to happen in 2027 or 2028: China vs. USA, sparked by Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Venezuela is allied with China, has weapons, and is within range of the Panama Canal. The canal will be very important during the war, as it will be the route that Atlantic naval ships take to get to the war zone. China would lean on Venezuela to target, damage, and possibly shut-down the canal, dramatically increasing US supply lines and down-time for ship repairs & updates. Most of our ship capacity is on the east coast.

Everything the US does now is with an eye on this possible war. It is the reason why the Biden administration didn’t get more involved in the defense of Ukraine. The US fears getting bogged down in a second war when the war against China starts. Here, with Venezuela, we took out a significant threat quickly and made the canal more secure. Yes, there’s oil, ego, distractions, and other reasons … but don’t discount the role this future conflict plays.

You did not insult me and I am glad you are willing to have this conversation. At the end of it, I think the fundamental difference is there is something you see as being good that we see as being bad. I wouldn’t want you to do something you think is bad, so I understand why you feel the way you do. And I feel like you are comfortable enough with me having the convictions to follow my own conscience. Where we disagree, and where we have room to discuss further, if the conversation was going to continue, is what is moral or immoral about the issues that are the reason we are having this conversation. I will say, however, if you read Scripture, Jesus did preach & judge. It is just a question of who would be subject to that preaching and judgement today.

Are these the guys who raid schools to rape girls and force boys into child militias?

It was ISIS and Nigeria asked him to do it.