I have one of the new Nightsters, it’s a harley-davidson that isn’t a vibrating air cooled dinosaur. It’s smooth, fast, and quiet. It handles great. It gets decent gas mileage.
If it’s raining or cold, I drive an old Samurai. It’s not a vehicle for those on the spectrum like myself who have trouble talking to people, because it sometimes draws a crowd.
We got a set of these for our puppy, and she picked up on them pretty quick. We’ve got walk, food, play, and outside. It’s not perfect though. Like she’s supposed to hit the walk button when she needs to go potty, but occasionally instead she’ll take a shit on the floor and then hit the button. “Look dad I pooped on the floor so we can go outside now!” And I feel like a play button may have backfired cuz she slaps that fucker all day long. I mean they aren’t going to train your pet for you but they are a useful tool. I’m much happier that she’s smacking the button instead of clawing at the front door.
Never used those buttons, but my idiot cat does have his ways to tell me what he wants, and some of them are a bit abstract. For example, I tried to teach him to “knock” on the window when he wants to be let out / in so he won’t wail at the top of his lungs in the middle of the night when he wants me to open the window for him. It worked after a few weeks, but what he learned is “knocking on glass = human lets me out” so he will sometimes go knock on the glass door of the cabinet instead and then make a beeline for the window once I open it for him. When I play dumb and open the cabinet instead, he’ll just knock harder or THEN move to the window. He isn’t interested in the actual cabinet or its contents at all.
Tapping a button to let the human know what you want can’t be that much more different / abstract for a pet than tapping on glass. You just have to be consistent in showing them the right behaviour and reward it with the correct action whenever they do it right, so they eventually make the connection.
I currently drive a hybrid escape, ~600 miles per 14.5gal tank, pretty happy with it. Mine has the lane/brake assist but I turned off the lane since my state is so bad at painting lines it was trying to steer me out of lanes due to old lines being still visible or no lines being visible meant it was worthless too. That’s really my only complaint so far, had it 2 years now.
My driving is a mix of city and highway, I average low-mid 40s
I went from £400 a month fuel spend to just over £100 going to hybrid. My insurance came down from £700ish to £450 p/y (all the anti collision toys etc). The services were 4-600 a year now 250-300. It’s been 4 1/2 years and I’m keeping it. It cost me about 10k more than I’d normally pay for a car and I reckon I’ve made my money back and then some. That anti collision stuff has also saved my arse a couple of times.
In Hinduism, Ananda means something akin to ecstatic or joyous, and swamis will often take it as part of their name. Such as Vivekananda, or Yogananda. I’ve always loved that, and Vivekananda is a major player in forming my personal philosophies about life.
About a week from setting up Button #1 “Go For A Walk” and us pressing it before we go for walks to my 5yo rescue mutt pressing it himself when prompted “Do you want to go for a walk?” After about a month he was always hitting the button before we went out but often would come bother us in his old ways (nosing under our hands, whining, pawing at our feet) before he would hit the button to get our attention first.
We added “Puzzle” in month 2 because he only gets treats when he solves a “puzzle” (mix of dog puzzle toys and treat stuffed Kong). That one caught on immediately.
We thought he was getting them mixed up because he would give us all the signs we used to interpret as wanting to go out like a yawn and stretch, hit both buttons, and then stand next to the puzzle basket like we were dumb. We moved the two buttons really far apart.
The reality is he wants puzzles because he’s bored far more often then he ever really wanted to walk, he’s down from 4 walks a day to 2 once we started to trust that he really knew what he was telling us.
We added a “Food” button but he never used consistently because he understands the meal names “breakfast”, “lunch”, “dinner” better then the word “food” for mealtimes. We serve meals at the same time every day anyway so we eventually took the button back up because he never used it.
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