If we're to speak about very specific increments of time and units of reading material -- say, you get to read N books over 1 week -- then sure, the zero-sum argument holds. But a lifetime is so much time, offering so much opportunity to the experienced reader, that time is almost effectively lifted as a constraint.

The only zero-sum quantities in this case are time and number of books. Depth and breadth of subject matter are better described as characterizing subcategories of #_books.

Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.

One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.

When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.

Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.

"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.

You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.

Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.

Those were the days, man.

If milkshakes were illiquid, and could only be bought and sold every N years, that would seem to peg damages to asset value instead of currency value. Or am I wrong?

If we add the condition that milkshakes are not replaceable, does that change the outcome? I'll stfu now if this is derailing things.

Fast forward to the year 2020. Milkshakes are now worth $1,000,000 USD. Have I deprived you of $100, or have I deprived you of $1,000,000? (Note that we can't seem to use retroactive NPV analysis in 2017, since in 2017 we had no way of accurately predicting how milkshakes would be priced in 2020.)

On the one hand, I appear to have imposed a severe opportunity cost on you. On the other hand, I haven't taken the world's only milkshake from you. So what I've literally stolen from you in 2017 is the present value of the milkshake, $100.

IANAL, and I will confess that I have no idea how a court of law would evaluate this case. But in economic terms, it certainly feels as though I've deprived you of more than $100. So what have I actually taken from you?

[EDIT: This post was meant to pose a question. It was not meant as a frank disagreement with the parent post per se. I've cleaned up the wording a bit to try to make it clearer.]

The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that advantage materialize, or the niche appear.

I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger, faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar competitors.

So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee, but it narrows things down quite a bit.

For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species, which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche. Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts haven't been dulled in a fish farm.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence, or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.

The negative reviews are pretty much the only interesting data points on the site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives (especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size of reviews; you are looking at the sample size after the company has culled and gamed what it can, which is often quite a lot of the original pool.

This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.

We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.

Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.

The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).

I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.

Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.

The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.

Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.

Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.

If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.

I will go out on a limb for a second and suggest that the day will come soon enough when the United States formally bends the knee on this issue as well. We are headed in that direction much faster than anyone anticipated.

The 'free world' has chosen to worship the Almighty Dollar as its lord and sovereign. China is where most of your dollars come from now. Ergo, China has the mandate of market-capitalist heaven, and you work for China now.