I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.

I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.

I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.

The tragedy of the commons isn’t that most people take such good care of the commons. I bet people see your tidy walk and feel guilty about messing it up.

Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.

Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.

Only those who return the cart for upright and pure reasons (disorder makes my skin crawl) will escape samsara