A behavioral addiction is a form of addiction that involves a compulsion to engage in a rewarding non-drug-related behavior – sometimes called a natural reward – despite any negative consequences to the person’s physical, mental, social or financial well-being.

A gene transcription factor known as ΔFosB has been identified as a necessary common factor involved in both behavioral and drug addictions, which are associated with the same set of neural adaptations in the reward system. Dopamine is involved.

Behaviors like gambling have been linked to the idea of the brain’s capacity to anticipate rewards. The reward system can be triggered by early detectors of the behavior, and trigger dopamine neurons to begin stimulating behaviors. But in some cases, it can lead to many issues due to error, or reward-prediction errors. These errors can act as teaching signals to create a complex behavior task over time.

There’s no point being smug about not having a gambling addiction if you do in fact have, for example, some sexually related addictive habits or any non-drug related addiction.

I understand how poker machines work, and subsequently have no interest in them. Effectively I have rationalized away this risk, or so I think. It may be that my reward system just isn’t that turned on by the dopey fucking machines. Aesthetically, they displease me.

So the trick is to understand why one can resist one form of addictive behavior and translate those skills into another area. For example, if one has an addiction to sex with inappropriate women one could start viewing women as poker machines with cunts. That might do it.

As an aside, it’s clear to me that poker machine evolved slowly over time to be the mean machines that they are now. But effectively they are robots designed to steal money off people and hand it to a much smaller number of people. And there’s a self-interested whole social and political system around them working hard to maintain their existence.

Assuming that humans are just local concentrators of wealth, these poker machines are simply a means for even more efficient local concentration of wealth.

A shop that is a shrine to the founder, after whom the shop is named. Gross.

Money and happiness can’t co-exist, I’m telling you.

Some people, women, Asians, and particularly Asian women, run as though they’re are preparing to stop running with each footstep.

It’s an upright stance, short steps, straight arms with tiny little arm swings.

Odd. Whence?

It many ways it should be a crime to lack a self-sense of humour. Especially if the lack of one exposes over to emotionally threatening situations which might otherwise be laughed off.

But then, what price youth? Gotta be a caterpillar to be a butterfly. Why then are so many stuck wriggling around, earth bound forevermore?

On such juicy slugs do the Weinsteins feed.

The best way to make an animal extinct is to cut off it’s food supply. Or was that to render the fuckers infertile?

If necessity is the mother of invention, then competition is the mother of innovation. Want Australia to be innovative? Then break up all of our oligarchies.

The war for attention in a clientalistic society favours the promotion of charlatans, liars and thieves.

Innovation needs a competitive environment to thrive. That is, companies must innovate in a competitive environment in order to survive and grow. There is not status quo. No resting point.

Monopolistic and oligarchical environments reduce the need for innovation, unless that innovation is related to further exploiting said monopolies and oligarchies in the interests of a minority over a majority.

Australia is a country of monopolies and oligarchies. Its a mostly hidden antitrust problem. We the human frogs in boiling water have been slowly annealed to the state of bemused compliance. We are however given enough of the spoils to consider ourselves lucky to be here. And if we happen to forget this, our politicians can always point to the hordes of queue jumping asylum seekers trying to join the party.

Antitrust – Although “trust” had a technical legal meaning, the word was commonly used in the US to denote big business, especially a large, growing manufacturing conglomerate of the sort that suddenly emerged in great numbers in the 1880s and 1890s. To be harmful, a trust had to somehow damage the economic environment of its competitors.

In Australia, we have taken a different approach. We condone large monopolies of the corporations that provide our services. We do however have a show pony ACCC, that takes the cricket bat to small entities in a mock show of antitrust fervor.

All this is to prove, once and for all, that the current focus on innovation is simply a marketing ploy by various agencies. They want to appear cool and sexy, while still serving the same old monopoly masters that reward their political dogs eventually.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Is economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories.

I love it when academics talk about the rest of the world as industry.

The episodic memory

Is the type of memory where you remember things because of the location or time or place or the people with whom they happened to you

The memory is basically metatagged with external data that you experienced

And I reckon you have a poor episodic memory

(As opposed to the semantic memory which is a memory for facts and knowledge per se)

Anyway

Turns out we use our episodic memory to “imagine future events”

So guess what

It’s unlikely you are very good at imaging future events.

Power and sex. Ugly mix.

Dishonest sex? One party’s after marriage and kids and the other is after a root. That ok?

When is it ok?

On the rare occasions that both parties just want a good time. Maybe they should pay each other $300, just to be sure.

No amount of education of boys will resolve this paradox. They’ll just get smarter at pretending.

Truth is, all our issues resolve themself in sex. Evolution sees sex as the goal of all efforts. The universal solution to all questions.

Technical unemployment will hit the all sectors and especially the services sector and people in it that look at screens for a living.

There has been a lot of speculation as to to what society will look like in the dystopian unemployed future. My guess is that the wealthy that benefit from all that AI and machines will use their wealth to have cheap servants from amongst the unemployed. No, they will seek to have slaves.

This because people cannot really feel better about their wealth unless they can contrast it to the position of others without. It is why we humans have always been attracted to slavery.

Truth is, you can’t have both the money and the love.