Currently living: Hobart, Tasmania — RobTAS

Have you met the devil yet? :wink:

I was born in England, lived in Canada, USA, Belize and have lived in Honduras since '75.

So the best thing to do here would be to post some question about things you wish to know and wait and see if anyone has answers.

I doubt anyone here would call you a racist for asking questions.

There are hundreds of different news providers online, spending some time reviewing them would help to get a better understanding of what is going on around the world. If several groups say the same thing and there is no one screaming "lies", then there is a good chance it is true.

I think so. What does Destee mean? — TiredThinker

Not trying to be nasty, but your name suits you well.

Is there any specific topic you would like to discuss? From my point of view looking for a dedicated forum would allow little or no discussion because they would mostly be of the same mind. Where as here there are many countries, ethnic groups and points of view to provide a better gamma of views.

no I don't think that I learned anything. — Massimo

Will you be going out like that again soon? Will you apply for another job?

My night sucked and I don't know what any of these experiences mean if They mean anything. — Massimo

They will only have meaning if you give them meaning, did you learn anything from them?

Thanks

I have a few panel installed, started mostly as backup because we had a lot of outages and I was working online from home. But I put a few more up and now I can run the refrigerator which is the biggest part of the bill. I also have a 12volt light system so I always have light.

I am hoping to have all of the major work done in the next year or so, that will leave me with just maintenance and damage costs for the future. Fingers crossed on that one. :lol:

Maybe the question would be better suited to a place where more people with specialized American knowledge.
The international and more intellectual nature of this forum does not enhance your chances of getting answers to questions of that type.

I'm sorry to hear about your setbacks. Money's always a major obstacle, isn't it?
Maybe you're up to some less physically demanding tasks this year. Tiling isn't too hard... just ridiculously difficult sometimes. Painting a roof sounds like a bigger job than I'd ever take on! I can just about manage three rungs of the ladder to wash the top windows. — Vera Mont

Thank you. I am just short of 70, if I leave things much longer I will not want to do the the work at all. I plan on retiring in the next couple of years and need to spend the money to do the work while I still have some coming in.

I feel so unaccomplished reading this. I've always wanted to build a whole house, — L'éléphant

I have designed and built three, mostly with just help for the heavy or excessive time consuming stuff that I could not get done inside the time frame by myself.

The house I have now was originally a wooden framed building that I built. I renovated it by changing the framework to metal. I was lucky that I did because we had a bad earthquake,7.2, and it came down from its original 2 meters in the air to sitting on the ground on 2 sides. I was able to lift back to one meter and all of the damage it received was in the siding panels and a couple of minor bends in the frame.

Does anyone have a winter project they would like to brag or complain about? — Vera Mont

We don't really have a cold season down here, it is more of a dust and mud type of thing. And the temperature rarely gets too low that you need more than a sweater or a light jacket .
The list I have is too big to mention all of it, I will just list the larger ones.

Finish building fence.
Paint roof and rest of outside walls
Replace ceiling in main bedroom.
Finish tiling and plumbing in new bathroom

Some of these were started before the covid lock-down and could not be finished, then last year I had an accident and have not completely recovered still. There are about another dozen things on the list, but money and time will keep them from being done before next year.

Are you American, from the USA?

People from the 70's

Not exactly science fiction or fantasy but,...............................Point Place, Wisconsin.
:wink:

Bible quotes on the TPF, OMG. :lol:

I posted that 3 years ago. You have no idea what it's like waiting that long for a reply. Absolute torture. — Hanover

I never look at the dates, it takes the fun out of things. :rofl:
I had not seen the thread before so it either got missed back them or was of no interest at that moment.

I am now going to look for your posts from as far back as I can find and answer them, just for the fun value.
Hope I can find at least something worth replying to. :wink:

There are plenty of really good new ideas: — Hanover

Not many of them are truly new, they are mostly either combinations of existing ideas or remakes of other ideas.

I have often thought that it would be fun to put on a bigfoot costume and hoax people. — Agree-to-Disagree

Be a bigfoot for a day, just like with the UFOs, someone would probably try to shoot you.

Abduction and probing is reported frequently. There must be an explanation for this. Does anybody have any ideas? — Agree-to-Disagree

Maybe the want to get to know the difference between the different human races that many bigots keep saying exist, them being the best type obviously.

Like a near fast-as-light spaceship. :roll: — jgill

I meant any technology. :shade: :roll:

The guy with the singing guitar.


He always lets others have a solo.

If there was any chance aliens had visited Earth, don't you think the other nations would be a little more interested in this?

Why do you think literally no one outside the US cares about this at all? — Tzeentch

Other nations do not have the resources to fund investigations into things like UFOs.
The USA does so because it thinks that they will get some sort of advantage over the rest of the world from spacer travelers, technological or military.

What I do not believe is the "fact" that aliens might be aggressive and that we need to be defended from them at any means. If they have gotten here and wanted to take over the world it is doubtful that we could do anything to stop them.

If they are peaceful, and as they have not yet attacked I think that we can consider them so, why don't they make contact? Would you talk to your new neighbor if he walked around point a shotgun at you?

Another thing that I think we need to consider is how they got here, not just the method of transport but the reason behind the journey. It takes a long time for signals from earth to reach out to the stars, so they cannot have found out about us until recently unless they were planet hoping and found us by accident.

If they are here now, we have to question how they got here so fast after receiving the signals or if they have been for a long time what were they doing before we became technologically advanced enough to be any use to them.

If they came here a long time ago to conquer us, why did they let us develop technology that would make their job harder. If they just arrived recently to conquer, why did they not stop our technological advancement? It would not take much to do so.

If they came a long time ago in peace, then it might be possible that they have helped with the advancement of the technology we have today.

So they only reason I can see for them to be here is a peaceful one, sharing knowledge.

One of the things I always laugh about in the alien invasion movies is the way they portray them as ugly monster that slobber all over everything. How could something like that even develop technology? You see them with claws trying to use the human like controls of their spaceship or weapons.

I believe that to be able to develop technology the beings must have the physical attributes necessary to be able to create and use tools. That is why ants will probably never develop an Ipad. It might take a while, but there are several other mammals that might one day actually create advanced tools.

Living environment will also play a part in advancement of any being in the universe. Dolphins are supposed to be very intelligent, but in their environment and with their physical attributes it would be extremely difficult to create tools and material to build anything.

And when I think about it, now I just might be talking to myself... :-D — A Realist

Yes, you are talking to yourself, carry on then.

Jane Doe would then become president, and could push those cool things, because the voters picked her and employed her to make it so. — jorndoe

Unfortunately the president does not make the laws and make things happen, that is the job of the congress. So people should actually spend more time finding out what their congress person is offering them.

Southern Pride

A convoluted idea held by most southerners that depitcs the glory days of the Antebellum south and other traditions. Something that should not be honored and instead despised for it's radical racial and moral bias of a past generation. Something that leads to internal American conflict and strife between the people of America. Prevents the diffusion of culture. A cultural ideal built upon the advantageous use of human beings to promote the well-being of white anglo-saxon protestants. Something that promotes grandeos ideas of geographical and cultural superiority. Something that leads to a rift in learning and understanding others ideals and culture i.e. North/South. Something that contains more negative biased perspective than good beliefs. Something that
Southerner: Southern Pride is the ideal of a generation, Northerns will never understand!!

Northerner: Northerners will never understand because we weren't fighting against the UNION in the civil war. We don't look back and dwell on the glory days of a generation long passed like a depressed alcoholic has-been.
by thenorthernperspective November 28, 2010 — The Urban Dictionary

I lived in New Orleans for some years, late 60's early 70's, and it was also something that puzzled me when we got there.

I think it is probably just a case of extremely extreme ethnocentrism.

What I often wondered was what would have happened if the southern states had actually won. Would it have been possible for them to be even prouder than they are? :chin:

There should be a comedy section on the forum as well.

It would be the most used on some days. :lol:

think "blame for the downfall of man" is a pretty negative inflection. "credit for the saving of the human race" is a positive spin on the same story. — noAxioms

How did you get this from,

Giving robots the order to do anything at all costs, including looking after humans gives them free rein to kill all except a few perfectly good breeders to continue the human race if it were necessary. — Sir2u

You mean, shut us down because we are a danger to humanity? Hmmmm , but the ones being shut down are humanity. — Constance

No, humanity is the species, the concept. 10%, hell even 1%, of the current population would be a gain if they thought we would wipe ourselves out completely.

Asimov's Laws Of Robotics
The laws are as follows: “(1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
(2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
(3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
Asimov later added another rule, known as the fourth or zeroth law, that superseded the others. It stated that “a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

It is this last part that worries me.

jack-in-the-box toys — Dawnstorm

Actually you did here the same as I do when I am not sure and I don't want be to harassed by the grammar police. Rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem.

I don't know exactly how correct I am but I mostly use a rule for things like this that I learned somewhere a long time ago.

If the noun-phrase or compound noun has several heads that are of equal value, when it is obvious that as a whole it refers a single object that cannot be broken down into separate pieces without losing its meaning or is used as a noun to describe an object the S goes at the end of the line,

How many jacks do you see here?

I don't see any. I only see two box. But the toy's name is "Jack-in-the-box". A single word, proper noun.



Now there is a jack, but the name is still "Jack-in-the-box"

(or choose your trusted authority and do as they say) — Dawnstorm

Good idea, let's do that.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/jack-in-the-box

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jack-in-the-box

Merriam says that both work, but has this little caveat.
"These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'jack-in-the-box.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors."

This is sort of weird because I have not been able to find any use of Jacks-in-the-box on the most popular web sites, they all return Jack.

So what? — Jamal

Ouch! :worry:

passersby — Jamal

Perfectly good word there, fine example of where to put the S. :up:

The Secret Life of Words:
English Words and Their Origins
By: Anne Curzan, Ph.D

The Routes of English
By: Melvyn Bragg

These are good books to read, especially if you are not native speakers. They help to understand just how screwed up English really is. I have a few more, but they are on an old drive that I don't have handy right now and I cannot remember the names

You say this like it is a bad thing. — noAxioms

No, I stated it as a possibility without any inflection of good or bad.

Too much weight is given to a test that measures a machine's ability to imitate something that it is not. — noAxioms

Nowadays a chat with most young people would convince me I was talking to a computer, and most kids find the AI talk like they do so they would never tell the difference either.

If an AI was programed to test for signs of humans using something similar to the Turing test, would people be able to convince it that they were humans?

But how can we know that? — javi2541997

Twenty boxes containing ten apples in each. Could not be an apple in boxes.
Twenty boxes containing ten Jacks in each. Could not be a jack in the boxes.

The whole thing is the toy, one object. Each box constitutes a toy. If it has one Jack in it it would be a jack-in-the-box. If it has more than one Jack in it, it could not be a jack-in-the-box.

The problem is Jack-in-the-box is a clause being used as a noun. It has a subject and predicate. — NOS4A2

If the phrase is being used as a noun, then it has to be treated as such. It does not have a subject nor a predicate because it is counted as one word, thus the hyphens.
Being only one word the S goes on the end.

Ergo, plural would always be applied to Jack instead of box (right?). — javi2541997

When you talk about Jack-in-the-box, the subject is the box, because that is the toy. Because you are talking about a box with a Jack in it. That is the way to decide where the S goes.
As Quk points out, multiple Jacks in multiple boxes would be Jacks-in-the-boxes. But if there is only one Jack in each box then it is Jack-in-the boxes.

Of course, then again, because there is no motivational possibilities, lacking affectivity altogether, there would be no motivation to do harm. — Constance

I always considered that the primal controlling laws of robotics would be to blame for the downfall of man. Giving robots the order to do anything at all costs, including looking after humans gives them free rein to kill all except a few perfectly good breeders to continue the human race if it were necessary.
To stop global climate changes making humans extinct it would be perfectly reasonable for them to kill off 90% of the humans that are creating the problems or just shut down the actual causes of it. Could you imagine a world with all of the polluting power plants shut down, all of the polluting vehicles stopped. I would not take long for many millions to die.

Who was it who said...

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; tiny minds discuss grammar. — Jamal

I don't know who said it first but there are several variations. My own is:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; tiny minds discuss themselves(usually on Twatter, Farcebook, Nit nok).