Yesterday, an encounter with mmmbeer reminded me of my encounters with Siam Sam. Feel free to join me in denouncing mmmbeer for inadequate reading skill, but my real question is about septimus :smack:
Is there some flaw in my posting style which causes fellow Dopers to imitate blithering idiots?
The cited thread was about “class warfare,” but this thread isn’t about that: it’s about mmmbeer’s obtuseness. As background, however, you need to know that Warren Buffett included his secretary’s payroll taxes when he made his famous comparison of his and her tax rates. Whether it is fair to include payroll taxes is beyond the scope of this Pitting. The question is not whether mmmbeer should have agreed with the inclusion of payroll taxes; it is whether he should have been able to understand that Doper septimus was including it in his comments.
What I Pit is a Doper who can Reply to a post which mentions “payroll tax” twice, include one of the mentions in the excerpted quote, and express an agreement which ignores the word “payroll.” (I then responded, mentioning “payroll tax” three more times, asking mmmbeer if he’d confused my remarks; he responded, quoting my message with all three of the “payroll tax” mentions included, still didn’t grasp the meaning, closed his post with “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.”
Let’s be very clear. I was not playing some game, where I wrote “payroll tax” in a small font hoping that mmmbeer would miss it, so that I could Pit him. Look particularly at my #244, where I politely call attention to the confusion. Yet even after this the “conversation” went on for another six turns.
#239:
#241:
#242:
#243:
#244:
#247:
The “conversation” continued; #248, #249 by me, #250 by mmmbeer, #251 by me, and it as only after that, in #252, that mmmbeer finally grasped that I’d mentioned “payroll tax.” By that time the phrase had occurred no less than thirty-three times in my posts and the excerpts from my posts quoted by mmmbeer.
My two cents - it’s pretty clear that mmmbeer uses “everyone pays 10%” to include payroll taxes. Seems he wasn’t the one being obtuse. And yes - I understand that his apparent understanding of the issue is marginal, at best.
*Yeah, yeah - you can click on the little blue arrow, but it’s just not as intuitive.
Hm, does Septimus remind anyone else of Mojo Jojo?
He was wrong, for he did not account for payroll taxes! And I told him this! That he was wrong! I, Mooojooo Septimus, informed him of how he was wrong in failing to answer my question! About whether he accounted for payroll taxes! This is the last time mmmbeer will cross Mojo Septimus, for he has crossed Mojo Septimus for the last time! Bwahahaha!
Huh–it seems pretty clear to me the exact opposite, that mmmbeer meant the exact opposite. Unfortunately, I think both of the players in this spat spent awhile trying harder to gotcha one another than they did trying to state their own position as clearly and unambiguously as possible.
The question on the table might better be phrased thusly:
If someone gets a paycheck (for a day, a week, a month, it doesn’t matter) of $1000, how much–after deducting ONLY money for the federal government–should they take home? Currently the person pays about $130 in payroll taxes, plus whatever they owe for federal income tax.