my_hat_stinks

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A sect is a sub-group of people unified by beliefs or practice, a denomination is essentially just a large named sect. Christianity is not monolithic and organises into groups, it by definition has sects.

Even if you were right it’s such a ridiculously pointless and pedantic argument, it does nothing to further the conversation. You’re just trying to use cheap gotchas as a thought-terminating cliche. The only thing you’ve done is to force us to literally argue semantics, that is not a good look for you.

For completeness, here’s a Christian source using the word sect to describe Christian groups, one of the top search engine hits when I searched.

I disagree with that framing, someone not buying your shit is not the same as you losing money. Inkscape saved millions for graphic designers, which is very different. Adobe was not entitled to that money, you can’t lose something that was never yours.

The important factor isn’t whether someone can be addicted (otherwise you’re banning nearly everything), it’s the harm that addiction causes. As a general rule of thumb physical dependencies like alcohol are more harmful than habitual addictions, but that obviously isn’t the whole story.

Caffeine addiction is the same category as alcohol and tobacco but causes so little harm that I don’t think anyone is seriously opposed it. On the other end of that scale is something like meth or other hard drugs, generally understood as destructive and has few serious supporters encouraging use. Breaking these addictions is almost always hard and physically taxing, in some cases can even be lethal.

Marijuana addiction is in the same category as most things that make you feel good or form habits so it’s harder to nail down a proper scale, but the lower end is probably something like video games; a debilitating addiction is possible but uncommon and most people would oppose a blanket ban on the basis of “can be addictive”. Gambling is on the other end can definitely ruin lives. I’d say that’s a little worse than coffee. Breaking these addictions is more like breaking a bad habit, it can feel hard for the addict but generally isn’t going to kill them.

From your description it sounds like they haven’t complied with a legally binding ombudsman decision. The ombudsman is the last stop before legal action, you should get in touch with a real solicitor rather than ask for anonymous advice online.

An N322A form might be what you need to enforce the decision, but if I were you I’d check with Citizens Advice or a lawyer first.

Uploading your consciousness to a machine wouldn’t really extend your lifespan. Think of it like moving a file from one device to another; the file isn’t actually moved, you just get a copy on the second device. You and your digital clone will also begin to diverge immediately as the lived experience of being a new digital entity would be different from continuing life as a meat person.

The closest you can get is to Ship of Theseus it; get a machine implant which gradually takes over brain functions as cells die or parts of the brain fail. Single stream of consciousness in a single body, now fully digitised. Incidentally this is also closer to biological processes to replace cells, though the brain cells renew much less frequently then other cell types. I think some areas don’t naturally get replaced over a lifetime too but I’m not certain on that, either way you’d want to go faster than natural cell replacement.

Alternatively you could make the transfer process dissolve your meat brain. Personally I’d say you are dead and your clone lives on but its the same argument as Star Trek style transporters; the clone still feels like it’s you so if they got to where you want to go does it really matter?

If you want, I guess? Not a belief I hold personally, things I haven’t seen are just things I haven’t seen.

Fair, but since I didn’t see you in that kilt my statement still stands

Definitely a skirt, not a kilt. Kilts are flat in front and pleated in the back/sides, usually with a sporran, and pretty much always tartan; the only time I’ve seen someone wear a solid-colour kilt is in pictures of Americans cosplaying with “tactical kilts”.

And it’s differentiated from IC meaning Independent Contractor by…?

No, corporate jargon is stupid and saying it’s acceptable because a big corp uses corporate jargon is even stupider.

IC is a common term for integrated circuits and a hundred other things.

Maybe it’s used for workers in your specific region/field but that’s not definitely universal and it’s not even a useful or descriptive term. Managers are also individuals who ostensibly contribute something to the company. The distinction between managers and workers is that the workers are the people doing the actual work, not that they’re individuals.

Sounds like corporate jargon. Why not just say worker, a term everyone understands?

When their kid grows up and has kids of their own. Then you know they’re a grand dad.

I also take idioms literally, I read the entire book right there before deciding whether to buy it. Obviously you can’t trust how they chose to present the book so you need to read it to know if it’s worth reading.

They only need to overlap at the start and end, meaning the rest of the line can be way off and it’ll still start and stop at the same places. Here’s a quick graph courtesy of WolframAlpha showing three curves with the same start and end point.

Which line is more gradual or smooth really depends on what you mean by those terms.

Another way to visualise it is to imagine a string tied taut between two posts making a straight line. If you add some slack to the string so it’s no longer taut you’ll see the middle curve as it’s pulled down by gravity, but it’s still tied to the same two posts so it starts and ends in the same place as the taut one.

I don’t know about the big bang, but the elephants and turtle are Terry Pratchett. Discworld, Pratchett’s most well-known setting, is a disc shaped world on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle.

This is true for all public holidays in the UK, there’s a (usually) fixed number of public holidays but the dates are flexible.

They’re also included in the minimum 28 days paid time off too, meaning if you’re a full time worker and have to work on a bank holiday your employer is legally required to offer an extra day off somewhere else instead, either a fixed date or added to your holiday allowance. Conversely, the “extra” day off you get when a monarch keels over may be subtracted from your holiday allowance for the year. This is also why my employer is allowed to follow English bank holidays despite having next to no presence in England; the number is fixed but the dates are not.

Trans men and castrated men exist, I don’t think it’s the balls.

Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).

I’m not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don’t expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.

From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it’s the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they’re the ones who started the fire.