…is rampant in the USA. Basically, you get free education here-grades 1-12. Yet, mots kids don’t want it.The dropout rate in inner city highschools is as great as 70%. what is the explanation? I certainly don’t know-it seems (to me) that the way out of poverty is education. :o
Stranger , I have to admit that was pretty damned brilliant.
People don’t ‘become’ ignorant. They start ignorant and have to be taught.
Marley23 In all fairness, politicians go to expensive hookers all the time. If someone wasn’t out to get him, he wouldn’t have been caught. Occam’s Razor would tell us that a high ranking politician getting caught for something people do on a daily basis, must have had someone pushing the story and making it into an agenda.
Heh, it’s not that simple. They reject a broken system of rote indoctrination that doesn’t really educate people but pushes groups of trivia designed to facilitate the standardized tests. Most public school education IS in fact pointless or has done a poor job of getting kids to understand it’s importance. Teaching the importance of a skill is a relevant part of education. There isn’t a trend against education, there is a crappy product that is not meeting the needs it was designed to fulfill.
Supply and Demand IS whatever the market will bear. That’s the whole point.
However, there’s a more direct answer. The money you pay for a gallon of gas has nothing to do with the amount they paid for it. That money’s done gone. Instead, the price you pay for gas reflects the cost of the oil company’s NEXT purchase of gasoline.
What you suggest would involve the company keeping track of the cash paid every gallon of crude they buy, linking this amorphous quantity to the simirly amorphous quantity of gas they eventually sell, and price accordingly, AND somehow keep seperate the vast cash reserves necessary to purchase more crude at unknown prices. And, at the end of the day, you will pay the same for gas, just at slightly different times.
Consider your ignorance fought. 
And they get caught sometimes. See also Vitter, David.
I don’t think a Wall Street conspiracy is necessary in this case; I think powerful people often get arrogant, fuck up and ruin things for themselves with little outside help. I also find the “official” story (Spitzer’s bank noticed funny transactions, leading to an investigation and so on) credible without some kind of a Wall Street conspiracy. But I can see where reasonable people would disagree. What’s frustrating is arguing with someone’s friend, by proxy, when the person sitting there admits she knows nothing about what she is saying, but argues more and more vehemently all the same. She wasn’t interested in the facts. As far as she was concerned, Spitzer was a righteous defender of the little guy, so the greedy corporations got together to take him down. And I’m not just assuming this, she came pretty close to saying it.
It’s a good thing you’re wearing those asbestos underclothes.
Best as I can tell, the SDMB is not one iota smarter, on average, than any corner tap or barber shop. In fact, I suspect less, and probably much less.
And so on. This whole view of intelligence is, to me, fundamentally flawed. You’re right; most Dopers have a skewed perspective. But it’s not that they’re smarter; rather it’s that they believe the things about which they’re smart have more value. Or else that they think the basic universals they’ve divined are impressive because their parents taught them that every thought they ever had was wonderful.
What pisses me off is when politicians mock educated people: “Oh, he’s just one of those Harvard educated elites from Massachusetts”. It used to be that people with a good education were admired rather than denigrated. What makes it worse is when the aw-shucks, faux-populists are themselves the product of prep schools and Ivy league Universities.
Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, Obama was editor of the Harvard Law review, Wesley Clark was first in his class at West Point. These are real accomplishments and shouldn’t be something that you hide so you don’t look too “book-smart”. (I know there are brilliant Conservatives too, I just don’t know the particulars off the top of my head.)
Born so, anything more is a challenge.
That is not ignorance, that is stupidity. Different phenomenon.
Hey, I love my variable rate loan. It started out cheap, almost went up to what a fixed rate would have been, and has since been dropping like clockwork. Thanks, ABCP
You’re probably referring to those bait and switch low intro rate loans.
http://www.dfi.wa.gov/CS/ameriquest_facts.htm Ameriquest paid a settlement of 325 million dollars due to fraud and unfair practices. i guess they were not hoodwinking people.
When I lived in Princeton I got my hair cut in the next chair over from an astronaut one day. But I don’t think many corner barber shops are at that level.
(Or have such a high percentage of Jeopardy contestants as we do.)
To respond seriously to the OP, consider the reading habits of much of the American public. So many read very little if at all. Few of those who do read books that will teach them things. Many read stuff that is utter crap (see: The Secret) and those are the ones who actually read.
I get my local paper and the NY Times. If I depended on my local paper for news, I’d be ignorant also. They take a few wire service stories and chop to fit. And I live in Silicon Valley. I used to get the Mercury News, but that got taken over by the owners of my local paper, and it is nose diving.
Most of the people who watch even the soundbites on the national news are old.
I can rant on about the lack of logic and reasoning ability, and innumeracy, but it’s late. C. M. Kornbluth appears to have been right about the future.
In a broad sense, I would say it’s predominately (but not 100%) wishful thinking. i.e. people believe things not necessarily because they are true but because it satisfies some psychological need that they have.
For example, believing that there is a conspiracy among oil companies satisfies the need to blame somebody else for high gas prices. For many people, it’s psychologically easier to blame big evil corporations than to blame our own rather aggressive consumption.
As another example, some people believe that it’s wrong or unfair for the federal government to tax peoples’ income. Many of those same people believe that the federal government lacks the legal authority to tax peoples’ income. From a logical perspective, there is no reason why the two beliefs should be correllated, but my sense is that they are. Again, it would seem to be the result of wishful thinking.
I’m being whooshed, right?
Just because we keep telling each other we’re special doesn’t mean we’re actually special.
It’s long overdue that we deep six the myth that this place is somehow a reservoir of unbridled intellect.
Hey, don’t do that. The only reason I joined is because I like reservoirs full of unbridled intellect. The minute you tie a bridle on that there hoss, you break his spirit.
All of those qualities are highly variable from person to person.
Suppose I ask you to find the term in this list that doesn’t belong with the others: pig, falcon, chicken, apple, cow.
You would most likely say that apple doesn’t belong, because it’s a plant while the rest of the list is animals. Someone else might say that falcon is what doesn’t belong, because we don’t eat it.
Neither conclusion is inherently correct. They depend on the approach. The first approach depends on formal knowledge, while the second depends on practical knowledge. Neither answer is always “easily deduced”.
As for “absorbed reaily from a variety of common sources”, that doesn’t make something true. That the Moon Landings were a hoax is readily absorbed from a variety of common sources, but all of those common sources are worthless.
Decisions such as taking a variable-rate loan aren’t necessarily based on ignorance. A person who took such a loan in 2005 was basically gambling. If rates remained low, they would win. If rates popped up, they would lose. The fact that they gambled doesn’t indicate ignorance.
I think we may be defining “people losing their jobs” differently. If by “people losing their jobs” when subsidies are eliminated <> net loss of jobs in the economy, then you’re right. I never tried to say that it wasn’t the case.
But, in the sense that the guy I was talking about was using it, he meant individuals losing their particular job; i.e. Joe Blow, sugar harvesting machine driver. Remove the sugar subsidies, and it’s likely that HE would lose his job, even if it means that there might be a net gain of 100 jobs at candy companies.
Back to the op… I wonder how much of it is just lack of information. People I know (educated, rational, generally non-ignorant people) are routinely amazed when I mention that generally, the price of gasoline is set by the individual stations, not by Big Oil, at least not directly.
As for how I do it, I’m curious, pretty much insatiably curious about many things. I tend to think “How does X work?” or “I wonder why X happens?” and then proceed to go look it up. If I get conflicting information (frequent in hobbyist type fields of interest like gardening), I generally go with the more scientific opinion, or if there isn’t one(like trying to find a recipe), go with the Wikipedia-style approach of finding the most common variant on that theme. I know that the accuracy of your source is as important as your own analysis. Garbage-in, garbage-out after all!