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It was more profitable for Ford to accept the losses of 2,400 dead and horribly burned customers than to weld on an $11 patch over their gas tanks. So, yes I think under the right conditions, safety might be more expensive than assuming the costs of a crash for a fixable problem. After all, we have history to prove that companies have chosen profits over the civic or morally right thing to do.

Obama saying that blacks have a disadvantage after a shooting is race rioting, but retweeting an open neo-nazi and calling Mexicans rapists isn't???

It is exactly the same thing, to a conservative snowflake.

Its a well-researched psychological phenomenon known as white fragility. Read that paper and so much ridiculous behavior by easily triggered racists will suddenly make complete sense.

You'll also understand why they are so fond of calling liberals "snowflakes" and accusing them of being "triggered" -- they are just projecting.

These types of academics are not interested in demonstrating the existence of these problems. They start with the assumption that the problems exist. Instead, they seek to "reveal" the ways in which the problems exist. You don't need to take my word for it though. Whiteness Studies scholar, Robin DiAngelo, can do it for me.

Whiteness Studies begin with the premise that racism and white privilege exist in both traditional and modern forms, and rather than work to prove its existence, work to reveal it.

White people are paid more than non-whites for the same products on eBay. That is white privilege in action. Whiteness Studies scholars do not need to demonstrate this premise. They assume it. Now, the only task of the Whiteness Studies scholar is to reveal how that is the case.

That's how these studies work. If you question their premises, then you are being racist, sexist, whatever-ist because you are denying the reality of these problems and demonstrating your privilege. (Or, in the case that you happen to be part of the underprivileged group and criticize the premise, you're engaging in internalized racism, sexism, whatever-ism.)

Lee Iacocca, is that you?

Let's try that link again, shall we? It might not work...

Just as long as Lee Iacocca is not in charge...

The bullying they're concerned about mostly involves gay kids. From the paper: "Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year old boy from Williamsville, near Buffalo, NY, took his life after what his parents claim was yeas of bullying because of struggles with his sexuality." "Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers student, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after two classmates secretly taped him during a sexual encounter with a man and broadcast it over the web."

One of the papers cited is "LGBT and Allied Youth Responses to Cyberbullying: Policy Implications" On page 128 (the paper starts at journal page 115), after discussing how big a problem this is for gay youth, they remark "This finding somewhat contradicts a study by Smith, et al. (2008) on cyber- bullying in secondary school, which did not factor the characteristics of sexual identity and gender identity into the equation. Instead, they found that secondary school students, in general, recommended as their best coping strategies in coun- tering cyberbullying both blocking and avoiding messages, and telling someone when they were being cyberbullied." The key point here is that relatively simple avoidance strategies work for hetrosexual kids, while gay kids have much worse problems. They often can't get help from their parents. "Family rejection is often more feared than victimization or harassment. ... a significant percent of LGBT youth are forced to leave home once their sexual or gender identity is questioned by family members, and approx- imately 20-40% of all homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender".

So this really isn't a free speech problem at all. It's a parenting problem.

Well, it just occured to me that one image is worth one thousand words. Here's a pattern that disrupts even a human brain, badly. Try to focus on it. Heck, set it at someone's background wallpaper if you're pissed off at them.

http://www.uncg.edu/%7Ewhanthon/illusions/optical_illusion.jpg

(And no, it's not the goatse pic. Much as that's been known to disrupt human thought patterns, this time we're talking just overloading the image processing;)

So basically now think an animal with maybe 1/10 of your optical nerve's bandwidth, and even less neurons in their brain dedicated to processing the image. I have no doubt that a zebra's pattern appeared and thrived because at some point it had the same effect upon some predator (who needs to estimate distances very accurately) as the above-linked wallpaper.

I wish we had this in my Economics Department... Video games for college credit is possibly the best idea ever.

If Civ counted for History credit, I'd probably have a PhD in it by now.

I know someone is going to bring up the topic of laptops being easy to steal and stuff, but at my school, all students are required to register their MAC address before they are able to connect to the network. Your MAC address is then assigned to a hostname based on your user ID (example: studentid.uncg.edu), so it is relatively easy to track down stolen laptops.

iPods and cameras, on the other hand, are a different story.

Stop allowing companies, the federal, state and local governments to use your SSN for identification purposes, in any case when it doesn't match certain exemptions it MUST be optional. READ the back of your social security card, stay informed and if this isn't a case of a need to change your social security number, I don't know what is.

Private businesses can request your SSN if they want... you don't have to give it though. But if you don't, they don't have to give you whatever you're looking for either :)

However, UT is a public school and is subject to the restrictions on government agencies... here's a page with some info on the use of SSNs in public schools.

Anyways, as a former UT Austin student, I'd be annoyed if my SSN was one of the ones that got out... and if so, I wonder how UT plans on contacting me--as far as I know, they don't have my current address, phone number, or any other type of contact info. As a side note, the first year I was there (1988), a lot of professors posted exam grades outside the classroom indexed by SSN... I guess someone put a stop to that :)