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[chris_notts]

Or, going the other way, how about a species bird-like in behaviour? A lifelong pair bond would be driven by a not-quite-human notion of love; and how about the strong need to defend a territory at all costs?

Lifelong pair bonds are the ideal in several human societies. I'm surprised you regard us as 'not-quite-human'.

That was awkwardly phrased, sorry. What I mean is that in several bird species, lifelong pair bonding seems to be a biological imperative -- which isn't the case in humans. (Some would suggest that we have a biological imperative to the contrary, but I'm not opening that particular can of worms...)

There's clearly a continuum. We're probably (maybe?) the most monogamous of the great apes, but:

(a) Numerous human societies allow men to have multiple wives (the converse is far more rarely sanctioned)
(b) Even when not officially sanctioned, cheating and affairs are very common, not to mention the modern acceptance of sex without any established relationship
(c) Even when humans are monogamous, they are serially monogamous. Almost everyone dates and has sex with multiple people before eventually finding the partner they settle down with.

There are clearly species more monogamous than us, in that (a) monogamy is a species-wide phenomenon, without a cultural component, (b) there is less cheating, and (c) there are fewer life-time partners than the average modern human has.

[Pabappa]

I spent all night looking for this comic. A lot of other people have done the same joke, some with people vomiting on each other, etc but i like this one because it's "cute":

https://pleated-jeans.com/2012/10/09/if ... ds-4-pics/

The TV series Mork & Mindy revolved around the premise of a species that is superficially human but lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young ... but they seem to have only mentioned this once during the entire run of the series and it apparently wasnt really "about" that so much as it was about the star of the show not fitting in behaviorally.

Its a gross violation of all scientific principles I know, but I could at least suspend disbelief long enough to take in a story about a culture of humans that is exactly like us except that they lay eggs. Perhaps there could be 600 babies in one clutch, for example, and ... well, it probably gets pretty dark right from that because that's going to lead to a massive infant mortality rate but I bet someone's already written a story like that and explored the negative consequences.

[Richard W]

(a) Numerous human societies allow men to have multiple wives (the converse is far more rarely sanctioned)
(b) Even when not officially sanctioned, cheating and affairs are very common, not to mention the modern acceptance of sex without any established relationship
(c) Even when humans are monogamous, they are serially monogamous. Almost everyone dates and has sex with multiple people before eventually finding the partner they settle down with.

You'll find a good many hits on 'avian adultery'. I quickly found

Now, with the use of advanced techniques to establish paternity, biologists are finding that, on average, 30% or more of the baby birds in any nest were sired by other than the resident males.

Point (a) is a matter of economic opportunity. Point (c) has a lot to do with successfully avoiding pregnancy.

As to the oddness of the emotion, well, 'married love' is often reckoned to be different to 'romantic love'.

[Linguoboy]

The TV series Mork & Mindy revolved around the premise of a species that is superficially human but lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young ... but they seem to have only mentioned this once during the entire run of the series and it apparently wasnt really "about" that so much as it was about the star of the show not fitting in behaviorally.

It was mentioned more than once. Their starships are also shaped like eggs, so they were a theme for various bits of comedy (e.g. Mork tossing chicken eggs into the air to "teach them to fly" or stuffing caviar back into fish while saying "Return to mother ship!").

In the fourth season, the principles get married and Mork lays an egg than hatches their son. Since it had already been established in the course of the series that Orkans age "backwards" relative to humans, the child was played by beloved comic Jonathan Winters, who was 56 years-old at the time.

[alynnidalar]

Perhaps there could be 600 babies in one clutch, for example, and ... well, it probably gets pretty dark right from that because that's going to lead to a massive infant mortality rate but I bet someone's already written a story like that and explored the negative consequences.

Not necessarily that dark--they would probably just not view new hatchlings as properly "alive". Humans kind of do this already. (yes, this is an imperfect analogy, but bear with me) We don't perceive unfertilized ova as being alive or having much value; hundreds die every month (in addition to the one that's subject to ovulation and is lost through menstruation) without us having much concern over it, as we have literally no way to prevent it (and no reason to want to). Even fertilized eggs are lost with enough regularity that medically speaking, pregnancy isn't seen as starting until implantation. In a species/culture like you outlined, they would probably feel similarly unconcerned about the loss of "hatchlings" until they hit some other development milestone that indicates they have a higher chance of surviving.

[Ares Land]

You'll find a good many hits on 'avian adultery'. I quickly found

(...)

Point (a) is a matter of economic opportunity. Point (c) has a lot to do with successfully avoiding pregnancy.

As to the oddness of the emotion, well, 'married love' is often reckoned to be different to 'romantic love'.

Oh, sure, there's quite a lot of variation among birds, and a lot of adultery even with species that typically pair-bond.

If we consider, say, ravens... I think there haven't been any studies on adultery in ravens, but AFAIK there aren't any cases of polygamous ravens, even with plenty of resources. Which can be interpreted in economic terms, by the way: reproduction is extremely onerous for male ravens, as they feed the female while the eggs are incubating.

Its a gross violation of all scientific principles I know, but I could at least suspend disbelief long enough to take in a story about a culture of humans that is exactly like us except that they lay eggs.

The implications would be quite impressive. I'd be tempted to forget about large clutches; it'd make sense for sentient species to have fewer children -- although you could make it work; octopuses have a huge amount of larval offspring and they're pretty smart.
If they incubate these, you're probably looking at very different gender roles. Either the female or the male may incubate, and if -say- the female incubates the eggs, someone has to feed her.

Marvin Harris has put forth fairly convincing arguments tying a lot of our cultural features, from sexism to war, to the need for birth control. (Very short version: if you treat women consistently worse than males, you end up with a lot of agressive males -- good for defense -- and a restricted number of women, which helps keep population stable, which can be extremely useful for a given group with restricted resources).
What happens if a species can control population growth just by destroying the eggs, or not caring about them? For that matters, ravens (them again) and crows don't mate, period, even when pair-bonded, until they canbuild a nest and they won't build a nest until they're able to claim a territory. Again, the equivalent behavior is considered an ideal by many cultures, but they often fall short of it -- whereas in ravens, it seems built-in, so to speak.

[alynnidalar]

Incidentally, while it's hardly an in-depth analysis of the situation, one of the conflicts in the Mass Effect videogames centers around the problem of an intelligent species that lays very large clutches of eggs. The krogan hail from a brutally deadly planet; most eggs/infants don't survive due to predation, etc. However, once exposed to modern technology and science, large numbers of krogan who otherwise would've died young begin to survive to adulthood, resulting in quite a lot of social and political problems.*

* explaining this is irrelevant to the topic at hand, hence the footnote, but if you're wondering: basically, the krogan population boom leads them to forcibly settle a large number of planets. This leads to war, but as they're basically the toughest species out there and now one of the faster-reproducing ones, conventional methods don't stop them. A different species instead infects them with the "genophage", a nebulously defined bioweapon that resulted in genetic mutations leading to severe drops in reproductive viability. This is supposed to make the krogan become less violent so as not to risk their population... it does not. It's an interesting situation from a social/political perspective, even if the actual science is pretty handwavey.

[Pabappa]

The guy whose comic I posted here is apparently into shop-dropping.

He goes and puts his cheaper products in CVS, Dollar Tree, etc and just leaves them there so people will find them and say "w...what?" and presumably go online and find the products he really wants to sell. He's clearly counting on people noticing his "company's" brand name, which is Obvious Plant. At first, i thought he was actually getting stores to agree to sell his products .... but he explained on one post that he's slipping items one at a time onto store shelves, with no price tag or anything. just a toy or other item with the "obvious plant" logo somewhere on the package. e.g. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_nSys0HAiZ/

Since presumably no store will attempt to actually charge a customer for that product, anyone who wants the item they see can take it for free. Perhaps there have been some awkward situations at the stores and Im sure @obviousplant gets a kick out of that.

__________

Yes, I suppose its true that if a 90% infant mortality rate were an unavoidable consequence of how we reproduce, we wouldnt have quite the same reaction to each individual infant death that we do when it happens in our world. And if we laid 600 eggs at once, either the babies would have to be absolutely tiny or else our bellies would have to be ridiculously huge. So perhaps 600 is too much.

It's also possible that wombs are able to do things that eggs cannot .... I've heard people talk about pregnant women getting cravings for certain foods, and I dont know if it's actually true, but perhaps this is a biological response to the baby's needing a certain nutrient at that exact time. That way even if the mother is temporarily not getting enough nutrition, it can be made up for in a relatively short time. Whereas if you lay eggs, the developing embryo's entire supply of nutrition is pre-packaged, and if it somehow isn't enough, or was lacking in some key nutrient when the eggs were first laid, tough luck, there's no getting more.

I dont know if the claims of the baby communicating through the placenta are true .... if they are, though, that suggests that live birth is advantageous for the health of the baby even over and above the matter of infant mortality.

[Moose-tache]

For any small business, market access is always the hardest part. I make a pretty mean BLT, but I could never make a living selling sandwiches, because I have no way of getting to hungry people other than shouting at them from the side of the road with a sandwich in my hand, or getting a job at someone else's sandwich shop. So the appeal of shopdropping or other retail hacks is obvious. But retail businesses survive by investing in market access and then recouping those losses through markup. Shop dropping is basically a supplier saying "thank you for putting in the hard work of reaching customers by buying real estate and advertising and sales staff, but I'd rather enjoy those things without letting you get your cut, thank you." On a small scale, this is sleazy. On a large scale, it threatens the viability of the retail outlets that these shop droppers are happy to rely on.

Anyone feel particularly untroubled by the moral implications of shop dropping?

[zompist]

Anyone feel particularly untroubled by the moral implications of shop dropping?

Um... no?

Dollar Tree: 15,000 stores, revenues $22 billion.
CVS: 9600 stores, revenues $134 billion.

These small businesses will survive.

[Pabappa]

You both have good points about shop-dropping in general, but I think I'll give @obviousplant a.k.a. Jeff Wysaski the benefit of the doubt here .... he is only putting his wares in stores like CVS, etc, and his products have essentially zero overlap with what those stores are actually trying to sell. So he's not harming any small businesses other than those who sell gag products like his, and that's only if his product placement is actually effective at bringing him new customers.

Which leads me to my main point .... he may not be doing this for the money. I sense a mischievous instinct behind it all, that although he certainly will draw in a few customers doing what he is, it's probably far less than what he gets through his Instagram account, which has 500000 followers and regularly gets 50000 likes on each post. He's an artist, and he may just get a kick out of making his mark on the world. It's the same feeling I got more than twenty years ago when, at one of my very first jobs, I brought in some of my childhood books and just casually worked them into the book section, complete with price tag stickers saying that they cost $0.00. There was no way I could make money off of that, ... I did it because it was fun. I never got to see a customer go up to the register with one of my books, perhaps because I did this towards the last few weeks of my time there (I think I was only there for one summer, anyway), and I only worked evenings after school. Was I just being generous? I was, but I have to admit I enjoyed playing out the scene in my mind that I assumed would take place when a customer, probably with a young child, would go to the register with one of my books.

Its just a hunch ... just like my original post was a hunch .... that Wysaski may be a bit like me, in that although he needs to make a living, he also wants to have fun even if it isnt going to bring in a lot of money.

edit: as for why i didnt just give the books away .... i was young then, had no car, and no internet access, so .... yes, i couldve asked my mother to give them away to someone else, but other than that i had no other way to get rid of them, so i just did what gave me pleasure.

[zompist]

I only just noticed the "untroubled". So just to clarify, my point was that these are huge businesses and they're not hurt by this prank.

[Linguoboy]

You both have good points about shop-dropping in general, but I think I'll give @obviousplant a.k.a. Jeff Wysaski the benefit of the doubt here .... he is only putting his wares in stores like CVS, etc, and his products have essentially zero overlap with what those stores are actually trying to sell. So he's not harming any small businesses other than those who sell gag products like his, and that's only if his product placement is actually effective at bringing him new customers.

It never occurred to me that the genius behind Obvious Plant was making any money at all from his pranks. I would never have thought of actually contacting the artist and asking to buy one of his creations. From what I can tell, their chief purpose is to drive traffic to his webpage, which must make him some money off ad sales and the occasional commission. He probably has a Patreon, too, I suppose. By the idea that this is some kind of viable business model for small creators--let alone that it represents any sort of threat to giant retailers--is nothing short of bizarre to me.

[alynnidalar]

Yeah, I assume most shopdroppers are doing it as art, or for the fun of it, or to make a political statement. They're not doing it on the scale you'd need to make money or actually disrupt normal business.

I mean, think about it on a practical level. To effectively drive people to your business, you would have to get their attention with your product, make it clear to them that the product is actually sold by you and not the store they found it in, and make it so valuable or interesting to them that they would go out of their way to go to your website or whatever and make a purchase from you... as opposed to just buying something in the store they're already in. To increase the odds that people will see and be interested in your products, you'd have to place a LOT of them on the shelves of a LOT of stores--which, of course, only makes it more likely that store employees will find and remove your products (which will decrease your profits again because a) fewer customers seeing your products and b) you're out whatever it cost to make the removed product).

Or, if the idea is to disrupt a store's normal functioning, again, to do so you would have to put massive quantities of product on the shelves, enough to actually confuse a large number of customers and cause them to stop shopping there, over an extended period of time, before the store would actually be negatively affected by your actions. And that's just not practical to do without being noticed by someone who will tell you to stop.

[Kuchigakatai]

How to tell the YouTube video player (or is it the HTML5 player?*) was not designed by East Asians: if you click on the bar that shows you where in the video you are, and then press the PageDown key, it actually goes earlier in the video. And if you press PageUp, it goes later.

In East Asian languages, "up" is earlier and "down" is later, but this is clearly not following that convention.


* I don't know how or why, but Firefox does not let me inspect the HTML of a YouTube page. Everything is extremely slow when I try to poke around, and the Inspector selector doesn't even let me select the video frame. I wonder whether this is hard-coded behaviour that Firefox has on YouTube... I've never seen the inspector getting extremely slow like this on any other website... The other possibility that occurs to me is that YouTube has so much Javascript this is what ends up happening as the browser struggles to render it all. But I find that unbelievable. I've loaded miles of a Facebook page before and obtained the HTML off it without much problem (literally off the Inspector), and that did not deter Firefox the way a silly little YouTube video page does!

[KathTheDragon]

I would actually expect PageDown to go later in the video, on the analogy of it scrolling "later" on a page.

[Moose-tache]

Archaeologists refer to time as moving "up," i.e. the "Upper Cretaceous" is the late Cretaceous, since the most recent layers of sediment are usually at the top. Maybe Youtube's UI was designed by archaeologists?

[Kuchigakatai]

Archaeologists refer to time as moving "up," i.e. the "Upper Cretaceous" is the late Cretaceous, since the most recent layers of sediment are usually at the top.

Really? That's very nice. It does make perfect sense as a metaphor there...

[Pabappa]

Very odd UI design there. At first I thought you were using a standalone app, but I reread your post more closely and then confirmed that it does actually behave that way on the web. I had never noticed because i either use the mouse the whole way or use the J/K/L keys to seek back and forth.

Regardless of language I still think it's an odd decision, since nobody writes bottom to top and therefore the latter half of a clip will always be on the bottom in any visualization where the frames are spread out and dont all fit on one line.

[Kuchigakatai]

Very odd UI design there. At first I thought you were using a standalone app, but I reread your post more closely and then confirmed that it does actually behave that way on the web. I had never noticed because i either use the mouse the whole way or use the J/K/L keys to seek back and forth.

Me too, or also the left and right arrow keys. I only noticed it yesterday because I happened to do it accidentally.