I can empathize with having my stuff taken, but if you had $1.3 million in jewels, I'm going to bet you're still better off than almost everyone I know even after the theft. This is a minor inconvenience, and that's before we even begin to discuss the ethical implications of the jewelry trade.
There are not aliens among us, but if there were aliens among us, it would not be a supernatural phenomenon. I disagree completely that things can't be put into science and non-science boxes. Science is when you look for the answers, and non-science is when you make them up. Let's take UFOs for example.
There's a blob in the sky. We don't know what it is. It is flying. It has some mass. That is, by definition, an Unitentified Flying Object. It moves in ways that seem impossible, and then suddenly vanished.
Science is looking at the evidence and trying to form a testable hypothesis. Perhaps it was an optical illusion? If so, we could probably recreate the conditions and replicate the illusion. Perhaps it was a human craft that has capabilities that were previously unknown to us? If so, we could probably describe a theoretical mechanism that could move or disappear the same way. Can we prove it was a craft? Can we measure accurately its behavior? Are the instruments and witnesses reliable?
The best bit about all of this is that any of them could be true whether or not aliens exist. Once you decide that, since nothing on earth can explain it, there must be aliens with some sufficiently advanced technology, you have abandoned science altogether. Why not fairies or ghosts? Maybe it was a magician or a superhero with mutant powers? Once you abandon the feasible to assume the supernatural, you leave the door open to any supernatural explanation. Maybe the reason we haven't found bigfoot is that he has an invisible flying vehicle that defies gravity.
Maybe aliens exist. Certainly I believe that life can exist on other planets. There may even be intelligent life capable of interstellar travel. I hope we find evidence of it someday.
It strains credulity to suggest that in all of spacetime, our sentient spacefaring species would overlap with another without any measurable evidence. The evidence we do have does not support the logical leap from Unidentified to Extraterrestrial.
In the example given, no. The science of it is well understood.
Lately? You mean, like, since the dawn of recorded history? Because I suppose on a geological scale, you could call that "lately."
Also, in response to the rest of your comment, what?
That's not at all how a scientist looks at the unknown. There are plenty of things we can't yet explain, and maybe we will not understand them in our lifetimes. But science rejects the notion that anything cannot be understood, or that supernatural explanations can handwave away discrepancies. Like, if you were doing an experiment, and you got anomalous results, so you concluded that a fairy probably changed reality for a moment, you aren't really doing science anymore. Science requires the fundamental axiom that the universe is consistent and governed by natural laws. Failures of those natural laws to predict outcomes is not a violation of the natural laws of the universe, but instead represent incomplete or incorrect understanding of them.
Which is not to say that you're wrong about people. Humans can simultaneously hold incongruous thoughts. Some scientists can and do hold supernatural beliefs, it's just that when they do, they aren't doing science. This isn't like saying they aren't true Scotsmen. It's more like a baker who is baking bread with a chisel and a block of wood. Their profession is still baking, so they are still bakers, but carving a loaf of wood is not really baking, and the result is not really bread.
Nobody got hurt. Money and jewelry can be replaced.
Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered "helper" NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won't engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.
To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it's jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don't make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it's all stuff that would happen around a table in someone's basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.
You don't have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you're watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.
To the tyrant, freedom is violence.
Layman's breakdown:
The facts of the case.
Ames had a job. Her performance reviews were generally positive. Her manager was gay, and Ames is straight.
She applied for a promotion. She didn't get it. Another person was hired for the promotion, who was gay.
Ames was demoted to a significantly lower paying job, and someone else was hired for her previous role. That other person was also gay.
She sued for discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The established precedence for testing discrimination has three steps. The first step is establishing that something fishy happened that may have been discriminatory. This is ostensibly a low bar to entry to a lawsuit. You just have to demonstrate something happened. Like, you can't sue for "they looked at me funny" or "they didn't like me because I'm [fill in protected class]." You don't have to prove that you were the victim of discrimination at this level, you just have to demonstrate that there is something that requires review.
This is called the McDonnell Douglas burden shifting framework, and the next step is that the business has to prove there was a legitimate business reason for the something that happened. You can see why the first step is a low bar but also an important step. If the case is "they looked at me funny," how is the business supposed to defend against that? "You had a weird hat on," or simply, "that's just my face." If there's an obvious business explanation, then the third step is it goes back to the complainant to demonstrate that the business reason is discrimination or bullshit.
It's a reasonable framework that ensures all discrimination allegations are handled consistently and methodically. The court doesn't jump into whether weird stares are discriminatory or not until after they have determined that there's something to evaluate and the business has had a chance to justify it.
An example could be a waiter suing Hooters for gender discrimination because they didn't hire him. The first step is that the restaurant did not hire him and hired someone else, a woman. The next step is the restaurant justifying the business decision, that the restaurant's business model is built on women's boobies, so they exclusively hire waitresses. The third step is the waiter trying to prove that the business decision is discriminatory, and that a man could have boobies as profitable as a woman.
So Ames presented her case, but the lower appellate court required that Ames additionally demonstrate that her employer had a history or pattern of discrimination against straight people. The thought process was that "reverse" discrimination against straight people is relatively rare, so to pass the first step, Ames needed to meet an additional burden. Notice how many times I said "additional"? That's not how laws are supposed to work. The framework never got to the second step in the process because the court applied a different standard to the complaint. The court had a legal reasoning for this, but anyone following the case knew that it was a decision that would not survive on appeal.
The SCOTUS sent it back down to the lower court to apply the standard framework, which Ames will still probably lose. It's really hard to demonstrate discrimination, especially when the people making the decisions were also straight. Mediocre performance reviews are not a strong case that you deserve a promotion, and she accepted the demotion rather than sue for constructive dismissal. It's hard to say that she will win her case, but it's a bit alarming how well-funded her legal team seems to be.
Even more alarming is the concurrent opinion by Thomas and cosigned by Gorsuch essentially admitting that they don't like the McDonnell Douglas framework and would overturn the precedent if that was the question before the court. Maybe it isn't a perfect framework, but the oligarchs that own the conservative justices clearly have a target in mind, and are basically colluding with the complainant to come back with a different argument that would allow conservatives to eliminate some additional human rights.
So those are the objective facts of the case. Anything more would be speculation.
All I'm hearing is that I can still be a sedentary lazybones for like another 10 years before I need to start exercising.
Or, like, don't look at people's genitals in the bathrooms. This is not a real problem. Public restrooms have managed to create privacy for as long as we've had public restrooms. Trans people aren't a new phenomenon, they're just the latest conservative scapegoat.
This is not a real problem.
Aaron Rogers.