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[Impending Doom]

That's how I feel about people who can't do calculus and statistics.  Good bless 'em, the poor dears.

So you feel innately superior to those of us who chose to put our time and effort into more useful skills with actual real-world applications?

Seriously. I saw an integral once in Intro. to Chemistry. Never saw calculus again anywhere else.

[andrea]

as an engineering student, I have to disagree with you on that.I saw integrals once... and then they started appearing everywhere.
there are tons of real world applications of calculus, much of modern physics and engineering wouldn't work that well without it.

I am assuming sarcasm however.

[Impending Doom]

True about the integral in Chemistry, but yes, the rest is sarcasm. I'm an engineering student as well, so I'm sure it starts to show up more eventually, but it certainly doesn't feel like it now.

[mainiac]

I was jesting with my earlier comment.  But if you think you can get far in chemistry or physics without calculus, you have another thing coming.

[Sheb]

Actually, it depends on what kind of chemistry you're doing. Organic synthesis work perfectly fine without calculus.

[Truean]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111206145117AAc4mrF

There are sadly too many conservatives in there for my taste echoing Fox News....

[Aqizzar]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111206145117AAc4mrF

Seems like a pretty heated and 50/50 divided crowd to me, as Internet commentary tends to be.

This one caught my eye, just because holy run-on sentences Batman.

How do you justify tax cuts for the rich and corporate elite when too many of them, like dividend recipients and hedge fund managers and General Electric pay a paltry zero to 15% maximum tax on income with very little "trickle down" effect, when tthe lower 80% of consumer demand creating families and jobs creating small businesses pay a harshly regressive total tax bill in the form of sales, property, excise, franchise, payroll, and, in addition to such taxes, income tax at rates typically in the 15% to 30% range on incomes needed for a basic decent standard of living while the rich thanks to their GOP generated tax cuts acquired two-thirds of the nation's weath and almost all of the income gains starting with and since Reagan due to GOP tax policy and GOP deregulation and GOP government welfare in the form of tax credits and subsidies for the rich and corporate elite?

Dude, lern 2 period.

[Truean]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111206145117AAc4mrF

Seems like a pretty heated and 50/50 divided crowd to me, as Internet commentary tends to be.

This one caught my eye, just because holy run-on sentences Batman.

How do you justify tax cuts for the rich and corporate elite when too many of them, like dividend recipients and hedge fund managers and General Electric pay a paltry zero to 15% maximum tax on income with very little "trickle down" effect, when tthe lower 80% of consumer demand creating families and jobs creating small businesses pay a harshly regressive total tax bill in the form of sales, property, excise, franchise, payroll, and, in addition to such taxes, income tax at rates typically in the 15% to 30% range on incomes needed for a basic decent standard of living while the rich thanks to their GOP generated tax cuts acquired two-thirds of the nation's weath and almost all of the income gains starting with and since Reagan due to GOP tax policy and GOP deregulation and GOP government welfare in the form of tax credits and subsidies for the rich and corporate elite?

Dude, lern 2 period.

Perhaps I was just looking a page of them at the time.

Yup. The problem with Yahoo is that they have a character limit on their post, so punctuation loses out sometimes. In this instance, I somehow don't really think that was a problem for this poster, though it's entirely possible they have other problems in terms of grammer (Yes, I misspelled it on purpose. That's the joke).

[mainiac]

So the Fed never lent 7.7 trillion to the banks.  The actual number was quite a bit smaller, and was paid back a while ago.  To get to 7.7 trillion dollars, you are including loan guarantees, which aren't the same thing as loans, let alone "bailouts".  And both the loans and loan guarantee's that did happen were fully disclosed, it's just the specifics of exactly which banks got how much money that is now coming to light.  The scope of these loans was publicly available information that was published (which in retrospect I should have checked before wading into an argument on this subject) as they were happening.

Bloomberg estimates a 13 billion dollar profit on the whole mess for the banks, which comes out to about 43 bucks per american.  I'd be very surprised if there is anyone in this conversation who hasn't been ripped off to the tune of more then 40 dollars in various bank fees and service charges over the past three years.  And unlike those fees and service charges, these loans didn't come out of our pockets and did prevent a global collapse that was pretty freakin' scary at the time if you recall.

IMHO Liberals, generally speaking, care about what they are saying is true or not.  It's why I consider myself a liberal.  This is why I get pissed when I see people railing at stuff like that 7.7 trillion dollar figure.  If liberals aren't better then this, who is left to be the voice of reason in our politics?  There is seriously bad stuff going on and the banks are to blame for a lot of it.  But we need our complaints to be grounded in reality.  If you attack indiscriminately, pretty soon you start attacking things that are good for the public.

[Aqizzar]

The problem isn't so much the loans themselves.  The problem is both the preferential treatment of larger banks by the Federal emergency window loans, and the fact that they made no distinction between holding of Reserve Loans and buying Treasury Bonds.  The national banks that precipitated their own collapse were able to take out loans from the Federal Reserve at nearly zero percent interest, and then instead of doing anything particularly productive with it, investing it strait into Treasury bonds paying about three percent interest.

Federal financial policy was, and still is mind you, so screw up and panicked that they basically gave an exclusive list of the largest banks a license to print money, by selling the national treasury back to itself at profit and sitting on their accounts.  $40 a taxpayer?  That's nothing compared to what the Treasury has spent out in interest on the bonds the banks bought with free loans.

[mainiac]

$40 a taxpayer?  That's nothing compared to what the Treasury has spent out in interest on the bonds the banks bought with free loans.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it was the bloomberg estimate for that exact amount.

[kaijyuu]

IMHO Liberals, generally speaking, care about what they are saying is true or not.  It's why I consider myself a liberal.

Hate to break it to you, dude, but stuff like that doesn't follow political lines. Or most any line, really. People will almost always push what they find most convincing, and only withdraw it if blatantly proven wrong (and good luck getting them to apologize for promoting false evidence after the fact).


Not everyone's like that of course but it's pervasive in every large group or organization, especially ones people are passionate about. Getting one's point across is more important than the base of that point being rooted in reality.

[mainiac]

Hate to break it to you, dude, but stuff like that doesn't follow political lines.

Like hell it doesn't.  I went to an election debate last year and just listening to the outright lies and falsehoods the conservatives cheered at would seal the mind of any neutral observer.  Outright lies are endlessly repeated in our political process.  So don't give me that crap.  To be a conservative in this country is to state that a vast amount of stuff that is patently false is true.

[kaijyuu]

If a conservative walked into a liberal convention, they'd be telling me the exact same thing about spreading lies and falsehoods.

What's to say they're not just the lies and falsehoods we buy into?


Name an issue and I'll probably agree with you on it. Historically, liberalism tends to be the "correct" side too (or at least the one we've ultimately chosen). The mentalities on both sides though are, generally speaking, the same. You'll find most people are more concerned about being seen as right than promoting the truth. Politics especially, as it's built to be about being seen as right rather than promoting the truth. Any party or politician that doesn't vehemently promote their position in spite of doubts is one that's doomed to be ineffectual. You just hope you end up right and are vindicated by history rather than demonized by it.


Outside of politicians it still happens, too. Look at any thread recently about various bills. People lambast it based on what they've read in blogs. Have they actually read the bill itself, though? Not likely. Could they be being manipulated and fed lies about things like you claim conservatives are? Certainly. Reality eventually kicks in and rarely are things as bad as the sensationalist blogs and politicians claim. Occasionally it's just as bad as they claim, but far from all the time. This goes for liberal as well as conservative. Neither are immune.


Who's eventually "right?" Usually liberal, at least in my opinion. How they go about it, though? Exactly the same.

[mainiac]

Libeals spout nothing along the lines of:
-Obama is a muslim/not a citizen
-Global Warming is a myth
-Evolution is "just" a theory
-We have solid proof of WMDs in Iraq
-Keynesian economics is socialist

Both sides are not exactly the same.  You are just intellectually lazy and don't want to see the difference.  And the "neutral" observers have to blame both sides if they want to appear neutral.

Honestly, even if we are making a judgement with zero knowledge, what are the odds of neither side being more prone to lies?  Pretty freaking slim.

Conservatives aren't punished for their lies, so they tell more of them.  And it's people like you that are rewarding that behavior.

I didn't walk into a conservative convention either.  I walked into a neutral election debate.  A debate where the conservative repeatedly shouted down the moderator when he asked questions they didn't like.  Even though the debate rules specifically said that you weren't allowed to cheer or boo during the debate.