The love of a God didn't save me from trauma, sexual and gender identity issues, clinical depression, and the ever looming bipolar disorder. Living is hard, even if it's also simultaneously fun and easy for me to succeed; because the concept of my personal identity isn't flush with the expectations that society and my family have. Being myself almost always gets me in trouble and is misunderstood with sometimes violent repercussions. This forms further cognitive dissonance which is a psychological isolation that has physical isolation as a matter of course. Depression runs in my family, despite all of their love and adoration of Jesus. Southern Baptists, bless their hearts.

I'm sorry to hear about all of that poolcleaner. I think maybe you have the idea that Christians, according to the bible, are supposed to live pain free lives. That isn't what the bible says, though. Jesus promised that Christians would suffer, not only persecutions but grievous trials, physically and spiritually. A Christian is supposed to die to himself, take up his cross, and follow Jesus.

That means a Christian can become depressed, or have gender issues, or any number of other infirmities or temptations. Christians can and do screw up all the time. People have a picture of churches filled with people who think they are perfect, but it is the opposite. Churches are usually filled with people who have screwed up everything royally, and God rebuilt their lives from the ground up. Churches are filled with people who know and proclaim that it is only by Gods grace and mercy that there is anything good happening in their lives; they are filled with broken people who are held together in the loving arms of almighty God. They fall apart sometimes and God puts them back together again.

There's almost nothing logical about anything you say. The only logic is that you make things make sense according to the Bible. If it's scientifically logical but goes against the teachings Christ or God, it's wrong. If the Bible can support the science, it's good!

The most destructive thing in a mans life is a lack of integrity. When you cheat, you aren't getting away with it because no one found out; you are going to reap a bitter harvest from the bad seed you have sown. A loss will occur, whether it is financially, or even mentally and emotionally, and it will far outweigh the temporary gains. It is the same with lying, hating, lusting, etc. Sin in our lives is destructive physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The bible describes it in exacting detail and it matches reality because the true reality of mankind, what he is really like, and why, can only be found in scripture. The bible is right about everything it says about mankind. Although the bible does match our observations of the natural world, I think it is more remarkable how it matches the reality of the inner universe.

I don't know if think you think this is science or not, as far as the video goes. As far as I can tell it is speculation based on a few studies the author researched. Has anyone tested his theory?

You, on the other hand, make every excuse to prove your stupid philosophy is true and that science is wrong for not agreeing upon the truth of your hippy God love cult. Prove me to be objectively incorrect in my perspective and I will give up on my convictions. Because what is a conviction if it's a false one based upon circular logic and feel good analogies? Oh, them feels. Them Jesus feels. Jesus hippy love.

I'm not a Christian because I thought it was a good idea, or because it made me feel good. When I gave my life to Jesus, I didn't feel any differently at all, except perhaps with a realization of some things I had to change in my life. I became a Christian because God revealed Himself to me, and He showed me Jesus is the messiah. No one ever witnessed to me or explained the gospel in my entire life; it was entirely because of personal revelation that I became a Christian.

I'm not here to prove anything; I post when I feel motivated by God, and the intent of my heart is care and concern for your souls. I started coming here when I was a new christian, and I got into arguments with people over petty issues. To me, now, the real issue is where you're spending eternity and I am praying for that. Perhaps I will never be known on this forum as anything other than an unthinking zealot, but God knows I am sincere at least about that.

You do realize the people who have the whole world as their oyster are in an entirely different form of isolation, right? You're oversimplifying the concept of isolation in an effort to push your Jesus drug.

I understand this because I have lived that life; being both the life of the parties at fortune 500 companies and a solitary hermit, addicted and lonely in a world that no one else fully understands. Not because of a lack of Jesus drug, my friend. I tried the Jesus drug and it is the cause of much of my cognitive dissonance.

The love of a God didn't save me from trauma, sexual and gender identity issues, clinical depression, and the ever looming bipolar disorder. Living is hard, even if it's also simultaneously fun and easy for me to succeed; because the concept of my personal identity isn't flush with the expectations that society and my family have. Being myself almost always gets me in trouble and is misunderstood with sometimes violent repercussions. This forms further cognitive dissonance which is a psychological isolation that has physical isolation as a matter of course. Depression runs in my family, despite all of their love and adoration of Jesus. Southern Baptists, bless their hearts.

There are so many other factors you're ignoring just so that you can present the lamest of analogies of seeds on dry soil and sin cages.

Sin cages. Ignorant science versus the logical sin cage. Nuff said.

There's almost nothing logical about anything you say. The only logic is that you make things make sense according to the Bible. If it's scientifically logical but goes against the teachings Christ or God, it's wrong. If the Bible can support the science, it's good!

But that's not how science works. Scientists do not make stupid excuses in order to support prior written works which lack evidence. If something doesn't make sense, a scientist no longer uses it as a basis to explain the world around them.

You, on the other hand, make every excuse to prove your stupid philosophy is true and that science is wrong for not agreeing upon the truth of your hippy God love cult. Prove me to be objectively incorrect in my perspective and I will give up on my convictions. Because what is a conviction if it's a false one based upon circular logic and feel good analogies? Oh, them feels. Them Jesus feels. Jesus hippy love.

@newtboy
@Lawdeedaw

you two are adorable.like an old couple that should have divorced decades ago but were unwilling to share the pet dog.

the arguments i see playing out here are one of distinctions,but what are we basing those distinction on?
well,Lawdeedaw has addressed that point and i happen to agree with him.

if you find an abuse of power cop video,where someone is shot or beaten to death acceptable.then you must also find this video acceptable,because they are both using the exact same metric.

that being said,i feel newtboy brings up a good point:context,meaning and ultimately the REASON for posting a video where someone dies.

i think i understand lawdeedaws intent on posting.to reveal the cultural hypocrisy we have in regards to homeless people.how they are invisible,disregarded and disenfranchised.that even though we cringe at having to see homeless people,nevermind interact with them.they are still human and can have just as much courage and moral integrity as any one of us,even though they are discarded and invisible.even though there is much hand-wringing and empty-worded rhetoric,disguised as compassion,making us have the feel-goods while we do nothing.

they are human and this mans humanity and sacrifice can be beautiful to behold.

but where is the context?
take away lawdeedaws poetic understanding...what is happening here,besides a man getting shot and the gunman riddled with bullets?

so newtboy brings up a good point.
so allow me to add some much needed context:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/homeless-man-saving-hostage-victim_55f06cdbe4b093be51bd1940

Well done! I recently celebrated my first Top 15 after 9 years, too! Feels good, eh? Congrats!

"Hi, I'm Graham from News Xtraneous. Tom, your character in the movie seems to favour the reverse cowgirl. Do you find it hard to talk publicly about your favorite sexual position?"

Fuck this expectation of public figures to dutifully out themselves so that fast-selling feel-good stories about courageous-brave famous people can be written. When they chose to talk it's commendable, when you hound them its kinda despicable EYE-EM-OH.

Yeah, this is one decent feel-good lateral-thinking video.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

As a person who has solar on their roof, our bills have shown a slight decline (and I live in a tropical location with no obscuring of the panels), but that doesn't offset the cost of production (both in labour and energy input which is mostly supplied by carbon based sources). I run a 6 KW/h array which is slightly overclocked as we are capped at 5 KW/h input to the grid (at 8c KW/h sell, 36c KW/h buy). I'm looking at a ROI in ~11-15 years

There are also many studies (and not just from people who are pro nuke or anti-climate change) showing that solar PV in general, and rooftop solar specifically, is small potatoes in terms of energy returns, even when considering possible future gains in panel efficiency and storage technology.

I am not bashing solar because I don't like it, I spent the money to get an array on the roof because I think we do need to do something, but I'm not kidding myself in to believing that we're saving the planet when the vast majority of solar PV going out these days is manufactured in countries that emit enormous amounts of carbon and pay people peanuts to do the work... When, as you say, solar is heavily subsidised or has rebates offered to drive take up.

Nuke is expensive, but it returns far more energy than is invested to build it. Hydro, similarly (although Cali etc shows why hydro might be a dead end in this changing world climate). We can invest an enormous amount of time in half measures, or we can do it right, at least until we crack large scale fusion power production.

If it worked as well as it's hyped to do, huzzah, happy days. But so far, the boom is mostly hyperbole. At the very least, f#ck off subsidies/rebates etc to households and instead build huge solar PV farms with helio tracking arrays which make a better return on energy invested and basically give far more bang for buck. Or sink it all in to wind and cut back on PV. It's a feel good technology with hidden baked in carbon costs that is lulling us in to a false sense of security.

To be honest, though, if I had been married to a woman with beautiful, long hair, for 7 years, and then she decided to shave it all off, I'd be pretty miffed as well. I might not vocalize it, but I'd certainly not feel good about it. Shaving off a beard drastically changes a man's appearence, and when your wife has never seen you without it, I can very well understand a negative reaction.

Edit: just to add, the shaving of the beard/hair being deliberate would play a large role in my reaction being negative. If the hairloss is unintentional, I would react with sympathy.

they should invent a claw machine that has guaranteed winner after the same person has put it enough money to double the average value of the prize. (it would need to be in one of the member-card-swipe arcades like Dave&Busters, to track the user)

This way the owners still profit, and the player feels good for winning (at least a brief moment until they realize how much they paid for that stuffed animal)

The tax level in Norway has fluctuated between 40 and 45% of GDP since the 1970s. The relatively high tax level is a result of the large Norwegian welfare state.

You literally dwarf the US tax rate per person, almost by double the amount.

You have a VAT tax of 25%, among the highest in the world. My equivalent is sales tax, which is 8.25% on the dollar, and it should be 2.5% lower than that, but Austin is a super-left city that taxes extra to cover all their feel good plans.

To be clear, the average Norwegian household pays roughly $70,000 per year in tax. Including the state’s oil income, government tax revenue exceeds $100,000 per household.

Discretionary spending is kept to an extreme minimum, because you don't have much left after taxes. The cost of living and recreation in Norway is through the roof compared to other countries.

Workers come to the office, punch a clock, shuffle papers, and go home. There is no cultural drive to work hard and get promoted. Norway has created a system that makes it virtually impossible to pull ahead of your peers financially. In fact, culturally, there is a thing where you are NOT supposed to do better than someone else.

What major worldwide innovations or brands do we get out of Norway? None that I can think of offhand, but here is a list of some of their more important companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Norway.

So, you get taxed a ton, cost of living is incredibly high, there is no incentive to do better than anyone else, and in return you get to have free stuff like healthcare and education. Not that it matters really, because once you get out of school you get to become a worker bee drone. Unless of course you move to another country and get to achieve something there.

So, yeah, enjoy your hive mind country. As screwed up as mine is, at least there is a chance to become something if you work hard and invest correctly.

If they have to write an essay about the art to define what I'm looking at, then they are a creative writer, not a visual artist.

I should be able to look at a piece, and get something out of it. Good feelings or bad, it should evoke something that makes me want to be part of it. Edward Munch and Francis Bacon, hell even HR Giger didn't make art that was feel good, but their works are amazing and evoke emotions that stay with you.

The reason we live in dystopian future... today... Excellent fan video released on the internet, stirs up a reinterest in a shitty old intellectual property, people who profit from this buzzes response? Take the video away from the masses. F U, aholes.

I just... I get it, but it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like the internet I voted for! lol

I know a way to make that hard work really pay off for her.

Hmmm... if only there was a way to just say that for other guys to hear. Pay no attention, ladies, sexism is just male bonding and nothing more.

We don't really want to know what it's like to have a woman staring back during doggy, like some alien all twisted up. Are you going to kill me?

Yes.

Will it feel good.

No.

That's... I'm alright with that.

I'm also a Toronto cyclist and your'e right.

But I still swear at bad drivers, give them shit and kick their cars because it makes me feel good in the moment.

The good these guys are doing is recording it so a much wider audience can see it, and that might change things.