It's OK, the invisible hand of the marketplace will correct all this eventually. I predict with minimal loss of life. Minimal when compared to other loss of lives, like WW2, but not everyone, so that's good.

Monsters in Doom didn't really fly. All characters extended from the floor to the ceiling even if they didn't look like it. If you tried walking under one of the "flying" monsters, you would run into an invisible wall. This was also noticeable in multiplayer. I remember playing deathmatch with a friend and when he went up an elevator to grab a power up, I ran and sat at the bottom of the elevator waiting to surprise him when he jumped down. He couldn't jump down, because my character was blocking him even though he couldn't see me down at the bottom of the elevator.

Doom's levels, as far as the computer was concerned, were still a flat sheet of paper, and the player and monsters were just little 2D sprites moving on top of the paper.

Doing these things as a prelude to proselytizing means they aren't altruistic, they are a part of the indoctrination process. If your church does all these things without ever mentioning religion, asking for donations, or asking for those helped to volunteer, it is incredibly abnormal.

"You dont get to see those kinds of Christians because they don't call attention to themselves"
And yet, here you are calling attention to yourself (and them), so you proved your statement wrong by stating it publicly. Oops! ;-)

Churches are for profit institutions, why shouldn't they pay taxes? The Catholic church is a haven for pedophiles, why have it's assets not been seized under RICO statutes? Many other for profit companies donate food, shelter, and services, yet they also pay their share for the public services they enjoy. Why should it be different for an organization who's product is intangible and invisible?

There won't be an effort to exterminate Christians, there may well be an effort to exterminate Christianity, along with all other divisive religions. I hope I'm around to see it.

Once again I would ask, why do you question your god's clear wish that I (and others) not believe in him? Shirley, you don't think you know better than he/she, right? (that's right, I called you Shirley.) ;-)

Doing 100 good deeds and one incredibly evil deed makes one evil. No church in history has ever reached that level of goodness. Churches are evil. I hope that clears things up.

Also, it sort of looks like he has a huge invisible dildo pointed at his mouth.

"...world view allows for the human nature of some people being good, some people being turd-nuggets, and allowing them to make their own decisions, and the invisible hand of market forces to mitigate the damage..."

Is this just his description? Or a generally agreed upon one by folks with his political viewpoint?

Versatility is great, but I think they tried to do everything and failed to do anything well. Having multiple skills is different from trying to be a Jack of ALL trades.

Personally, I much prefer bulletproof to 'invisible', since there's no such thing as invisible, just hard to see.

Again, that's the plan, but it can't do that today. When acting as 'close air support', it is visible and in danger from ground and directed air fire, going slow, and is slow to get going fast again. Also, close air support is not just dropping bombs, that's more medium-long range.

No, the F-35 is the worst plane for 'full air superiority' because it's far too expensive, and we won't have enough of them to control the smallest skies for years/decades, and even then they'll be to valuable to use that way.

Yes, it seems like insane overkill to be electronically invisible to fight against people who barely have electricity. Even against the most advanced ground to air systems, our current planes were doing fine. I don't see the need for this in the foreseeable future, just the desire for better, more expensive toys.

For sure, I believe that by trying to be all things, it has made compromises in other areas. But perhaps the flexibility is a more important than a few advantages here and there. All of the current US planes are also multi role as well, with the exception of dedicated bombers. So any jack of all trades worries also apply to the majority of the planes that have been in service for the last 30 years. It seems like versatility has been the driving factor for upgrades. So it makes sense a new plane would be designed with versatility in mind.

For things like Close Air Support, I would much rather be in the invisible fast plane, than the bullet proof slow plane like the A-10. You've dropped your bombs before the enemy even know you're there, and before the bombs hit the ground, you're 40KMs away, at an altitude where most ground based missile systems can't hit you(even if they can detect you).

Close air support of that nature of course only happens when you have reached full air superiority, which the F-35 is the best plane for.

It might seem overkill now to have such an advanced plane to drop bombs on people with AK-47's, but you never know how politics can change. Assad might decide to start buying some advanced Russian SAM systems, and that's when a stealth plane will come in handy.

Bad idea, once they are finished and you go out to inspect the work and find nothing there and then they'll just tell you it's invisible.

As I see it, there were only prosecutions from Abu Ghraib because the abuse became public knowledge.

While rape and murder have never been proven to be executive orders (although it's pretty clear that murder in the field has been ordered by many presidents, including the current one, but is called something different), they were certainly standard procedure. That's why the offenders felt safe publicly posting pictures of the crimes. Had they been a tiny bit smarter about it, there almost certainly would have never been a prosecution, because that would make the crimes public and keeping the abuse secret was far more important than addressing the crimes.
Most of what we saw from Abu Ghraib was clearly, and admittedly sanctioned by the president and his cabinet. as you said, there was.."sleep deprivation, hooding prisoners, playing loud music, removing all detainees' clothing, forcing them to stand in so-called "stress positions", and the use of dogs" and also waterboarding and other acts designed to inflict the feeling of being murdered. From there to actual 'rape and murder' is just a tiny step over that invisible line that the executive branch had taken them right up to and complained about being stymied by.
They may not have been directly directed to rape and murder, but they were presented with people they were told to treat as subhuman and directed to do more to get the information that 'legal' torture had not delivered. I'm not sure what else they might have done in that situation.

I have had this issue for ages. I thought I knew what was causing it but I can't seem to get to the bottom of it.
The controls still work but they're just invisible.

This isnt about the change new technology brings. You can welcome the Digital Age or you can condem it. Doesnt matter. What matters that things WILL change. Very drastically in a small amount of time. A LOT of stupid, boring, menial jobs will soon vanish. Which is a good thing, but what to do with all this people who worked on those jobs?

Our wealth is based on us buying lots and lots of new things. Things and services. For that, we need money. We work to get that money. But if more and more jobs vanish, you cant just wait and hope for the best. You have to somehow counter that loss of expendable income.

What method you use or what combinations will be effective ... time will tell. But relying on the Invisible Hand of God (err ... The Free Market) and making the already super rich even more rich will NOT work.

As i said ... in Davos more and more influental people finally agree that something has to be done, because those job losses and economic changes will happen. Very fast. This is not a slow process like changing from hunter/gatherer to farming. Even the Industrial Revolution took several generations to finally establish itself. The Digital Revolution, in combination with a more and more intertwined, globalized world will change our lives in a matter of only a few decades.

What I get as the "point" of the One Ring is
A) backup / fallback plan in case Sauron is killed so he won't be completely destroyed (containing some of his soul / essence)
B) a trap to facilitate his control of the other races by tempting and corrupting them

And I think your take on the reason for the invisibility is correct according to the way Tolkien intended it. But it still doesn't sit real well with me. To me it feels better to imagine the whole ring story as a take on "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".

The other rings of power are interesting. The three for the elves are largely free of the influence of the one, because Celebrimbor was already very suspicious of Sauron / Annatar when he made them. So the elves can and do continue to use them, though warily.

The seven for dwarves aren't discussed a lot, but hinted that they help corrupt the dwarves natural appreciation for gems and gold into a darker greed for those things. That dovetails into stuff in The Hobbit pretty well. So, while they don't corrupt dwarves in the same way they do men, they DO lead to isolation and and factionalization of the dwarves, which I suppose could have been Sauron's intent.

The nine for humans seem to work quite well as judged by Sauron's intent for them.


I guess that overall, I just feel like temptation and corruption of wearers of the one ring seems like a very elegant way to achieve Sauron's goals when he made it. A ring that grants the wearer the single ability that they most desire but also will be most tempted to abuse would be very difficult for people (and elves or dwarves or whoever) to resist. Gandalf and Galadriel are directly offered the ring but refuse only because they both *know* that they would be corrupted by it. I don't see invisibility as enough of a game-changing ability for either of them to be so confident that they couldn't handle it.

But the point of the One Ring wasn't to corrupt its wearer, no? I thought that was just a side-effect of it a)containing part of some evil dudes soul b) having a sort of will of its own and wanting to get back to aforementioned evil dude. Equally I thought the reason the ring makes people invisible is a byproduct of it pulling the wearer into whatever bizarro interdimension that the ring-wraiths and sauron semi-inhabit. Hence why Sauron et al can immediately see the wearer despite spending the rest of the time frantically scanning every corner of middle earth as a creepy big eye thing. I thought the idea was that the ring was only truly powerful in the hands of Sauron, given it was sort of a large part of him, and in combination with the other rings of power, the owners of which it was _meant_ to control.

No, my complaint would be that despite investing so much into it, it kinda fails. Turns out the Dwarves are basically incorruptible and the elves immediately sense they have been conned and stop using their 3. Perhaps he should have made more than 9 for the men.

Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch... Funny, but a stretch.

The bit about "what does the ring DO?!" in the beginning was interesting to me because that is one thing that I also dislike about Tolkien's works (as a nerdy reader of the Silmarillion like Soren in the video). The three elven rings Narya, Nenya, and Vilya all grant enhanced "elemental" type powers (for example, Gandalf has Narya, which is why he's got the beefy fire magic). Invisibility seems like a pretty poor ultimate power for the *ONE* ring (yes, there are other features, but invisibility is the primary *active* power of the ring).

Personally, I think that it would be cooler if the mighty *one* ring granted the single ability that any individual user would be most tempted to use, and eventually ABuse -- to facilitate its corruption of the wearer. Smeagol/Gollum, Bilbo, and Frodo, being Hobbits, are already predisposed to stealthiness, so granting them invisibility on top of that makes sense and would tempt them to use the invisibility to do more morally ambiguous things and possibly eventually outright evil things. Isildur, being human, could/should have been granted a different power by the ring. Extreme combat prowess or something. Certainly overconfidence in that could just as easily have led to his death via the "betrayal" of the ring.

Cloaks of invisibility are standard issue now.