So on the one hand, I think you are going to find almost nobody agrees with your pronunciation. On the other hand, you should wear your mispronunciations with pride because what that tells me is that you were a reader growing up and likely came about this word the first time in text without any other context, maybe even many times before you heard it spoken. Your brain made an educated guess (I’m guess pulling from the pronunciation of “jaguar”?). It got it wrong, but understandably so, and it has cemented in your brain. Fix it if you care to, but no real need. Either way, kudos for being a young reader.

Sehn-tar, because I am American and that’s how I learned to say it. How am I meant to justify a common pronunciation?

Obviously this is a silly example, but I really do remember when they would write out full urls with paths like 3 directories deep in magazines and newspapers expecting you to manually enter those urls and visit whatever site. I hated that shit in the early days of the internet in grade school. “http://www.theentireforty-ninecharacterlongnameofthecompany.com/marketingadvertisements/newspapertimes/landingpage79fad5c21e.html” (don’t click that link… i just made it up. It doesn’t go anywhere.) I could barely type but now I have to get every character correct or I might accidentally end up on a black market website or porn somehow (where my fellow Whitehouse dot com victims at?). QR codes and smartphones really are godsend for print media internet ads.

P.S. I told you it didn’t go anywhere. You feel better now?

P.P.S. Apparently Whitehouse dot com still functions but is no longer porn. It’s some election betting thing now? Idk.

It gets better. “God’s Plan” and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. “Make mama get better”, “Let the Cowboys win”, “Get me the job I want”, etc. And they LOVE to say that “prayer works”. But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.

A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with “God’s Plan”.

B) If absolutely anything would be part of God’s Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone’s life.

C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.

D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god’s will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.

E) Other people’s prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That’s troubling, to say the least.

F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. “God, Protect them”, “Bless them with your Grace”, “Watch over them”. Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.

On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!

It feels like Chinese windmills with backdoor controls from the Chinese government is both a crazy idea and pretty easily solved. Just rip out and replace whatever remote control system is in it. Unless it’s wired to a bomb, worst case scenario they shut it down while you manually restart them.

Yes your interest does also need to outpace inflation. Not seen a savings account that pays interest of anything like that right now. Nothing low risk is keeping up with inflation.

That’s because what it takes is time, a resource we are all limited on. The only way to accelerate it is to have a head start like already being rich or having money seeded from family or have enough spare income early on to front load it for growth. Instead, most start with nothing, make the least when we’re young, often not being able to even start saving and accruing interest until we’re older, and when we make the most money is near our retirement when that money has the least amount of time to accrue interest before we start eating into it to live off of. If you front load it with a lot of money you could line just off interest alone.

And the ReDead face huggers approaching as you are literally frozen in fear.