But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science, example:
There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.
Except I would say that racism/sexism is in hating or discriminating against those who are different. Let's say for the sake of argument that it were statistically proven that black people are better runners on average and physiological reasons for it were scientifically proven. To use that information to discriminate against non-black runners when assembling a team would be racist.
And top hockey players are mostly white, would you therefore say that black people can't perform in the cold and white people are slow, as a rule? Maybe bring that up if there were an article about selecting people for a polar expedition?
"Oh nobody's categorically better, but I think whites generally have better cognitive skills and blacks are generally weak in this area but better at manual labor. NOT RACIST! ^_^ "
Asians in general are natural rule-followers. They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc. Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
But whites are still smarter.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end. Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student Asians I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me, the caucasian, on my laziest B-student day. If you need someone to get the grade, fine--go to the Asian. But if you need someone to get you to the moon--your best bet is still a white person.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
Will this get modded to +5 like the parent post? Why or why not?
Are you serious? GP's post is almost entirely blatant, over-the-top sexism. Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
No, it's not. The purposes of fuel taxes is for road repair. People who drive more on roads are, well, using roads more. With use comes wear. This is why diesel is so heavily taxed at the pump now (in part) - trucks do more wear/tear on roadways.
I fail to see how a mileage based tax - ie a use tax - would not be superior to a commodities tax (fuel), as it would more closely couple the tax and where it's going.
Wear has far more to do with vehicle weight (more specifically PSI road pressure) than distance driven, see this post:
Therefore taxing a big rig and a Miata at the same rate per mile driven is extremely unfair.
The alternative is to needlessly penalize people who drive lower MPG vehicles. You know, the people who can't afford or do not wish to afford a newer vehicle, because there's no point in getting rid of something that works, and their actual use of the vehicle is minimal enough to not justify buying a new one. Taxing the shit out of fuel will, basically, just push people to consume more cars when the old ones are still quite serviceable. (I say this as someone who only drives a diesel '86 Blazer on occasion - less than 5k a year.)
Most older cars that are on the road right now aren't generally bad on gas. Most mid '80s-late '90s compact cars - the kind people who don't have a lot of money to spend on cars drive - get MPG that would still be considered decent today. Anything newer than that should do decently as well.
I might note that 'road tax' on gasoline isn't structured like diesel is, in case you didn't know. Vehicles used off-road are not taxed (due to the availability of 'farm diesel') road tax, which is a significant percentage of the cost of fuel. (This allows farmers and ranchers to not have to pay road taxes to fuel their tractors and farm trucks.) I see no reason why this structure should not also be used for gasoline (especially since I and people like me, as well as all the people with spiffy new TDI cars, still have to pay the added tax on diesel that heavy trucks do).
I agree that's a problem, there's no reason to discourage the use of diesel through taxation these days, taxes should be the same on both.
Of course, needlessly penalizing people who disagree with you is pretty much what progressive government does on an exclusive basis, so, rock on and tax 'consumption' through the roof so that you and your fellow upper middle class friends can keep doing your weekend trips to Tahoe or Aspen without the added costs of paying proportionate road tax.
(I'm going to guess you're also in favor of progressive taxation schemes - just a wiiiild guess.)
I take it you discount the concept of environmentalism and any kind of forward-thinking energy policy in it's entirety? I'm not discouraging the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles because I think it's uncool.
And upper middle class? Weekend trips? Hahahaha! I'm a Gen. Y'er and on top of that, I live in the 3rd world.
You're right, but I propose that it would be worthwhile to effectively subsidize them temporarily through this tax break to spur adoption, for the environmental and national security benefits. Do you disagree?
Miles driven does nothing to the road compared to pounds per square inch. My cars do almost nothing, both are around 2klbs, one is on 195/50/15 tires and one is on 30x9.5"s. Very low psi on the road. Compare to a big rig...every single time one comes into my neighborhood I find new potholes.
Bullshit, what poor person drives a car with poor MPG? They dump them fast and hard and fawn over the hypermiler's favorites like the CRX HF, AE9x-AE1x series Corolla, and Swift. When your car costs less than a high-end laptop, fuel costs are a big deal.
The SUVs that rich idiots drive suck fuel like a black hole, like the Range Rover...anything, BMW X5 and Cadillac Escalade.
It's not unfair to gas guzzlers, it's unfair to people with long commutes regardless of what they drive.
It would be better to just jack up the gas tax. It punishes the wasteful more than the thrifty and is still has some relationship to distance driven. Plus it doesn't punish EV drivers at all, for now I'd think they're worth giving a break.
Or even better yet, start charging big rig operators the lion's share of the road maintenance costs for causing the lion's share of the damage.
Not just people with nice soft office jobs, people who have never known financial hardship. Wanting to work with your hands is understandable, but wanting to suffer the lifestyle that comes with it? Haha it's my second greatest life transplant fantasy after sending a libertarian back to the Gilded Age.
Even besides that, a good idea could be killed off if the initial small sample of voters happens to be uninterested. With small sample sizes comes the potential to gather a highly homogenous group by accident. Post gun control proposal, happens to hit a group with 51 or more NRA members in it, proposal never had a chance at life.
Instead it would be better to allow a larger group in the initial vote, to reduce this chance. The diversity of the group would ideally be maximized by including everyone...oh wait.
If you want to refine the Online Polite Fuck-Off Letter Dispensary then maybe increase the threshold required for a response, or associate some cost (in some virtual point system which all users are given equally) with voting and creating polls so that people won't waste it on bullshit.
(how many people do you know can afford to buy a $200,000+ tank?).
I know a few people with cars that cost that much...go into any major first-world city (especially London) and look at all the $200k+ supercars driving around. Any one of those could be a tank.
The fact that so many bad guys have guns, and they're so easy for bad guys to buy, despite all of the laws against it (I'm confounded as to why these criminals keep violating the gun laws), would prompt a rational person to look for a form of protection. Therefore I conclude that the number of guns a person owns is directly proportional to his sanity.
Do you refuse to drive or eat unhealthy foods? Because those carry greater risks than gun-toting criminals. I drive, eat unhealthy foods, and own no guns, I must be batshit crazy!
LOL keep thinking that those sweet words originally intended to give power only to land-owning white men are so very, very special, and haven't been routinely shat all over and ignored since the days of the civil war.
Slashdot Mirror
I just responded to another post on this very topic:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3358539&cid=42477551
As long as you know.
But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science, example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Ethics_of_research
But in general I would agree with this:
There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.
Except I would say that racism/sexism is in hating or discriminating against those who are different. Let's say for the sake of argument that it were statistically proven that black people are better runners on average and physiological reasons for it were scientifically proven. To use that information to discriminate against non-black runners when assembling a team would be racist.
And top hockey players are mostly white, would you therefore say that black people can't perform in the cold and white people are slow, as a rule? Maybe bring that up if there were an article about selecting people for a polar expedition?
Got any "un-PC truths" to share about race too?
Again, use the race analogy to help yourself.
"Oh nobody's categorically better, but I think whites generally have better cognitive skills and blacks are generally weak in this area but better at manual labor. NOT RACIST! ^_^ "
Fair enough, maybe it is.
Asians in general are natural rule-followers. They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc. Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
But whites are still smarter.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end. Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student Asians I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me, the caucasian, on my laziest B-student day. If you need someone to get the grade, fine--go to the Asian. But if you need someone to get you to the moon--your best bet is still a white person.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
Will this get modded to +5 like the parent post? Why or why not?
Oh you're ridiculously sexist yourself, why didn't you say so when responding to my post?
Are you serious? GP's post is almost entirely blatant, over-the-top sexism. Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
Parent currently modded +4 Slashdotters are Sexist as All Hell
I appreciate your effort to troll us properly, we get too much copypasta and random offensive phrases these days.
No, it's not. The purposes of fuel taxes is for road repair. People who drive more on roads are, well, using roads more. With use comes wear. This is why diesel is so heavily taxed at the pump now (in part) - trucks do more wear/tear on roadways.
I fail to see how a mileage based tax - ie a use tax - would not be superior to a commodities tax (fuel), as it would more closely couple the tax and where it's going.
Wear has far more to do with vehicle weight (more specifically PSI road pressure) than distance driven, see this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3356485&cid=42472203
Therefore taxing a big rig and a Miata at the same rate per mile driven is extremely unfair.
The alternative is to needlessly penalize people who drive lower MPG vehicles. You know, the people who can't afford or do not wish to afford a newer vehicle, because there's no point in getting rid of something that works, and their actual use of the vehicle is minimal enough to not justify buying a new one. Taxing the shit out of fuel will, basically, just push people to consume more cars when the old ones are still quite serviceable. (I say this as someone who only drives a diesel '86 Blazer on occasion - less than 5k a year.)
Most older cars that are on the road right now aren't generally bad on gas. Most mid '80s-late '90s compact cars - the kind people who don't have a lot of money to spend on cars drive - get MPG that would still be considered decent today. Anything newer than that should do decently as well.
I might note that 'road tax' on gasoline isn't structured like diesel is, in case you didn't know. Vehicles used off-road are not taxed (due to the availability of 'farm diesel') road tax, which is a significant percentage of the cost of fuel. (This allows farmers and ranchers to not have to pay road taxes to fuel their tractors and farm trucks.) I see no reason why this structure should not also be used for gasoline (especially since I and people like me, as well as all the people with spiffy new TDI cars, still have to pay the added tax on diesel that heavy trucks do).
I agree that's a problem, there's no reason to discourage the use of diesel through taxation these days, taxes should be the same on both.
Of course, needlessly penalizing people who disagree with you is pretty much what progressive government does on an exclusive basis, so, rock on and tax 'consumption' through the roof so that you and your fellow upper middle class friends can keep doing your weekend trips to Tahoe or Aspen without the added costs of paying proportionate road tax.
(I'm going to guess you're also in favor of progressive taxation schemes - just a wiiiild guess.)
I take it you discount the concept of environmentalism and any kind of forward-thinking energy policy in it's entirety? I'm not discouraging the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles because I think it's uncool.
And upper middle class? Weekend trips? Hahahaha! I'm a Gen. Y'er and on top of that, I live in the 3rd world.
You're right, but I propose that it would be worthwhile to effectively subsidize them temporarily through this tax break to spur adoption, for the environmental and national security benefits. Do you disagree?
I want a laser wallet to store laser beam currency! (That's what they use in the future.)
That'd be the coolest wallet ever!
just that in examples to date they tend to be operated by the few, for the benefit of the few, which tends to be an unstable situation.
Unlike the stable egalitarian paradise we enjoy...
Miles driven does nothing to the road compared to pounds per square inch. My cars do almost nothing, both are around 2klbs, one is on 195/50/15 tires and one is on 30x9.5"s. Very low psi on the road. Compare to a big rig...every single time one comes into my neighborhood I find new potholes.
Bullshit, what poor person drives a car with poor MPG? They dump them fast and hard and fawn over the hypermiler's favorites like the CRX HF, AE9x-AE1x series Corolla, and Swift. When your car costs less than a high-end laptop, fuel costs are a big deal.
The SUVs that rich idiots drive suck fuel like a black hole, like the Range Rover...anything, BMW X5 and Cadillac Escalade.
It's not unfair to gas guzzlers, it's unfair to people with long commutes regardless of what they drive.
It would be better to just jack up the gas tax. It punishes the wasteful more than the thrifty and is still has some relationship to distance driven. Plus it doesn't punish EV drivers at all, for now I'd think they're worth giving a break.
Or even better yet, start charging big rig operators the lion's share of the road maintenance costs for causing the lion's share of the damage.
Not just people with nice soft office jobs, people who have never known financial hardship. Wanting to work with your hands is understandable, but wanting to suffer the lifestyle that comes with it? Haha it's my second greatest life transplant fantasy after sending a libertarian back to the Gilded Age.
Remember the joke Judge Dredd poll a while ago? Happened just as the new Dredd movie came out...odd coincidence.
Even besides that, a good idea could be killed off if the initial small sample of voters happens to be uninterested. With small sample sizes comes the potential to gather a highly homogenous group by accident. Post gun control proposal, happens to hit a group with 51 or more NRA members in it, proposal never had a chance at life.
Instead it would be better to allow a larger group in the initial vote, to reduce this chance. The diversity of the group would ideally be maximized by including everyone...oh wait.
If you want to refine the Online Polite Fuck-Off Letter Dispensary then maybe increase the threshold required for a response, or associate some cost (in some virtual point system which all users are given equally) with voting and creating polls so that people won't waste it on bullshit.
(how many people do you know can afford to buy a $200,000+ tank?).
I know a few people with cars that cost that much...go into any major first-world city (especially London) and look at all the $200k+ supercars driving around. Any one of those could be a tank.
GameboyRMH TheCoolGuy 123 Cyber Street, Lulz City, Hackistan.
The fact that so many bad guys have guns, and they're so easy for bad guys to buy, despite all of the laws against it (I'm confounded as to why these criminals keep violating the gun laws), would prompt a rational person to look for a form of protection. Therefore I conclude that the number of guns a person owns is directly proportional to his sanity.
Do you refuse to drive or eat unhealthy foods? Because those carry greater risks than gun-toting criminals. I drive, eat unhealthy foods, and own no guns, I must be batshit crazy!
American Exceptionalism overpower mode ENGAGE!!
LOL keep thinking that those sweet words originally intended to give power only to land-owning white men are so very, very special, and haven't been routinely shat all over and ignored since the days of the civil war.