My children have received autism-specific therapy and learned key NT social skills from it. I am happy to share my understanding of their experience, but I would ask permission first since this question was directed at autistic people and my official role in the family as dad and husband is being “the most neurotypical one.”

Edit to add: they have learned skills that help them navigate life, including life in a NT dominant world. I hesitate to label them as NT skills because they are used by my autistic children and maybe the actual skill is approached differently, but that is probably pedantic.

I wanna show you a trick mother showed me when you weren’t around.

Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.

My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.

I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.

Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.

It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.

Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.

Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.

You can believe what you want, I guess, but that does not change reality. The company also has a vested interest in marketing your account security. They also lose out when accounts on their system are compromised. It seems a bit ridiculous to say that only one of the two parties who have a vested interest in security here gets to set the rules.

Thank you! I was going to make this exact point. Autocatalytic reactions are assumed with good reason to be a necessary step on the way from non-life chemicals to life, but they are only one step. Carbon is the only element that can form the basis of the huge variety of chemicals needed for the simplest of life to evolve.

When I was an undergrad, I had professors who made completing arguments that live on other planets would not only be carbon-based, but that it likely would closely resemble life on Earth on molecular, microscopic, and macroscopic levels. Survival of the fit certainly depends upon the environment, but it also must comply with chemistry and physics. I am no expert in theoretical xenobiology, but it provides a strong and fact-based counter to the idea that alien life would by default be wildly different from life on Earth.

Having adequate savings and/or additional income absolutely changes the job hunting game. This is one of the big reasons they having a 6-month emergency fund of necessary expenses is critical for financial health. It reduces the needs to make decisions that sacrifice long term benefit for short term survival. Like for many here, $10k is not that number for my household. We need much more in savings for a family of 4 with disabilities.

But let’s talk about how it changes the job hunt. The big answer is that you do not need to take any given offer. You can hold out for the right offer. For my wife, that meant passing up higher-paying contract roles and roles with less-than-ideal management and work life balance situations. When she found the right job, the heading she was working with was very clear, “This is the type of company where the pay will not look as great as some at first. Look at the benefits. Look at the employee reviews. This is the last job I am ever going to find for you.”

Having a safety net let us hold off until my wife found the right job. It was not about “knowing your worth” where you then ask for too much. It was about finding the best match. That ideal match has been very good for my family for many years now.

I am still going strong on Tears of the Kingdom. I love exploring a world I already new with changes and additions. I love having an open world game where I am still mandated to be a good person. I love getting creative with weird things. I love that my oldest kid plays as well and my youngest likes to help me solve puzzles. It has just been a blast for my family.