I think it’s because there’s some unwritten rule about not inducing children to commit suicide. I don’t think a little kid could handle such a curriculum without getting severely depressed and offing themselves. Adult survival of this is much higher, mostly thanks to access to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, something children are not allowed to have access to, given local laws and their status as legal minors. It is correct to lie to them and make them think that if they are good students now they will be successful as adults because they are too young to be exposed to night clubs where 9 to fivers tend to find refuge and a drug dealer at the end of a tough shift to survive and avoid suicide.

To my one downvoter, I really did go to college with this guy and my testimony is true. It was the 1990s. It was Ithaca College. Later in life, the Ancient Aliens documentaries came out. My partner decided to watch them religiously. When I watched an episode with my partner and I saw my former college classmate, I said, “Holy shit! I went to college with this guy!” I have respect for him because, wow, he was a student at the School of Communications and he was doing any of his electives possible in our department in the School of Humanities, Anthropology. He didn’t mind the impatience with him the Anthro profs expressed to him, which was blatant. I even ate lunch a lot with him in the Terraces Dining Hall and asked him lots of questions and got to know him. He was very certain about what he was going to do with his life. I often tried to talk him out of it because it sounded insane to me. And look at him now. Famous and in the media. So famous and in the media we’ve got old memes with his pic. He was from a family with money and I guess he came to the USA to study at Ithaca College’s School of Communications because he thought it was a good fit for him. You know, he was on target and knew what he wanted to do with himself from a very young age. His idea, to me, are ridiculous. But he set out to do what he wanted to do in the media and he did it, with enormous success. Doesn’t mean I think he’s credible. He truly does believe in his theories and ideas, though. He always has, since he and I were 18 years old having lunch in the Terrace Dining Hall. That deserves major respect.

Yeah, I get that. But even antiretrovirals are not available to a lot of people. In Europe they must be approved and some of them are not. The same is true in the USA. Then, in the USA, you have to be able to afford them because your insurance will help you pay for them or you have lots of money. In Europe, where socialdemocracy is still in place, the public health system may or may not decide it’s a thing you can have access to. If it decides you can’t have access to it, you have to pay. So, um, you know, your point is a good one, but it’s a moot point. I also did not directly refer to prophylactic drugs in my comment. You just assumed I was talking about them. Read my comment again and think about what I’ve said here about access to medicines that prevent the spread of the disease. You unwittingly made a ton of assumptions about my comment.

It’s good news for this place in the world and I hope other places in the world pay attention and make these medical marvels available to everyone. In the EU country I live in, you can have access to these kinds of drugs if you say you are a prostitute and you have to somehow prove you are a sex worker to get access to them. It looks like in Innery Sydney, Australia, they actually tried a different approach which made medicine available to people who wanted to protect themselves from accidental exposure. It’s really a no-brainer, medical professionals and politicians: Stop making people feel guilty about having some fun a screwing around with people of the same sex and start helping them protect themselves when they’re just a little too tipsy to think and have an “accident.”

But you see, this approach is an international problem on both sides of the tipping argument. Are you against tipping and think the worker should be compensated by their employer? That’s great. Do you believe in this philosophy enough to actually seek out politicians who will make sure employers compensate the workers? All around the world, it seems that nobody cares that much about workers when it’s time to vote. Workers in countries where tipping is not customary earn a crappy salary that does not allow them to live without depending on the kindness of their families. Good luck making yourself independent of your parents on a typical salary a waiter earns in Spain, for example. Workers in the USA where tipping is all the rage don’t do much better. You can work in the retail industry and earn minimum wage, or sometimes slightly higher than minimum wage and live out of your car or live with your parents. You can work at a restaurant and depend on tips and live out of your car. You can be a visiting professor of sociology at whatever university and live out of your car. In Spain, you can have a PhD and ghost write for full professors and live out of your car or you can wait tables and not have a car and live with your parents. I mean, really. There is no difference in the end. Wages from work are low all around the world. They are low in democratic countries because people care more about some other issue and not about the people who bring food to their table at a restaurant, no matter what kind of tipping culture is predominant in that democratic country.

I mean, law enforcement occasionally uses polygraph tests in their investigations even though that type of “evidence” isn’t admissible in court and, to be honest, what kind of scientific credibility does a piece of technology like a polygraph even have? They’ll use whatever they can get their hands on even if it’s questionable. Some police forces probably even have a psychic consultant or something. It scares me.

I just wonder what it is like to be this poor child. I mean, he’s probably an adult now. If it was my photo being used this way, I would totally put it on my resume when applying for jobs.

Haha! I went to college with that guy. He was all about the aliens when he was just 18 years old in my intro to archaeology class. The professor got really tired of him saying the aliens answer in class about so many things. I wonder if his first word was aliens when he was a child?