Yes, your boss IS an idiotic sack of crap. You should definitely just walk out and quit tomorrow.
Of course I don't mind that you didn't get home in time to walk the dogs like you promised. No, I'm not mad that they destroyed the rug.
That's hilarious! I've never heard that joke before!
You're absolutely brilliant. I wish I had thought to say that.
Of course I don't mind if you don't want to listen to me talk about my day. It sounds like your day was pretty tough already.
I'd love to have your friend Jake over for dinner! He always has the most entertaining stories about the women he dates.
Of course, in order to be truly successful, the app would also have to disable the husband's sarcasm meter. Fortunately, in many models, the sarcasm detectors seem to already work at reduced capacity around women (quite possibly because there's a glitch in the programming that incorrectly flags women's intelligence too low).
OC forgot the first rule of successful trolling: you need a sufficient threshold of people falling into the targeted category before any of them will start feeding you.
Speaking as a married woman who would LOVE her husband to actually give an honest opinion when she asks him a question and finds it infuriatingly patronizing when people assume that the fact that I don't dangle my most vulnerable parts between my legs somehow, for some bizarre reason, translates into me being too stupid to know better than to ask questions I don't want to hear the answer to -- guess what: when I ask an honest question, I want an honest answer. If you men are too wimpy to handle that, please stop blaming women for your insecurities. And if you men are too self-absorbed to pay to attention to your wives, LEAVE. Go be alone. Or are you afraid?
BTW, when your wife asks you how she looks wearing whatever she has donned, she does NOT want an honest answer. "You look fine" or "You Look LOVELY" or something like are the only acceptable answers.
Yeah, because (1) women aren't diverse individuals and can therefore ALL be written off as wanting the same thing, and (2) women are delicate flowers whose genteel emotions can't handle hearing that a particular outfit isn't flattering, even when they have SPECIFICALLY ASKED for an outsider perspective on the matter.
Justice is the judges job to ensure everything proceeds fairly. lawyers only care about winning their case.
Yes and no. Do you know many actual lawyers? While it's true that we're ethically required to put our clients' interests paramount (and by "ethically required" I mean that if we breach this obligation, we face consequences up to and including disbarment, as in it would then be against the law to continue in our profession), and while it's true that, as in any profession holding the promise of some worthwhile amount of money, there are plenty of legal professionals who ignore any internal moral compass they have, it's equally true that there are many, many lawyers who not only care about justice, but who actively work on persuading their clients to seek just outcomes. Those who have never hired attorneys are likely unfamiliar with what an attorney-client relationship looks like from the inside, but in my experience it's exceedingly rare to have an attorney pushing his or her client to litigate aggressively. Far more often, we're the ones trying to reign in the rabid pit bull clients, detailing the uphill battles they'll face, incessantly reminding them of the potential risk and consequences of litigating aggressively, and encouraging reasonable settlements. It's easy to paint lawyers as bad guys because we are literally legally prohibited from sticking up for ourselves at the client's expense.
Not all tax rules are designed to structure incentives. Sometimes they are purely designed to re-internalize externalities. Cribera's suggestion is that parents create positive externalities for society, so a child tax credit is a way of re-internalizing part of that positive externality.
But again...why should the childless be subsidizing that cost of having a kid for those that choose to do so by us paying higher taxes for their priv to do this?
My point was that it isn't necessarily a flat-out subsidy. Because the tax deduction is a fraction of the cost of money you're pretty much necessarily churning back into the economy by virtue of your higher consumptive needs, one could make the argument that it's not a subsidy at all, but rather a recognition of the immediate boost to GDP occasioned by the introduction of more consumptive spending into the economy. Or, here's another possible way to look at it: every individual gets a tax deduction for his or her own existence. Everyone. Every last person. That's the "standard deduction." Everyone gets it (or, at least, has the option to take it if they don't want to itemize their deductions). I haven't checked how the child tax credit works but if I'm not mistaken it works out to saving most people less than they save thanks to the standard deduction. So, in a sense, it's kind of like the law treats the kids as partial people who get a partial tax deduction just for existing. They don't get as much as a full person would get for existing, but they also don't earn income/contribute their own taxes yet either.
My guess would be that the other commenter properly registered the business, and the address fell into an area zoned exclusively for residential use. The reason for properly registering your business is so you don't incur massive fines if and when the city figures out that you're running a business (which, assuming one is properly filing taxes for the business, will not be difficult to do -- and if one is not properly filing taxes for the business, one incurs the risk of going to jail for tax fraud).
As someone without kids, I'd like to point out that you're ignoring the contributions to consumptive spending made by people with children. I'd love to be able to take my dogs as tax deductions like people with kids can do with their kids, but, to be fair, the tax deduction is a tiny fraction of the actual cost of raising a kid. What I get for not having kids is a hell of a lot more disposable income, which also means I get to save more of it and put more of it toward things that might take longer to get pushed out into the economy (i.e., an immediate bump to GDP as opposed to a long-term bump -- you need a balance of both in a healthy economy), and which uses will in the long run benefit me more and possibly get tax-favored status (e.g., investments).
There are PALENTY of valid complaints to have about the child-rearing among us, but complaining about a relatively small tax break they get strikes me as a little bit ignorant of the cost of actually HAVING the kid. Now, you want to complain about something, I'd suggest complaining about baby showers, where well-intentioned friends are basically expected to step up and flat-out **buy** the happy couple the shit they'll need for the incubating gremlin, while subjecting you to ridiculous games that tend to smack of some unpleasant combination of inanity and sexism. AND THEY DON'T EVEN SERVE ALCOHOL AT THESE THINGS.
Sure, your article proves your point and mine. Since it validates both claims, do you think it is worthwhile for either?
Then perhaps your earlier point was inartfully put; you said that anyone wearing purple glasses was likely to be "more-or-less unattractive" simply by virtue of being outside of the norm. Putting aside questions of the percentage of people superficial enough to be swayed by something as minor as the color of someone's glasses, the article I linked suggested that people "outside the norm" -- where "norm" here, presumably, means inoffensive, unremarkable, and vaguely attractive features -- aren't "unattractive" so much as not universally found attractive, BUT considered significantly more attractive than the norm by those who DO find them attractive. In other words, I don't think it would be fair to say at all that someone outside of the norm would automatically be considered "unattractive." It would be far more accurate to say that that person would likely get more attention, both positive and negative. "Less" attractive, even, MAYBE, if you consider attractiveness a quantifiable feature derived from averages (I don't, but YMMV).
Anyway, my point wasn't to suggest that anyone is *actually* more or less attractive than anyone else, because, as you note, attractiveness is considered to be subjective (I tend to agree, personally; finding that certain things like symmetry and defined cheekbones tend to be considered attractive by most people doesn't by itself prove anything, and the existence of outliers -- i.e., individuals who do not find such features attractive -- itself means the term "universal" is technically inaccurate). I'm honestly not sure what your point is about opinion pieces backed up by "science." I'm not offering an "opinion" here, just an observation that your use of the word "unattractive" in reference to someone wearing purple glasses was not the most descriptively accurate choice.
I'm replying late since you did, so I presume you don't have a problem with late replies. As humorous as I found your self-righteous preamble, I'll spare you mine.
Basically, you are saying "So what if bad statistics lead to faulty conclusions about one gender? People make faulty conclusions about other gender based on its "otherness" all the time."
Sigh... no. Nope. Not what I said, and not what I meant. There was some heavy sarcasm sprinkled in my last paragraph, and while sarcasm is difficult to translate from the written word, it was pretty damn blatant (and presumably the source of your odd note about "full emotional," which I'll chalk up to a combination of fatigue inhibiting reading comprehension and a veiled reference to quasi-ironic ableist humor rather than sexism). I'll try to explicate and see if that helps you out: my point was NOT, as you assume, that since sexism causes bad things to happen to women, therefore it serves you guys right, too. My point, rather, was twofold: first, I suspected (and still suspect) that you were willing to apply a harsher critical lens to this study because it happened to implicate the male gender (this is very common in society -- there's a lot of work I'm not going to rehash here going into the different ways that information about men is evaluated versus how information about women is evaluated -- this is part of how sexism is insidious and ubiquitous). Second, to the extent that you were implicitly fretting over any problems with using the study to draw broader conclusions about men in the abstract (and there is a valid concern there; assuming the study is factually valid -- and you've still yet to identify actual problems with it -- those facts don't tell us anything about the group of Men as a whole), it seemed an opportune time (particularly given all the unironic "wimmins is sneaky" comments getting crazy upmods left and right) to point out that, hey, what do you know, how about that, lazy thinking can be bad for men too. It was less a substantive point regarding the wrongness of sexism (to be clear, it's wrong no matter which way it cuts) than it was an implicit chastisement against hypocrisy, I suppose, though perhaps not entirely fair, as I can't *conclusively* prove from your comments that you're particularly sexist. So, yes, I made some assumptions about you, just as you made assumptions about me. It happens. I would've thought the relevant xkcd would have clued you in to the flippant tone, but different strokes and whatnot.
I'm going out of order here, but you brought up a point without finishing: whence the implicit accusation of cognitive dissonance in my post? Unless you're referring to your belief that I'm misreading the study, which results, rather embarrassingly, from an unfortunate **second** misreading on your part.
And it IS, unfortunately, another misreading. Here's your "gotcha":
Ugh... I am really sorry... but you are taking that quote out of context and using faulty logic on it.
Okay, first off, speaking as a philosophy major, it's like nails on a chalkboard when people misuse the word "logic" the way you just did. Good god please stop. If you want to tell me I'm misreading or misunderstanding it, go nuts. But the only "logic" I'm applying to it is implicit (the proof would go something like "abc words written in English have xyz meaning; the words set forth here are abc words words written in English; therefore, the words set forth here have xyz meaning," etc., etc. Boringly banal stuff. Unless you meant to make an epistemological point about assuming coherency and constancy and the existence of an objective universe and such, but I didn't get that vibe from your post. Let me know, however, if I'm wrong there and you really were trying to start a debate about whether or not language is an objectively meaningful communicative form, and/or whether or not you and I actually exist.) "Logic" doesn't mean any kind of argument. It refers to a v
It isn't that it's illegal to inform the customers about your costs -- hell, as long as it isn't in connection with a planned IPO/attempt to sell non-registered securities, you're free to set up a booth where customers can peruse copies of your entire accounting records if you want. There is no law that prevents you from informing your customers of the costs of business and your profit margins. There are plenty of reasons not to do it, but illegality is not one of them.
Instead, what this means is that now businesses can discriminate against customers who don't have the cash to pay for their purchases. While I understand that a credit-based economy has a lot of problems, not least of which is the upward transfer of wealth, at the same time, it is a reality that many households rely on credit to get by, especially in an economic downturn. So, for those who need to save their cash for rent and put groceries on the credit card, this is now just another example of ways in which it is literally more expensive to be poor than it is to be wealthy.
Huh...really? My bank doesn't do that as long as I use one of their ATMs.
Bolded the important part. How far out of your way do you need to go to find one of your specific bank's ATMs before the cost of doing so exceeds the value of avoiding the surcharge? For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, twice minimum wage, if there isn't one within walking distance, it frankly isn't worth your time to seek it out. If you're thinking about it in advance and stop on your way to the store, okay, fine -- but it only makes sense to plan that way if you already know you're going to a cash-discount place. I don't know, maybe some people plan that far ahead, but honestly, frequently my shopping trips are more along the lines of "oh, I forgot I need to get this" on my way home from work or something. Just another reason to be glad I live in California, I guess.
Speaking of which, I hadn't realized credit card surcharges are illegal here. I can think of a handful of gas stations I regularly drive past that do this. I wonder if they have special dispensation, or if they're just blatantly thumbing their noses at the law? Because I don't make a habit of carrying $50+ cash on me at all times (and don't exactly plan out a schedule for when I stop for gas), I never stop at these places out of sheer loathing. Wonder, too, how it is that services like Square and Paypal get around it for California customers...
My experience with small banks has been that they don't just fuck you over same as the big banks, there's also the greater likelihood of incompetence. I know others have had better experiences, presumably with different local/smaller bank chains than my experience, but there's your contrary data point fwiw.
Nowadays I bank with USAA. You can't buy insurance unless you are a member, but anyone can set up a bank account with them. I have banked with Wells Fargo, Citi, Chase -- every last one of them has made me angry enough to swear at the poor underpaid customer service lackey who isn't allowed to put me through to anyone with actual authority. I have NEVER had a serious problem with USAA. The biggest problem with them is that sometimes my payments actually take the 48 hours they warn you they may take to process (and it only feels like a "problem" because it usually doesn't -- I am unbelievably spoiled with this bank).
Personally, I'd love to see some kind of legislation setting minimum fairness/customer treatment standards at the level of the banks with the highest customer satisfaction ratings (USAA often tops these lists). That'd be a rare law that would wind up setting the bar higher and higher. Which is also why it'll never happen...
Sneaky behavior triggers physical abuse. Female ability to manipulate does same thing, hence, all violent crimes man do.
Wow. Usually people try to hide their victim-blaming by dressing it up in fancy words and pseudo-science. Not you. Nope, you'll just dive right in there and come right out and actually go ahead and SAY that women are to blame for being abused because they're sneaky.
Confirmation bias? More like cognitive dissonance -- on your part.
I.e. Percentages match in the case of "all science and engineering fields" - let' narrow the field to only "life sciences".
Whoomp! There it is! There are more misconducts among males in general, than there are males in life sciences.
You either didn't read the article carefully or didn't understand it. From the article: "...nearly all instances of misconduct investigated by the ORI involved research in the life sciences, and the proportion of male trainees among those committing misconduct was greater than would be predicted from the gender distribution of life sciences trainees. Males also were substantially overrepresented among faculty committing misconduct in comparison to their proportion among science and engineering faculty overall, and the difference is even more pronounced for faculty in the life sciences (5)." (Emphasis mine). In other words, they weren't cherry picking a damn thing. They didn't need to limit it to life sciences to find the disproportionate misconduct. That's just where it was most egregious. Playing with the numbers to make them say something different isn't going to change the findings. I don't even understand your bizarrely cryptic note at the end about the fact that there are 49,810 -- ZOMG TEN -- men in life sciences. It doesn't seem that's even an actual literal number, but instead something you got to by plugging percentages into your calculator. This proves.... what, exactly?
Perhaps instead of feeling like your masculinity is somehow threatened by the fact that in the upper echelons of academia, EXTREMELY PRIVILEGED AND POWERFUL MEN tend to be worse actors than their extremely privileged and powerful female peers, you could instead put your energy into, I don't know, something actually useful. And if you're afraid that the numbers about a specific subset of powerful people might lead people to draw unfair conclusions about your gender as a whole, well, gee. What on earth would make you think people might respond so unfairly. Perhaps, I don't know, maybe the fact that this is what people do to women all the time?? How about that -- maybe the problem, then, isn't the facts, but the sexism. Almost like the feminists have a point or something.
In most places, women weren't even 'people' till about 500 years ago. and is some places they still aren't.
Based on the fact that the top comment wastes no time getting to the sputtering about how the study must be flawed because wimmins is sneaky, I'm somewhat inclined to think slashdot one such place.
Telling that his first thought is "find a woman to do this," without thinking about the potentially horrifically dangerous consequences for such a woman, rather than "build an artificial womb to do this." You don't go straight from "huh, injecting this cell into this virus seems to kill it" to "human trial sign-ups start in February!" At least not if you have a modicum of ethical decency and/or empathy for the human subjects in question.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm angry that I don't have mod points to give you and angrier that apparently no one else caught the North Korea reference.
Of course I don't mind that you didn't get home in time to walk the dogs like you promised. No, I'm not mad that they destroyed the rug.
That's hilarious! I've never heard that joke before!
You're absolutely brilliant. I wish I had thought to say that.
Of course I don't mind if you don't want to listen to me talk about my day. It sounds like your day was pretty tough already.
I'd love to have your friend Jake over for dinner! He always has the most entertaining stories about the women he dates.
Of course, in order to be truly successful, the app would also have to disable the husband's sarcasm meter. Fortunately, in many models, the sarcasm detectors seem to already work at reduced capacity around women (quite possibly because there's a glitch in the programming that incorrectly flags women's intelligence too low).
OC forgot the first rule of successful trolling: you need a sufficient threshold of people falling into the targeted category before any of them will start feeding you.
I use to be in a relationship with one. I cannot stress enough how important it is to stay away from those relationships. :)
And, on behalf of feminists everywhere, thank you for avoiding us. I assure you the disinterest is entirely mutual.
"Brilliant"? Well, fuck. Have you heard the one about the rabbi and the priest? Because I'm about to BLOW YOUR MIND with comedy genius...
Speaking as a married woman who would LOVE her husband to actually give an honest opinion when she asks him a question and finds it infuriatingly patronizing when people assume that the fact that I don't dangle my most vulnerable parts between my legs somehow, for some bizarre reason, translates into me being too stupid to know better than to ask questions I don't want to hear the answer to -- guess what: when I ask an honest question, I want an honest answer. If you men are too wimpy to handle that, please stop blaming women for your insecurities. And if you men are too self-absorbed to pay to attention to your wives, LEAVE. Go be alone. Or are you afraid?
BTW, when your wife asks you how she looks wearing whatever she has donned, she does NOT want an honest answer. "You look fine" or "You Look LOVELY" or something like are the only acceptable answers.
Yeah, because (1) women aren't diverse individuals and can therefore ALL be written off as wanting the same thing, and (2) women are delicate flowers whose genteel emotions can't handle hearing that a particular outfit isn't flattering, even when they have SPECIFICALLY ASKED for an outsider perspective on the matter.
Justice is the judges job to ensure everything proceeds fairly. lawyers only care about winning their case.
Yes and no. Do you know many actual lawyers? While it's true that we're ethically required to put our clients' interests paramount (and by "ethically required" I mean that if we breach this obligation, we face consequences up to and including disbarment, as in it would then be against the law to continue in our profession), and while it's true that, as in any profession holding the promise of some worthwhile amount of money, there are plenty of legal professionals who ignore any internal moral compass they have, it's equally true that there are many, many lawyers who not only care about justice, but who actively work on persuading their clients to seek just outcomes. Those who have never hired attorneys are likely unfamiliar with what an attorney-client relationship looks like from the inside, but in my experience it's exceedingly rare to have an attorney pushing his or her client to litigate aggressively. Far more often, we're the ones trying to reign in the rabid pit bull clients, detailing the uphill battles they'll face, incessantly reminding them of the potential risk and consequences of litigating aggressively, and encouraging reasonable settlements. It's easy to paint lawyers as bad guys because we are literally legally prohibited from sticking up for ourselves at the client's expense.
Not all tax rules are designed to structure incentives. Sometimes they are purely designed to re-internalize externalities. Cribera's suggestion is that parents create positive externalities for society, so a child tax credit is a way of re-internalizing part of that positive externality.
But again...why should the childless be subsidizing that cost of having a kid for those that choose to do so by us paying higher taxes for their priv to do this?
My point was that it isn't necessarily a flat-out subsidy. Because the tax deduction is a fraction of the cost of money you're pretty much necessarily churning back into the economy by virtue of your higher consumptive needs, one could make the argument that it's not a subsidy at all, but rather a recognition of the immediate boost to GDP occasioned by the introduction of more consumptive spending into the economy. Or, here's another possible way to look at it: every individual gets a tax deduction for his or her own existence. Everyone. Every last person. That's the "standard deduction." Everyone gets it (or, at least, has the option to take it if they don't want to itemize their deductions). I haven't checked how the child tax credit works but if I'm not mistaken it works out to saving most people less than they save thanks to the standard deduction. So, in a sense, it's kind of like the law treats the kids as partial people who get a partial tax deduction just for existing. They don't get as much as a full person would get for existing, but they also don't earn income/contribute their own taxes yet either.
My guess would be that the other commenter properly registered the business, and the address fell into an area zoned exclusively for residential use. The reason for properly registering your business is so you don't incur massive fines if and when the city figures out that you're running a business (which, assuming one is properly filing taxes for the business, will not be difficult to do -- and if one is not properly filing taxes for the business, one incurs the risk of going to jail for tax fraud).
As someone without kids, I'd like to point out that you're ignoring the contributions to consumptive spending made by people with children. I'd love to be able to take my dogs as tax deductions like people with kids can do with their kids, but, to be fair, the tax deduction is a tiny fraction of the actual cost of raising a kid. What I get for not having kids is a hell of a lot more disposable income, which also means I get to save more of it and put more of it toward things that might take longer to get pushed out into the economy (i.e., an immediate bump to GDP as opposed to a long-term bump -- you need a balance of both in a healthy economy), and which uses will in the long run benefit me more and possibly get tax-favored status (e.g., investments).
There are PALENTY of valid complaints to have about the child-rearing among us, but complaining about a relatively small tax break they get strikes me as a little bit ignorant of the cost of actually HAVING the kid. Now, you want to complain about something, I'd suggest complaining about baby showers, where well-intentioned friends are basically expected to step up and flat-out **buy** the happy couple the shit they'll need for the incubating gremlin, while subjecting you to ridiculous games that tend to smack of some unpleasant combination of inanity and sexism. AND THEY DON'T EVEN SERVE ALCOHOL AT THESE THINGS.
Maybe the flags were also meant to be ironic. HOW META.
Sure, your article proves your point and mine. Since it validates both claims, do you think it is worthwhile for either?
Then perhaps your earlier point was inartfully put; you said that anyone wearing purple glasses was likely to be "more-or-less unattractive" simply by virtue of being outside of the norm. Putting aside questions of the percentage of people superficial enough to be swayed by something as minor as the color of someone's glasses, the article I linked suggested that people "outside the norm" -- where "norm" here, presumably, means inoffensive, unremarkable, and vaguely attractive features -- aren't "unattractive" so much as not universally found attractive, BUT considered significantly more attractive than the norm by those who DO find them attractive. In other words, I don't think it would be fair to say at all that someone outside of the norm would automatically be considered "unattractive." It would be far more accurate to say that that person would likely get more attention, both positive and negative. "Less" attractive, even, MAYBE, if you consider attractiveness a quantifiable feature derived from averages (I don't, but YMMV).
Anyway, my point wasn't to suggest that anyone is *actually* more or less attractive than anyone else, because, as you note, attractiveness is considered to be subjective (I tend to agree, personally; finding that certain things like symmetry and defined cheekbones tend to be considered attractive by most people doesn't by itself prove anything, and the existence of outliers -- i.e., individuals who do not find such features attractive -- itself means the term "universal" is technically inaccurate). I'm honestly not sure what your point is about opinion pieces backed up by "science." I'm not offering an "opinion" here, just an observation that your use of the word "unattractive" in reference to someone wearing purple glasses was not the most descriptively accurate choice.
"Outside of the norm" isn't synonymous with unattractive. In fact, it's been suggested that people with less-conventional features provoke more varied and extreme reactions, including both repulsion and extreme attraction.
I'm replying late since you did, so I presume you don't have a problem with late replies. As humorous as I found your self-righteous preamble, I'll spare you mine.
Basically, you are saying "So what if bad statistics lead to faulty conclusions about one gender? People make faulty conclusions about other gender based on its "otherness" all the time."
Sigh... no. Nope. Not what I said, and not what I meant. There was some heavy sarcasm sprinkled in my last paragraph, and while sarcasm is difficult to translate from the written word, it was pretty damn blatant (and presumably the source of your odd note about "full emotional," which I'll chalk up to a combination of fatigue inhibiting reading comprehension and a veiled reference to quasi-ironic ableist humor rather than sexism). I'll try to explicate and see if that helps you out: my point was NOT, as you assume, that since sexism causes bad things to happen to women, therefore it serves you guys right, too. My point, rather, was twofold: first, I suspected (and still suspect) that you were willing to apply a harsher critical lens to this study because it happened to implicate the male gender (this is very common in society -- there's a lot of work I'm not going to rehash here going into the different ways that information about men is evaluated versus how information about women is evaluated -- this is part of how sexism is insidious and ubiquitous). Second, to the extent that you were implicitly fretting over any problems with using the study to draw broader conclusions about men in the abstract (and there is a valid concern there; assuming the study is factually valid -- and you've still yet to identify actual problems with it -- those facts don't tell us anything about the group of Men as a whole), it seemed an opportune time (particularly given all the unironic "wimmins is sneaky" comments getting crazy upmods left and right) to point out that, hey, what do you know, how about that, lazy thinking can be bad for men too. It was less a substantive point regarding the wrongness of sexism (to be clear, it's wrong no matter which way it cuts) than it was an implicit chastisement against hypocrisy, I suppose, though perhaps not entirely fair, as I can't *conclusively* prove from your comments that you're particularly sexist. So, yes, I made some assumptions about you, just as you made assumptions about me. It happens. I would've thought the relevant xkcd would have clued you in to the flippant tone, but different strokes and whatnot.
I'm going out of order here, but you brought up a point without finishing: whence the implicit accusation of cognitive dissonance in my post? Unless you're referring to your belief that I'm misreading the study, which results, rather embarrassingly, from an unfortunate **second** misreading on your part.
And it IS, unfortunately, another misreading. Here's your "gotcha":
Ugh... I am really sorry... but you are taking that quote out of context and using faulty logic on it.
Okay, first off, speaking as a philosophy major, it's like nails on a chalkboard when people misuse the word "logic" the way you just did. Good god please stop. If you want to tell me I'm misreading or misunderstanding it, go nuts. But the only "logic" I'm applying to it is implicit (the proof would go something like "abc words written in English have xyz meaning; the words set forth here are abc words words written in English; therefore, the words set forth here have xyz meaning," etc., etc. Boringly banal stuff. Unless you meant to make an epistemological point about assuming coherency and constancy and the existence of an objective universe and such, but I didn't get that vibe from your post. Let me know, however, if I'm wrong there and you really were trying to start a debate about whether or not language is an objectively meaningful communicative form, and/or whether or not you and I actually exist.) "Logic" doesn't mean any kind of argument. It refers to a v
USING money gives the government control. Who do you think enforces its value??
It isn't that it's illegal to inform the customers about your costs -- hell, as long as it isn't in connection with a planned IPO/attempt to sell non-registered securities, you're free to set up a booth where customers can peruse copies of your entire accounting records if you want. There is no law that prevents you from informing your customers of the costs of business and your profit margins. There are plenty of reasons not to do it, but illegality is not one of them.
Instead, what this means is that now businesses can discriminate against customers who don't have the cash to pay for their purchases. While I understand that a credit-based economy has a lot of problems, not least of which is the upward transfer of wealth, at the same time, it is a reality that many households rely on credit to get by, especially in an economic downturn. So, for those who need to save their cash for rent and put groceries on the credit card, this is now just another example of ways in which it is literally more expensive to be poor than it is to be wealthy.
Huh...really? My bank doesn't do that as long as I use one of their ATMs.
Bolded the important part. How far out of your way do you need to go to find one of your specific bank's ATMs before the cost of doing so exceeds the value of avoiding the surcharge? For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, twice minimum wage, if there isn't one within walking distance, it frankly isn't worth your time to seek it out. If you're thinking about it in advance and stop on your way to the store, okay, fine -- but it only makes sense to plan that way if you already know you're going to a cash-discount place. I don't know, maybe some people plan that far ahead, but honestly, frequently my shopping trips are more along the lines of "oh, I forgot I need to get this" on my way home from work or something. Just another reason to be glad I live in California, I guess.
Speaking of which, I hadn't realized credit card surcharges are illegal here. I can think of a handful of gas stations I regularly drive past that do this. I wonder if they have special dispensation, or if they're just blatantly thumbing their noses at the law? Because I don't make a habit of carrying $50+ cash on me at all times (and don't exactly plan out a schedule for when I stop for gas), I never stop at these places out of sheer loathing. Wonder, too, how it is that services like Square and Paypal get around it for California customers...
My experience with small banks has been that they don't just fuck you over same as the big banks, there's also the greater likelihood of incompetence. I know others have had better experiences, presumably with different local/smaller bank chains than my experience, but there's your contrary data point fwiw.
Nowadays I bank with USAA. You can't buy insurance unless you are a member, but anyone can set up a bank account with them. I have banked with Wells Fargo, Citi, Chase -- every last one of them has made me angry enough to swear at the poor underpaid customer service lackey who isn't allowed to put me through to anyone with actual authority. I have NEVER had a serious problem with USAA. The biggest problem with them is that sometimes my payments actually take the 48 hours they warn you they may take to process (and it only feels like a "problem" because it usually doesn't -- I am unbelievably spoiled with this bank).
Personally, I'd love to see some kind of legislation setting minimum fairness/customer treatment standards at the level of the banks with the highest customer satisfaction ratings (USAA often tops these lists). That'd be a rare law that would wind up setting the bar higher and higher. Which is also why it'll never happen...
Sneaky behavior triggers physical abuse. Female ability to manipulate does same thing, hence, all violent crimes man do.
Wow. Usually people try to hide their victim-blaming by dressing it up in fancy words and pseudo-science. Not you. Nope, you'll just dive right in there and come right out and actually go ahead and SAY that women are to blame for being abused because they're sneaky.
And people wonder why feminism is still relevant.
Confirmation bias? More like cognitive dissonance -- on your part.
I.e. Percentages match in the case of "all science and engineering fields" - let' narrow the field to only "life sciences". Whoomp! There it is! There are more misconducts among males in general, than there are males in life sciences.
You either didn't read the article carefully or didn't understand it. From the article: "...nearly all instances of misconduct investigated by the ORI involved research in the life sciences, and the proportion of male trainees among those committing misconduct was greater than would be predicted from the gender distribution of life sciences trainees. Males also were substantially overrepresented among faculty committing misconduct in comparison to their proportion among science and engineering faculty overall, and the difference is even more pronounced for faculty in the life sciences (5)." (Emphasis mine). In other words, they weren't cherry picking a damn thing. They didn't need to limit it to life sciences to find the disproportionate misconduct. That's just where it was most egregious. Playing with the numbers to make them say something different isn't going to change the findings. I don't even understand your bizarrely cryptic note at the end about the fact that there are 49,810 -- ZOMG TEN -- men in life sciences. It doesn't seem that's even an actual literal number, but instead something you got to by plugging percentages into your calculator. This proves.... what, exactly?
Perhaps instead of feeling like your masculinity is somehow threatened by the fact that in the upper echelons of academia, EXTREMELY PRIVILEGED AND POWERFUL MEN tend to be worse actors than their extremely privileged and powerful female peers, you could instead put your energy into, I don't know, something actually useful. And if you're afraid that the numbers about a specific subset of powerful people might lead people to draw unfair conclusions about your gender as a whole, well, gee. What on earth would make you think people might respond so unfairly. Perhaps, I don't know, maybe the fact that this is what people do to women all the time?? How about that -- maybe the problem, then, isn't the facts, but the sexism. Almost like the feminists have a point or something.
In most places, women weren't even 'people' till about 500 years ago. and is some places they still aren't.
Based on the fact that the top comment wastes no time getting to the sputtering about how the study must be flawed because wimmins is sneaky, I'm somewhat inclined to think slashdot one such place.
But don't worry, it was just women, so, you know, not real people anyway.
Telling that his first thought is "find a woman to do this," without thinking about the potentially horrifically dangerous consequences for such a woman, rather than "build an artificial womb to do this." You don't go straight from "huh, injecting this cell into this virus seems to kill it" to "human trial sign-ups start in February!" At least not if you have a modicum of ethical decency and/or empathy for the human subjects in question.