That was his stated reason, yes. The truth was a bit weirder. He was thinking extremely long-term.

And of course it doesn’t help that the reason I’m down in the hole to begin with at this point in my life is because the people I mistakenly trusted the most fucked me over.

Hunter S. Thompson hit the nail on the head when, after losing the election for Sheriff (of Aspen?), he proclaimed “The American Dream is fucked”. I mean, we can argue about when it went bad, or if it was ever a possibility in the first place, but it’s pretty clear at this point that the “American Dream” is a sick,…

I’m more into the absurdist take on things because our political atmosphere keeps getting dumber and weirder. I think of things like coming up with a “Baby Bump Protector(TM)“, which is made of kevlar, comes in your choice of the US flag, the confederate flag, or the Punisher logo. Sometimes I wish I was unethical…

I don’t look forward to watching Sinema and Manchin hold up the process if one of the justices dies...

The untouchable power structures that we must endure are absolutely insane, and inimical to life itself. Frank Herbert knew what was up:

Indeed...

I was thinking of dog-owners like my sister, who are lazy about training and therefore give the dog (who doesn’t know better unless you show it, consistently) mixed signals as a result of not being consistent about when rewards are delivered or not delivered. Then they get mad and scold the dog, who is generally…

Addendum: Pavlovian conditioned fear interferes with other learning.

As I mentioned to the poster you responded to, all learning is context-specific. It also has to be reinforced frequently. If you’re using punishment, that results in Pavlovian conditioned fear, which is debilitating if that fear gets generalized to other stimuli (by, say, constantly punishing the dog in different…

Anyone who has studied animal learning can tell you that punishment procedures (an operant conditioning paradigm) result in Pavlovian conditioned fear as a side-effect. Furthermore, all learning is context-specific. It’s why your dog will inhale that box of donuts off the counter when you leave the room.

As someone who studied and taught animal behavior at the graduate and post-graduate levels, his methods and and “philosophy” infuriated me. He’s a grifter equivalent to “pet psychologists”, without the training and with a different focus (pet psychologists are “touchy-feely” versus his toxic-masculine “leader of the…

Not only that - most of them believe that our country was founded on the values expressed in that book (which most of them haven’t even read all the way through, let alone understand, but rather go by someone else’s interpretation of it that they for some reason trust without question).

Won’t somebody please think of the corporations!

They fired the horses. What more do you want?

Yep. There’s plenty to criticize Grimes about without resorting to this fucking garbage. It’s not like she wasn’t successful on her own before they met.

She has expressed Libertarian leanings in the past, so it’s not like being a shitty billionaire is outside her wheelhouse.

It’s okay, everyone. They got rid of the horses!

I believe you meant “viability”.

Can a robot be an incel, though?