The author distinguishes between the need to act hastily to stop a behavior (to protect the cat, in your example, or the child from himself, in the article's example), and what we do as a follow up (time-in spent talking and engaging instead of time-out spent isolating).

As we've known for a long time, positive reinforcement causes people (and animals) to repeat behaviors that resulted in being rewarded. Negative reinforcement, on the other hand, can sometimes stop unwanted behavior, but it can just as easily cause people to become better at hiding it, which is a lose-lose. First there's the loss of trust at becoming the person the child has to fear, and then there's the loss of connection by not really knowing what the child is doing. I'm sure many of us have had "if my parents knew..." moments. Maybe we still do! We hide things from people who punish us. (It's a common problem in adult relationships as well. If our S.O. punishes us for something they don't like, usually by withholding themselves, then we start to hide that part of ourselves from them, and vice versa. Rarely do we change our behavior because we were punished.)

Anyway, I tend to agree that we should use positive reinforcement whenever possible, but it does require a lot more time and energy than negative reinforcement. Punishment is much easier to dole out than finding effective rewards. With dogs, you can reward them with a piece of ham, and it will never get old, ever. With kids, yesterday's reward is today's tedium, but punishment doesn't require much creativity or reinventing (unless you enjoy that sort of thing). And negative reinforcement may not be as good, but it would be a lie to say that it's completely ineffective. And some behaviors are only inappropriate in public anyway, like picking your nose, so it doesn't matter if it's hidden. Negative reinforcement can accomplish that, so it's just a question of whether it's worth the weakened bond.

irregardless of what others want?

Um... yes. Wait, no! Damn, I suck at answering questions posed with made-up words.

Not to mention a computer to access it with, or electricity to power the computer.

Paleo: all meats in america are processed to some level, and red meat has been directly correlated with an increased risk of prostate and colon cancer. various additives like nitrites and processing methods such as using carbon monoxide to improve meat color, actually involve carcinogens or cancer suspect agents in their execution. Factory farming and the prolific use of sterroids and hormones in all american meat have virtually guaranteed an increased risk of cancer. enjoy significantly elevated levels of cholesterol, and supporting a fundamentally unsustainable concept of factory farming that contributes to everything from climate change to aggressively resistant bacteria and viruses.

This is a specious argument, a man of such extreme wealth will have zero problems acquiring whatever form of meat his heart desires. Should he want only American Bison filet every day then he can afford an immense herd where one individual is killed to provide him his daily cut of meat.

Life expectancy didn't exceed much above 30 until the upper paleolithic, around 30,000 years ago there was a steep rise in the number of teeth from individuals older than 30. There were of course those who managed to make it to what we would in modern times consider old age, but from all the evidence we have they were extreme outliers until around that period.

That's a valid concern, but in theory pallets are marked so that you can identify what they're made of, and some of them are just made of untreated wood. I would imagine that this mostly applies to domestic-only shipments.

Yeah, zinc vaporizes right around a mere 500 degrees, you can easily exceed that by burning a stack of pallets. Whoops! Been to that bonfire already.

Conditioning has a lot of scientific basis. A psychotherapist talking about translating neuroscience to raising kids sounds suspicious.

The difference with a 3d moulder being that, instead of taking a couple hours to 3d print a mould, then stop your production line and manually install the new mould in place of the old, then start it back up again you could effectively instantly form 3d mould (via microactuators or whatnot), do a 15 minute production run and make a couple hundred parts, then move on to mass producing the next part you need with no break in-between. Your "factory" could be in full production mode nonstop yet have a single line produce many dozens of different types of parts over the course of a day.

When one thinks of space colony applications, it quickly becomes clear how essential such a thing will be. Even if you try to simplify, you're still going to have tends to hundreds of thousands of types of parts that will wear out with time. Let's say 100k unique types of of parts with a mean lifespan of 3 years - that's probably pretty realistic for a colony. That means you'll have to produce a new type of part every 15 minutes nonstop - with quantities varying from one-offs to the tens of thousands, depending on the part. Now think of how big your typical production line is and how much mass that means transporting from earth. Clearly, rapid production flexibility is critical! (same applies to all steps of the chain, including robotic assembly)

(and yes, I know a single moulder or whatnot cannot achieve all possible production jobs, real production lines involve many types of materials and many processes... it's just an example of a common production mechanism :) )

(as another side note, it should even be possible to make 3d moulds for metals. Carbon fiber cloth - or better, graphite fiber cloth - can tolerate temperatures hotter than many metals, but still has stretch and could be shaped with an array of actuators).

In some cases pallets or even containers are just not allowed into certain ports after leaving certain ports, increasing the destruction rate. Better to just stop using wood. The plastics are very recyclable.

Steel with too high a carbon content to be magnetic is called stainless, unless it's over 4% and then it's called hypereutectic and it's very difficult to produce and nobody is making nails out of it, just like they aren't making nails out of stainless — especially not for pallets.

...someone might actually try to carry out your plan, and then destroy their lungs with zinc from galvanized pallet nails from china.

Seems to me like you're both right and both wrong, because pallets aren't going away, but I can see more conveyors being used to move pallets. You're more right than he is, though, because pallets aren't going away.

Fuck, put some shredded cheese and some old bay into some bisquick already, what year is it?

Who told you that? The Nook Simple Touch has a two-point capacitive multitouch display. I've got one right here.

The oldest tech like this had straight beams and receptors on the other side and was totally digital, but now they can read reflections, so in theory they can have resolution higher than the resolution of the scanning grid.