Funny -- my immediate reaction to this quote was not that it reflected the modern age, but that it was *timeless.* I could easily see John Adams or James Madison expressing nearly identical sentiments.
These are good questions, but see my two other comments in this thread.
I could care less about defending this girl, and I can certainly agree it was stupid to send out any tweet about race or AIDS that could in any way be misconstrued.
But that doesn't change the fact (I believe) that people ARE misconstruing it.
As I've noted, the tweet makes far more sense if you read it as sarcasm, and imagine the girl giving an eye-roll as she says it.
Again, one can still say it was stupid, especially for a PR professional. But while that would suggest that she (at least occasionally) has bad professional judgement, having poor judgement is much less of a sexy crime than being a racist.
(And note that, if you read the tweet as sarcasm, it would in fact suggest she is anti-racism, since she was *parodying* what she sees as racist ideas).
Actually, as I noted in my comment upthread, that's the only context in which the tweet itself makes any sense.
I have no interest in "spinning" it. I'm not a progressive, and I suspect this girl is. I think she expected that her "followers" all knew her to a certain degree, and would know she was being sarcastic.
People should try this: Read the tweet in question. Then, read it again, this time picturing the girl rolling her eyes as she says it. Takes on completely different meaning, doesn't it?
You are right, and 95 percent of the super-justified, self-righteous commenters on here are just making themselves sound foolish.
The tweet only makes sense as a work of sarcasm -- like walking outside during a rainstorm and saying "Wow -- great day!" In person, the way you convey sarcasm is with a turn of voice and an eyeroll. We all do things like this all the time. It's just that allowance for this type of expression don't exist on Twitter.
I am not a progressive and have little sympathy for that worldview. But it's relatively obvious to me that this girl is a progressive who was sarcastically *parodying* the white-privilege view put forth in her tweet. She obviously thought her "followers" would understand that.
This fact, which you've picked up on, has gone over the heads of nearly everyone else here. No one even wants to stop for a second and actually think about it.
Well, no, they're not. They're a SYMPTOM of the problem, that is causing many people to confuse cause and effect.
It's not "Rising administrative costs cause universities to charge more."
It's "Increased demand, propelled by government subsidization of costs (i.e., cheap loans), allows universities to raise prices to the point where they can afford to spend lavishly."
Yeah, pretty much exactly what I was going to say. His comments are mostly spot on. But, the government is ALWAYS harmful? Even the most hard-core libertarians don't believe THAT.
lllll AJ
Newsflash: Gov't prints money, prices increase
on
The College-Loan Scandal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ah -- the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!
This is exactly what classical, supply-and-demand economics would predict.
Most of us understand why the government can't just print more money. The price of everything would just go up.
This is exactly the same scenario. The only difference is that in this case, the government is printing a special kind of money -- money that can only be used for one thing. It is no surprise when then price of that thing just goes up accordingly.
Subsidies (i.e., cheap loans) increase demand. Increased demand causes the price to rise.
Consider:
* The US massively subsidizes education. The price of education rises far beyond the rate of inflation.
* The US massively subsidizes housing. The price of housing rises far beyond the rate of education.
* The US massively subsidizes health care. The price of health care rises far beyond the rate of inflation. (Except, of course, the kinds of health care -- like cosmetic surgery -- that do not typically get subsidized. Costs in these areas have plummeted.)
I don't pretend to have an answer to this dilemma. The only really clear thing is that the laws of supply and demand aren't *statutory* laws, that can just be altered with a pen and a lot of hand-waving. They are fundamental natural laws, and well-intentioned attempts to manipulate markets (from student loans to price-control regimes) almost always trigger equal and opposite consequences.
The real shame is that important issues like these are so easily demagogued. Even though the system is clearly broken, no politician in his right mind would ever propose changing it. "Look!" people would scream. "He hates education! And poor people!"
Rates have never been lower, and congress has never bee more corruptible.
I'm not disagreeing with you -- mostly I agree with you -- but I think you skipped the most important thing. Government has never been more powerful, which means lobbying has never been so worthwhile -- indeed, necessary. Centralizing power and decision-making makes it obvious where wealthy parties should be making their investments: at the center. That's why of America's 10 wealthiest counties, six of them surround Washington DC.
Also -- I thought it odd that every single thing you presented in your second paragraph as a hypothetical is in fact already happening all around us (carbon sequestration and other Solyndra-type debacles, higher-priced fuel formulations, huge research grants, etc.).
If my understanding is correct -- and I don't pretend to be an expert on this -- the summary is pretty misleading. It's not that China is a white knight crusading for green energy. It's that China is doing EVERYTHING: Green, nuclear, coal, you name it.
Googling around ("china coal plants") suggest that China is opening a new coal plant at a rate of one per WEEK. They built as many coal plants as exist in the entirety of Texas + Ohio **in 2011 alone**.
(Also, let me state the obvious. In China, the government has great power. It can use this power to accomplish big things. Some of these things are good. Many are bad. Use state media and censorship to give the population one side of story? Check. Decide you need a big dam, so just evict 1.3 million people and ravage the local environment? Say no more -- done. Artificially surpress the standard of living of a billion people to subsidize trade? Hey, to make an omelette you gotta crack a few eggs.)
I don't necessarily concede your point -- I don't know if House Republicans have in fact been trying to slash climate research funding.
But in the bigger picture, it hardly matters. Climate research around the world is funded to the tune of billions every year. I mean, seriously -- of all scientific fields, climate research, of all things, is hardly lacking for funding. It's a huge, highly visible area of massive public interest. Does that mean every researcher gets every grant they want? I assume not. But let's be realistic here. Every large university in the world is pumping out climate research.
I don't pretend it was the only data point. My post was about how stupid MightyMartian's post was -- instead of pointing out other data points, he responded with the kind of stupid post everyone here should mod into oblivion. What exactly was "insightful" about it?
lllll AJ
I know, and good post. Mine wasn't about the merits of the issue -- it was entirely directed at MightyMartian's idiotic posting, and even moreso, the idiotic readers who thought it was "insightful." THAT'S insightful? lllll AJ
Good lord -- I thought the mods were retarded today BEFORE I saw this post.
"When things get too out of balance"?!?! Allow me to mentally wander back to the old techno-libertarian days of Slashdot, when goofy claptrap like this would have been MERCILESSLY MOCKED, not modded "interesting."
The Chicxulub impact -- did the asteroid somehow sense that things down on Earth were "too out of balance"? Did it think: "Hmm... I'll take care of this!"
What, is Sunday "idiots-upmodding-mindless-drivel they-agree-with day?"
(1) You put this in quotes:
"this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".
Except... it's not a quote. BlueStrat didn't say "this is probably just nature at work." Those are YOUR words. They are not the words MightyMartian was commenting on. If you want to paraphrase/make up words and start debating them with yourself, be my guest. But don't drag me into it.
(2) There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out.
Of course there is. Doing nothing IS sometimes the most rational response. History is replete with instances where everyone would have been much better off if authorities had simply done nothing. I can think of a dozen instances just off the top of my head. Does that mean THIS is one of those cases? I don't know -- and neither do you. We only know about those things in hindsight. But history makes it sand-poundingly obvious that, yes, sometimes doing nothing is much better than a badly misguided attempt to address a problem affecting a complex system we don't understand very well, on the theory that, well, we must do SOMETHING!!
(3) and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment etc etc etc
So pointing out an obvious fact (i.e., that MightyMartian's reaction was emotional and not rational) is an "accusation"?
Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.
So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.
If you actually have something meaningful to say, and you want to show all of us you're actually NOT an idiot, well -- what's stopping you?
After a long time on Macs, I took the plunge into Linux with a Dell Mini 10.
I was amazed to find out that, once purchased, you were pretty much stuck with the OS as it shipped. If you upgraded, you broke the graphics driver.
There were gigantic, epic forum threads (this I think is the main one -- 543 pages. Not comments -- pages.) devoted to fiddling with command-line settings to try to get things working again. Eventually, it just got to be too much and I installed XP on the thing.
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
The American system is based on the idea that we are endowed *by our Creator* with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men to *secure* those rights. - aj
If theaters need to make money off their concessions, you'd think they'd charge an amount that would tempt me to actually, you know, buy some.
As opposed to how much I buy now, which is none.
- aj
I've thought many times that there must be a huge, untapped market for a line of electronics for grown ups. Try searching for a shelf stereo system, for example. Most of it is garish crap, burdened with all kinds of obscure functionality most people will never use. There are systems more minimal and adult-looking, but "minimialist" doesn't mean "user-friendly." What I'm talking about is a system that looks nice, is of relatively good quality, and for which you never need to read the manual. It's just obvious how to work it.
Car stereos are the same way. They almost all sacrifice function for style.
And alarm clocks. How about an alarm clock with a panel that you flip open, and behind it is a simple, phone style number pad. To set alarm 1, you press
[Set Alarm 1] - [7] - [3] - [0] - [am] - [Enter], then turn a little analog dial to set the volume, and flip the panel closed.
The idea that someone's great-grandson should be taken as some kind of authority on what his grandfather would think -- which in ITSELF is just an "appeal to authority," void of any real meaning.
So this is an appeal to an appeal of authority. Or is it an appeal to authority of an appeal to authority? Whatever, it's meaningless.
I mean no disrespect, but those sources all seem to cite... each other. To be more specific, they all ultimately seem to rely on that George Monbiot article, which in turn -- provides no source.
I remain open to the possibility that Richardson actually said this, but at this point it's looking unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny -- my immediate reaction to this quote was not that it reflected the modern age, but that it was *timeless.* I could easily see John Adams or James Madison expressing nearly identical sentiments.
lllll AJ
Erich -
These are good questions, but see my two other comments in this thread.
I could care less about defending this girl, and I can certainly agree it was stupid to send out any tweet about race or AIDS that could in any way be misconstrued.
But that doesn't change the fact (I believe) that people ARE misconstruing it.
As I've noted, the tweet makes far more sense if you read it as sarcasm, and imagine the girl giving an eye-roll as she says it.
Again, one can still say it was stupid, especially for a PR professional. But while that would suggest that she (at least occasionally) has bad professional judgement, having poor judgement is much less of a sexy crime than being a racist.
(And note that, if you read the tweet as sarcasm, it would in fact suggest she is anti-racism, since she was *parodying* what she sees as racist ideas).
lllll AJ
SCHecklerX -
Actually, as I noted in my comment upthread, that's the only context in which the tweet itself makes any sense.
I have no interest in "spinning" it. I'm not a progressive, and I suspect this girl is. I think she expected that her "followers" all knew her to a certain degree, and would know she was being sarcastic.
People should try this: Read the tweet in question. Then, read it again, this time picturing the girl rolling her eyes as she says it. Takes on completely different meaning, doesn't it?
lllll AJ
Jah-Wren -
You are right, and 95 percent of the super-justified, self-righteous commenters on here are just making themselves sound foolish.
The tweet only makes sense as a work of sarcasm -- like walking outside during a rainstorm and saying "Wow -- great day!" In person, the way you convey sarcasm is with a turn of voice and an eyeroll. We all do things like this all the time. It's just that allowance for this type of expression don't exist on Twitter.
I am not a progressive and have little sympathy for that worldview. But it's relatively obvious to me that this girl is a progressive who was sarcastically *parodying* the white-privilege view put forth in her tweet. She obviously thought her "followers" would understand that.
This fact, which you've picked up on, has gone over the heads of nearly everyone else here. No one even wants to stop for a second and actually think about it.
lllll AJ
"Adminstrative Costs are the problem."
Well, no, they're not. They're a SYMPTOM of the problem, that is causing many people to confuse cause and effect.
It's not "Rising administrative costs cause universities to charge more."
It's "Increased demand, propelled by government subsidization of costs (i.e., cheap loans), allows universities to raise prices to the point where they can afford to spend lavishly."
lllll AJ
Yeah, pretty much exactly what I was going to say. His comments are mostly spot on. But, the government is ALWAYS harmful? Even the most hard-core libertarians don't believe THAT.
lllll AJ
Ah -- the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!
This is exactly what classical, supply-and-demand economics would predict.
Most of us understand why the government can't just print more money. The price of everything would just go up.
This is exactly the same scenario. The only difference is that in this case, the government is printing a special kind of money -- money that can only be used for one thing. It is no surprise when then price of that thing just goes up accordingly.
Subsidies (i.e., cheap loans) increase demand. Increased demand causes the price to rise.
Consider:
* The US massively subsidizes education. The price of education rises far beyond the rate of inflation.
* The US massively subsidizes housing. The price of housing rises far beyond the rate of education.
* The US massively subsidizes health care. The price of health care rises far beyond the rate of inflation. (Except, of course, the kinds of health care -- like cosmetic surgery -- that do not typically get subsidized. Costs in these areas have plummeted.)
I don't pretend to have an answer to this dilemma. The only really clear thing is that the laws of supply and demand aren't *statutory* laws, that can just be altered with a pen and a lot of hand-waving. They are fundamental natural laws, and well-intentioned attempts to manipulate markets (from student loans to price-control regimes) almost always trigger equal and opposite consequences.
The real shame is that important issues like these are so easily demagogued. Even though the system is clearly broken, no politician in his right mind would ever propose changing it. "Look!" people would scream. "He hates education! And poor people!"
Rates have never been lower, and congress has never bee more corruptible.
I'm not disagreeing with you -- mostly I agree with you -- but I think you skipped the most important thing. Government has never been more powerful, which means lobbying has never been so worthwhile -- indeed, necessary. Centralizing power and decision-making makes it obvious where wealthy parties should be making their investments: at the center. That's why of America's 10 wealthiest counties, six of them surround Washington DC.
Also -- I thought it odd that every single thing you presented in your second paragraph as a hypothetical is in fact already happening all around us (carbon sequestration and other Solyndra-type debacles, higher-priced fuel formulations, huge research grants, etc.).
lllll Alaska Jack
Grishnakh -- HEAR HEAR HEAR!!
Exactly the same reaction. WTF? Has this guy ever actually lived anywhere else, or is he just spewing out what he knows surely MUST be true?
I've been all around the United States. It is possible that places like the ones he describe exist? Sure, I guess. Is it the norm, or even common?
No. No it's not.
lllll aj
If my understanding is correct -- and I don't pretend to be an expert on this -- the summary is pretty misleading. It's not that China is a white knight crusading for green energy. It's that China is doing EVERYTHING: Green, nuclear, coal, you name it.
Googling around ("china coal plants") suggest that China is opening a new coal plant at a rate of one per WEEK. They built as many coal plants as exist in the entirety of Texas + Ohio **in 2011 alone**.
(Also, let me state the obvious. In China, the government has great power. It can use this power to accomplish big things. Some of these things are good. Many are bad. Use state media and censorship to give the population one side of story? Check. Decide you need a big dam, so just evict 1.3 million people and ravage the local environment? Say no more -- done. Artificially surpress the standard of living of a billion people to subsidize trade? Hey, to make an omelette you gotta crack a few eggs.)
lllll aj
MOD UP
Drooling Dog --
I don't necessarily concede your point -- I don't know if House Republicans have in fact been trying to slash climate research funding.
But in the bigger picture, it hardly matters. Climate research around the world is funded to the tune of billions every year. I mean, seriously -- of all scientific fields, climate research, of all things, is hardly lacking for funding. It's a huge, highly visible area of massive public interest. Does that mean every researcher gets every grant they want? I assume not. But let's be realistic here. Every large university in the world is pumping out climate research.
lllll AJ
I don't pretend it was the only data point. My post was about how stupid MightyMartian's post was -- instead of pointing out other data points, he responded with the kind of stupid post everyone here should mod into oblivion. What exactly was "insightful" about it? lllll AJ
I know, and good post. Mine wasn't about the merits of the issue -- it was entirely directed at MightyMartian's idiotic posting, and even moreso, the idiotic readers who thought it was "insightful." THAT'S insightful? lllll AJ
Good lord -- I thought the mods were retarded today BEFORE I saw this post.
"When things get too out of balance"?!?! Allow me to mentally wander back to the old techno-libertarian days of Slashdot, when goofy claptrap like this would have been MERCILESSLY MOCKED, not modded "interesting."
The Chicxulub impact -- did the asteroid somehow sense that things down on Earth were "too out of balance"? Did it think: "Hmm... I'll take care of this!"
lllll AJ
Good post -- the abstract sounds interesting. Thanks! lllll AJ
What, is Sunday "idiots-upmodding-mindless-drivel they-agree-with day?"
(1) You put this in quotes:
"this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".
Except... it's not a quote. BlueStrat didn't say "this is probably just nature at work." Those are YOUR words. They are not the words MightyMartian was commenting on. If you want to paraphrase/make up words and start debating them with yourself, be my guest. But don't drag me into it.
(2) There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out.
Of course there is. Doing nothing IS sometimes the most rational response. History is replete with instances where everyone would have been much better off if authorities had simply done nothing. I can think of a dozen instances just off the top of my head. Does that mean THIS is one of those cases? I don't know -- and neither do you. We only know about those things in hindsight. But history makes it sand-poundingly obvious that, yes, sometimes doing nothing is much better than a badly misguided attempt to address a problem affecting a complex system we don't understand very well, on the theory that, well, we must do SOMETHING!!
(3) and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment etc etc etc
So pointing out an obvious fact (i.e., that MightyMartian's reaction was emotional and not rational) is an "accusation"?
Cunning? Oh for Pete's sake. Grow up.
lllll Alaska Jack
Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.
So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.
If you actually have something meaningful to say, and you want to show all of us you're actually NOT an idiot, well -- what's stopping you?
lllll Alaska Jack
After a long time on Macs, I took the plunge into Linux with a Dell Mini 10.
I was amazed to find out that, once purchased, you were pretty much stuck with the OS as it shipped. If you upgraded, you broke the graphics driver.
There were gigantic, epic forum threads (this I think is the main one -- 543 pages. Not comments -- pages.) devoted to fiddling with command-line settings to try to get things working again. Eventually, it just got to be too much and I installed XP on the thing.
||||| Alaska Jack
Count me in as another guy who came here to say exactly this.
Will lives in a rural peasant village in England. His life is pretty normal for any kid growing up in the dark ages.
Except, strangely, his father has a wristwatch ...
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
The American system is based on the idea that we are endowed *by our Creator* with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men to *secure* those rights. - aj
If theaters need to make money off their concessions, you'd think they'd charge an amount that would tempt me to actually, you know, buy some. As opposed to how much I buy now, which is none. - aj
I've thought many times that there must be a huge, untapped market for a line of electronics for grown ups. Try searching for a shelf stereo system, for example. Most of it is garish crap, burdened with all kinds of obscure functionality most people will never use. There are systems more minimal and adult-looking, but "minimialist" doesn't mean "user-friendly." What I'm talking about is a system that looks nice, is of relatively good quality, and for which you never need to read the manual. It's just obvious how to work it.
Car stereos are the same way. They almost all sacrifice function for style.
And alarm clocks. How about an alarm clock with a panel that you flip open, and behind it is a simple, phone style number pad. To set alarm 1, you press
[Set Alarm 1] - [7] - [3] - [0] - [am] - [Enter], then turn a little analog dial to set the volume, and flip the panel closed.
Done.
lllll Alaska Jack
The idea that someone's great-grandson should be taken as some kind of authority on what his grandfather would think -- which in ITSELF is just an "appeal to authority," void of any real meaning.
So this is an appeal to an appeal of authority. Or is it an appeal to authority of an appeal to authority? Whatever, it's meaningless.
- aj
I mean no disrespect, but those sources all seem to cite... each other. To be more specific, they all ultimately seem to rely on that George Monbiot article, which in turn -- provides no source.
I remain open to the possibility that Richardson actually said this, but at this point it's looking unlikely.
- aj