Wondeting what to give people for christmas. Having no energy and no money is a bad combination. One year I planned it months in advance and slowly made everyone hand-made gifts, but although they were touched by all the time and effort, no one really liked them. I think that goes better in movies.

I’m sorry. Just wanted to give you a virtual hug if you’d like one.

Ugh, yours sounds even worse than ours.

We just elected a centre-right party that needed to go into coalition with our most right-wing party, who are libertarians, and our most populist party. They finally formed yesterday and now we have a government that is going to destroy the environment and decimate social services.

I was a bit offended by tourists doing that mmhmm thing until I found out that it’s considered polite in the US.

I was interpreting it as “yes I know you are thankful to me, and so you should be! By the way, I’m an oaf.”

“c’est moi,” meaning, “it’s me who thanks you.”

Ah so that’s what that means. I thought I was mishearing. That’s pretty close to what I was brought up with, “it’s my pleasure” (meaning it’s me who is pleased to be helping).

The informal/vernacular in my country (NZ) is “sweet as” which puzzles most visitors, or sometimes “it’s all good”.

That’s such a cool idea!

That sounds hard.

Do you meditate at all?.Sometimes it can help reset the critical inner voice.

That’s so cool that you’re doing NaNoWriMo! I’ve always felt too daunted by lack of plot. Let us know how it goes!

The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.

We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!

Another way of looking at it is bottle openers look remarkably similar to beetle genitalia.

I think the beetles were here first.

The being baptized part is relevant to converts, and the being a godparent part would have relevance for all transgender catholics.

That would make sense. The cats in my life have always seemed super expressive to me but I was infatuated with our family cat pretty much from birth.

I knew it!! When I was a kid I was told cats don’t have facial expressions but they so do!

Thanks so much, I understand the hypothesis now!!

And that article does show how it could map onto humans. For some reason I had been under the impression that early hominids did not necessarily have the females-as-strangers setup.

It’s interesting to compare with elephants, who are matriarchal. The “Alice” of an asian elephant herd will often stop having kids (though, she biologically still can) so her daughters can have some, even though unlike Charlotte, her daughters are related to her so theoreticly it’s more of a Bob/Daniel situation.

I feel like the stupidest person in the world because I still don’t see the difference between Bob and Alice and now I also don’t understand this part

If Daniel has a child, Bob won’t have a new child, to avoid starving his grandchild.

How does Bob do this? Why doesn’t he just menopause too? If menopause ensures more descendant survival wouldn’t they both do it?

Why doesn’t Alice just die?

The troupe still have to find enough food for her, how is that an evolutionary advantage to keep a non breeding member around?

If something happens to Charlotte now the troupe cannot reproduce unless they go out and find a new female, but if something happens to Daniel then Bob can still reproduce with Charlotte. What is the advantage in that asymetry?

Edit: I was puzzling over the Charlotte factor. Is it more that somewhere along the line the Charlottes of this world were killing the non-menopausal Alices? Because that kind of would make sense.

Thank you so much for taking the time to try to explain it by the way. If you don’t feel like answering my latest round of questions that’s okay!

I’m old enough that a lot of things that were going to take a long time have come to pass, so I feel confident this will come.

AI and genetics are both moving fairly fast, and insurance is about numbers and probabilities.

But isn’t old male and old female POV the same?

For both of them the new babies are biological grandchildren. So why would only one of them want to stop producing more? Why is there not a male menopause?

What am I missing here?

I’m waiting for the part where the US insurance companies are discovered using that data en mass to increase premiums and deny coverage.

That’s going to be my “I told you so”.

And elephants.

Kind of weird though that the males don’t feel the same grandchild pressures.