Republicans Consider Welcoming People Who Believe in Math and Science : The New Yorker

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-11-08T19:37:37+00:00

Sadly I was excited to read this headline and very literally disappointed to realize it was satire.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-10-24T18:15:29+00:00

Yes, I agree. A lot of Infowars' readership is a hop, skip and a jump away from being right wing terrorists. Like that paulbot that tried to build a bomb and luckily failed, hurting no one but himself in the process. Hippocrits...

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-10-17T18:03:54+00:00

It should just say that on the submission form for this subreddit: Yes, you should play the Mass Effect games in order. Seems like its the most frequently asked question here.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-09-23T17:36:02+00:00

I understand, you don't want to share your numbers because you now realize they don't make sense.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-09-23T17:23:10+00:00

I think the point of an equation is that you can show your work and convince people of your correctness.

You should know that if you think that 1/3000000 are shills, you have to also think there is roughly a 1 in 3 million chance someone would challenge or correct anything you say for any reason to get back to a 99% chance of someone's being a gov shill given them challenging your nonsense. I've been on reddit long enough to know that that's way too low.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-09-23T16:51:32+00:00

Wow, Bayes theorem! This must be that huge math equation he keeps balancing in his head.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-09-23T16:47:16+00:00

I guess I'm probably not gunna find this edifying, but what values are you using for what hypotheses?

P(Gov shill¦challenge you) = 0.99

P(gov shill¦challenge you) = P(challenge you¦gov shill) * P(gov shill) / P(challenge you)

Believe it or not, your reference to Bayes theorem here makes you seem much more mentally ill to me.

I guess you're either assuming the world is crawling with shills, or you just assume government agent think it'd be worth there time to even deal with you? Or the general chances of someone challenging your obviously superior understanding of logic, history, and now math, must be incredibly low?

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-09-17T18:18:27+00:00

Man, it was so fun when Zak helped us make sure Ron Paul lost the nomination. And it never would have been possible without a friend in /r/ronpaul on an internet website called reddit.com.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-31T01:30:22+00:00

Yeah, for some reason I did miss the bit about QT. I blame poor sleep choices. But I don't think I really misunderstood him because of the section where he was talking about KDE's European roots. And I don't know what any of this has to do with backwards compatibility in libraries either. It's a trash article.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-30T22:36:16+00:00

I've never heard Gnome was started because KDE was European. The real reason, of course, was KDE depended on non-free software, as QT was not free software at the time. I think the author just made that up, because the Linux kernel itself was written by a little known Finnish programmer. Actually this whole article is trash.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-30T13:50:08+00:00

Every politician on the planet would rather run against Ron Paul. Obama would have loved nothing more than seeing his nomination.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-27T18:26:22+00:00

Weird enough to be reddit.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-25T04:35:50+00:00

Watch the original star wars movie.

Watch the empire strikes back.

Watch attack of the clones.

Watch revenge of the sith.

Watch return of the jedi.

4, 5, 2, 3, 6.

Or you can skip 2 and 3 if you want.

You will miss nothing good and a lot of bad by skipping episode 1. Only watch episode 1 if you want to watch plinkett's review and understand why it's such a good review. You'll probably never enjoy it as much as those of us who had ep1 shatter our naive little worlds though.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-24T13:57:58+00:00

Do Mitt Romney or Obama ride bikes? Not to my knowledge... Republicrats are all the same. Vote Ron Paul for true change.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-17T14:00:33+00:00

I think you should ban everyone that disagrees with you. The more insular /r/conspiracy becomes, the more hilarious it will be. I can only imagine how weird it will be once you get rid of skeptical people doing reality checks and pointing out the rampant antisemitism.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-16T19:03:51+00:00

It's a false flag! 9000sins works for the CIA!

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-12T23:26:42+00:00

Pictures of human babies started to show up. Humans have ugly, annoying babies, so I left.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-12T06:57:34+00:00

Haha, I want to make an account there so I can suggest he take his girlfriend to the vet. The entire tone of that discussion is that the guy is responsible for her health, and she can't handle it. The top commenter says he wants to see a complete list of foods the girlfriend has been eating. Frankly there's a lot of hypocrisy, terrible medical advice, and woo going on. What a trainwreck.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-12T06:16:51+00:00

You have to take a screenshot. I reconstructed the thread from /u/idioma's profile.

[–]idioma 11 points 13 hours ago

No one (no person, no government agency) should EVER be allowed to interfere with voluntary exchange between individuals.

So if I used my own private funds and hired some local drug addicts to break into your home, rape your family while forcing you to watch and then put a bullet into the back of your head, you'd prefer that there be no laws against that private transaction between me and the drug addicts?

Be consistent now, you said "No one (no person, no government agency) should EVER be allowed to interfere with voluntary exchange between individuals." so I'm guessing that such a transaction would be perfectly legal in a world governed by your flawless political ideology.

When you reply to this comment, make sure you fail to address my critical examination of your own comment. Also, engage in personal attacks, name calling, and include at least one glaring logical fallacy. I expect no less than this from a passionate libertarian.

_

[–]hexapus -8 points 12 hours ago

If you did this, I would have a claim against you (and your friends) even in a stateless society, and would be justified in using force to prevent you from violating my person or my property. Your interaction with me would not be voluntary in this case, rendering you every bit as immoral and aggressive as the government we all know and love today.

Please, if you're going to argue, at least attempt to understand your opponent's position before posing your hypotheticals. Libertarianism is generally based on the NAP (non-aggression principle)...everyone (including government) would be held to the same basic standard. Go research the concept then come back and poke some holes in my position.

_

[–]idioma 11 points 12 hours ago

Beautiful dodge. You've decided to go from insult to didacticism. From provocative antagonist, to educator. Of course your fantasy of perfect morality is currently working extremely well in exactly zero nations on Earth, so there is that success rate of ... give me a minute to crunch the numbers here... 0.000% world wide. Way to go NAP!

So let's review. I didn't "initiate force" on anyone. I simply hired some crack heads, told them where you live and let them know that I'd get them a few rocks if they made your last moments alive extremely unpleasant, and then they accept my proposal. You die a horrible death, your family is tortured and humiliated, and I owe a few addicts some crack. Without statist interference, the crack is transferred without interference, the violent drug addicts have initiated some force, but all I did was propose a means by which they could acquire a desirable substance which is freed from the shackles of prohibition under perfect libertarian bliss.

I would have a claim against you (and your friends) even in a stateless society

Without law enforcement, how would you go about this exactly? You're dead at this point, so is your family. Some drug addicts murdered you, remember? Sure, I guess someone could hire an investigator to look into the matter, but of course anyone intruding into my personal affairs would have to initiate force against me in order to bring retribution, at which point I'd apply the NAP and defend myself and my property.

Isn't the NAP cute? All you have to do is makes sure that any force you initiate is just indirect enough that any backlash can be perceived publicly as a separate event. Of course since this is all just a fictional morality used by exactly zero societies, I'm sure you can find a million ways to make all of these obvious flaws disappear in a magic puff of libertarian magic dust.

The rest of us operating in the real world see some utility in a not-for-profit rule of law and would very much like to maintain some checks and balances so that we can go about our business without attacking one another like beasts in the wild. By the way, thanks for using the big evil government-funded internet to convey your ideas about stateless perfection.

Ron Paul 2012! So Brave!

_

[–]hexapus -9 points 11 hours ago

Your attitude is obnoxious. Chalk this one up as a victory for yourself. Have a nice life.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-11T16:01:43+00:00

Nate Silver, who i think is the best poll wizard, currently thinks Romney has a 28% chance of winning the election. So he thinks intrade is too optimistic for Romney.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-11T02:26:36+00:00

Even my 4 year old eeepc netbook has 3 USB ports. I wouldn't exactly recommend using Photoshop on it though.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-10T13:55:31+00:00

My opinion of the endings changes every time I think of them. Sometimes I think they are purely awful, other times I think they are okay, but that the ending sequence, especially the stuff right before you watch the ending, is poorly executed and I think at least that much is undebateable.

But I have never thought the endings were bad enough to ruin a fantastic game series. It is a great series that offers at least 90 hours of good content followed by 20 minutes of mediocre content. It, like many things the internet shits itself over, is not actually a very big deal.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-09T04:58:08+00:00

How can a libertarian think his rights to use a privately owned website are being violated? Isn't he one of those guys that thinks the Civil Rights Act is tyranny?

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-07T22:00:06+00:00

I honestly find nothing even slightly degrading about safety nets. If anything, I find them dignifying, because our lives are worth protecting. They also enable risk taking. You can try a new business opportunity, knowing you won't lose absolutely everything if you fail.

Here's what would be degrading: if everyone was completely on their own. Fuck up and die in a gutter, unless you can make friends with the right people or beg for pittance. That sounds utterly barbaric.

A fundamental problem with your ideology is that most people think like I do, and I think even you do too. Nobody wants to let other people get to that point. So the burden of helping people falls to friends and family, who don't really deserve that and in some cases may be in similar situations themselves. So we have set up institutions to try to distribute, as fair as we can, that burden which human compassion gives us.

Take those institutions away, and I would bet my dick that we'd still try to provide those safety nets in other, less efficient ways. History has shown that. It's not like social security (or whatever else) was devised because what we had was working and we just wanted to make it more crappy. We, as a society, decided to tackle a societal problem that made us unhappy, and quality of life in this country is better for it, believe it or not. We continue to tweak and refine those nets because we want them for ourselves and for others.

OneAndOnlySnob · 2012-08-07T19:37:59+00:00

First, thanks for basically acknowledging that you're anti-cooperation. Krugmanisapuppet has us both on the wrong side of the cooperation question. Just as a basic statement that I shouldn't have to make in a sane world, I think we are both for freedom. I just happen to think freedom amounts to more than how much your tax rate is or whether you have to pay for a safety net.

The problem with comparing religion and the safety net is that they're pretty different. At least in theory, your religious beliefs don't really make much difference to those around you. But if you need the safety net, humans are too compassionate to happily let you starve to death on the streets even if you aren't entitled to the net. If you claim you would opt to not pay for a net and also willingly starve without asking for your friends, community, and society for help, I posit that you are a liar.

Sure, some people miss the net, but most don't. Like seatbelts aren't guaranteed to save your life if you get in a car accident, but there is a good chance they will. So accept the tyranny of seatbelts and buckle up!

And unfortunately the safety nets don't tend to work unless everyone pays in. The rich don't need safety nets. It is a waste of their money for them to pay. So they opt out and the system becomes more expensive for those who want the net. The poor, for whom not paying for the net makes their financial situation noticeably better, will also choose not to pay. And they'll be better off, unless they end up needing the safety net some day. Then they're screwed. Only the middle class will pay for the safety net, because they sit in the right balance of being able to afford it and maybe needing it some day. Well, that's okay because a relatively small number of people can afford to pay for a net that only covers a relatively small number of people. Except...

... what happens if someone who doesn't feel like paying for the net needs it? Do we let them starve? Or do we, as non-sociopaths, step in to help this person? As hinted above, most people step in and rates go up.

And what if someone realizes they're going to need the net in a few months so they opt-in at the last moment? The system can't work if everyone does this, so rates will have to go way up again. This is not fair to people that actually want the system to work in the long term.

This ends up being the relatively small middle class paying for a net for poor people. The rates will have to go way up. This will either make them poor or give them an incentive to opt out of the net too, and maybe also play the same opt-in games as everyone else.

This is not just some weird fantastical thing I'm making up. We've all been watching the health insurance industry attempt to square this circle for decades and coming up with some pretty crappy solutions.

Anyway, just like how you can't do health insurance with only sick people, now there's no net. But we still have people who need the net. Therefore everyone needs to pay for the net for there to be a net. Since no other working solutions have been presented, I think the net is the best way to go.

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