I got a Commodore VIC-20 in High School and learned to program in BASIC. My biggest achievement was a simple Defender-like game where I could actually fly a ship around in front of a moving background and fire a laser...all in under 3.5K of RAM with lots of room to spare.

High School was programming in BASIC and FORTRAN on a DEC PDP-11, and college was programming in several languages a PRIME.

Fast forward to my first job post-graduation from college where I programmed in VAX BASIC supporting an unsupported ERP system.

Over the last 35 years, I've programmed in several languages and after a long stint in IT support and management, I'm back to programming in RPG and loving it.

But it was BASIC that got me interested in programming.

If Microsoft wants to treat their OSs like a chromebook, I'm not buying more than one for the household.

Why so many? What is there that only runs in Windows 11 and not under Wine that you need so badly that you're willing to buy an extra computer just for that?

I can give them two more: Catastrophe and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Despite the frequent descriptions of Americans as prudes...

I think that the stereotyping Americans as prudes is just a holdover from 100 years ago or so and that was really just a holdover from Victorian attitudes. Now, there are large numbers of Americans who act like prudes in public because they think it's expected from them while acting much more openly in private, especially when their privates are involved.

Possibly because I limited my question to Christians only. Not being raised as a Christian, there are many things that don't make much sense to me as I watch them from the outside.

40C doesn't mean squat to me...but 107F + does.....

Thank you. I can work with Celsius, but never developed an intuitive feel for it. In this case, however, I knew that 98.6F=37C, meaning that 40C is a tad above normal body temperature.

Not completely. Take a good look at Jewish culture, and you'll see a large component of doing right because it's right, not because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.

I've always thought that it's because they only respond to punishment, not reward.

In your original post, you stated that your wife had a stay in hospital, for which you received no bill, which you said was due to having insurance through your job. That simply wasn't true.

You must either be thinking of somebody else as I've never married, or misreading my post. I wrote that I didn't receive any bill for two weeks in the hospital because the bill was sent to the VA and they dealt with it for me.

Alas, no. My hearing loss isn't bad enough to get an award greater than 0%, although my hearing aids are free. The tinnitus is at 10%, the highest it can go and my diabetes is at 20%. I recently got my non-h lymphoma declared, but as it's asymptomatic, there's no compensation, just the cost of my oncologist taken care of.

I don't consider the VA to be "socialized healthcare;" I earned it by serving my country in wartime and getting shot at. Granted, nobody was aiming at me personally, but I did see six inch shells hit the water within 30 yards of my ship. Second, I was explaining why I sometimes have co-pays but not always. Does real socialized healthcare work like that?

Almost no one in the US has insurance that doesn't have co-pays or deductibles.

I do, and I don't. My healthcare is through the VA, and whether or not there's a co-pay or not depends on what it's for. I have a number of long-term conditions with a co-pay on the medicines needed to control them, but everything I get from them for my diabetes, my hearing issues and my non-h lymphoma are 100% free because they're all service connected. Not only that, back in '22, I slipped on some black ice, came down on my right knee like a pile driver and knew I couldn't get up without help, so I called 911. They took me to the local hospital, about a mile away, where they X-Rayed me and found out that I'd busted my hip. This is a small hospital, and they didn't have an orthopedic surgeon handy, so I ended up in a larger hospital over 100 miles away where I spent two weeks. My bill for that and the physical therapy needed? Zero. The VA paid all of the bills at their rate, and the hospitals were required to take whatever they got as Paid In Full. How many private plans can do that?

I think it says something that if you ask most people if Veterans deserve lifetime care from something like the VA they would agree wholeheartedly, they deserve it.

That's what people say now, and as a 'Nam vet, I'm glad that they do. But take it from me, back then, large numbers of people were so against the war that they opposed veterans getting any benefits, even health care for service related conditions. That's right, they hated the war so much that they thought that those of us who were dragged off to participate didn't deserve long term health care for whatever happened to us over there.

And frankly I don't consider plumbing, ventilation, electricity and/or gas to be something only for the upper middle class; I think the those living in affordable housing should have those things too.

What makes you think that any affordable housing wouldn't have those utilities? There's lots of that kind of housing in New York's housing projects and they all have the needed utilities. What I wrote about is housing that has private homes, either freestanding or as duplexes or triplexes that not only are substantially identical but have a bare minimum of room for the number of people expected to live there and no way to customize their home other than by putting things on the walls and maybe changing the color of the paint on the walls. And that's why I wrote that upper middle class families wouldn't want to live there. They'd want both more space and more control over what their home looks like.

...onsite labor can be extremely efficient and much more flexible in build materials and customization than 3D printing can ever hope to achieve.

This type of thing isn't intended to be used to construct customized houses; it's intended to produce large numbers of buildings that are either identical or in a small number of designs that are rotated, possibly with slight variations in the order, to make the similarities less obvious. You're not going to get upper middle class families to live in them, but they'd be acceptable for low cost housing. Think of the buildings described in Little Boxes slightly over sixty years ago.