The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.
> The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.
Doesn't matter. Even if civilization collapses and we're all miserable, if it means more money is flowing into OpenAI's coffers, it's all good.
When I was a kid, we had a long shelf dedicated to storing a voluminous encyclopedia in the family room, and subscribed to periodic (annual?) updates.
This was expensive.
IIRC, these books were purchased one small stack at a time from a locally-owned grocery store, which spread the expense over a longer period. One week, they'd have the books 1-5 on display and for sale, say. And the next week, it'd be books 6-10. After a time, a family could have the whole set.
Anyway, we had that. So when I wanted to find general information about a topic back then, before Google or Altavista or Webcrawler or whatever, I'd look in the encyclopedia first and get some background.
If it was something I really wanted to dig deeper on, I'd go to the library. If I couldn't find what I needed, I asked for help. Sometimes, this meant that they'd order appropriate material (for free) using inter-library loan for me to peruse.
If I already had enough background but needed a very specific fact, then I'd call the library's reference desk and they'd find it for me and call back. They'd then read the relevant information over the phone.
And if I wanted a reference to have and keep, then: We had book stores.
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Nowadays: Encyclopedias are basically dead, but we can carry an offline copy of Wikipedia in our pocket supercomputer if we choose. Books still get published. Libraries are still present, and as far as I can tell they broadly still find answers with a phone call.
It's not all lost, yet. The old ways still work OK if a person wants them to work. (Of course, Googling the thing or chatting with the bot is often much, much faster. We choose our own poison.)
It's a given that a book on programming is already out of date when it goes to print.
My main gripe with paper sources is that sometimes an important piece of information is only mentioned in passing when the author clearly knew more about it.
Being older, I remember homework involving a trip to the library to look through lots of books for 1 tiny bit of information needed for the homework.
For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.
The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.
Right, that's why they have massive churches adorned with gold and intricate sculptures. Just because it technically isn't required to pay does not mean that years of brainwashing won't condition you to give your money away. I've only been a few times, but seeing old people queue up to give a sizable part of their pension to the church just made me sad.
Evidence for that statement? Can you give some examples?
Mostly when people say "the Bible is not true" its usually a result of misunderstanding it (e.g. adopting Biblical literalism, not understanding the culture and context, not understanding nuance).
No. You interpret each document in context and in culture.
For example, you interpret Genesis as a story that makes a point and tell you something - it is like Jesus's parables (no one same says they are literal!). For example, that all human beings are made in the image of God - as we all look different that is clearly not literal. That we are all related and of one ancestry.
On the other hand you interpret the gospels as deliberately written biographies of Jesus. You interpret the epistles as letter written by their author to a particular person or group of people. You interpret the psalms as lyrics.
It is the traditional way of interpreting the Bible and few people had a problem with it until modern times.
Yes, that is the point of fiction. its not unfair to compare Genesis to Star Wars to an extent, but, to a Christian, what you learn from Genesis is a lot more important (the "word of God" rather than the "word of George Lucas").
However, much of the rest of the Bible should be read differently - the letters, biographies etc. Each document ("book") needs to be read appropriately and in context. Again, each can be compared to others in its genre, but its inclusion in "the Bible" (but there are lots of Biblical canons) gives it that extreme importance.
> It is the traditional way of interpreting the Bible and few people had a problem with it until modern times.
Sorry to nitpick, but there were quite a lot of "heathens" and "witches" who had faced some problems with the traditional interpretations of the Bible before modern times.
Its a departure from Christian tradition (including early Christians), and it leads to demonstrably false conclusions, and its silly to treat many works of many different genres (myth, chronicles, personal accounts, poetry and lyrics, biographies, and letters) as all being interpreted the same way.
As I understand it, there are parts of France that spent time as parts of Germany and are still somewhat culturally German that do church tax in a similar way - much of what was Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.
"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.
In Germany it's not really true. AFAIK you pay those taxes only if you are registered follower of 3 main religions. You literally can opt out, they are a counter example.
Poland is the one I experience it. Church is funded in multiple ways. At least 3 billion PLN a year from concordat deal from 90's. Priests have pensions and annuities. Churches pay no taxes on (heating) fuels. Schools pay for Religious Education classes, very often run by priests or nuns. Uniformed services almost always pay for cleric's services or clerics fully in their services.
Of course church still gathers funds on their own, sometimes using dark patterns.
I think tax breaks are different from direct funding, the same for payment for specific services at a reasonable price. For example the UK exempts virtually all religious bodies from tax, and its on the same basis as a huge range of things (e.g. amateur sports, equality and diversity, community facilities...). I would not consider that state mandated payment for services.
I do not know enough about the concordat or how Polish pensions work to comment on those. I would be interested but there does not seem to be a lot of information online (e.g. the wikipedia article is a stub)
I was thinking of Christianity as I was responding to a comment that used the word "church".
However, besides that, subsidies from general taxation are not the same as payments for a service received (i.e. going back to it being a "subscription service"), whereas something like the German system where the payment is linked to entitlement to services (if other comments here are accurate) can be reasonably characterised as a subscription service.
I disagree with the distinction between subsidies and payments. The math is zero sum, either way purchasing power is undesirably and forcibly reduced from one entity and given to another.
That is not the distinction I am making here. I even partly agree with you (with some nuances).
I am making a distinction between being made to pay through general taxation (e.g. as a pacifist is forced to pay for the military, an extreme libertarian for public services in general) and being made to pay in order to use the service (e.g. like a Netflix subscription). Almost everywhere they exist, subsidies for religion are like the former, not the latter.
Where does the money come from? Religious services are generally funded by donations, and these donations are usually done in the open, whereby (from what I saw) regularly attending and not donating the expected amount would put you in a socially uncomfortable situation.
Back when my parents made me go to church, I remember observing that a lot of the donations being made were in envelopes that the church provided.
That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.
(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)
No reason anyone would would feel social discomfort in my experience, which is mostly in Catholic and Anglican churches, and AFAIK money comes mostly from donations not made in public. I have not felt the least worried about what people would think when I have not had cash on me or about how much I put in.
Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.
Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.
Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
I do know that, but I also know how donations can become an expectation.
Also, it's worth noting in the context of this thread, that people can use AI inference for free on many services, with payment only need for higher usage, and even then, if you don't care about expectations or inconvenience, it's trivial to abuse the free tier.
A thousand years? What made you go with that number?
The protestant reformation was only about 500 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Martin Luther wouldn't have bothered that much if the expected "donations" were really cheap. And even if you do go with "a coin", which was apparently the price of an annual indulgence for a regular peasant, that was about the same price as a whole pig, or on the order of $1k in today's money, so definitely not symbolic.
I know that hackers here need to always be right and go to great lengths to try to distort reality when they are wrong. You're not even fooling yourself by saying that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, much less fooling anybody else.
If you make it a habit to always lie in order to always be right, you start building castles of lies that hinder you in life. Just because of pride.
I'm sorry if you don't like pedantry, but this is what I'm in HN for.
To be clear, I definitely didn't mean to imply that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, and suggesting that this is what I meant is clearly not the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of my message. I was referring specifically to the Florin/Gulden/Guilder coins being used across Europe in Martin Luther's time, which contained about 3.5g gold, which at today's gold price would be worth over $500 just as bullion, but it was apparently worth about twice that in terms of purchasing power. From my searches, it seems that the poorest of the poor would need to pay a quarter of a coin annually, the typical commoner would pay 1 per year, and merchants/middle-class would pay 3 or more per year, to eliminate/reduce their afterlife punishment.
You can argue that my focus on indulgences is not relevant for some reason, and I'd be happy to discuss other examples of expectations of monetary payments to the church, but would appreciate if you refrain from accusing me of lying.
Churches have directly taxed their followers on their income. Some of them still do, like the government churches in Scandinavia. That's a tax.
Churches have also sold the redemptions of your sins. Sometimes a bit cloaked as donations, like what you mention.
And churches have accepted donations, with expectations so low that everybody can donate. Who can't donate a kopek, or a bowl of rice? People who are too poor to donate anything are not shunned by any church, on the contrary they will be on the receiving end of donations if they wish to.
I would also like to quote the definite authority on this subject, Mark 12:41-44:
"Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on."
