AdamSmith

Exactly! Allstate is the devil incarnate. My father had car insurance with them for years, then had one fender bender and whammo! Canceled. Thereafter, whenever insurance came up in conversation, he would put his hands together in the manner of the Allstate logo, intone "You're in good hands with Allstate," then stick out both middle fingers.

Interesting. Odd that McD's comes in below KFC, which I believe must put out competitive bids for chickens with the lowest meat-to-bone ratio. Lots more flesh on Popeye's or Bojangle's chicken by comparison. Also agree Starbuck's coffee always tastes burnt. From buying their beans in the past, my theory is they over-roast them in order to be able to buy variable-quality beans, to put it nicely, and mask the substandard quality. Concur that Caribou and Peet's tend to be much better.

Well, exactly. When I would host a favorite escort, his smell lingering in my sheets and pillows would give balm for days afterward.

I sound like his reincarnation

What else are they made out of?

Well, the flywheel hypothesis I think is unclear even today. Was what the Project did to post-war science productive, or distracting, or evil?

I did too -- we're in close enough quarters together, day after day. I still recall the slightly musky perfume my favorite (female, as it happened) 11th-grade English teacher wore. Also the usually rank BO coming off our favorite 8th-grade math teacher who also ran the chess club. We all thought it was hilarious, and just one more of his eccentricities.

She did elope at 15. He was 19. They were deeply in love for all life, til he passed of leukemia at 64.

I think for the first time ever, you are living down on the first derivative. I have a deep investment in this community, way beyond bull baiting. I said so above, sincerely. Lookin's deeply felt post I presume to say comes from some similar place. The community here, even with its anonymities, and its spats etc., is not a joke, to many of us.

The "farmer" diet indeed sustained our forebears many of them into their 90s or even beyond. My grandmother recounted how, when she was 14, she one time ate if I recall 16 biscuits for breakfast. (American biscuits, needless to say, not faggy little English cookies.) (Whoops, now we need the offensive-language debate again.) but anyway, her mother said, You're going to kill yourself eating. But the girl was the family's breadwinner, the father having passed away 2 years before, and had to go out and chop cotton for hire all day. So those biscuits went to good use. And she was not big: 140 pounds at that age of 14, and got smaller with the years. She btw considered it a godsend to get a cotton mill job at age 15, and get out of the fields. Etc.

Wonder if there have yet been any studies comparing the intermittent-fasting practice against the notion of eating several tiny meals throughout every day? One can see how evolution would have adapted us to both, given the uncertainties of 3-million-year-ago food supplies.

I think the sneakiness is your unwillingness to address the things I set out frankly and honestly.

Very grateful. (There is no appropriate emoticon.)

Au contraire! I would feel honored.

Are you hinting at a group grope? And, come to think, isn't that what we're already doing in this thread? We do all know one another pretty well from being here together, and are obviously mutually invested in the interactions. Look at the energies. I think I want to insist that even the criticisms of one another express some caring and need for one another, one way or another. I start to feel a bit like my beloved Hitoallusa with this line of thought but still, there it is, or part of it anyway. We value one another as community even when we fall into the more extreme nether expressions of each of our particular pathologies. P.S. It continues to amaze how Oz is the one among us without pathologies. How does he put up with us?

I think this about gets to the point. You certainly are. But uniquely among posters here, you can't resist lecturing others on how and what they should post. Why? This to me seems contrary to the spirit and nature of public message boards. We say what the fuck comes to our minds at the moment of posting. I've said this to you before, much to the point of becoming tiresome: if you want a forum to be different, post more yourself of the content you would like to see. But instead, you hector other posters to do what you want. My shrink has a specific term for that pathology: He wants to legislate reality. The underlying pathologies in that urge are obvious, I think. None of that is to deny my own pathologies, needless to say. Just to differentiate them.

How do you measure HAL's "smarts"? Once the refrigerator becomes able to develop a psychosis and consequently decide it needs to terminate my life functions, I will grant your point. Or when it declares: ...I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

ROFLMAO

Seriously: that, as they describe it to me, is their main challenge. You can remove all risk if you simply prohibit the vehicle from proceeding at all. But how to balance the introduction of some risk in order to let the thing proceed down the road, reason at intersections, etc.? Calculating the risk in diving at 10mph vs a reasonable road rate is the central challenge of autonomous vehicles.

If you can give an algorithmic, quantifiable definition of 'doubt,' these guys will pay you millions.

PPS: The job of engineers: (1) To make for one cent that which anybody could make for two cents. (2) To do that while also discovering and mitigating all the ways in which their work could kill many people. A somewhat daunting job description, come to think.

This Stone Age kid needs education: FO?

Indeed. I offer that out of more good will than you would credence, probably. But I do. But your accurate reading of me gave me more help than I have said before. If I could return the favor...