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  • If the professor were instead describing the virtues of trickle-down economics or the infinite beauty of the free market and a liberal student posted the video claiming to have taken offense, what would we see? We would see the media telling them about the freedom to associate and how nobody has ever been forced to attend a public university. This student can go take classes somewhere else if they don't like what they are hearing, their money will talk for them.
    • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

      You do not actually believe that a comparison of a professor making up bullshit about Republicans being racist, and expressing purely ignorant nonsense that doesn't stand up to the slightest amount of intellectual examination, is similar to a professor promoting the free market. I sugggest you stop pretending you do.

      • a professor making up bullshit about Republicans being racist

        Making up bullshit? Who has been actively suppressing voters? Don't give me bullshit about the voter ID laws being about preventing fraud when there are damn near zero cases of actual fraudulent voting occurring in any of the states and jurisdictions that are trying to force arbitrary new requirements on voters that quite nearly without exception make voting easier for middle and upper economic classes who work 9-to-5 and far more difficult for those who make less money working longer hours.

        And if you'

        • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

          a professor making up bullshit about Republicans being racist

          Making up bullshit?

          Yes.

          Who has been actively suppressing voters?

          No one.

          Don't give me bullshit about the voter ID laws being about preventing fraud when there are damn near zero cases of actual fraudulent voting occurring in any of the states and jurisdictions that are trying to force arbitrary new requirements on voters that quite nearly without exception make voting easier for middle and upper economic classes who work 9-to-5 and far more difficult for those who make less money working longer hours.

          Again: making up bullshit.

          First, your stat on "actual fraudulent voting" is bullshit. The numbers the left cites are the wrong ones. They cite the number of prosecutions or convictions. But even a tiny bit of thought will lead you to understand that if someone votes for someone else without an ID, that person will most likely never be prosecuted, because they won't be caught. Hell, the fraud might never even be detected, because that would require the real voter trying to vote and then being

          • Who has been actively suppressing voters?

            No one.

            Stop lying.

            Don't give me bullshit about the voter ID laws being about preventing fraud when there are damn near zero cases of actual fraudulent voting occurring in any of the states and jurisdictions that are trying to force arbitrary new requirements on voters that quite nearly without exception make voting easier for middle and upper economic classes who work 9-to-5 and far more difficult for those who make less money working longer hours.

            Again: making up bullshit.

            Why can't you stop lying? Just because you disagree with something - even when the facts clearly support the statement that you disagree with - doesn't mean that you are entitled to discard it as "bullshit".

            First, your stat on "actual fraudulent voting" is bullshit.

            If you are trying to convince me that you actually want to have e discussion, you aren't doing a very good job when you keep discarding everything that disagrees with your hyper-conservative opinion as "bullshit".

            The numbers the left cites are the wrong ones. They cite the number of prosecutions or convictions.

            No. I have been looking at state numbers, and looking for the total number of

            • >>>The free market ... causes harm and death.
              >>You're lying. The free market has never caused any harm or death, ever. We know this, because we know it is not even capable of doing so.
              >You're simply full of shit there. There have been millions of cases of people who have purchased goods on the free market which resulted in their deaths, which could have been prevented had there been even the most basic of safety concerns from the manufacturer.

              Is there a distinction between product and
              • Is there a distinction between product and market?

                The market is the driving force of most products. An unregulated market encourages shoddy development and production . A well regulated market will drive deaths from shoddy products as close to zero as possible (amongst other things), while a completely unregulated market will just consider those to be part of the cost of doing business.

                So yes, there is a distinction between product and market but the product is a direct effect of the market and a reflection of how the market runs. A free market has

                • The challenge I have with your analysis is that you seem to ignore the fact that markets have consumers. Consumers, given solid information, tend to have far more immediate impact on quality. For a good example of my point, see Microsoft Bob. Regulation both lags and loads down the market. Too much regulation leads to over-damped systems. If there was just one point I could somehow make clear to you, this would probably be it, sir.
                  • The challenge I have with your analysis is that you seem to ignore the fact that markets have consumers.

                    No, I fully acknowledge the importance of consumers on the market.

                    Consumers, given solid information, tend to have far more immediate impact on quality.

                    The solid information is the difficult part here. A fully free market does nothing to encourage dissemination of solid information. A fully free market with no regulation would view solid information as an impediment to profit and actually discourage it.

                    For a good example of my point, see Microsoft Bob.

                    Bob was as much a failure of marketing and understanding the consumer as it was a victim of solid information. As a case for this, how many examples of solid information can you think of

                    • A fully free market does nothing to encourage dissemination of solid information.

                      You're essentially saying that there is no such thing as demand, as demand creates vacuum.

                      If regulation prevents even one person from being killed by a shoddy product, then the lag is worth it, IMHO. Especially when the person had no way to know that they were buying a shoddy product.

                      And now you open Pandora's Box of utilitarian tradeoffs, as you try to figure out how if more lives can be extended vs. curtailed by experimenting with new foods, medications, surgical procedures, gadgets, &c.
                      Geospatial databases can guide first responders to victims. Errors in those databases can lead to the demise of first responders. Should we outlaw these databases?

                    • A fully free market does nothing to encourage dissemination of solid information.

                      You're essentially saying that there is no such thing as demand, as demand creates vacuum.

                      No, you can still have demand for shoddy products. Plenty of people wanted mercury treatments and any of a variety of snake oil therapies over the years. The free market allowed lies to be disseminated as facts when describing those products.

                      And now you open Pandora's Box of utilitarian tradeoffs, as you try to figure out how if more lives can be extended vs. curtailed by experimenting with new foods, medications, surgical procedures, gadgets, &c.

                      The free market, if it were the only force, would allow for all kinds of crazy experimentation that comes about with no background research or understanding of the laws of nature and physical reality. Our current system in the US has created the greatest number of

                    • The free market, if it were the only force, would allow for all kinds of crazy experimentation that comes about with no background research or understanding of the laws of nature and physical reality. Our current system in the US has created the greatest number of medical discoveries that mankind has ever seen. We had to get out of the dark ages of bloodletting and associated voodoo in order to get here, if we dropped all regulation we could well end up there again.

                      Capitalism is the accelerator, regulation is the brake.
                      No sane person is suggesting we drive without brakes.
                      What I'm suggesting is that pressing down on the brake pedal is not going to drive the economy any faster.
                      When Congress and the Administration bury private enterprise in legislation & regulation, such that companies have to lay on staff to (a) read, (b) comply, (c) litigate the ensuing rent-seeking, That. Is. Not. Legitimate. Economic. Growth. Furthermore, laws/regs distort the market such that

                    • Capitalism is the accelerator, regulation is the brake.
                      No sane person is suggesting we drive without brakes.

                      I think that depends on one's definition of sane; there are plenty of people on slashdot in particular who suggest that all brakes are bad (I'm not accusing you of being one, just saying that some exist).

                      What I'm suggesting is that pressing down on the brake pedal is not going to drive the economy any faster.

                      First, I will say that the rather binary statement of capitalism and regulation having exactly opposing results on the economy is over simplified. There are regulations that are growth-neutral and depending on how you define regulation some that could even be growth-positive.

                      When Congress and the Administration bury private enterprise in legislation & regulation, such that companies have to lay on staff to (a) read, (b) comply, (c) litigate the ensuing rent-seeking, That. Is. Not. Legitimate. Economic. Growth.

                      I wouldn't say anyone is get

                    • I wouldn't say anyone is getting buried in legislation and regulation. Each business makes their own choices on how to respond to any given new law.
                      . . .
                      Businesses are taking employees who they were already treating poorly, and finding an excuse to treat them worse. If these employees were previously above 40 hours they would have already had health insurance available to them. Now the bar has been lowered to 30 hours and the employer responded in kind by cutting the employee hours. Nobody forced them to do that; they could have just as well bumped them up to 40 hours in preparation and treated them like real live full-time employees.

                      One is sorely tempted to sarcasm.
                      Just hiring a nanny to look after my little one was an orgy of pain.
                      I was all macho: "I can surely figure out the taxation/regulations to pay all the taxes and do this correctly."
                      Flog me gently with a live cattle prod, boss: It. Sucked. Pond. Water.
                      And that's just to hire a glorified babysitter!
                      Perhaps you've a photographic memory, no sleep requirements, and a natural gift for sorting out Byzantine utterances. But I submit that you may be under-appreciating our governme

                    • I appreciate that you are able to keep this civil. This is why we can keep a conversation going without reducing ourselves to silly responses of 4 words or less.

                      Just hiring a nanny to look after my little one was an orgy of pain.

                      It sounds to me that you created a full time job and filled it with a person. If I may, I believe you said before that you live in Virginia (based on the senators and representative that you named a while back). How much of the dance with the tax man was for federal and how much was for state / local? I see this as an important question if we a

                    • It sounds to me that you created a full time job and filled it with a person. If I may, I believe you said before that you live in Virginia (based on the senators and representative that you named a while back). How much of the dance with the tax man was for federal and how much was for state / local? I see this as an important question if we are trying to determine how much blame for the complications belongs to President Lawnchair directly and how much might be beyond the realm of the federal government entirely.

                      To hire a nanny legally, I was forced to create a company (albeit a specialized one) and conform to a variety of laws. Yes, Virginia's web site and implementation of the procedures may suck more than those of other states.
                      But this gets at my point: public web sites and procedures tend to suck due to lack of competition.
                      If you don't like Slashdot, you just quit visiting the site.
                      If you don't like your government's interface for a tax web site, you can:
                      a. move
                      b. vote in people who will make prioritize im

                • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

                  An unregulated market encourages shoddy development and production

                  Probably, but there is no such thing as an unregulated market. Every market, including the most theoretically free market imaginable, is regulated. And such a theoretically free market has much better and more effective regulation than a government-regulated market. In fact, government-regulated markets encourage poor goods and services much more than a free market. Look at the housing crisis, banking crisis, energy crisis, medical insurance crisis, college cost crisis, and so on. These are all problem

            • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

              Stop lying.

              Show me evidence. You have none.

              Just because you disagree with something - even when the facts clearly support the statement that you disagree with - doesn't mean that you are entitled to discard it as "bullshit".

              Correct. However, the facts in fact do not support your view, but mine, and I explained clearly how.

              No. I have been looking at state numbers, and looking for the total number of allegations of fraud. Many of the states that have been pushing for voter id laws haven't had even an allegation of fraud or irregularities since the 70s at the most recent.

              Show me. That you haven't linked to it is telling. But I will reiterate my argument, since you ignored it: most such fraud will never be detected if you don't check for ID. If I vote for my cousin who says he doesn't want to vote because he doesn't care, how will anyone ever know? How will there ever be an allegation of fraud? The data of specific allegations, because of

              • Stop lying.

                Show me evidence. You have none.

                Why is that required for me, and not you? You accuse me of lying all the time and never provide evidence to back it up.

                However, the facts in fact do not support your view, but mine, and I explained clearly how.

                Are you lying because the truth makes you uncomfortable, or are you lying because you don't know how else to behave?

                Show me. That you haven't linked to it is telling.

                You haven't provided any links for your allegations, why am I required to provide any for mine? Besides you aren't here to have a discussion so I see no reason to expect that you would read any links I provide.

                If I vote for my cousin who says he doesn't want to vote because he doesn't care, how will anyone ever know? How will there ever be an allegation of fraud?

                How would voter id prevent that? You could borrow his id (be

                • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

                  You accuse me of lying all the time and never provide evidence to back it up.

                  We've gone over this.

                  When you make an unsubstantiated claim, I need no evidence to say you're lying. The burden of proof is on you. That is the only time I do not back up my claims of lying, when it is in response to such a claim.

                  You haven't provided any links for your allegations

                  My main "allegation" is a statement of reason, not of links or facts. It is very clear that this sort of fraud is simple to execute, and hard to detect. It is therefore necessarily true that the number of specific allegations of fraud can be vastly outnumbered by the actual inc

                  • We've gone over this.

                    You mean you've made shit up to accommodate your massive superiority complex. Humility is not a strong suit for you. Actually, it doesn't appear to be a suit for you at all.

                    When you make an unsubstantiated claim, I need no evidence to say you're lying. The burden of proof is on you. That is the only time I do not back up my claims of lying, when it is in response to such a claim.

                    Funny how you apply that label every single time you accuse anyone of lying. Why are you uniquely entitled to determine what claims are "unsubstantiated" and which are not? You didn't seem to learn much from your AA in journalism.

                    My main "allegation" is a statement of reason, not of links or facts.

                    So you admit there are no facts to back up your statement. Thank you. I'm glad we have resolved that

                    • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

                      Funny how you apply that label every single time you accuse anyone of lying. Why are you uniquely entitled to determine what claims are "unsubstantiated" and which are not?

                      You're lying. I never stated or implied that. When I call something unsubstantiated, it is only because either (this is the usual case) no substantiation was even offered at all, or what was offered was very very clearly shown to not amount to the slightest bit of substantiation. I don't have a ready example of the latter, but your posts are filled with the former.

                      So you admit there are no facts to back up your statement.

                      False. Please stop lying.

                      Easily half the sentences you have written in this thread support my statement, and pretty well none of them support yours.

                      You're a liar.

                      You already stated that just a couple quotes ago.

                      You're a liar.

                      Your own statements above refute that notion.

                      You're a liar.

                      you admit to not having facts to back up your assertions.

                      Only in one case: when my assertion is simply stating that an argument, wi

                    • Clearly I cannot expect you to give me a straight answer to why on earth you decided to come try to sell lies to me again, and then subsequently get mad when I point out that they are a huge bag of lies . You really aren't very good at this discussion thing, to the point where it is hard to believe that you are even fooling yourself any more with your obvious blatant lies. It's too bad that your pathological denial of reality is coupled directly to your epic degree of stubbornness that prevents you from ev
                    • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

                      you decided to come try to sell lies to me again

                      Sigh. You're a liar.

                      [you] get mad

                      You're a liar.

                      when I point out that they are a huge bag of lies

                      You're a liar.

                      You really aren't very good at this discussion thing

                      You're a liar.

                      your pathological denial of reality

                      You're a liar.

                      prevents you from ever learning anything.

                      You're a liar.

                      I'm tired of dealing with your bullshit.

                      You're a liar.

                      You treat me like shit every time you reply to my messages

                      You're a liar.

                      I don't want to talk with you any more.

                      You're a liar.

                      There is no reason at all to presume that you ever wanted to talk with me, either.

                      This part is true. I never wanted to talk to you. I have no idea who you are, and I know nothing about you. I speak to what is spoken, and not to who is saying it.

                      You tell lies, so I treat you appropriately to that. It's terribly simple.

  • If I were there, I'd have called him out as a liar and a racist, because that's what he is. It is racist to say that requiring voter ID is racist, because what you're actually saying is that black people are less capable or interested in simply following the rules to vote than white people are.

    • If I were there, I'd have called him out as a liar...

      Well of course! There's no offense there. It's just your way of saying, "I disagree." Hardly what you'd call sociable, but hey, waddya gonna do? You're just being you.

      • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

        So you say he wasn't -- very clearly and obviously -- lying?

        Because if he was lying, your criticism of me makes no sense. If he was not lying, then please defend his claim that asking for a voter ID is for the purpose of suppressing black votes. Or that Republicans are all white. (?) Or that Romney hid his money in the Cayman Islands (he paid taxes on that money, as federal law requires; nothing was "hidden"). He lied.

        It's not enough for me to say "I disagree." That's bullshit. He is not saying, "I thi

        • Check out the name of the class. Creative Writing.. If he committed any fraud there, it sounds like he's not very creative, more like your average internet meme machine.. I couldn't understand the long video without the subtitles, , so I skipped it, but it sounds like these students should demand their money back. Eh, who knows? Maybe when everybody got to talking about 'Creative Writing', he might prove he's worth every penny paid. I really doubt that this little bull session was part of the classroom stu

          • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

            Check out the name of the class. Creative Writing.

            I feel like you are trying to make a point, but I don't actually see one.

            Regardless, I wasn't commenting on him.

            False. Please stop lying. You were criticizing my response to him, which only makes any sense whatsoever if my response to him wasn't valid.

            • I feel like you are trying to make a point, but I don't actually see one.

              That's because you're a blind motherfucker.

              False. Please stop lying. You were criticizing my response to him...

              :-) Man! You are hilarious! Try rereading.. Here, I'll put in bold to accommodate your vision difficulties : ...I was commenting on your standard response to people who refuse to stick to your narrative... which you just confirmed again in your last post. TNX

              • by pudge ( 3605 ) * Works for Slashdot

                ...I was commenting on your standard response to people who refuse to stick to your narrative... which you just confirmed again in your last post. TNX

                So you say that you were not commenting on this guy, but in general, but then you say this case confirmed it, which is only possible if you are commenting on this guy.

                You suck at this.

                • No, you confirmed it in your previous response to me.. Keep trying.. I have lots of time... *all the time in the world*

      • If I were there, I'd have called him out as a liar...

        Well of course! There's no offense there. It's just your way of saying, "I disagree." Hardly what you'd call sociable, but hey, waddya gonna do? You're just being you.

        You could also point out that there is no point in even continuing the thought experiment beyond "If I were there", as obviously Pudge would never be there. The video clip was recorded at a major research university in the state of Michigan. Pudge completed an AA in journalism from a deeply conservative religious college. You have an equally good chance of finding Al Sharpton and Don King hanging out at a Klan rally.

        Whether you would find better social graces and acceptance of differing opinions at

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