I left my bathroom clock on standard time, because it’s hard to reach. Now I have to remember that it’s correct again.

A lot of people do, it just got me in this case because the meaning of break lined up with the action of turning onto county roads, so I thought it was some special thing.

We couldn’t get new parts from Yugoslavia, for some reason.

Oh, I was thinking of the definition of break, “a noticeable change in direction,” not brake, “to slow or stop by or as if by a brake.” Got it!

They break harder? I’m not familiar with this term, is it a regional thing?

That would explain my first experience driving in Massachusetts. We came down from New Hampshire to pick up a family member at Logan. At one point, I got onto the freeway from an entrance ramp on the right, into stop-and-go traffic, with about 1/4 mile to the left exit ramp I needed to take to the airport. I put on my signal; immediately somebody let me merge. Signal again; immediate merge into the middle lane. Signal and merge into the left lane, again right away. I’d heard about Massholes, so this was perplexing.

Now I understand: They were dazed and confused by the strange, blinking light!

Funny thing, when I moved in, my last apartment had a refrigerator that was made in Yugoslavia. It died.

Respect!

Terrible, terrible advice. That leaves a full car-length of empty pavement with the driver sight-lines of modern SUV and crossover designs. Pickup trucks are worse; I’ve seen pickup truck drivers stop a full 30 feet back. It wastes huge amounts of space on the street, and causes traffic congestion. On the other side of the coin, van and bus drivers can still get right up on your ass when following this advice.

Except you’re not getting along with others, but instead ascribing negative traits (i.e. disagreeableness) to people who may have different neurobiology, instead of having empathy to try to understand how they may experience sensory input differently than you do.

Misophonia, PTSD, autism, ADHD, hypervigilance, and more. There are lots of reasons that loud videos on a phone in a public space can wreck somebody else’s day that they have no control over. Please have some empathy.

Love it!

Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.

It could be highly inconvenient, since the Isle of Mann and Isla Mujeres are so far apart.

If you’re asking whether the binding arbitration clause would apply to the murder case, then no. Homicide falls under criminal law, where the state is the plaintiff. The state didn’t enter an agreement under the TOS. I suppose Disney could try to argue it applies if your legal estate filed a civil suit; in the real case it argued that the arbitration clause applied because the husband (who’d agreed to it) filed a civil suit as the plaintiff.

Instead, Disney would get away with it the old-fashioned way: because it’s a rich corporation.

I think it makes sense in two ways: Some people in right-wing world think that women are property, without individual agency. If another man has been able to have sex with her, you have failed as a Real Man™ to protect what’s rightfully yours, in the same way as you have failed if a fox gets into the henhouse.

Or, a Real Man™ is so good at sex that his wife doesn’t want anybody else. Either way, being a “cuck” means you’re not a Real Man™.

We were jazzed about the local-boy-made-good story, since Tom Wopat was born in the little town of Lodi, Wisconsin (“Home of Susie the Duck”), and went to school at UW-Madison. The car could’ve been named anything, as long as it did those awesome jumps.

He wasn’t a big name here in the Midwest, at least, until he gained national prominence by winning a seat in the Louisiana legislature in '89, thus becoming the face of the pit of foul putrescence at the heart of the GOP. (Anybody who thinks that Republicans turned batshit-evil in 2016 was at least 27 years late.)

That’s literally American history.

I do tend to think of choices that way. The way I understand the human mind is as a rational optimizer of utility. The brain has to balance all manner of competing sensory and cognitive input, and the mind constantly seeks to maximize pleasure and/or relief from distress. (That’s what I mean by utility.) They say that all models are wrong, but some are useful, and this one proves very useful. Instead of dismissing people as disturbed or crazy, look for the pleasure or relief that their mind is optimizing for. Drug users destroying their lives by seeking the next fix do so because the pleasure and relief of the drug is greater than distress from alienating family and friends. This is why people have to hit rock bottom before they’ll kick the addition; it’s when the distress of ruining their lives overwhelms the lure of the drug. This model even helped me understand a friend with schizophrenia. Her decisions were quite rational, actually, but were based on distorted and false perceptions.

Now this is funny, writing it out like this brought a mini-epiphany to me, a different model of what “free will” might mean. Our minds do have the freedom to change and react differently to different sensory and cognitive inputs. We’re not automatons fixed to a preset course of action. And it makes sense that way that even protozoans have some degree of free will. Intriguing!

I think about this a lot, about free will to make a choice in an otherwise-deterministic universe, and the thing that gets me is… yeah, it sort of makes sense if you consider the person making the decision like a black box. A decision comes out, and it seems free.

But what goes on in the box? How can it possibly be free will? If I were making a choice to benefit myself, and I had perfect information about the options and the consequences, then wouldn’t everybody in my position make the same (objectively best) choice? If I make a non-optimal decision because I lack some information, then that’s not free will, that’s due to an external circumstance. If I make a non-optimal decision because I’m not of rational mind, then that’s not free will, that’s either an intrinsic quality of my mind, or due to external influences. If I chose to be intentionally non-rational to prove that I have free will, the idea of free will itself and the need to prove it would be the external influence driving me.

If the choice was just one of just one of preference, then the preference is either one I was born with, or the product of outside influences. Maybe there’s somebody who can logic themselves into liking cauliflower au gratin without reference to subjective sensory experience, or cultural significance, and I just can’t imagine how?

The “utility level” is Madison Gas & Electric’s infrastructure. Our ISP had two independent electrical service connections based on the idea that if one went down, they’d still get power sufficient to run their data center from the other. That would be the case if each connection reached all the way to the generating station completely independently. However, the two substations to which the ISP was connected were linked in such a way that a catastrophic failure of one caused failure of the other, so it got no electrical power.