Sorry if I wasn't clear, kir_mokum. That is exactly what I was referencing.

More to the point - while I agree that the video didn't go there, the discussion in the comments did. The impact of religious ideas on every aspect of society is very real. Luck may seem like an obvious concept, but someone discounted it in favor of their belief that god has a plan for all things in the thread. Obi-wan was a cool guy, but his universe had some very different rules from ours.

Another point – to facilitate a discussion, I think we all assume that hard work is intrinsically beneficial. It is sort of a control we have to accept to engage with the valid idea of this video.

However, all hard work is not necessarily good for society or how we define success for us individually. For me, a good example is how I went about dating and eventually finding a lasting relationship that I’m happy with. I really did work hard on myself and my communication skills, but if you took a snapshot of wherever I was over the course of probably 15 years, I think much of my hard work might have been counter-productive. But then, look at it from the “success” point, and the hard work had a clear line, giving me the experience/education I needed to get to where I am.

And then, who is to say that in another ten years my ideas of success won’t evolve revealing that this current moment is another step towards a different goal?

Forgive me if this seems like a non-sequitur, but hand-waving “God has a plan” undercuts thinking about any of this clearly. At best, it cannot matter. If you cannot know the plan god has for you, and puny mortal minds cannot possibly figure it out, then what does it matter? Taken to worse extremes, it leads to the misunderstanding the video seeks to counter. “Since god planned it, it must be okay” is a half-step away from “I earned all of this with my hard work alone”. And, inserting god in there is even more insidious because you are replacing the idea of hard work with divine intention, or at least tacking it on so that it undercuts any argument against the status quo.

That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.

You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.

I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.

I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.

There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.

Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.

It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.

In reply to this comment by Jul210s:
The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document. It has no providence other than the opinions of the author and signers. It accomplished nothing.


Pretty asinine comment. Tough to be a legal document before there was a country...though I bet the British government thought it wasn't legal either.

I'm not big on overstating the significance of any person or document in history, but to say it accomplished nothing makes you either overly literal or looking for an argument. Which is it?