I think I've seen the 'J' dynamic before, but also it only "works" because others options are also in common use and so there's denyability of what's happening.
There is one other common case IMO: Monkey see monkey do. The "I have no idea what to say in the context and feel the need to say something/anything". Which has some in common with the empty platitudes one but may not be shallow as much as simply can't find words.
Maybe, but for modern-ish humans in western cultures cats aren't prey and really never have been. Certainly never to the extent that torturing non-prey animals for fun has been. AFAIK that behavoir is currently considered a predictor for escalating to similar abuse against humans.
Contrast that to society's reaction to meat production: don't make them suffer needlessly, or at least don't make me watch/know about it.
In the least convenient possible world, everyone has impulses to dominate others and would find that power directly enjoyable because they all have the same brain hardware. Many have the means at some point and try it; those with early failures are deterred, the rest find they like it. Most are ultimately deterred or constrained by some combination of reputational, social, cultural, or moral reasoning – they don’t stop such behavior but do reach equilibrium and stop escalating for lack of actual or perceived means. The remainder eventually become your serial abusers. This drive is not easily removed or isolated because it’s integral to how we process status hierarchies and social situations. Society has exhausted all low hanging fruit for pushing the numbers at each state as low as possible. Any mind we might construct that must process and participate in status higherarcies is suceptable to the same drives.
Here’s to hoping it’s not really quite that bad…
Strong upvote as I find this is a very useful lens for parsing this kind of behavior from others and checking such impulses in myself. Importantly, this also opens a whole other dimension for resisting bullying: One need not be able to win the specific game the bully wants to play (e.g., prove who's stronger and can win fights), mere be able to credibly threaten their status another way. Framing it as a negotiation over status ties up the strong majority of this behavior IMO.
Mind you, there's still the kid that thinks lighting a cat on fire is delightful fun - whole other league of not right in the head. I'm not sure the above being 90% right fundamentally alters the main thesis of the post. There are people who enjoy having absolute power of life or death over something or someone else; I’m not convinced that is truly a different impulse than the one that leads to bullying as much as a matter of degree.
Your assertions about that formula don't follow; while it is monotonic it converges to a finite value. E.g.for 'small number'=0.1, 'calendar age'= 30 at reproduction this converges to a base age at birth of 3.333 repeating and base age of 33.333 repeating. Inverse exponential beats linear (and polynomial) functions.
More directly on topic, germ line damage control doesn't need to be all that good to keep aging related damage from building up. Anything under unity converges with that model and anything under about half converges to something reasonable.
That last paragraph has some merit. Plenty of folks need some help, guidance, or oppertunities in some form or another, but all the largest providers of such help have a perverse incentive to keep people dating longer - it's the only way they retain customers. To the extent someone tries to run such a business on recurring charges, customer retention will inevitably become a KPI and of course you get what you measure... Obvious fix to that is flat fee, pay only if successful pricing model (or similar). At minimum, we need to stop incentivising these services to be as terrible as they can get away with at what is obstensively their main function.
It seems the same incentives exist to a lesser degree with self help books, especially at the publisher level. If the problem actually gets fixed the customer no longer needs self help books.
That seemed like the objection is more, it's going to be a slave to the existing orthodoxy as far as what's important/promising, rather than the politians, and the former is even worse if you're expecting novel thought or research directions. Not sure to what extent that's actually true but reporting structure does matter; especially the topmost layer that still has strong technical opinions.
Battery backups work well for electronics and small appliances for up to 30-60 min outages, but are likely prohibitively bulky and expensive to run everything. Presumably on a condo it's possible to convince other owners to pitch in in on a generator for the community, probably through the HOA.
This is largely discounting the third scenario, advertiser or viewer is actively hostile. Top comment above goes into the first of those two, but ads are frequently a gateway to all manner of scams, cons, and fraud. A cost largely born by those far less clever and more vulnerable than those participating in this discussion. On the other side, you've got things like click fraud. While not huge relative to ad volume, the costs and externalities are also huge compared to the money changing hands in these transactions normally and probably tips the scale significantly.
It seems a more durable policy has a much greater chance of surviving a bankruptcy, divorce, or other financial upset (far more common in a lifetime that folks care to admit) that could wipe out savings or assets. We shouldn’t underestimate the value of separation/legal protection for the assets we want to use to fund cryopreservation. This doesn’t seem to be covered at all in mainstream financial advice and that seems like a mistake. Specifics are hard to come by, but cash or investment accounts are effectively fair game if you owe anyone money for any reason. Accounts that have more strings attached on how you can spend the funds (e.g., various tax-sheltered accounts, trusts, presumably life insurance) seem to have proportionally more protection from being seized, at least to a first approximation, but as I said, seems to be very under documented. I'd be eager to hear about it if someone had more luck hunting down that info than I did.