God damn it, I knew I should have scrolled down first. Take your upvote.

Debbie saw one last chance to overshadow her daughter, and she grabbed it with both hands. What a consummate professional.

And when you open it you get points! Imaginary internet points! Does anyone else remember back in the stone ages of internet message boards when you just posted and then you had to check on your own post—like some kind of animal—to see what people had said, and had no real quantitative metric for how good a given…

I mean, you kind of answered your own question. Behavioral reinforcement works, often way, way better than you would expect. Find a pleasant sounding "ding" noise, and you can get people to do all kinds of things. Really.

I actually see where this FOC is coming from. Diablo (apparently accidentally) stumbled on some powerful techniques out of positive reinforcement, and both its implementation of those techniques (random loot to supplement more predictable earned progression) and the fundamental psychological insights are now endemic…

"So wait, everyone murdered each other for four years and then the ending is they stop and Adolph Hitler happens and also the horrible, repressive Russian Empire is somehow replaced by something even worse and then that gets taken over by someone even more horrible and everyone just kind of ignored Japan except for…

Well, it is Chicago.

Technically, a Christmas Cake was a woman unmarried after age 25 (the connection being that Christmas cakes were unsaleable after Dec. 25), but my understanding is that this is a bit outdated now. Japan's social norms have evolved since the phrase was in non-ironic use.

Shit like this is why we have Trump.

Large enough to eat you in your sleep.

That's not quite what he said. What he said is "I'm a negotiator—like you folks. Is there anyone in this room who doesn't negotiate deals? Probably more than any room I've ever spoken. [sic]" He then said "You're not going to support me because I don't want your money. Isn't it crazy?" and "You want to control…

That seems like a strange thing to do. I don't know why anyone would ever do that and then upload it to YouTube. That's just not how people act in real life.

What do you view as Obama's foreign policy accomplishments? I'm a Democrat and I think Obama has been a good president (and would have been great in the kind of political environment that prevailed even twenty years ago), but I don't see his foreign policy as much more than treading water. Why am I wrong?

Homogenized culture is accurate, but hides the ball a little. Japan's population is 98.4% ethnic Japanese. For people rebranding themselves from "White Supremacist" to "White Nationalist" (seriously, as if that's better), Japan is something of a role model.

I can't believe Clinton, of all people, didn't realize this, but 24 years later, "it's [still] the economy, stupid." Her husband went out and felt people's pain and at least made gestures towards understanding how poor and middle class Americans felt like they were being sold out in his upset election.

The difference is that conservatives are not describing reality. Take just the "conservatives are too self-critical while liberals always fall in line" bit—that is manifestly and numerically not true. The Republican Party has more consistent turn-out every election. In the last four presidential elections, the…

I hate to pour cold water on optimism, but it's simply not true that each generation is "more progressive" than the generation that preceded it. Progressivism is not a defined quality, for one thing.

I can't lay all of that at Obama's feet. It's clear now that to fix the Democratic Party from a strategic standpoint he would have had to basically purge the DNC. Those people are still living in la la land. How Pelosi holds on to the minority leadership position is beyond beyond me.

To be fair, Obama appointed nuclear physicists, but most of the time, the position has been held by your typical policy apparatchiks. Many of the prior holders have military or legal backgrounds with no science training to speak of. But they, you know, actually knew what the fuck it was at least.

They don't think of that list. The only thing Perry seemed aware of was "domestic energy production." They think that the DoE is a regulatory agency inhibiting domestic drilling, or funding alternative energy like solar and wind power. Dollars to donuts, if you asked them who was responsible for America's nuclear…