While you studied the catch scratcher, I studied the blade.

I was able to get 4 or 5 usable cat scratchers out of one blade.

IDSPISPOPD

“What do I look like a hood ornament to you or somethin?”

Only if he concentrates

OP is OP

Can you name anything that doesn’t grow continuously?

Not looking into it is how they get you!

Well then no wonder your brain’s so susceptible to radio programming. Take some shrooms to fortify yourself man!

So the way it’s ruining those markets is by making more goods available at lower prices?

Hay is for horses.

Straw is for soda.

Not even a little bit, no

Capitalist countries have more free food available than communist countries do.

That’s what interact with means: navigate, orient, decide, etc.

There’s nothing about our neural architecture that has “3D” built into the information it can process.

There’s no reason why a brain can’t interact with 4 dimensional space. You just have to feed accurate 4D data into the brain and it will learn.

I had a portable laser disc player. Lots of people thought I was a pizza delivery guy just jamming out to magic pizza tunes. It had to be held level

I stopped drinking caffeine earlier this year.

My anxiety melted away. Suddenly I wasn’t avoiding life any more. I just got my shit done, or at least worked consistently on it without hesitation.

Then I got in a car accident (very minor; nobody hurt) for the first time in 25 years of driving.

So I started drinking caffeine again. I realized that maybe me at my best is a little anxious. That relaxed and happy isn’t my best self.

He got away in the video. He’s the tow guy now.

Achievement Unlocked: Tow to Tow

Acquire a tow truck.

Or one lost job and impending cascade into poverty, perhaps after a long climb and struggle to escape that poverty.

Getting one’s car repossessed can easily be the a trigger for the total collapse of a person’s life.

Obviously his reaction is maladaptive. He’s fucked, and his hot head has made it far worse for himself.

But having one’s car towed is not like getting a wedgie or stubbing one’s toe. A person getting their car towed is most likely:

• Unable to make the payments required to keep it
• Behind on other payments too, like rent
• Utterly bereft of any cash buffer (else they would have paid the thing)
• Relying on that car to get to work and hence keep their job
• Living paycheck to paycheck, hence unable to survive even if he gets a new job immediately (it can take four weeks sometimes for the first paycheck at a new job to come in)
• Suffering from the cumulative effects of months, years, or even decades of financial anxiety

Not defending his behavior, but please don’t treat this like someone went on a rampage after stubbing their toe. People are trying so hard to survive right now.

If my car got towed right now, I’d end up on the street. I have better self control than this guy (learned in high school that violence is not tolerated at all by civilized society, so I learned to control it).

I myself have meltdowns, but they remain verbal. I’m definitely not proud at all to report that I lose control of my voice sometimes. I hate it when it’s happening and can’t stop it. But I’m not physically violent. The last time I expressed anger with my hands was when I slapped a countertop in 2009.

People think I’m on top of the world because I drive a brand new car. But that car is a rental.

That’s not some deep point. I guess I’m just saying that just because a person’s groomed and driving a shiny car doesn’t mean they aren’t an inch above absolute financial ruin.

I’m just trying to say don’t make too many assumptions.

For some people getting their vehicle towed means taking an uber to a tow lot, swiping their credit card for a few hundred bucks, and then skipping a few visits to the bar with friends. For others, it means the economic ladder they’ve been climbing with arms shuddering from exhaustion for the last five years, as they rise inch by sweat-soaked inch out of the alligator pit that is homelessness, is disappearing from under them, and that they’re going to be living on the street again.

The world is absolutely brutal at the bottom, and sometimes people’s rage is an expression of fear because they’ve been there and they don’t want to go back, and the yawning asshole checking boxes on his paperwork gets to go home and watch American Idol while the paperwork he filed sends you into the gauntlet of terror.

This has already happened. And your prediction is correct: nobody talks about it.

One of my goals lately is to only engage with controversial topics a small amount, with high quality comments.

If something is easy to talk about, I go for it. But highly charged topics, I want to say less of higher quality. That means providing data or other primary sources, and it means drafting things and proofreading the comments.

My reason for this is (a) I don’t think it’s healthy to bite off more than I can chew and (b) I don’t think it’s healthy to bite off nothing. My intention is to do what I can, well.