Too Clever by Half

The reason this is used instead of a fence has nothing to do with the dog's preferences (which of course we can't know), safety, or convenience. Instead, the reason seems to be cost. I don't see how it's possible to justify avoiding the cost of building a fence by mistreating your animals. If the man who has this farm can't keep dogs without delivering electric shocks to them, then maybe he shouldn't have any dogs.

I just watched a white male friend get punished for academic dishonesty because another student cheated off him, despite being able to prove conclusively with logs and other evidence that he had no part in it.

I also just watched another white male friend be discriminated against because of his race in receiving mental healthcare services. This made it necessary for him to change employers and move to another city so he’d have access to the mental healthcare services that up to this point had helped prevent his suicide.

Both decisions were unfair, unkind, and unnecessary, but were arbitrarily decided by a rules maker who had no oversight (a professor and a bureaucrat). In neither case did being white or male help my friends, and in the latter case he was denied limited services specifically because the bureaucracy prioritizes those services for racial minorities.

Seriously stop turning every damn thing into a racial issue with your empirically bullshit identity politics.

Imagine a company that has a single customer. There's a 50/50 chance that the customer will pay. If the customer pays then the company makes a ton of profit, if the customer doesn't pay then the company goes out of business.

For the company, this is probably more risk than they want to take. But there's probably hedge fund out there who has enough money to survive the customer not paying and is willing to take that risk for a fee. So the company can go to the hedge fund and say "if the customer pays us in the future we'll give you all the money. In exchange give us 40% of it right now".

And the company is happy because they have a 100% chance of staying in business. And the hedge fund is happy because (if the risk was priced correctly) they have a positive expected value in the trade.

That's all securitization is.

The OP says.

>> And they’re not that smart. I’d put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers.

From Wikipedia

>> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox." The animal's intelligence gave rise to the epithet "sly coon".[120] Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal's sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques.

Learning speed equivalent to the macaques? You gotta be kidding me. These creatures are underestimated and the author might just not like them?

I mean, look at his eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_... That guy looks really smart and self aware.