Why isn’t that common to cover with a blanket other parts of our body when we feel cold, like the belly or lower back?

It… is?

A million blessings on anyone who uses the term “crypto” to refer to “cryptography” and not “cryptocurrency”.

There’s at least one other condition that’s commonly misdiagnosed as autism: schizoid personality disorder. I’d imagine at least some who don’t quite qualify for an autism diagnosis would be well described as schizoid. There may well be other conditions that also share a lot in common with autism that might be similarly good diagnoses for certain folks who don’t quite qualify for an autism spectrum diagnosis. But it’s also valid for some folks who don’t qualify as on the spectrum to just qualify as not having autism.

Have you heard of the “Rat Park” experiment?

Scientists, when studying addiction, put rats in cages and gave them a choice between water laced with drugs (heroin or cocaine or whatever) and water not laced with anything. The rats all got hopelessly addicted and most died of overdose. “Drugs cause addiction.” So the scientists concluded.

But there were some problems with that theory. Old people get hip replacements and take heavy opioids for a while, but the rate of addiction is quite low. In the Vietnam war, American soldiers were all very addicted (mostly to heroin) and experts worried that when the war ended and the soldiers returned, we’d have an epidemic of heroin addiction here, but it didn’t really happen that way.

Someone got the bright idea to try another experiment. He got rats and divided them into two groups. One, as a control, he did exactly what was done in the first experiment. Cages plus laced and unlaced water. Unsurprisingly, the same result. For the other group, he made a rat paradise. “Rat Park” as he called it. Real grass, toys they could play with, food they liked, social interaction with other rats, but he still offered the same choice of laced and unlaced water. The rats in Rat Park tried the laced water (after all they didn’t really even know it was anything but regular water at first), but virtually none showed any signs of addiction.

Turns out conditions make a big difference to things like addiction. But the real clincher? He took the addicted “control” rats and put them in Rat Park and they voluntarily detoxed.

The conclusion? Addiction isn’t so much about “drugs” as it is about unfulfilled needs. Of course rats in solitary confinement in drab gray cages with crappy food are going to do the only thing within reach that has any chance of making them feel good. The “selfish” thing, if you will. But rats with fulfilled needs are a different story.

This isn’t a story about rats or about (only) addiction. People in good circumstances – people whose needs are met – have a capacity for being “good” that people with unfulfilled basic needs don’t. (Abraham Maslow, anyone?) Now, look around you. Is the world as it is today set up to fulfill people’s needs or keep them wanting? (Maslow estimated – very generously, I think – that 3% of the population had their basic needs fulfilled and were “self-actualized.”) Capitalism is predicated on the idea that want is bottomless. (It’s basic economics to pretend satiety doesn’t exist.) Every company out there with a solution has its fingers in whatever they can do to cause the very problem they purport to solve. The news is all about creating addictive FUD. Humans are kinda fucked right now. Of course in this situation folks are going to be selfish.

(Mind you, the richest folks aren’t necessarily the ones whose needs are best met. Just think whether Musk comes across as someone who isn’t deeply unsatisfied.)

Yes, the vast majority of people are selfish assholes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not human nature. This is what happens when you put humans in very unnatural situations.

7

I guess if it splinters the GOP any, it’s a good thing, maybe?

Then again, look how the whole Tea Party thing worked out. (Spoilers: not good.)

Mine wasn’t really all that bad, but the time that occurs to me involves me at like 5 or 6 years old, snow, a sled, a metal fence post, and a big red bump on my forehead. I hit pretty hard, but I don’t think I was concussed or anything.

Your post is all over the place with like 3 different unrelated topics.

The 30k thing is great for you, and maybe a coincidence. (You didn’t make it clear.) But I assure you syncronicities aren’t unique to your faith.

And I have no idea what that has to do with the meeting or the bible verse you referenced.

Gentoo.

No really. That’s my whole answer.

What are the chances of two separate gender reveal parties happening simultaneously using the same exact means of displaying blue/pink in the same apartment building exactly one apartment directly above the other?

Also, it bothers me way more than it should that on the middle one, the arrow goes from the movie frame to the window and the other two are the other way around.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure my family was only the second owners of my house as well. All I know about the builder of my house is:

• The same guy was responsible for building basically all the houses on my street.
• He didn’t survey very carefully. All the property lines are off by like two feet. Lol. It’s caused me some heartache with the neighbors to my south with property disputes. (Well, to be fair, the neighbors to my south would have caused the property dispute had the property lines not been off.)

Oh, I think I know what’s going on. It’s interpreting the number with a period on the end as a numbered/ordered list. Putting a space before the dot should fix it.

123. This is an ordered list.

And fixed:

321 . And this is not.

Still weird that the number’s sticking off to the side and getting cut off. Probably depends what client you’re using. In Lemmy-UI, it’s not cut off, but the number is further left than it would otherwise be. Jerboa looks fine, but it’s clearer on Jerboa that it’s interpreting it as an ordered list.

1962

Anyone else read the post title in Contrapoints’ voice?

Trump, referring to Musk: “Gimme another billionaire. I’m tired of this one.”

How is the cucumber involved?

Hey, this is a family-friendly webcomic!

Yes. Salmon’s probably my favorite fish. I eat a lot of sardines, though because they’re lower in mercury and such.

Someone finally found that hard drive in the back of the fridge where they put it while sleepwalking, huh?

Just what AI would say.

Great. It’s 0.001% less bad now.