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MetaTalk post: Informative answer deleted
unSane: If Tanaziki's posting history is a fair game, so is Taz's deletion history. I have absolutely nothing against him or her personally -- I daresay I agree with 95% of their opinions -- but the arbitrariness of the deletions with their flaky ex-post-facto justifications ('be nicer', 'say it's your opinion') makes me very very much not want to continue to be part of Metafilter, despite there being to much good about the site and the overall light-handed, judicious and very good... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gman at 5:32 AM on April 27, 2013
"Is there anything that can be done to stop this asshole of a doctor from ever again coming near a child with gender-identity issues?"

"No because the doctor's behavior did not demonstrate that he was impaired, incompetent, or unethical in violation of any state licensing regulations."

The answer was acceptable within the context of the facts provided. It's only problematic because the question was problematic.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by El Sabor Asiatico at 3:09 AM on April 27, 2013
"Apologies if the implication that someone might be drunk is offensive; I don't know."

koeselitz, it's offensive because it's dismissive: "You're drunk, so what you're saying is merely drunk ramblings we don't have to consider, answer, or refute" or even worse "What you're saying is so nonsensical that only a drunk person would say it."

It also implies that the person is addicted to alcohol, or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by orthogonality at 2:40 AM on April 27, 2013
koeselitz "still maintain[s], incidentally, that given the momentousness of the subject matter the way Tanizaki's comment challenged the premises of the question counted as deletion-worthy combativeness."

I'm assuming that this proceeds from the way that Tanizaki use of the of the word "ethical"?

Or perhaps you are also objecting to the "terseness"?

His used "ethical", In my opinon,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by orthogonality at 1:44 AM on April 27, 2013
If Tanaziki's posting history is a fair game, so is Taz's deletion history.

Agreed, though admittedly it will be tough for this point to cut through the sycophantic noise.
posted to MetaTalk by Blazecock Pileon at 3:38 AM on April 27, 2013
Here's the thing: This whole MeTa mess could have been avoided if Tanizaki had e-mailed the mods to ask why the comment was deleted and then, based on their comments, re-written it so that it was more polite and more clear.

i think this is typically just not done, and amounts to a procedural censorship. the idea is just put as many road blocks to saying something until they give up. i can't say i've felt any comment SO IMPORTANT to rewrite in a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cupcake1337 at 10:53 PM on April 26, 2013
dubusadus replied to me, "This assumes that the answer was beneficial,"

No, just that the answerer in good faith thought it was.

dubusadus went on, "that the answerer put in a large amount of time in the answer,"

No, I think you misread me. LobsterMitten's argument was that answerer (unlike mods) have no excuse to be terse.

The reason for an answer being terse is that it takes... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by orthogonality at 9:57 PM on April 26, 2013
rtha wrote: "By 'you' you mean you, right? Because I've been, uh, modded and don't think I've ever felt this way."

Later, rtha added, about a post of hers that was deleted, "I was having a spectacularly shitty day at work, so that didn't help. I started to fill out the contact form; typed, deleted, typed some more, closed the tab and took a short walk. Came back and still kind of cared, in an irritated way, but figured that the contact form wasn't going... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by orthogonality at 9:10 PM on April 26, 2013
This was a poor deletion by the mod who has, in my subjective opinion, a history of contentious deletions from almost his/her first day with mod powers. I have absolutely no insight into how the other mods feel but my God if I was a mod I'd be tired of being dragged into MeTa to circle the wagons and defend yet another iffy deletion which tarred me with the same brush. If Tanaziki's posting history is a fair game, so is Taz's deletion history. I have absolutely nothing against him or her... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by unSane at 9:05 PM on April 26, 2013
>Have you read this thread at all?

(I mean, honestly, jjjjjjjijjjjjjj, I understand how tough this moment must be for you. I mean, you just posted a completely incorrect comment. Tell you what – here's my recommendation: post a complete apology and retraction. I suspect this would be totally uncontroversial, and moreover it's the right thing to do.)
I've read the entire thread, yes, and my reactions were heartfelt and earnest and shared by many... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jjjjjjjijjjjjjj at 8:50 PM on April 26, 2013
LobsterMitten draws a distinction bewtween terse mod comments and terse user comments because: mod comments need to be made fast... [b]ut member comments are made under no time pressure (in this AskMe example anyway),

In my opinion, that's not correct.

Users who answer AskMefi questions are answering at the opportunity cost of doing something else. Most of us have jobs, families, pets, and other obligations.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by orthogonality at 7:02 PM on April 26, 2013
MeFi post: Ages 3 and Up
Here it is. So it wasn't a straight leap from 1983 to 2010, there was a gradual transformation.

Actually and I just remembered looking at that image, that I eventually threw away the gingerbread and gumdrop cards so that the game would be less interminable. And then just straight up took to stacking the deck so the first card my kid picked was the ice cream that takes you to 9/10 of the way through the game. SUCH A HORRIBLE GAME. I was so happy when she got into Uno at 4.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by looli at 2:01 PM on April 26, 2013
MeFi post: Taibbi held a gun to my head, er, I mean...
> more moderate posters like Ironmouth,

Ironmouth's contribution to this thread was not a distinguished one...

> JPD, and Mutant (who almost never posts anymore) get shouted down by more rabidly liberal posters who do not seem to be as familiar with the industry.


I personally know an awful lot about this field. Indeed, I wrote valuation models for mortgage derivatives in the 80s for Drexel Burnham... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lupus_yonderboy at 1:21 PM on April 26, 2013
This incestuous revolving door corruption just makes me sick:
One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by crayz at 11:24 AM on April 26, 2013
Your response to is most probably one of the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief (Yes, I really like this toolkit/model lately):
1) Denial: "Surely this can't be true! Taibbi must be wrong!"
2) Anger: "How can this happen? If someone commits financial crimes they should go to jail!"
3) Bargaining: "Maybe it's an isolated incident, or it's not really that big of a deal."
4) Depression: "The world is completely... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by suedehead at 10:44 AM on April 26, 2013
This is basically skimming and anti-trust, basically. Everything costs more. It's not a systemic threat to the capital markets, it's just sleazy.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 10:42 AM on April 26, 2013
Quibbling over Taibbi's talents or love for hyperbole just flat-fucking-blows-me-away.

Name ONE other person trying to make this subject available/understandable to the average layman. Whether or not he gets the occasional fact or metaphor wrong is nothing more than nitpicking. He's made his case, blown the horn, connected the dots for YEARS now - and EVERYONE KNOWS he's essentially right.

The big question is do we, as a country and a civil... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Benny Andajetz at 10:30 AM on April 26, 2013
Little over a year ago I worked for a company designing a foreign exchange trading platform. My advice to you is to not get into Fx trading. If the trader, brokers, liquidity providers or scalpers don't fuck you, the bank will. And they often go first.
posted to MetaFilter by jsavimbi at 9:39 AM on April 26, 2013
Do you know how hard it is to collect your campaign war chest from a lot of little banks, banks that may not even all be thinking in lockstep with each other? One-stop campaign fund shopping is so much more convenient and doesn't carry all those messy and confusing conflicting marching orders.
posted to MetaFilter by George_Spiggott at 9:36 AM on April 26, 2013
MeFi post: "The Logic Of Violence In Criminal War"
Some cartels do continue to provide the traditional protection and more mafia type extortional one hand washes another corruption elements, such as Michoacan's la Familia . . . unfortunately the ultraviolent American trained military defectors, los Zetas, are winning.

But I mean, come on guys. Prohibition worked, right?

What's the big deal. We just have to try to drug war harder.
posted to MetaFilter by hobo gitano de queretaro at 3:26 PM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: I have a crazy friend who says we dont need zipcodes...is he CRAZY?
The thing that's always astonished me about zipcodes is that they contain *almost* but not quite enough information to eliminate all the other text required to deliver a letter.

Living in the US, it's galling that in order to receive a letter I'm required to write down several times as much raw information as you would need to uniquely specify the exact physical location of my incoming mail file drawer on the surface of the earth.

The extra... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by eotvos at 2:46 PM on April 25, 2013
cosmic.osmo: the USPS has a single "preferred city" for each zip code that they'd prefer for everyone to use, even if they don't actually live in that city. That's what your address is being corrected to. There are also "acceptable cities". Using preferred or acceptable cities will, as the USPS says, "minimize delivery delays". Look at what cities are in a zip on this USPS page.
posted to MetaFilter by zsazsa at 11:40 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: Hush Little Journo, Don't Say a Word
I give up. I'm all out of anger and exasperation. Sometimes all us fighting the good fight against stupid misogynistic shit doesn't seem to make a difference. Doesn't even seem to make an impression. Just... (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Why do some people not want me to buy their games? Why? I HAVE MONEY. I LIKE ZOMBIES AND THINGS AND OTHER KINDS OF NON-ZOMBIE GAMES ARE COOL TOO. Why do they insist on marketing only to 50% of the population?! Because when I see shit like this I feel... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tequila Mockingbird at 4:29 PM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: No Sanitation? No Services? No Problem!
Well patch 2.0 came out today, traffic is still broken and people are still getting locked out of and/or getting forced rollbacks in their cities along with some new problems, but you can get five trourist attractions for your city when you buy Crest and Oral-B products!

From RPS, The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by the_artificer at 8:29 PM on April 22, 2013
MeFi post: All those verbal gaffes were just strategery.
There is a bias in much of the mainstream press and commentariat that people from outside of NY-BOS-WAS-CHI-SEA-SF-LA are less intelligent, or at least well educated. Many public commenters harbor an anti-Texas (and anti-Southern, and anti-Midwestern) intellectual bias. They mistakenly treat John Kerry as smarter than George Bush because John Kerry talks like an Ivy League professor while George Bush talks like a Texan.

What nonsense. If this were... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by The Notorious SRD at 4:46 PM on April 25, 2013
Also, after seeing the Bush interview with Diane Sawyer, where Bush says in one breath he thinks the Iraq war was the right thing to do and in the next breath how holding his new grandchild was one of the best and more powerful experiences of his life; and I'm kind of thinking about all the innocent dead Iraqi people and American soldiers who probably would have also loved to hold new babies etc. And it makes me think that he has what I call the Mitt Romney Effect, which is based on the fact... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by triggerfinger at 4:16 PM on April 25, 2013
You're doin' a heck of a job, Hennie.
posted to MetaFilter by Greg_Ace at 2:41 PM on April 25, 2013
It's fun to watch 'em try to get all their ducks in a row for Jeb '16.
posted to MetaFilter by BitterOldPunk at 2:39 PM on April 25, 2013
All he tells us is that George W. Bush is smarter than Keith Hennessey.
posted to MetaFilter by Ice Cream Socialist at 2:35 PM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: Sundoggin' it
Okay then. Any situation that can be accurately described with the phrase "[object] to lower their waste" is one that should be avoided.
posted to MetaFilter by MCMikeNamara at 12:05 PM on April 25, 2013
Approximately 70% of people over the age of, say, 40 immediately thought "With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." :-(
posted to MetaFilter by Eyebeams at 11:55 AM on April 25, 2013
...hoisted themselves into the Arizona sky...

I hope they bought their own Petard brand scissor lift for this purpose.
posted to MetaFilter by gurple at 11:46 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: Iranian Men Dress In Drag For Gender Equality
When Joe Arpaio read about this, he sided with the Iranian judge.
posted to MetaFilter by airing nerdy laundry at 11:33 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: Just how do you move a secret aircraft overland to a secret base?
The is awesome. I love logistics like this.

If I recall they actually changed the design of the original Minuteman missile to account for the tunnels and bridges on the way to all the potential silo sites.

Almost every large project I've worked on has treated deployment as an afterthought, with some memorable side-effects like having to ship special one-time use carts along with routers so that the customer could get the device the 15 feet from... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 11:00 AM on April 25, 2013
Seems like possibly the worst place on Earth for your Top Secret Alien Level Security Clearance employees to be living, though, no?

In Vegas they can bring their work home and nobody will notice.
posted to MetaFilter by rongorongo at 10:41 AM on April 25, 2013
1) Cut a hole in a box.
2) Put your plane in a box.
3) Make her drive the box to area 51.
posted to MetaFilter by tylerkaraszewski at 9:57 AM on April 25, 2013
the magnitude of computing power in my pants

That pickup line never works.
posted to MetaFilter by kmz at 9:23 AM on April 25, 2013
Such epic levels of engineering done with pencils and slide rules.

I'd be curious to see employment figures between then and now for engineering departments. I was talking to an older coworker awhile ago and he mentioned that, before computers, you would have a fleet of engineers just working on (for example) the wing - each engineer would get a 1-foot section of the wing to be in charge of and do all the calculations for, and that was how the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by backseatpilot at 9:18 AM on April 25, 2013
Engineers are engineers.
posted to MetaFilter by robocop is bleeding at 9:10 AM on April 25, 2013
Such epic levels of engineering done with pencils and slide rules. I think about our modern CAD and modelling systems and the magnitude of computing power in my pants pocket right now and compare it to that and am in awe of the engineering skill (and fearless boldness of implementation) involved, there.
posted to MetaFilter by rmd1023 at 9:08 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: "The Logic Of Violence In Criminal War"
It's a war where one side refuses to remove almost all of the income of the other side, and one where the better you do against one the more well-funded the remaining participants become.

At some point, it will make more sense for the cartels to have hearts and minds social welfare programs themselves and just replace the state entirely to get the population on side. See: Hamas, Hezbollah.
posted to MetaFilter by jaduncan at 8:09 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: Will it go 'round in circles...
In 2001, as Jon Jones was regulating his hurdy gurdy,

Is an introductory clause I have never before come across.
posted to MetaFilter by three blind mice at 1:59 AM on April 25, 2013
MeFi post: There's Amazonian and Then There's...
But if Anita Sarkeesian announces just that she plans to consider these issues (i.e. long before she has a chance to comment on the issues themselves) she gets an avalanche of death threats. What a world.
posted to MetaFilter by ErikaB at 4:43 PM on April 24, 2013
MeFi post: GIANT GOD WARRIOR APPEARS IN TOKYO
How very . . . Japanese.

I imagine at this point the original cultural background for "Let's trash Tokyo!" is long past and has been replaced by senior animators saying "I grew up watching Tokyo get trashed. I loved those bits. It's my turn now!"
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 5:24 PM on April 24, 2013
MeFi post: Jocasta Innes, 78, influential writer on decor, cooking
"After her marriage to Joe Potts broke up, in the early 1980s Jocasta Innes moved to Spitalfields, where she renovated a derelict brewer’s house and began a new relationship with her next-door-neighbour, the modernist architect Sir Richard MacCormac."

What?? This needs to be an adorable romantic comedy right now (or after a suitable period). She's a down-to-earth rag-rolling bean-casserole queen! He's Sir Post-Modernist academic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Erasmouse at 3:18 PM on April 24, 2013
MeFi post: There's Amazonian and Then There's...
Looking at the web site the only logical conclusion is that the next game in this series will have one of the characters be a massive set of disembodied, floating breasts, bereft of a mere human to drag them down.
posted to MetaFilter by GuyZero at 4:14 PM on April 24, 2013
I would love - just once, ever - to see Tycho think that something, somewhere, wasn't completely and totally ok. Because all I ever see from that corner of the internet is an unending litany of excuses for every individual instance that someone objects to, coupled with the same puerile caricaturing of his opponents (when will those histrionic ladies get their tone right?). I'm sure he'd agree (publicly) that sexism and heteronormativity are problems in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kavasa at 4:10 PM on April 24, 2013
Tycho's news post has this to say:

You probably don’t have to guess how I feel about this latest round of compulsory swaying and fainting, so much like an old timey Tent Revival, complete with its hopping devil and its perpetually put upon holy warriors.

...

The only characters here who aren’t fucking mutants are the Elf and the Wizard, who are there to calibrate the player; everybody else is some fun-house
... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by FAMOUS MONSTER at 3:57 PM on April 24, 2013
MeFi post: And Indrani believes works of art can change individuals
To get a deeper understanding of Wallace Shawn--the living, breathing person--watch him in "My Dinner with Andre," especially in the scenes at the beginning and end that are sandwiched around the dinner at the Russian Tea House. It's difficult not to read these as hard biography. He walks through the streets and reviews his life--he led an "aristocratic" life as a child (as the son of William Shawn), attending private schools and being dragged around in limos.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Gordion Knott at 9:33 AM on April 24, 2013
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