Dr. Bob

The issue of when you are an adult is a trickier question than you might imagine. I have written in a previous answer about how children in North America would leave home around 13 or 14. There would be transitional spaces such as rooming houses or boarding houses before they were fully Independent, but they were fully functional “adults” by 15 or 16.

You can see this in the coming of age rituals for various cultures. The bar/bat mitzvah at age 13, the quinceanera at 15, the sweet sixteen for white folks. I do note that many of these are female centered and signal availability for dating/marriage. Boys just became men without much ceremony.

We still have a gradual introduction of rights and privileges with age. In my jurisdiction courts will consider a child’s wishes in divorce starting at age eight. You can be charged with a crime at age 12, you can work for wages at 14, you can drive at 16, vote at 18. Alcohol consumption is 19 where I live but is 18 in many parts of the country.

So why 18? It matches up with other markers of maturation like graduation from high school. Could it be 17? Probably. Should it be 16? Possibly. But 18 used to be an age of independence. You could expect to be leaving home and starting a life separate from your parents. That has certainly changed. If we were to keep things in alignment maybe we should push the age back into the mid-20s? 😆

$20. I don’t enjoy gambling.

Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I’m not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people’s programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.

Jack FM was a joy to listen to - at least in the early days - because they got rid of DJs. They wanted the effect of listening to mp3s on shuffle. I have never enjoyed DJs and I think it’s pretty common. Just play music and back announce the tracks.

I can read French but struggle with spoken French. Hell I can’t even understand some people speaking English and it’s my mother tongue.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

As old as people. I bet when we crack Linear A that will be one the phrases.

My guess is that it’s dumber than we might imagine and guesses on the basis of word frequency without context. Trying to spell foreign words is horrific. I have a comment about a banjo tune called pateroller that a nightmare to get through because it was convinced I was fat fingering the spelling.

It is incredibly useful for individuals. But it is not a diagnosis by itself. It’s an invitation to probe deeper into issues. One thing that people don’t like to hear though is that conditions are exacerbated by excess weight.

The safest way to manage some issues can be to decrease mass, but it is genuinely difficult for people to do, relief is slow, and it feels like a value judgement.

It is a great metric. It is easy to calculate and can be done from historical data where other measurements can’t. It’s not the only piece of information that should be considered though. It’s an indicator not a diagnosis.

Not gonna happen.

More autocorrect. Half my comments are edited because of this bullshit.

Freshman 40? It used to be the freshman 15. Inflation is everywhere.

Go watch Quadrophenia if you can. There is an early scene of Jimmy sitting in wet jeans to get them to shape correctly. The film was released in the '70s depicting the early '60s.

There is something to this but I might have described it differently.

Being obese is seen as a moral failure, and struggling to lose it is a virtue. Drugs are seen as a cheat because you haven’t atoned for the moral failure by suffering, therefore you have not earned the right to be treated differently.

People who have lost weight in this thread talk about how their own attitudes changed. Is that what spurned the change for them or a result of the effects? It’s probably both but it’s complicated. And very, very far from a simple framing like privilege.

In my jurisdiction that is exactly how they do it. No field sobriety test is used. Just roll down the window and blow. Refusal is the same penalty as a DUI and will earn a trip to the police station for the real test.

I knew someone who lived in the same block as a well known motorcycle appreciation society. It was an incredibly clean and safe area. And the local dive bar was fun without a hint of shadiness or trouble. They did not shit where they ate.

No. It was a novel from the 1960s maybe. There was a government department of telepathic planning or something. That scene was where a character was getting a tour of the recruitment facility.

Eta it might be The Demolished Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man

And we still have delivery people. The function has never gone away.