published helmet research - not troll

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 01:30:52 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Amazing, though, how despite my having posted them *four times* you
have not been able to rebut a single one of the criticisms levelled at
the paper linked above. One can only conclude that you accept them
without reservation.

What criticisms?

Of the 2002 study in IP, based on the figures from the earlier studies
(as pointed out by others) and therefore including the inaccurate 19%
figure as an underlying assumption, these are some of the key
criticisms:

1. The results claim a benefit for the age group 5-12. However,
as the report admits, the results are very sensitive to helmet
wearing rates before the law. This was 87% in the 5-12 age
group, 56% in the 13-18 group and 39% for adults. Because the
wearing rate was already so high for young children,
relatively few helmets had to be purchased as a direct
consequence of the law, resulting in lower user costs than for
older users.

The study takes into account only the cost of helmets
purchased when the law came into force, assuming previous
purchases to have been 'voluntary'. However the 87% wearing
rate was only achieved by a combination of pre-law publicity
and persuading schools to introduce 'compulsory' wearing long
before the law itself. By ignoring the cost of earlier helmet
purchases, the study is misleading and substantially
underestimates user costs.

On this basis alone, helmets are not cost-effective for 5-12
year old cyclists if fewer than two-thirds of the children
would wear one with no external influence.

If only 5% of users would choose to wear a helmet voluntarily
(typical of the Netherlands), benefit:cost ratios fall
generally, to 0.30, 0.36 and 0.43 respectively for the 5-12,
13-18 and 19 year age groups.

2. The head injury reductions assumed for this report are those
arising from Head injuries to bicyclists and the New Zealand
bicycle helmet law. The critique for this key paper shows that
its results are misleading, with no medium term net benefit in
head injuries. If this is the case, the cost:benefit figures
in this paper would be very much worse.

3. The costs assumed for quitting cycling are low in the extreme
at $49.95 (£15.48) per person. This includes just $30 (£9.30)
for costs arising from reduced exercise and increased car use.
By comparison it costs the economy £2 billion per year for
obesity, which is just one of the negative health consequences
when people no longer take regular exercise.

Even these very low costs are ignored by the report for people
who quit cycling in the run-up to the law. In the view of the
authors, fewer people cycling is seen as a positive outcome of
the law.

In addition, the quoted five year life for helmets is invalid for the
under-12 age range; they grow out of them in less time than that
(about 3 years is closer to the mark). This alone may well also
remove the supposed benefit in its entirety.

For reference, I do not know of any jurisdiction where the voluntary
helmet wearing rate for children has been measured as high as 50%;
remember that Scuffham's supposed benefit vanishes if the voluntary
rate would have been as low as 2/3.

As I said, when you posted a rude statement,
I simply skipped the remainer of your posts that day. In fact,
I don't accept anything you've said on the topic, least of all
statements by you that I never read.

Except that the response was posted four separate times and on more
than one day, in response to your repeated refusal to read it. And if
you are going to sulk when people to post ripostes to your playground
insults you really need to cultivate a radically different posting
style. That or a thicker skin.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 01:35:32 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

She
obviously has a political agenda on this topic - mostly related to
helmet laws

And how do you go about campaigning on legislative issues without
engaging in politics? Clearly politics, like helmet research,
recumbents, offline newsreaders, Godwin's Law and time zones is in the
"things Bill doesn't understand" box.

Do you understand the difference between having a political agenda
and campaigning?

Yes, Bill, I do. Having accused me of a political agenda solely on
the basis of having a copy of a piece of draft legislation - a
compulsory helmet law against which I was campaigning - it would
appear that you do not. I also have copies of parts of the Road
Traffic Act and of the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations (strictly
speaking a Statutory Instrument, not a law, of course), on which I
have also campaigned, having been invited to take part in a public
consultation on its revision.

You can read that as a "political agenda" (interesting in context,
since both sides in the helmet debate had copies of the Bill and it
was actually drafted by the Liddites themselves) or you can take it as
a sign of someone who has taken steps to become better informed on the
subject under debate. The consensus seems to be the latter.

I know campaigners against lid laws whose party politics are at
opposite ends of the spectrum. I also know that laws are changed by
politicians, and compulsion is therefore de facto a political issue.

Perhaps I'd take you more seriously if you didn't
go around trying to put words in my mouth.

LOL! Which party does Dorre vote for, Bill? Come on, if her
political agenda is that overt then it must be obvious. Or, since
you've also accused me of having a political agenda, which party do I
vote for?

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 05:20:34 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote (more or less):

"Tom Kunich" writes:

"Bill Z." wrote in message
...
"Tom Kunich" writes:

The same thing happened in California and Bill said that wasn't
so. He told us that the three brands who provided the vast majority
of bicycle shop children's bicycles couldn't possibly have stopped
manufacturing bicycles for children because they were no longer
riding. His theory was that they stopped buying bicycles because
they already had enough. Thereby proving his excellent marketing
skills and knowledge as well.

What I actually pointed out is that the helmet laws were never
really enforced. How is a law that is unenforced going to stop
people from cycling?

Oh, I don't know -- because for kids they were 100% enforced BY THE
SCHOOLS???

The schools have no authority once the kids leave the premises..

That may be true for some jurisdictions, but is not universally true.

The British system has schools retaining a duty of care for pupils on
the way from home to school, and on the way from school to home.

I believe Australia and New Zealand are the same.

--
Cheers,
Euan
Gawnsoft: http://www.gawnsoft.co.sr
Symbian/Epoc wiki: http://html.dnsalias.net:1122
Smalltalk links (harvested from comp.lang.smalltalk) http://html.dnsalias.net/gawnsoft/smalltalk

(Frank Krygowski) writes:

(Bill Z.) wrote in message ...
"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

Amazing, though, how despite my having posted them *four times* you
have not been able to rebut a single one of the criticisms levelled at
the paper linked above. One can only conclude that you accept them
without reservation.

What criticisms? As I said, when you posted a rude statement,
I simply skipped the remainer of your posts that day. In fact,
I don't accept anything you've said on the topic, least of all
statements by you that I never read.

:-) Well, that's certainly a creative excuse for doing no homework!

The rub is this: by your standards - "when you posted a rude statement,
I simply skipped the remainer of your posts that day" - nobody would ever read _your_ posts, Bill!

You should at least work on making your arguments internally consistent!

I've only replied rudely to people who were rude to me, lied about what
I said, etc. 90% of what you've been saying on this thread has consisted
of nothing but personal attacks.


--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 01:33:42 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

As I said, if you start off frothing at the mouth, I'll simply
skip whatever else you might be saying.

LOL! As I said, if you start every post with a playground insult,
expect every reply to start with a riposte.

Every post of yours were I told you off has been a post containing
a personal attack initiated on your part, often misrepresenting
what I said.

to the battle of wits unarmed, the riposte will usually me
considerably more inventive and pertient than your insult.

What "riposts"? All you've done is post one misrepresentation after
another, with childish snide remarks.

But hey, it's a great way of ignoring the facts which tell against
your arguments: ignoring time zones, threading and the characteristics
of newsreaders (most of which read by default in thread order rather
than date/time order) you can start a flame subthread with your
inanities, which as long as it sits above the rest of the thread,
enables you to pretend that ignoring someone's arguments is a valid
response.

The facts are that the first thing you posted as a reply to anything
I said *started* with a personal attack. It's the standard story
from the anti-helmet camp that you joined by aligning yourself with
some of the worst cases on usenet.

Oh, and BTW, I've *gone* through multiple of your messages and they
contained *nothing* but personal attacks one after the other. Then
you whine when I start ignoring you.

Of course, just as with Scuffham, you are the only one who's fooled.

What do you have against Scuffham?

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 01:30:52 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Amazing, though, how despite my having posted them *four times* you
have not been able to rebut a single one of the criticisms levelled at
the paper linked above. One can only conclude that you accept them
without reservation.

What criticisms?

Of the 2002 study in IP, based on the figures from the earlier studies
(as pointed out by others) and therefore including the inaccurate 19%
figure as an underlying assumption, these are some of the key
criticisms:

The "others" are not credible sources. They've consistently complained
about every helmet study showing positive results ever published, no
matter how small a benefit such a study showed. Further more these
same critics heaped praises on Scuffham over the past 10 years or so
(until now.)

1. The results claim a benefit for the age group 5-12. However,
as the report admits, the results are very sensitive to helmet
wearing rates before the law. This was 87% in the 5-12 age
group, 56% in the 13-18 group and 39% for adults. Because the
wearing rate was already so high for young children,
relatively few helmets had to be purchased as a direct
consequence of the law, resulting in lower user costs than for
older users.

But the benefit measured was the reduction in injury-related costs due
to those extra helmets. What's probably going on is that in the older
groups, the people who weren't using helmets simply weren't riding
very much any more anyway.

The study takes into account only the cost of helmets
purchased when the law came into force, assuming previous
purchases to have been 'voluntary'. However the 87% wearing
rate was only achieved by a combination of pre-law publicity
and persuading schools to introduce 'compulsory' wearing long
before the law itself. By ignoring the cost of earlier helmet
purchases, the study is misleading and substantially
underestimates user costs.

The study was about the effigacy of legislation.

On this basis alone, helmets are not cost-effective for 5-12
year old cyclists if fewer than two-thirds of the children
would wear one with no external influence.

That's simply not true. Children in that age group are mostly told to
wear a helmet by their parents. They don't generally decide on their
own, and there basic riding skills and mileage are not correlated with
their parent's purchasing decisions.

If only 5% of users would choose to wear a helmet voluntarily
(typical of the Netherlands), benefit:cost ratios fall
generally, to 0.30, 0.36 and 0.43 respectively for the 5-12,
13-18 and 19 year age groups.

Well, that's obviously not true. The 5-12 group consists primarily
of kids using bicycles for basic transportation or to play with
their friends. For adults and most teens, you get a few who become
interested in cycling as a sport. Most of the others stop cycling
or just ride occassionally for very short distances. The additional
helmets after the law went into effect for adults and older teens
were probably mostly purchased by people who put in very little
annual mileage, with correspondingly yearly low accident rates (due
to so little time spent on a bike.)

2. The head injury reductions assumed for this report are those
arising from Head injuries to bicyclists and the New Zealand
bicycle helmet law. The critique for this key paper shows that
its results are misleading, with no medium term net benefit in
head injuries. If this is the case, the cost:benefit figures
in this paper would be very much worse.

The "critique" is not credible.

3. The costs assumed for quitting cycling are low in the extreme
at $49.95 (£15.48) per person. This includes just $30 (£9.30)
for costs arising from reduced exercise and increased car use.
By comparison it costs the economy £2 billion per year for
obesity, which is just one of the negative health consequences
when people no longer take regular exercise.

How you avoid obesity is an individual choice. You don't have to ride
a bicycle to do that.

Even these very low costs are ignored by the report for people
who quit cycling in the run-up to the law. In the view of the
authors, fewer people cycling is seen as a positive outcome of
the law.

The authors never said that in the paper we are discussing. You made
that up. They merely indicated what the numbers would be if you
included the reductions in head injuries due to that.

In addition, the quoted five year life for helmets is invalid for the
under-12 age range; they grow out of them in less time than that
(about 3 years is closer to the mark). This alone may well also
remove the supposed benefit in its entirety.

You mean a helmet can't be handed down to a younger sibling?

For reference, I do not know of any jurisdiction where the voluntary
helmet wearing rate for children has been measured as high as 50%;
remember that Scuffham's supposed benefit vanishes if the voluntary
rate would have been as low as 2/3.

What's your point on that? Do you think his numbers were not accurate?
If so, why?

As I said, when you posted a rude statement,
I simply skipped the remainer of your posts that day. In fact,
I don't accept anything you've said on the topic, least of all
statements by you that I never read.

Except that the response was posted four separate times and on more
than one day, in response to your repeated refusal to read it.

Yep - you continued your personal attacks so I flushed every post I
saw on a day when you were in a bad mood.. I'm in California. You
might want to look at the time-zone difference. I end up seeing a
list of N messages from you, often all in a row. If the first one
(or maybe two) are just mindless insults, the rest of yours get
flushed.

you are going to sulk when people to post ripostes to your playground
insults you really need to cultivate a radically different posting
style.

Repeating yourself over and over in the hopes that people will believe
you? It is typical of you people.

Bill

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

Gawnsoft writes:

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 05:20:34 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote (more or less):


Oh, I don't know -- because for kids they were 100% enforced BY THE
SCHOOLS???

The schools have no authority once the kids leave the premises..

That may be true for some jurisdictions, but is not universally true.

The British system has schools retaining a duty of care for pupils on
the way from home to school, and on the way from school to home.

I believe Australia and New Zealand are the same.

Both of us live in California (same area.) This discussion came up a
few years ago and Kunich specifically mentioned a town about 10 miles
(16 km) from where I live.


--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 00:45:17 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

LOL! As I said, if you start every post with a playground insult,
expect every reply to start with a riposte.

Every post of yours were I told you off has been a post containing
a personal attack initiated on your part, often misrepresenting
what I said.

I did not start the name-calling, your definition of "personal attack"
includes "riposte to Zaumen's playground insults" and you also have an
unusually broad definition of "misrepresentation".

to the battle of wits unarmed, the riposte will usually me
considerably more inventive and pertient than your insult.

What "riposts"? All you've done is post one misrepresentation after
another, with childish snide remarks.

Said the man who started the playground insults.

But hey, it's a great way of ignoring the facts which tell against
your arguments

The facts are that the first thing you posted as a reply to anything
I said *started* with a personal attack.

That is simply untrue - as you would know if you had not been avoiding
addressing most of my points due to your lack of understanding of time
zones and offline newsreaders.

It's the standard story
from the anti-helmet camp that you joined by aligning yourself with
some of the worst cases on usenet.

Where is this anti-helmet camp? Still no evidence that there exist
more than a handful of people who are anti helmet. Anti bull****,
yes, plenty of those - they are the ones who rebut Scuffham and other
idiocies.

Oh, and BTW, I've *gone* through multiple of your messages and they
contained *nothing* but personal attacks one after the other. Then
you whine when I start ignoring you.

To use one of your favourite words: liar.

Of course, just as with Scuffham, you are the only one who's fooled.
What do you have against Scuffham?

Nothing, other than the fact that he has manipulated the data, working
back from the desired conclusion to the data. He is defending an
unjust and ineffective law which should be repealed.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 00:38:36 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

I've only replied rudely to people who were rude to me

Ever met Ed Dolan? He gets his retaliation in first, too.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 01:07:11 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Of the 2002 study in IP, based on the figures from the earlier studies
(as pointed out by others) and therefore including the inaccurate 19%
figure as an underlying assumption, these are some of the key
criticisms:

The "others" are not credible sources. They've consistently complained
about every helmet study showing positive results ever published, no
matter how small a benefit such a study showed.

Ah, so your benchmark for credibility is that they accept the
small-scale studies despite their flaws? Or is it sufficient merely
to agree with you in order to be credible?

I don't know of any pro-helmet paper which does not contain flaws.
Ultimately the biggest flaw is that the benefit shown is never
delivered in real populations, so the authords have always failed to
account for at least one major confounding factor.

Further more these
same critics heaped praises on Scuffham over the past 10 years or so
(until now.)

That might be because he was originally using the whole time series
and admitting it showed no benefit. Once he reduced the time window
and ignored pre-existing trends in order to prove benefit where
clearly none exists, his stock went down a bit.

1. The results claim a benefit for the age group 5-12. However,
as the report admits, the results are very sensitive to helmet
wearing rates before the law. This was 87% in the 5-12 age
group, 56% in the 13-18 group and 39% for adults. Because the
wearing rate was already so high for young children,
relatively few helmets had to be purchased as a direct
consequence of the law, resulting in lower user costs than for
older users.

But the benefit measured was the reduction in injury-related costs due
to those extra helmets. What's probably going on is that in the older
groups, the people who weren't using helmets simply weren't riding
very much any more anyway.

That is an assumption unsupported by evidence. The criticism stands:
even within the limited scope you suggest, benefit can only be shown
if over 2/3 of child cyclists would have worn a helmet anyway, a
figure which has not, to my knowledge, been achieved anywhere without
compulsion. If one assumes that the voluntary wearing rate would be
under 2/3, as it invariably is without compulsion, then the costs of
helmets outweighs the "savings" in injuries, notwithstanding the fact
that the data had to be massaged to provide the claimed savings int he
first place.

The study takes into account only the cost of helmets
purchased when the law came into force, assuming previous
purchases to have been 'voluntary'. However the 87% wearing
rate was only achieved by a combination of pre-law publicity
and persuading schools to introduce 'compulsory' wearing long
before the law itself. By ignoring the cost of earlier helmet
purchases, the study is misleading and substantially
underestimates user costs.

The study was about the effigacy of legislation.

It was about the cost-effectiveness of the legislation. The valid
criticisms regarding the arbitrary exclusion of much of the cost goes
to the heart of the paper's argument.

On this basis alone, helmets are not cost-effective for 5-12
year old cyclists if fewer than two-thirds of the children
would wear one with no external influence.

That's simply not true. Children in that age group are mostly told to
wear a helmet by their parents. They don't generally decide on their
own, and there basic riding skills and mileage are not correlated with
their parent's purchasing decisions.

Child helmet counts in the UK show consistently under 20% wearing
rates. The voluntary wearing rate has never reached 50% anywhere I
know of. Therefore, by the lights of the paper's own argument,
helmets provide no benefit.

Remember, this paper is not about the safety benefit, it's about cost
benefit. The safety benefit comes from the 2000 selective
reinterpretation of the earlier data, and has already been soundly
rebutted.

If only 5% of users would choose to wear a helmet voluntarily
(typical of the Netherlands), benefit:cost ratios fall
generally, to 0.30, 0.36 and 0.43 respectively for the 5-12,
13-18 and 19 year age groups.

Well, that's obviously not true.

You've run it through the formula, have you? Nigel Perry did, and
that was the answer. This is Scuffham's own formula applied to the
voluntary wearing rate in the Netherlands. Are you saying the forumla
is wrong? In which case the whole paper is wrong.

The 5-12 group consists primarily
of kids using bicycles for basic transportation or to play with
their friends. For adults and most teens, you get a few who become
interested in cycling as a sport. Most of the others stop cycling
or just ride occassionally for very short distances. The additional
helmets after the law went into effect for adults and older teens
were probably mostly purchased by people who put in very little
annual mileage, with correspondingly yearly low accident rates (due
to so little time spent on a bike.)

That is an assumption based on no data, and in any case does not
affect the validity of the criticism. The paper is computing whether
helmets provide a cost benefit, the criticism shows that the
underlying assumptions for costs are wrong, and that if they are
corrected the supposed benefit (applying to a single age group)
vanishes. The report itself shows no cost-benefit for the older age
groups.

2. The head injury reductions assumed for this report are those
arising from Head injuries to bicyclists and the New Zealand
bicycle helmet law. The critique for this key paper shows that
its results are misleading, with no medium term net benefit in
head injuries. If this is the case, the cost:benefit figures
in this paper would be very much worse.

The "critique" is not credible.

By virtue of having been written by people who disagree wioth you? or
do you have some specific insight into the 2000 paper on which the
injury saving data is based? Scuffham originally proposed no benefit,
after all, and it was only by careful selection of data points and
ignoring pre-existing trends that he proved even the small benefit he
says he did (and still a long way short of the prospective studies,
remember). The criticisms look robust to me, having also looked at
Scuffham's earlier work based on the same data.

You need to go back and read both this paper and the one on which it
is based, the 2000 AAP paper. The two are indivisible; a weakness in
the AAP paper is a weakness in the IP paper. It's like a house of
cards.

3. The costs assumed for quitting cycling are low in the extreme
at $49.95 (£15.48) per person. This includes just $30 (£9.30)
for costs arising from reduced exercise and increased car use.
By comparison it costs the economy £2 billion per year for
obesity, which is just one of the negative health consequences
when people no longer take regular exercise.

How you avoid obesity is an individual choice. You don't have to ride
a bicycle to do that.

There is a lot of research out there which shows that riding a bike
for transport is one of, if not the, most effective life choices you
can make in terms of long-term health and fitness.

Our Government are pinning a lot of hopes on that.

Even these very low costs are ignored by the report for people
who quit cycling in the run-up to the law. In the view of the
authors, fewer people cycling is seen as a positive outcome of
the law.

The authors never said that in the paper we are discussing. You made
that up. They merely indicated what the numbers would be if you
included the reductions in head injuries due to that.

The authors show that once you include their supposed costs for loss
of cycling, the cost-benefit is increased. In other words, they are
counting lost cycling as a banfit, which implies that cyclists are
more likely to incur injury costs than to extend their lives. That is
wrong. Estimates vary, but every calculation I know of shows that the
benefits of cycling outweigh the risks, helmet or no.

Of course, it helps if you start by assuming thathelmets prevent a
meaningful number of serious and fatal injuries, but that, too, is
unsupportable.

As to whether the report ignores the costs of those who quit cycling
in the run-up to compulsion, show me where it says they are included.
Compulsion was preceded by a period of intensive propaganda, and
helmet propaganda /always/ portrays cycling as dangerous (how can you
sell someone protection from a non-existent danger?). There is
evidence that merely promoting helmets deters cycling. There is
evidence that the run-up to the law in NZ saw a decline in cyclist
numbers. The authors do not account for that, so they are ignoring
part of the cost.

In addition, the quoted five year life for helmets is invalid for the
under-12 age range; they grow out of them in less time than that
(about 3 years is closer to the mark). This alone may well also
remove the supposed benefit in its entirety.

You mean a helmet can't be handed down to a younger sibling?

Not unless they have the same shaped head (our two definitely don't).
After three years Michaels helmet was in any case pretty much trashed.
The manufacturers recommend that helemts are replaced every 3-5 years,
so by assuming the top of that range the authors are in any case not
being entirely honest. And there are plenty of households with only
one child. The authors also assume that no helmets will be lost,
stolen, trodden on and damaged or whatever. Assuming a 5-year life
for a child's helmet is definitely optimistic.

For reference, I do not know of any jurisdiction where the voluntary
helmet wearing rate for children has been measured as high as 50%;
remember that Scuffham's supposed benefit vanishes if the voluntary
rate would have been as low as 2/3.

What's your point on that? Do you think his numbers were not accurate?
If so, why?

The point is, the authors' assertion of cost-benefit for the youngest
age group is explicitly based on few additional helmets being bought
due to the law. It assumes that without the law and the pre-law
promotion period the voluntary wearing rate would still have been 87%.
This is an invalid assumption. No jurisdiction without compulsion has
ever approached that. I know of none which has exceeded 50% without
compulsion. Actually I don't know of a jurisduction which has
achieved even that without some form of coercion.

If the voluntary wearing rate would have been below 2/3, the entire
supposed cost-benefit for the only age group which shows such benefit,
vanishes.

As I said, when you posted a rude statement,
I simply skipped the remainer of your posts that day. In fact,
I don't accept anything you've said on the topic, least of all
statements by you that I never read.

Except that the response was posted four separate times and on more
than one day, in response to your repeated refusal to read it.

Yep - you continued your personal attacks so I flushed every post I
saw on a day when you were in a bad mood..

Whereas you are only rude on days with a Y in the name. Do try to
elevate the discussion above the level of the playground.

I'm in California. You
might want to look at the time-zone difference. I end up seeing a
list of N messages from you, often all in a row. If the first one
(or maybe two) are just mindless insults, the rest of yours get
flushed.

As previously explained, the threading model of most newsreaders means
that the subthreads higher up the tree, which you dragged into
pointless name-calling some time ago, will always appear first.

And the time zone difference (8 hours) means I am quite likely to be
posting when others are not. Right now it is 9:38am here, 1:38am
where you are.

you are going to sulk when people to post ripostes to your playground
insults you really need to cultivate a radically different posting
style.

Repeating yourself over and over in the hopes that people will believe
you? It is typical of you people.

You will now, of course, post a link to where I said this before. Oh,
I didn't. Zaumen wrong again shock, pictures at 11.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University