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T Zero posted:I was listening to a podcast today about the lottery and they said that 40 percent of Americans see the lottery as their only chance at wealth. So not only do they think they are going to be rich, they think it's going to happen overnight. That's why the state lottery is hugely profitable - it's a voluntary tax on the stupid and delusional. This is a totally invalid chain of reasoning. You're assuming that 40% think winning the lottery is likely, and then because that idea which you ascribed to them is stupid, you are calling them stupid. It's possible that these people are so cynical that they believe they have a better chance of winning the lottery than advancing in society. I don't know if they believe that, so I'm not going to assume they do, but it's one of many alternatives to your "they must be stupid because I imagine they have stupid beliefs" chain of thought.
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Apr 29, 2012 12:45
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Bruce Leroy posted:But why can't it be both? Why can't these people be cynical about the myth of upward mobility in American society while simultaneously having poor understandings of probability to the degree that they think they have realistic chances at winning the lottery? The point is that it could be anything; I illustrated that by making up my own explanation. It could be both, neither, something different altogether, or all of those things. With that much information you simply can't draw any conclusion, which is why the first post was unfair. Any speculation on the point has exactly as much merit as something you just made up out of thin air, so it's quite unfair to attack someone for a position you just imagined they had. For example: "Obama cancelled the Constellation program because he doesn't want us to find out what he's been doing on the moon! Therefore it's clear that he constructing moon lasers to conquer the world for the Muslim Kenyan Communist Party!" Take a real thing and make a non sequitor conclusion from it, and you can make up anything you want. This one only sounds more fantastical because the non sequitor is more obvious, but there was one present in post I quoted. edit:  at "effective tax rate of 29.5%" for the 1%. I wonder how exactly they define "effective" considering we know Mitt Romney paid 13% on his income this year. Jesus how does he even manage that, you would think it would be somewhere above the 15% for capital gains. (I don't understand the carried interest loophole but I'm guessing that has something to do with it?)
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:50 on May 1, 2012 |
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May 1, 2012 11:46
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Uh Jesus I made more than that last year and the IRS gave me money for bothering to file. I don't want to tell you you're doing something wrong, but somebody is doing something wring. The tax code is all kinds of hosed up. Seriously you should not have to pay taxes on income that's like 50% the poverty level. How did you end up paying taxes on that?
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May 15, 2012 15:21
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Goatman Sacks posted:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577438421678904222.html?mod=hp_opinion I can't believe my family still gets that rag. They've been getting it since I was a kid and it was a respectable publication and sheer inertia has kept them renewing it every year even though they now disagree with virtually everything it says. I keep telling them to cancel and get the NYT if they want a paper but whenever I visit or mention it my mom is always like "oh I forgot and just renewed it again."
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Jun 1, 2012 17:53
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I love that austerity has been so thoroughly discredited in the U.K. at this point that pro-austerians have to claim that what they're doing isn't actually austerity at all. They're backpedaling so hard that they can't possibly claim a shred of intellectual honesty to an intelligent observer.
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Jun 4, 2012 03:57
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I agree with the letter. What have teachers ever done for us? Always sitting around at school, doing nothing, yet simultaneously pumping our children full of lies. drat them and their lazy and yet also tireless lifestyle!
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Jun 16, 2012 09:32
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Muscle Tracer posted:Given that current studies estimate about 10% of people are gay, they're also pretty drat integral to America. At that ratio, we've potentially had a few (closeted) gay presidents already. If I remember correctly the 10% figure was from the Kinsey report which is hardly current, and his methodology was too poor to make any generalizations. I've never heard that figure from anyone in a position to be acquainted with actual current studies, assuming there are any that are definitive enough to make that kind of sweeping conclusion.
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Jul 4, 2012 14:37
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