Every group I’ve been in the archers just bought more than they could ever use and someone in the party could carry the extras. Like every time they go back to town they drop 5 gp for 100 arrows.

I think that generally depends on the city, but most cities will have what are known as Enterprise funds. This generally applies to things like the Utility Departments (water, power, and some cities even run an internet service provider) where rather than running on taxes these programs need to function almost entirely from funds they bring in for charging for their services. Things like road and sidewalk maintenance wouldn’t fall into Enterprise fund operation since there is no active service being rendered that can be charged for, though you could have toll roads but they are exceptionally unpopular in the US.

A bus or rail system could be an Enterprise fund, but it probably depends on where you’re at. The public transit system in NYC is an enterprise fund because they have enough usage that they can raise funds from services to cover their costs, but a bus system in a rural city might not be an enterprise fund if it’s being used almost solely to provide the elderly or poor with transportation.

In addition to Enterprise funds, US cities operate as businesses (ie they must have balanced budgets and operate within their means, they don’t get to act like the federal government and just close down). In most cases if you said we’re going to triple the buses/vans but now instead of being revenue neutral it’s going to lose money it won’t get approved.

Sure, I’ve seen that, so you got me thinking on it. The largest city near me has 1 way adult bus fare at $2.20 one way and express bus fare at $3.00. The city’s internal minimum wage is $25/hour. To add an extra vehicle you would need a minimum of 8.3 passengers per hour of service to recoup costs of just the driver’s wages. This doesn’t include vehicle maintenance or all the other costs of employment (contributions to his 401k, contributions to the pension fund, the employer match for personal insurance, workplace insurance, etc).

Realistically you probably need greater than 12 passengers per hour per extra vehicle you add and that’s on speculative hope that if you reach a certain coverage threshold people will use it rather than drive their own car. It explains itself why it’s a hard sell to politicians.

In truth it’s probably a bit of both, there likely aren’t enough buses/routes and there are not enough buses on each route. Typically in most US cities, even State capitals, buses just don’t have enough usage to justify doubling or tripling them to either create more routes or reduce frequency. In some cities they do have super limited routes that may be meandering, but have less stops, or are short in length to maximize frequency, but generally this is for a very specific route.

I used to live in a large US city in the south east that had a bus route that ran from a designated parking lot to a major industrial area. A one way trip for the bus was around 40 minutes (they had isolated bus only lanes with enforcement) and if you were to drive in traffic it would take 35 min to an hour. On the other hand my bus commute in that city would have been at least 2 hours to and from my workplace because it wasn’t that specific route.

Similar situation when I was in college, the main campus was only like 2 miles long. My furthest class was about a mile away, but between waiting for the bus to arrive and then also waiting for it to drive across campus it was generally faster to just walk. After maybe the first week I never rode the bus again.

My understanding is that honey bees are dying in farmed environments in the USA. Basically farmers will pay these large bee hive companies to bring bees in tractor trailers to their farm and let them out for a period of time to help pollutant their fields. These bees are the ones having record die offs, but from what I understand the die offs are less than the number of new bees being made.

Basically the efficiency of the corporate farming operation is decreasing, but the captive bee population is fine.

If someone out there knows better and has source information I would love to be corrected.

Idk man, you remember that time when Republicans went to Russia for July 4th? Russia might not be able to control their troops, but they have enough dirty money they can buy some US politicians.

Argh matey!

Of all the Christians to put shade on I wouldn’t have thrown Paul in the lot. Paul seemed like a pretty down to earth person from everything I read, he was basically a riches to rags semi militant hobo hippie. Now Peter…

Some of the most Christian acting people I have known were Jews, Muslims, and Atheists.

…Win?

Jokes aside, if you don’t believe in god and end up going to heaven because you were actually a good person that would be a win in my book, but I would imagine the atheist in this event would be eternally upset that they were wrong in their actual premise. Joke is more funny if you ended up in a non-Christian afterlife.

That’s the thing, looking at the company they don’t work “normal labor” jobs. Infosys is into info tech, consulting, and outsourcing services and looking at their acquisition history I get the impression they buy up smaller companies and consolidate their work into their product. Basically they make websites and tools that your company buys for $100k to analyze and optimize workflow, but the site doesn’t work well and they never fix it. After 2 years enough time has passed that the higher ups don’t feel embarrassed retiring the software and buying something else. Also, rather than just coding themselves they code with AI or buy other companies that already wrote the code and put it into their own product.

At the end of the day they aren’t “working,” they are being available. They are the shitty guy who is answering a work call on a Saturday while they are supposed to be watching their kid’s ball game. They are the person who has to step out of the movie theater because they are getting an urgent work call at 10 pm on Friday. They are the person who flies back from their vacation two days early because the boss wants to ask about sales numbers. This is how Executive suite types say they work 16 hour days 7 days a week, they count every hour of the day as work because they are available, not because they were being productive that entire time.

This is going to come off as shilling for Valve, but it isn’t my intention.

I could entirely see Valve pricing the Steam Machine relatively affordably and this statement is ultimately a dig at how overpriced pre-built PCs and consoles can be.

“The Steam Machine outperforms 70% of current user PCs…we neglected to say that the majority of user PCs are overpriced for what they deliver.”

I don’t know, I feel like that’s a bit of a stretch. If god exists, creation is because of them, and early humans and faith are shaped by them, then the concept of a god who purports themselves as objectively good despite subjective proof otherwise doesn’t seem unlikely. The idea that god might not be good in the way we think good should be is relatively modern and prior to the last 100-200 years god was good because everything prior said so. For fucks sake most people couldn’t read and just trusted the guy in robes to tell them what to think.

So yeah, just like me trimming a plant and putting it in rooting hormone 1000 times, I think an all powerful and knowable god could theoretically always inevitably result in Christianity if they wanted, the bar isn’t that high when the majority of the species lifetime is dismally stupid.

Also, your argument is inherently flawed if you think the contrast of a good god must be an evil one. Concepts of good and evil have fluctuated wildly over the centuries, both in location and sentiment. If god made everything and said they are good then at best good to us doesn’t mean the same thing as good means to them and trying to frame the argument in that is meaningless.

At the end of the day you get to decide if you believe in god or not, if you do believe in god you can still decide whether you like “god” and want to follow it; however, making the logical leap that god doesn’t exist because they aren’t good by your definition is fundamentally flawed.

If you’ve never seen it I recommend you watch the movie, “The Man from Earth.” It’s a short “indy-esque” movie and, without too many spoilers, focuses on a man who claims he is a prehistoric man who just never died. In his long life span he says he traveled to India and studied with the Buddah and while returning west began to spread the Buddah’s teachings, in time people began to call him Jesus.

Really interesting movie, lots of great thought experiment stuff, but it does make an interesting point that the literal teachings of Jesus are so different from the old testament teachings that one almost wonders how they could come from the same source.

Also I don’t think it’s even worth examining a flawed deity in the context of Christianity, because it’s clearly something they made up. “Whats that, lord? Go kill the people we don’t like and steal their land and take their virgins as war brides? Well if God says so 🤷”

Well that’s part of the problem, the people in the situation are flawed as well. A biblical reference that comes to mind is First Samuel 15:3 in which god instructs the Israelites to kill all of the Amalekites including men, women, infants, nursing children, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey. In the story Saul actually sins and disobeys god by not killing everything he is instructed to kill as fucked up as that is.

When discussing god with atheists it often comes down to a point similar to this, “God can’t be real because if god existed they wouldn’t allow XYZ.” In reality we have no reason to assume as much.

If there is a god that entity could be flawed and faulty while still being omniscient and omnipotent. We assume that a being with human sentiments and unlimited knowledge would have to be a good being, but that’s not necessarily so. It’s entirely possible that if god exists it views us similarly to how we view ants and simply just doesn’t share the concerns or beliefs we feel are naturally just and fair.

At the end of the day god could be a giant toddler on the playground and while they are unfair and unjust you have the choice of either believing and following (assuming the Christian god) to go to heaven or not believing and following and burning in eternal torment.

This is all just a thought experiment, but the argument that god can’t exist because god isn’t good is inherently a flawed argument (not that you are explicitly making that argument, I’m just extrapolating off of what you posted, ie god might not be a good guy).

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Honestly didn’t know that Gelsinger was a bible thumper, after his time at Intel I figured he’d just retire and disappear.

a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Hahahahaha…wait, was that not a joke?

I was thinking that this was a relatively bullshit example, but the movie “The One” featuring Jet Li makes this an awesome example. On it’s face the impacts of one person likely aren’t even enough for one person to notice, but if you had someone with the knowledge and means to take advantage of this they could be incredibly powerful.