The Good Post Gallery

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is an oldie, but it deserves recognition as the best advice anyone has ever given anyone else ever on the forum:

No, no, no.  If you are a poor, and you have a job at the Electric Company, you stay there, and say 'yes sir' and 'no sir, and just batten down the hatches and wait.  It will all be over soon enough.  No need to rush it by getting conned up the a**s by some Kiwi b******s and ending up living under a bridge.

Seriously, I know poors who work at the Power Company (true they're from the previous unionized generations so they made $70,000/year, but still), and they survived.  Every one of them - and they will get to die in hospitals with medical treatments.  Yes, Public Utilities are not government jobs, but they're the next best thing.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Jeff, you never addressed my question: If you don't go to Kenya, does that mean God changed his mind?

No, it would mean I read it wrong.  I don't forsee that happening, though.

But didn't you say he verbally spoke to you?

Exactly.  Read two things - read the second sentence of the quoted post and read my previous post in response to jmfcst's question.

OK.  But you said he spoke to you.  If he verbally spoke to you, what exactly did he say?  "Jeff, go to Kenya" or something you ahd to interpret?

I am not going to keep answering your questions. Obviously, you either don't belive that God still speaks to His children or you refuse to accept any answer I provide. I know what God told me so people need to accept that.

Besides, this forum thinks the only acceptable answer is to stay in Oklahoma. They refuse to consider that God sometimes asks His children to do things that go against societal thinking.

No one is suggesting that your only options in life is the hell hole of a state you live in or Kenya..

What is being said is you should actually think rationally about what it instead of deciding what you want to do and labeling it as God told you to do it. 

You seem to have such strong feelings about certain things that you convince yourself God is telling you to do something when in fact no such thing is happening.  We have been down this road before, it never ends well....

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I was just about to post that Scott. Ironic that came out of the Deluge.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I don't think it was the vacation itself that cost me the job, but I think getting sick afterwards got me in the long run.  The first commandment of the workplace "Thou shall never get sick."

You need to start taking personal responsibility, for it is given that your trip would most likely lead to an illness – there were several posters on here who even predicted it.  But, despite those known risks, you decided to go to Africa anyway, no matter the risks to your obligations to your employer.

It’s not like you came down with the flu after getting a flu vaccine.  Your company correctly concluded you did not do your due diligence to stay healthy in order to make a good first impression and meet your obligations to your employer.

You do NOT make pleasing your employer a priority in your life.  I would have fired you also.  Since you have a disability (stuttering) to being with, you need to make every effort to be doing it better and cleaner than the other guy.  Instead, you've lost your job in call centers three times. Been warned multiple times by posters, including me, with a history of half-chocked ventures with fly-by-night scam artists and two failed marriage engagements!

Reap-what-you-sow rules of engagement exist for your safety and for that of your team. They're not flexible, nor is the world. Obey them or your history will be written with government food stamps. Is that clear?

Dismissed.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Here's some advice. It's very good advice and I think you'll thank me for it eventually.

Don't ask for advice here.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

There's really no point in picking on DWTL now, especially for things he said five years ago, but I did find the "we would let people know if you join another religion you go to hell" bit quite amusing since that's not even Catholic teaching (even if the statement is taken literally and not defining "another religion" as "another Christian denomination" which is what I think he meant.)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

As a response to jmfcst this is quite dated now, but I just found it and I think it was passed up the first time it was posted, and it's too good to exclude from here:

jmfcst, people "hate" (I use the term "hate" because it's being used referring to sports and not a meaningful context) because he's a mediocre NFL quarterback who has managed to orchestrate a series of flukey last second drives. Not because he's a virgin or Christian or whatever. People (like myself) may mock the act of Tebowing, but that's more a component of his personality rather than a specific attack on his faith. Philip Rivers and Peyton Manning and Josh Hamilton and Jeremy Lin are all outspoken Christians, yet nobody hates them because they're actually good at what they do.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Nathan, you wear suits?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's not a small technicality.  Putting all of your eggs in one basket, just to have that basket fall to the ground means you don't have any eggs left.  Putting most of your eggs in one basket means you still have eggs left.  It's not a technicality - it's a huge difference.  Time after time you've been dishonest with the forum, and your story never stays the same.

All of a sudden your sure-fire plan falls through and WHAMO! there's a sudden back-up plan.  But we can't know what the company is?  For someone who compulsively shares details of his life with the forum, that seems strange.  So why all of a sudden is there secrecy with this company and none of the previous ones?  Is this another Rainbow incident?

Alright, fine, I'll disclose the name of the company - Aetna Insurance.  Jr. Web Developer for Aetna Insurance located in Layton, Utah which is 12 miles south of downtown Ogden.  This position has been developing since Xerox was still in play back in early August.  It has slowly materialized and I was actually accepted a week ago, but I just kept it under my hat because I really wanted to go to Kansas.  Since I am not going to Kansas, I am going to Utah, instead.

Either you're lying to us or someone is lying to you.

Here's why!

• The three Aetna Insurance offices in Utah are located in Salt Lake City, Sandy, and Taylorsville. None of these are very close to Ogden or Layton.
• Looking at the Aetna website, jobs with the prefix "junior" seem to be exclusively for college interns.
• There is no "junior" position that exists in their web team.
• Aetna doesn't call the position "Web Developer", they call it "Web Engineer."
• None of Aetna's three Utah offices are currently hiring Web Engineers, or any other jobs in the IT field for that matter, besides a few random non-web IT jobs in SLC.
• Oh, actually, the entire Web Engineer team is based solely out of their national headquarters in Connecticut, so there's literally no reason for them to ever be offered in Utah or anywhere else.

You will be interviewing for a non-existent job in a non-existent office, and if the job were to exist it would effectively be a minimum wage internship, and instead of being at the non-existent office near Ogden it would actually be in Hartford, Connecticut, on the other side of the country.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

...though certain of his beliefs, such as his support for animal rights... are problematic.

as I believe I said in IRC, Vosem appears so absurd because he explicitly states what are meant only to be the implicit tenets of neoliberal ideology.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is old, but I found it after looking up some things after the debate on teacher's salaries, and thought it was great. krazen should take notice:

There are various things one might mean by "overpaid", depending on the standard to which the pay is being compared, and it is worth getting clear on which one we are talking about. In particular, one could be "overpaid":

1. compared to the actual pay obtained by the people in question on the actually existing market, with all the regulations and market distortions that are in place.

2. compared to some external moral standard of the value of the work, which might include non-monetary values.

3. compared to the pay that the work would receive if the entire world were an ECO101-style model free market, with no regulations limiting individual exchange at all.


By standard (1), obviously no profession is underpaid or overpaid, since, tautologically, people are paid what they are paid.

By standard (2), teachers are not overpaid, and CEO's and athletes are, IMHO. Of course others might differ on the underlying philosophical questions.

By standard (3), we are pretty much all overpaid, since the standard of living would be much lower if certain welfare-enhancing medical and technological improvements that depended on co-ordinated state intervention had never occurred. The yellow avatar types would disagree with this, based on what is in my view a naive understanding of the history, psychology and biology of the species, though I generally get the sense people like Gustaf and Franzl wouldn't disagree.

However, when I encounter people claiming that union workers are overpaid, they generally seem to be using none of these criteria. Rather - though it usually isn't explicit - they seem to be using a sort of strange mix of (1) and (3), where we apply (1) to the rest of the economy, keeping fixed the regulations that allow the economy to function as it normally does, but apply (3) to the specific transaction involving the labour of the workers in question, discarding the actually existing labour procedures in favour of individual exchanges between individual workers and their employer. By this standard, yes, teachers are a bit overpaid, as are all union workers, and the more left-wing interlocutor shouldn't deny it, since to do so would be to deny that there is a union wage premium that is advantageous to the worker. But why we should take this funny combination of (1) and (3) as a basis for actual public policy decisions is not clear to me.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Honestly, my favourite post in years:

Are you the troll guy Carl who only posts bad economic numbers?

That should also go to the Sulfur Mine.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Nobody "wins" in the 2012 board. Humanity loses.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

One does suspect that a Carter grandson, if 'unemployed', is so by choice, Politico.  After all Romney's never worked a day in his life either.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I came here just to add that BK post.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This also deserves some recognition:

Would Americans want Puerto Rico to be state however? I think there has been little discussion what this would actually mean, in practice, if it were to happen except for Rick Santorum, who basically gave reasons why I doubt most Americans would support statehood for PR if it actually came to it.

If PR were to ask for statehood, it would be extremely difficult politically to deny it. It would, in fact, require taking an outright anti-Hispanic stand, with little possibility of any sort of a fudge - not something one would necessarily want to do.

It is further complicated by the fact that within PR it is the relatively pro-Republican PNP that's pro-statehood, while the outright pro-Democratic PDP prefers the status quo. While PNP is not exactly the local affiliate of the Republican party (it does have a pro-Dem wing, though that one is relatively weak right now), nearly all the local Republicans are part of it. If the national Republican party opposes statehood, it would amount to a complete destruction of the local Republican organization on the island. As Puerto Ricans are US citizens (something that, in the short term is not even possible to change if PR declares independence), they can and do vote when they find themselves living on the mainland.  Oposing statehood would, basically, tell those of them who still vote Republican that their party does not want their vote - in those many words and, once again, without much realistic possibility of a fudge.

It would even be pretty hard to make a principled anti-statehood argument in a way that wouldn't alienate at least some normally pro-Republican Cuban-Americans: it wouldll all come down to the issues of language and culture that Cubans themselves hold dear, and the arguments would undoubtedly degenerate into outright anti-Hispanic claims that would make a lot of people feel very unwelcome in that sort of a party. At that point, being a Hispanic (even Cuban) Republican would become a lot like being a gay Republican - not impossible, but not that easy or pleasant.

To sum up, if the Republican party openly opposes statehood, it would go a long way towards making sure that the Hispanic electorate converges to black levels of support for the Democrats. And, of course, when and if PR votes for statehood, Democrats themselves would have no incentive at all to oppose it. Hence, though a number of diehard anti-Hispanics can be counted on making a few passionate speaches, nobody who cares about national political implications would dare to do anything to prevent it happening.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Would recommend that non Jay Jay posters desist immediately, lest they want to waste a surprising amount of time arguing with a barrier made of fired clay.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Oh, I'm buying this game now. I disagree with many of his political/cultural/foreign policy views, but I've always found it ridiculous how much hate he got for essentially serving his country and its interests.

He was the point-man for an illegal executive branch plot which overstepped Congressional authority and grossly violated the separation of powers in our government. He managed the sale of a thousand anti-tank missile launchers to a hostile regime that sponsored (sponsors?) terrorism directed against the United States and its allies. He used the profits from this venture to fund rebel groups who sought to forcibly overthrow the (by that point) democratically elected Nicaraguan government; these groups notoriously killed tons of innocent Nicaraguan civilians (to the extent that the American-provided manuals even offered justifications for doing so). In addition, North used Panamanian dictator Noriega as a go-between when contacting the rebel groups; Noreiga was a brutal dictator in his own right and was also at the time was personally involved in smuggling mountains of cocaine illegally into the US.

To top it all off, he lied to Congress and the American public about all of the above, destroyed evidence that indicated otherwise, and only came clean when it was obvious the scale of his actions had been realized.

I really don't see how any of that can possibly be construed as "serving his country and its interests" in the slightest.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The fact that this whole "lol Obama's only up by 1 with a D+7 sample that's junk" thing is still going on is crazy, but I finally woke up and realized that the proof that it's horsesh**t was right in the crosstabs all along.  We all talk about how pollsters don't weigh yet that hasn't seemed to convinced the skew poll people so here's another angle to look at it that proves poll skewing to be non-existant.

First, let's go back to the 2004 and 2008 Exit Polls:

2004
Democratic 37%
Republican 37%
Independent 26%
D+0

2008
Democratic 39%
Republican 32%
Independent 29%
D+7

Now, simply by looking at that we can say, it was D+7 in a Democratic year but D+0 in a Republican year and this seems like a Republican year so it has to be close to D+0.  It sounds reasonable I suppose, but there's one big factor not being considered: why do people sign up for a political party? Their beliefs.  Personal beliefs are far stronger than affiliation.  If people feel their beliefs are not inline with a certain party, they will claim to leave it.  That's where the poll skewing shows itself to be non-existant, when we look at the exit polls on ideology:

2004
Liberal 21%
Moderate 45%
Conservative 34%
C+13

2008
Liberal 22%
Moderate 44%
Conservative 34%
C+12

Interestingly enough, the electorate's makeup by ideology didn't change much from 2004 to 2008.  What happened? McCain underperformed Bush in moderates by 6 percentage points.  Un-coincidentally, 5 points less  identified as Republican in 2008 compared to 2004; likely moderates who moved to Independent identification in 2008.

So, let's look at ideology identification in some 2012 national polls.  While nearly all polls ask this question, unfortunately, not all polls publish the makeup.  There also haven't been a lot of national polls done in recent weeks.  The most recent poll I can find which did publish the makeup was the NBC/WSJ poll (Obama 49-46) from 9/30.  Let's see what they found, first on Party ID:

NBC/WSJ
Democratic 32%
Republican 26%
Independent 40%
D+6

Now, at this glance, it looks like NBC/WSJ is aligned to show a Democratic bias by showing the turnout for Democrats to be the same as 2008.  However, when we look at the ideological identification...

NBC/WSJ on 9/30
Liberal 22%
Moderate 38%
Conservative 37%
C+15

And there we have it.  Pretty close to both 2004 and 2008 exit polls.  In fact, the NBC/WSJ poll, if anything, has sampled this election to have more conservatives in it than even the 2004 election.  "Unskew it" to 2004 levels and:

NBC/WSJ on 9/30 (My Numbers)
Obama 50.44%
Romney 42.53%

Of course, those aren't scientific.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So in my case, if you're a member of a fraternity or sorority, chances are Romney is the "cool" option.

No offense, but isn't a fraternity the antithesis of 'cool'?  And a sorority is even worse.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

As always, J. J., you are almost totally wrong, but have found one thing that you will inevitably latch onto, to pretend you're actually competent in what you're discussing.  Let's begin!

No, but unless the guy was a letter carrier or a a public official, he had no obligation to deliver them.  Simply put, it is not legal to draft people into the US Postal Service.

Wrong in every state I know of, wrong in Virginia.  To wit: "If any person (i) agrees to mail or deliver a signed voter registration application to the voter registrar or other appropriate person authorized to receive the application and (ii) intentionally interferes with the applicant's effort to register either by destroying the application or by failing to mail or deliver the application in a timely manner, he shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor."  If I function as a voter registrar in a way that suggests to voters that I will turn in their application for them, and don't, I am guilty of a crime -- in Washington, in Virginia.  I have been doing voter reg for a while now, bro, and everyone knows this.

As to why, because they were duplicates, or at least he thought most of them were.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/worker-for-gop-hired-contractor-charged-with-dumping-va-voter-registration-forms/2012/10/19/86062d7a-19f1-11e2-ad4a-e5a958b60a1e_story.html

There is no indication there that Mr. Small thought they were duplicates -- just that they were.  That article doesn't even say Mr. Small was claiming that.  Also, read it more carefully.  Three of the eight voters were already registered.  One wasn't, but was a felon (did Mr. Small run felony background checks?)  Four were new voters and not duplicates.  Mr. Small is responsible for nearly disenfranchising four people, and there is no reason to assume he knew the other four applications were moot.

The line I assume you'll draw on to defend Mr. Small's applications is this: "If any person intentionally solicits multiple registrations from any one person or intentionally falsifies a registration application, he shall be guilty of a Class 5 felony."  That line does not prohibit submitting applications for those already registered.  It prohibits soliciting someone to register multiple times -- something that submitting a voter registration when you're already registered won't do.  People do that all the time.

Only if the person is a hired third party, which he was.  If someone hands you a voter registration form, and you are not an official (or a letter carrier), you have no obligation to do anything with it.

Demonstrably false.  I doubt that's even true in Pennsylvania.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I have noticed recently that many posters on the forum (and journalists too) appear to have a mistaken idea of what a "media market" is. In particular, many people appear to think that viewers typically don't see stations from outside their media market. This is incorrect.

What "media markets" actually are has to do with the FCC's "must carry" rules. Cable providers are legally required to carry local stations within a certain area - so, say, you can't offer a cable package in New York and omit a New York local affiliate from your basic cable package. (I'm not endorsing this one way or the other, but the thinking behind the rule is that since cable infrastructure uses public property, it's legitimate to prevent them by regulation from colluding with certain broadcasters to exclude other ones). So the country is divided into market areas within which local channels must be carried. Neilsen also uses these same areas for market research and ratings purposes. (The FCC uses the term "Television Market Area" and Neilsen uses the term "Designated Market Areas", and the informal term "media market" applies to both, but their boundaries are co-extensive so there's never a problematic ambiguity.)

But although providers must carry local channels within a media market, there's no prohibition at all on carrying channels outside the media market. In fact this is quite common. For example, when I lived in Mercer County NJ, my basic Comcast cable package included the main network affiliates for both New York and Philadelphia even though I was in the Philadelphia media market so offering the New York channels was a voluntary market decision. A more politically relevant example now: when I google "Toledo cable", the first result is a company called "Buckeye Cable", which seems to be the main provider in the area, and  their Toledo "standard service" (pdf) includes not only the Toledo affiliates for all the national networks but also all the Detroit affiliates as well (plus even CBC Windsor). So actually all Detroit channels are widely seen in northwestern Ohio, even though this is a different "media market". And small markets don't necessarily have their own affiliates at all - Zanesville for example has a local PBS station and it gets its own media market so that Columbus cable companies aren't forced to show Zanesville PBS, but ABC and CBS don't have Zanesville channels so they just show Columbus affiliates there.

In addition to all this, if you have just an antenna, then what channels you get is just based on signal reception which obviously has nothing to do with county boundaries.

So, the lesson is, media markets are actually not that relevant at all to where ads are being seen and you have to look at the actual channel lineups offered by companies in the area, or distance from signal towers.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I had good insurance with my job before obama came into office.

It isn't really possible for 'private' insurance to be good, I'm afraid.  Insurance companies don't want to pay you if they can avoid it, you see.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Badger, I don't personally think joining the military and fighting is, in itself, something that should be commended. Particularly in times of general peace. A different argument can be made for strong, morally indisputable missions like defeating fascism  in WW2.

But otherwise , I view veterans no differently than any other fellow citizens and human beings.

This. Would you hold any higher respect for someone for being a veteran of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan? How about a veteran of the Serb or Croat armies in the early 90s?

It's not surprising someone living in Germany thinks this way, I've noticed that Germans far more than most nationalities tend to lack holding someone in higher regard because of military service. There's a reason for that...

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

HockeyDude, the support for racial profiling alone (which, along with a degree of military-worship despite his putative left-libertarianism, he shares with compatriot bro-atheists like the odious Sam Harris) is enough to make Bill Maher somewhat questionable as a political tastemaker, to say nothing of his absolutely horrible--beyond just the level of 'asshole', really--personality, the rest of the somewhat questionable positions and beliefs that others have cited, and that weird incident where he scaremongered about the name 'Mohammed' becoming popular in the United Kingdom and other incidents of such kind. He's not 'absolutely right on every count about religion' if for no other reason because he doesn't care about what treating religious people's actually ways of life with any compassion even of the unwanted and paternalistic variety, just with a kind of mockery that is often part, as with so much of the above, of a general complex of racist and, especially, classist subtext endemic to much of the bro-atheist movement.