v for frequency?

And President Biden is not an idiot. Bowman, on the other hand...

Who is about as Irish as Xi or Putin.

I knew an Irish engineer who designed digital video equipment about forty years ago, and there was a famous Irish mathematician:

I believe things are changing there also.

In societies where it would appear that people are polite because they're armed, it's usually the case that they're polite because that's what society expects of them.

Ah, maybe it wasn't just me. I tried the gummies first without any noticeable effect either. Besides being expensive they tasted like a roach rolled in sugar.

Maybe some people get a benefit from CDB but not me. I'm pragmatic. I take turmeric which is supposed to be good for joints. I wouldn't swear one way or the other but the stuff is cheap. Something that is expensive and doesn't seem to have a benefit gets cut from the list fast.

The other part of the equation is the habitat has a very small population. Like a small town being a prick is not a long term plan. It's a long series and it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Another author I enjoy, Fran Porretto, is less optimistic in his Spooner trilogy. Flee the Earth to avoid tyranny and eventually try to reinvent it.

Dueling might be a little extreme but I grew up in a tough, decaying mill town. Being an asshole could have consequences. The internet is the worse case; you can bark like a junkyard dog with no consequence. Why be reasonably polite if nobody is going to physically kick you in the balls?

I'm not sure it's not a chicken and egg scenario. In another post I mentioned the sort of town I grew up in. People were generally polite but there was the realization that if you were habitually abrasive you would get your ass kicked sooner or later. That didn't mean there were continuous brawls but the potential was there.

Of course you can overdo polite like 4 Swedes at a 4-way stop. 'No, you go first, I insist' ad infinitum. I have always been interested how a society develops its standards of conduct. The Swedes are an exaggeration but why are some societies polite and orderly where others are boorish? What happens when you take a polite place like Minnesota and introduce a population from a dog-eat-dog third world setting?

At last a considered, interesting, philosophical statement.

Maybe because that way people help you more.

Yeah, that's why he uses capsules. And makes his own, so he knows what kind of oil is inside.

$100 worth of THC tincture lasts him months. Much cheaper than some of the prescription stuff he takes. We end up in the Medicare Part D donut hole every year. (Which is why Biden's effort to regulate the price of 10 medicines he doesn't take makes us yawn.)

Because politeness fosters politeness.

I struggle with that every day on Usenet. The killfile helps; if I don't see assholes, I'm less inclined to lash out.

Wouldn't someone who is colour blind rely on the position of the lights? Top light is red, bottom light is green.

And thuggery fosters thuggery.

Humans are ultra-social, in that most of them get their beliefs and behavioral standards from the people around them, and not from principles. So a group has unstable, positive-feedback dynamics, Switzerland and Haiti being system states.

And some people would rather steal and rape to get what they want. That couples into the social positive feedback. A safe, productive, civil society needs forces to continuously push it in the right directions, to counter the natural feedbacks being seeded by the bad minority.

They used to hang petty thieves. Now they lock up the Tide.

Usenet, being mostly unmoderated, has terrible social dynamics. The jerks chase the good folks away. Insults become the norm. Envision positive feedback.

In suspect that the red and green lights look a different "colour" even to someone who has red/green colour blindness. The colour blindness cards will be designed to confuse colour blind people.

Breaks down when the lights run horizontally. IIRC the one I saw had red on the left.

It is the single blinking light that can fool some. Friend of mine would always ask if someone was with him, stop if alone as he could not tell the difference.

Switzerland and Haiti don't have a lot in common. Maybe John Larkin could spell out what he had in mind?

A feedback is a force. Greed is clearly one force, and a desire not to get ripped off by greedy people is another. Both have to motivate action before they make a difference. John isn't great on spelling out mechanisms.

Widespread capital punishment didn't prevent petty theft. Too few thieves got caught. With more cops, less draconian punishments work well enough.

John Larkin finds the absence of fulsome flattery insulting, and resents people who won't flatter him, which does lower the tone around here.

There are people who can be polite to people they see as exerting a positive influence - not praising Donald Trump is a good start - but John's idiosyncratic tastes align him with a less constructive crowd.

They might have shrunk it, but it's not gone. The last time I dropped $900 at the pharmacy (on a single prescription), my credit card company texted me over suspicious behavior.

My ex is a Type 1 diabetic so I assume she isn't yawning. Back in the '70s I don't even remember what insulin cost; in other words it was a trivial expense in the greater scheme. My jaw dropped a couple of years ago when a co-worker mentioned what his monthly outlay was.

The technology has advanced in 50 years but the price increases seem to be out of proportion.

I'm fortunate that the only prescription drug I take is lisinopril. Even that is optional but at about $10 for a 90 day supply I figure why not. This spring my doctor left it up to me. In her words 'I don't have a crystal ball and don't know how long you'll live but if it offers a little protection against a stroke you might want to try a low dosage.'

So says the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Of course the US isn't a signatory. The US does have a national standard but some states have their own version. Red on the left of a horizontal light probably is safe unless the local DPW drone is dyslexic.

A friend pointed out an oddity from his years in Japan. Japanese certainly can see green but for historical reasons the word for it means blue. Japan follows the convention but uses the bluest shade of green they can get away with to satisfy the 'green' convention while not going against the language usage so in Japan they go on blue.

I think that fits in with the fallacy that ancient Greeks were colorblind because Homer and the boys named colors differently. Then there was the 'white' statues thing. Better surface analysis showed they were originally painted in rather garish colors.

I saw something different last weekend. The intersection has the blinking light but the side road had a blinking stop sign. By that I mean the standard octagonal stop sign had what looked like flashing red Christmas tree lights around the perimeter. It has to be homegrown.

Apropos: I went to CostCo yesterday and they had artificial Christmas trees and blinking reindeer. Shoot me now.