This was my bike as a kid. It was pre-BMX and came with a fake gas tank and shocks.
With the Boomer Revolution came the reinvention of everything we used to take for granted. The first old guard institution they decided to shut down was, “Doing the math.” Now we have New Math and the word “Science” applies to everything from astrology to having your hair done. You can take classes in “How to be Gay,” “What not to Wear,” and “The History of Feminist Tweets.”
Of course, the side effect of all this “Nobody’s Wrong” culture is “Everybody’s Correct”—even dropouts like Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and Janeane Garofalo. You can say anything is a life-threatening epidemic because nobody took real math after freshman year of high school so nobody knows how much is too much. All of a sudden, people who did water colors of farts in college are telling you: how steel behaves under certain temperatures, how CO2 affects the global environment, how investment firms need to deal with bundled mortgages, and their favorite parts of a 2,300 page health care bill.
These same people believe: CEOs are the ones taking all our money, we need to pay more tax, our schools are underfunded, and our children aren’t safe.
It’s hard to ask someone who got a dolphin in math, “What’s the math?” but I ask it anyway. They don’t care. They just know we need more shit. The numbers don’t matter. “Yes they do!” I scream. Then they go off on some tangent about my anger and how it’s my mother’s fault.
Certainly CEOs making money off a company that failed is deplorable. John Thain made 10 million dollars after running Merrill Lynch into the ground but that’s one guy. Wall Street is one street. Yes, there are absurd bonuses going on down in one part of Lower Manhattan but you’re talking about a handful of pigs. Do you know how many civil servants there are in America? 12 million. Civil servants make an average of $40k a year in bonuses alone. That’s $480 000 000 000 in tips. Who’s John Thain again? I forgot. I’m supposed to pay more taxes to an entity that makes what, half a nantillion in tips? I’ve said this before but Obama’s going for a total handout of 13 trillion dollars. About half the American population is employed which means each worker will be obligated to pay $85,000. They say this math is unfair because the rich will be picking up most of the tab but that is quite the dinner bill. Why is it so hard for people to understand that 12 million people stealing a little is a lot more damaging than one guy stealing a lot?
Another annoying myth mathists (math racists) love to tell us is schools need more money. Oooh, they have the same books they had last year, how sad. The way education is going; having old books is a school’s only hope. In the 1960s, children were reading Wuthering Heights in the third grade. Today you’re not going to get to Dickens Emily Brontë until you’re third year at NYU and even then you’re going to need 40mgs of Adderall to follow it. The truth is we’ve doubled spending on education since I was born (yes, that’s adjusting for inflation) and it hasn’t done anything to test scores. According to the US Dept of Education, today’s k-12 schools get about a quarter of a million dollars per classroom per year. If teaching kids using gold chalkboards and diamond chalk is not affecting a student’s grades maybe it’s time to stop bitching about money and give the teacher a second look.
Nowhere does this fear of numbers inconvenience us more than the safety obsession. My kid is expected to wear a helmet whether she’s ensconced in her safety seat on the back of my bike or simply pushing her scooter around the playground. Outside of retards, my generation didn’t know what a helmet was until we were in our 20s. Now I’m supposed to put my kids in car seats until they’re eight-years-old!? EIGHT!? No wonder American kids are getting so fucking fat. They’re not allowed to do anything. When I was eight, we were making jumps for our bikes that went so high, you had to bring a magazine with you to read while you were up there. Not only did we not have helmets we didn’t have brakes. We stopped the front wheel with our feet. The worst that would happen would be the ghetto blaster you duct taped to the handlebars might make the Mötley Crüe cassette skip. Cut to my son at that age sitting in a fucking car seat like a paraplegic? Hell NO!
The defendants of legislation like this point out stats like 300 children were killed last year because they graduated from child seats too soon. Then they twist the number and say, “Imagine a school blew up with 300 children in it. There’d be a massive outcry.” Frankly, it’s a miracle there aren’t more fatalities on the roads. There, you just passed a guy you could’ve hit. There’s another. There’s a truck you could’ve smashed into. What if you went off the road there? You’d be dead, ad infinitum, thousands of times a day. When you factor in the trillions and trillions of potential crashes the average American driver avoids in his life on the road, 300 is beyond negligible. It’s literally a ten thousandth of a percent! Math is so vilified in today’s Fear Economy, we are living our lives based on a ten thousandth of a percent of the population. That’s enough to make Gay Marriage look relevant.
I could go on about this for 3.5 more hours but I’m over my 700-word count, which is already 100 words over the average blog article so I’ll stop right here, on the 964th word.
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great. just. great.
03.29.10 at 12:09 pm
In Canada we’ve got dykes putting comedians before human rights tribunals because he called her a fat dyke after she heckled him and threw drinks on him. If you came to Canada with this shit, they’d lock you up and throw away the key. BRB moving to America.
03.29.10 at 12:16 pm
Um, what was the point f this? That the wholefoods/helmet/fag contingent and the midwest-15-minutes-of-supervised-AOL-for-little-ashleigh corn fed jesus mom crew are retards? DUH!!!!!!!!
03.29.10 at 12:18 pm
spot on.
03.29.10 at 12:21 pm
Hey Archimedes, are you going to reference those numbers? Your bordering on hypocrisy. “The truth is we’ve doubled spending on education since I was born and it hasn’t done anything to test scores.” Do you want to account for inflation? Because when I was 5 a candy bar cost 45 cents. Any-who you bring up some good points, you usually do. People are know-it-alls including you and the kids are dumb, really fucking dumb.
03.29.10 at 12:22 pm
MATHISTS!!! purrrfect!
03.29.10 at 12:28 pm
Gavin, you sound like a bitter, 53 year-old divorced man who just found out about Howard Stern from the year 2003. We have bigger problems than people who worry a bit too much about the safety of their kids.
03.29.10 at 12:32 pm
you should be the only person allowed to write for this site.
03.29.10 at 12:42 pm
“every year they get dumber and dumber”
03.29.10 at 12:44 pm
this is all leading to the rise of rush limbaugh as american cultural figure par excellence
03.29.10 at 12:54 pm
i was in a bmx gang when i was a kid. we taped cards to the spokes to sound like motorcycles. no one messed with us
03.29.10 at 1:09 pm
This is a load of totally illogical, illiterate, math(s) free shit. Poor people have a right to be treated when they’re ill and their children have a right to education. Somehow this has to be paid for and they way we raise this money is tax.
On the tax issue let me make it very simple for you: if you have ten cakes and someone else has none and someone else has five then you take, maybe, four cakes from the guy with ten, one from the guy with five and then eveyone is happy. And Dickens didn’t write wuthering heights.
03.29.10 at 1:19 pm
Awesome bike! But what is its connection to the math rant?
03.29.10 at 1:20 pm
spot on but…
who do we go tell?
03.29.10 at 1:28 pm
I def agree that the generation imposing all these gay laws and policies are retarded but i read wuthering heights in the 3rd grade.
03.29.10 at 1:28 pm
I teach math to rich kids. They are all allowed to use calculators starting in grade 5. None of them know their times-tables. None.
03.29.10 at 1:30 pm
learning mathematical logic makes kids actually figure out how to follow arguments to their logical conclusion. all these faggy kids who see math as the antithesis of creativity can’t tell the bullshit from the actual and believe that the usa is competent enough to orchestrate 911.
people don’t like math because you can be just plain wrong. with english and art you get some leeway for stupidity, but none in math. kids are allowed to stop taking math because it’s hard for them and they aren’t getting good grades. well suck it the fuck up. a little pain will make you a better person.
03.29.10 at 1:31 pm
Dog- Sure, poor people have the right to be treated when sick, and educated etc… but who pays for that, and when is it to much? Where is the line that says one persons rights are more sacred than another? Where are the rights of the person who worked to earn that money? Shouldn’t they get the right to choose where there money goes?
The tax ‘cake’ illustration is nice. But what happens when the person who has ten cakes decides he won’t work to make so many cakes, when he knows that 4 will be taken?
03.29.10 at 1:35 pm
Link bait should never be this long.
03.29.10 at 1:35 pm
Ha! Dolphin.
03.29.10 at 1:42 pm
Anon – Good response to Dog. It should also be noted that we are starting to give more cakes out than can be taken from those with cakes (pretty much every entitlement on our books).
03.29.10 at 1:58 pm
Lets see the sources for all of these stats you’ve posted. Way back when I was in school, the only way to make a compelling argument was with scholarly sources that were cited. Maybe the seemingly boatloads of money being thrown into education is actually doing something!
But in all honesty, Gavin fails to address globalization in regards to education. We live in a global market, as such we can’t get by anymore with shitty second hand books that are teaching kids outdated information, because some fuckers in Taiwan will be way more up on the subject matter. All anyone needs now is a fucking broadband connection and a $300 computer to swipe the job that your kid invested 15 years of schooling to get. When Gavin was a kid, a nantillion years ago, kids could drop out of school or simply finish high school and be guaranteed a blue collar gig.
When I’m 40 years old and think I should be king of the world, I’m going to write an article about how no one cites sources anymore and just throws around numbers. I’ll call them citists (citing racists!) and whine about how they are all incompetent assholes who can’t listen to raw real talk.
Man, you sound so fucking old.
03.29.10 at 2:35 pm
Dog- you are insane. that was the recipe for Mao, Stalin and all the totalitarian communist regimes of the 20th century.
“Poor people have a right to be treated when they’re ill and their children have a right to education.”
right. so why take what little money they have away via income tax social security and the rest?
03.29.10 at 2:36 pm
This is good.
03.29.10 at 2:37 pm
Sweet bike.
I remember when I was a kid we used to hang out in sewers, build potato cannons and ramp our bikes over shit until the wheels fell off.
However, you should really reference some of these numbers that you put out so that you don’t sound like you are making ‘michael moore’ arguments, or whatever.
03.29.10 at 2:40 pm
Here’s a great book on it that busts all the myths about spending
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/educationmyths/
03.29.10 at 2:52 pm
Agree w/ you on the overall point Gavin
On education, your suggestion to “look at the teacher” seems a bit odd, considering your emphasis on logic. There’s no way you don’t know that teachers get paid dick, so basically you’re advocating for more intelligent/better educated/more committed/better trained individuals in the classroom. Why would any intelligent person with a shred of self-interest go into teaching, knowing they’re basically going to be living under the poverty line unless they’re single? The obvious answer would be to create a higher pay scale for teachers, but you’re already saying we spend too much on education. Maybe you want to privatize education? Hmmmm, the Constitution, and its interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court, has little math in it, but I believe it could answer that line of reasoning for you.
03.29.10 at 3:11 pm
Here’s some math for you. 1% of the nation controls 90% of the nations wealth. America is one sixth of the world in population and uses around one third of the worlds resources. This means people in other countries do without their own resources so we can have what’s made from them. And finally, because of speculative capital, the amount of “money” that exists in the financial worlds computers has no real world equivalent. If you wanted to give all the finance bankers, hedge betters, and Wall Street guys what they say they “owned”, you would need six earths to divide it all up.
03.29.10 at 3:17 pm
Other people have no resources because of a lack of resources or laws to protect one from acquiring and developing property – intellectual or otherwise.
And Gavin is right – math does not lie. We are dead broke as a country and will be more likely to be living like Argentinians than Americans in a few years. And that ain’t good, aside from their barbeque.
03.29.10 at 3:19 pm
for an article about “math” there is surprisingly little math. bring some numbers to your argument beatch. I’m with you on the coddled, helmeted, padded thing though. We used to jump our bikes wearing nothing but shorts maybe sneakers. road rash was just part of having fun. I too had a bike I stopped with my foot after the brakes broke. when I see all these padded up helmeted kids, I don’t think “wow that parent’s so responsible.” I think “wow, what a little pussy they’re raising.”
03.29.10 at 3:48 pm
Ok, we’ve double education spending in the past generation, and the kids aren’t smarter.
Hmmm…what else has changed? Oh, that’s right—more minorities!
03.29.10 at 3:50 pm
For fucks sakes, Gavin. Jay P. Greene? Do I need to find another source telling you that these bullshit sources you find are not scholarly, academic, or peer reviewed? You can find an “opinion” from any angle on this subject matter but it just makes your argument seem weak if it’s not a peer reviewed, scholarly source or at the very least a credited author without a political agenda.
It seems like you just want to spray an opinion without logical evidence, so you consult Google to find someone else that agrees with your opinion – scholarly or otherwise.
Non-academic, non peer reviewed bullshit books are a dime a dozen. I’ll save you from countless articles exposing Greene for being a right wing propagandist who has an agenda of his own.
Here is a counter argument from a source as credible as Jay P fucking Greene: “Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers”
Check it out, it actually cites sources and math!
03.29.10 at 4:01 pm
Teachers are impossible to fire and -per actual hour- do amazingly well. They also get several months off a year. The reason we fall for the “poor me” teacher bullshit is they have the best PR and most powerful lobbyists in the world.
This is well explained in Brimelow’s “The Worm in the Apple.” If we had teachers you could fire, they would have an incentive to do a good job. I believe voucher programs are the best solution to this problem. You guys love your gov’t so much, you sound like a bunch of North Koreans. Haven’t you ever dealt with them?
03.29.10 at 4:14 pm
Not only do people tend to ignore statistics and probability in the face of emotion, but they tend to over-simplify their arguments as well.
By the way, how many semesters of math have you studied?
The problem is not that kids are using the same books from previous years, but that there aren’t even enough of those books to go around. And that graph you linked to is FEDERAL spending. Most of the money spent on schools is at the state level.
03.29.10 at 4:18 pm
my brother split his head open playing “bike wars” when we were kids. and he took pride in that pain and gore, he was king of the neighborhood for a few weeks and proudly told the story of playing chicken and losing to anyone who would listen. whatever happened to kids having pride in hard-earned pain and gore?
that’s why tattoos have become so popular, so normal. none of the younguns are allowed to do anything that would naturally scar their body anymore so they have to go pay to get it done (hygenically, of course). hey, i just thought of that! wow, sometimes pain pills make you wise beyond your iq.
03.29.10 at 4:29 pm
Amen.
03.29.10 at 4:46 pm
Gavin, teachers always have to be working. The months they get off during the year are spent making lesson plans, and their weekends are spent grading papers and tests. You write blogs based off of the three books about politics you’ve actually read before for a living and make more money than most math teachers in the United States; you’re not in too much of a position to call somebody’s job easy.
Your opinions on politics are bullheaded and your sources laughable. But I’m just a guy on the internet.
03.29.10 at 5:01 pm
Did anyone read the caption on the main page about Arvind HAHAHAHA!
Awesome.
03.29.10 at 5:05 pm
Why is this on the main page but not in the article?
This is the best part.
Arvind is away on holiday this week so I have to pull in stuff I do for other sites where the average age is about two of you. How the fuck can the kids today afford to go to Hawaii for a week anyway? He’s not rich. He goes to community college and lives with his single mom in Queens. Fuggin’ guy. Just goes to show you. If you grow up in New York and just do your homework – not be a Rhodes scholar or invent a cure for cancer – you can easily get all the free education you need AND go to Hawaii.
Anywhobars, this is an article I wrote about the lack of math behind most people’s beliefs…
03.29.10 at 5:06 pm
hey 2negative, i’ve got plenty of teacher friends. none of them do the stuff you’re spouting, those are just things that they pretend they do but their close friends know better. one friend spent every day of his summer vacations on a hammock at the local lake. every fucking day, no lesson plans, no nada. other friends constantly get out early, shop, go home, get pedis and manis, redo their homes on their days, weeks, months off.
lesson plans? they all admit to using basically the same plan w/very slight variations year in and year out. they’re like stay-at-home moms. they know if they don’t keep bitching and putting up that “you don’t know how hard we work! it’s not as easy as it seems!” front that they’ll be found out.
winky wink. nudgy noo.
teachers work half as hard and get paid better than you.
03.29.10 at 5:17 pm
I worked two years in Education. I had 4th graders who couldn’t read an analog clock.
03.29.10 at 5:26 pm
I googled your numbers here, and they are all checking out, but the bottom line is that cassettes don’t skip. they can be chewed, eaten, busted or whatever but they don’t skip. it’s just science.
03.29.10 at 5:35 pm
Gavin, if you can figure out a way to keep kids from thinking about fucking and what they’re gonna do when the weekend comes while they’re supposed to be thinking about the significance of Niels Bohr and imaginary numbers that would be a great help to teachers.
Also, I don’t get the idea that just because someone thinks the government can help all of a sudden they’re Kim Jong Il? Great way to make an argument about numbers and logic, with an ad hominem fallacy. Brilliant.
03.29.10 at 5:47 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
This was interesting. Is the same thing going on in Canada? Because I was publicly schooled and it kinda sucked.
03.29.10 at 6:25 pm
I’m 26 years old, and I had to look up “new math” on wikipedia a couple years ago because my experience with that subject in school was completely unlike what Gavin describes here. I never got a dolphin in any subject; what I got was an assessment in 5th grade which determined whether I would be in the C, B, or A group until high school, a seeding that determined whether I would learn basic arithmetic, pre-algebra, or algebra. I was solving two-variable equations by the end of 8th grade.
Someone needs to tell Gavin that the only people for whom this vitriol against “new math” is relevant are middle-aged post-boomers like him.
03.29.10 at 6:28 pm
“1% of the nation controls 90% of the nations wealth”
who the hell cares? and no one is going without resources so americans can have them. there aren’t finite resources. There are things called plants that grow. two farmers make 2 hundred acres of crops. 4 farmers make 4 hundred. there is no battle for resources.
public shools were a bad idea from the start. why would you trust the government with something as important as your childs education? Notice the government doesn’t try to do anything where you will actually notice how shitty it is right away like say, run an airline (because the plane would drop out of the sky if they were run like a beaurocracy) or a drug company (the drugs would kill rather than heal you).
They tax the shit out of you so you HAVE to go to their horrible schools. Why do we only have right to as good an education as they want to give us? what’s more important to you, your kids education or bombing muslims? or congress being able to pay their staff 6 figure salaries to type up nonsense.
Gavin is wrong. teachers should be millionaires
03.29.10 at 6:30 pm
“Imagine a school blew up with 300 children in it. There’d be a massive outcry.” Frankly, it’s a miracle there aren’t more fatalities on the roads. There, you just passed a guy you could’ve hit. There’s another. There’s a truck you could’ve smashed into. What if you went off the road there? You’d be dead, ad infinitum, thousands of times a day.
cannotstoplaughing
03.29.10 at 6:57 pm
we actually have a bill that just passed in Florida, Senate Bill 6:
The state Senate on Wednesday approved on a controversial bill on a 21-17 vote to dismantle teacher tenure, a decades-old system in which educators’ pay is based on years of experience and whether they earn upper-level degrees.
New teachers hired after July 1 would work on one-year contracts and face dismissal if their students did not show learning gains on end-of-year exams for two years in any five-year period. For them, job security would be based soley on two factors: standardized scores and job reviews by principals. Existing teachers would have future pay raises tied to student scores and reviews but would keep their current job security.
and all the democrats are bitching. poor teachers. you have to actually prove you’re making kids learn in order to get paid more. imagine that!
03.29.10 at 7:07 pm
Try riding a Motorcycle and having people tell you how dangerous it is.
Like that 2 inch fiber glass drivers door is going to stop a freaking car.
03.29.10 at 8:57 pm
It’s anti-intellectualism that is ruining the educational system in this country. In public classrooms if a student shows one thread of interest or actually gives a shit about what the teacher is saying he or she is deemed a nerd and pretty much shunned by 95% of their classmates. This anti-intellectualism works in favor for the people with most of the money as the public is ill-informed and easily exploited. Separately, teachers can be fired that is a flat out ridiculous statement.
03.29.10 at 9:27 pm
“You’re” is a contraction for “you are,” whereas “your” is the possessive pronoun form of “you.”
03.29.10 at 9:49 pm
BTW, the reason the kids are all retarded fuck-ups is because we live in a culture of zero accountability. You can blame this on any number of things, but it comes down to what parents are instilling in their kids.
If the parents are ineffectual pussies with no self-discipline (or just plain absentee parents), then their kids will be the same; fucking idiots or arrogant shit heads who think they are smarter than they actually are.
How did all this come about? Well, for two-parent families, it’s basically a given that both parents will work. Why? Because in the American culture of debt, it is expected that the average middle class family will owe tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to their creditors.
Don’t buy shit you can’t afford. Don’t have a lifestyle you can’t sustain just so you can be all blinging and shit.
I don’t believe in indicting capitalism. It’s an efficient model for generating and distributing wealth. It is ‘Capitalism’ (big C) i have a problem with. It is straight greed and stupidity that leads to 1% of the population with 90% of the wealth or whatever the fuck the statisitic is.
Credit facilitates commerce, but when you give it out to the average consumer with poor credit, you’re creating a junkie-citizen who, at the end of the day, will end up defaulting on all their loans or pissing their life away trying to work to pay off their credit rather than spending more time with they chillens.
When the government bails out financial institutions that are irresponsible in lending to people who will never ever ever be able to pay back their loans, then it is basically telling all parties involved (creditors and debtors alike), “Greed is good.” There zero incentive to behave responsibly. Dealer gets his re-up and the junky gets his fix.
And not to sound like Anne Lolter, but this isn’t even beginning to address the ‘challenges’ that come with being a single parent.
If one believe in government regulation for anything, it should be in restraining the retarded lending practices (and associated ‘penalties’) that the major banks participate in.
Social programs, irresponsible debt/credit, crap parenting and teacher unions have effectively lobotomized large swaths of the American populace.
03.29.10 at 10:24 pm
so the point of the article is that people who dont know math use fuzzy math to prove their illogical points, and that you (last time I checked you majored in tree planting, not Pythagorean theorem) go onto use fuzzy math to prove illogical points.. I guess you do prove your first point (about idiots using math who probably should) by example..
03.29.10 at 10:49 pm
shouldn’t cant can’t
03.29.10 at 11:06 pm
mc lyte, Just as one quick example, you know the square bottle of water at the corner store, the Fiji one? That bottle gets filled at the only place that has good pristine drinking water. The government of Fiji keeps people out of that water supply so that that company can make lots of money. Where do they sell that water you might ask? Well its funny you should ask, because they sell it right here in the U.S. So yes people do without there own resources in their own country so we can have them. I don’t want to be one of those save the rain forest hippies, but the reason we don’t have most of the Amazon rain forest is because Americans want to eat Mcdonalds, so instead of growing them here they slash and burn the forest to make grazing lands.
Oh, and kill the tribes that lived there, along with all the trees that used to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Brazilians and Argentineans live in a dangerous environment so we can get fat on lazy shit food. But you’re right no one does without because of us. Ask Mexico and Haiti they’ll tell you.
03.29.10 at 11:44 pm
Glad to see some people with real educations, i.e. not fine art or English degrees, are coming out of the woodwork.
03.29.10 at 11:46 pm
Well said dude.
The only disagreeable part is “Do you know how many civil servants there are in America? 12 million. Civil servants make an average of $40k a year in bonuses alone. That’s $480 000 000 000 in tips.”
I’m sure the assistant clerk at the Water Billing Department is just making 32k in salary, not bonuses.
03.30.10 at 12:00 am
“He goes to community college and lives with his single mom in Queens”
Seems like a pretty ‘relevant/chill’ lifestyle. I love you, Arv…Kisses/Hugs/Kisses
03.30.10 at 12:05 am
I’ve been checking out your stuff over at Taki’s and this is your best bit so far Gavin.
03.30.10 at 12:29 am
hey moderators, can a nigga not get his posts moderated plz?
03.30.10 at 1:07 am
This whole idea of lazy teachers making big bucks is similar to the hipster hating shtick. Some “hipsters” are dumb rich kids in a uniform. Some teachers are lazy and shouldn’t make as much as they do. Get this though, every fucking occupation employs some shitty employees. It’s like SBTVC, some contributors fucking suck — but only the jackasses are saying “every article sucks, no one can write here.”
Truth be told, one of the main reasons I’m vouching for teachers in this discussion is because I’ve had some outstanding teachers amongst the shitty ones. I’ve had teachers that were still at my highschool at 8pm working on class plans and marking papers. I could roll in on my skateboard to their class and they would be grinding it out at their shitty wooden desk in the corner. So, although there are teachers crashing on a hammock all summer, there are teachers grinding it out for 12+ hour days, 5 days a week for 10 months.
Stop crying. You would stand a lot better crying about the legal system. But I guess everyone knows that it’s completely dysfunctional and that wouldn’t be as controversial for you, you crazy punk.
03.30.10 at 1:58 am
Teachers are on their way out also, soon it will be just visual and audio inputs in your head, will come with the option of whomever’s voice you want. Micheal Jackson teaching you Emily Bronte, come on! That’s the dogs bollocks that is.
03.30.10 at 4:41 am
WELL THIS ADDRESSED TO ‘ACTUALY A TEACHER’ GAVIN MACINES MAJORRED IN TREE PLANTING BECASUE HE KNEW THAT HE WANTED TO WORK FOR VICE MAGAZINE WHICH IS A PAPER PRODUCT SO HE NEEDED TO KNOW WERE PAPER COME’S FROM – TREE’S. DO’NT YOU REMEMBER WHEN HE WROTE THAT EXPOSAY EXPOSING THAT PAPER COME’S FROM TREE’S AND NOT FROM PAPER PLANT’S AS MANY LIB’S THINK ARE AN INEXAUHSTIBLE RESOURCE’S SUCH AS AIR, LIQUID, AND GOLD.?
03.30.10 at 9:26 am
@a teacher (actually)
It’s lame to comment on your own article but I can’t resist. “Majored in tree planting”? This is a perfect example of how lazy most teachers are. The tree planting season is May and June which is after school ends you fucking knob and you can’t major in it. It’s called “a job.” While I was sweating it out in Norther Ontario 14 hours a day, you were preparing your lesson planes on water skis at White Lake.
For the record, I did take calculus and algebra in university (though I am yet to use my ability to find the surface area of 3x + y cubed spun about the z axis in real life). However, I’m not talking about that level of math. I’m talking about how easy high school math has become and how few people take it after it becomes elective. They do the bare minimum and even then teachers cut corners to make it easy.
But who cares about the author? Why resort to his personal life? What about the facts? And don’t give me some anecdotal evidence about an Irishman you met who didn’t drink or a woman who had no tits. What is it with Libs where they find one exception to a rule and they think the whole theory gets flushed down the toilet? That, or they find out the guy who said the theory farts in bed so all his work is discredited.
Here’s a question teach, is it easy to fire you? It isn’t? OK, well then, do you admit that’s not exactly encouraging you to do a good job?
http://commongood.org/assets/attachments/firing_chart.pdf
03.30.10 at 10:26 am
fuck you moron- The government of Fiji is retarded then but that doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad, because one government steals it’s peoples resources to get profits for itself, that’s what our government does it’s what all government does. You aren’t exactly dissproving my point about the evil of governments by pointing out a government that takes its peoples water and sells it. If OUR government was stealing Fijis water the way the israelis steal the palestinains water you would have a rather excellent point.
If Fiji ’s govermetn didn’t have the power to purloin and sell their peoples water how would they do it? that power is the problem then, if it even is a problem it could well be that the people of Fiji are fine with it i have no idea.
Let me add that no one makes more money for doing less than Cat Power and how are you gonna hate on her?
DO you want her to pay 90% in taxes? it’s your own cruelty not any justice you are motivated by.
03.30.10 at 10:40 am
The math you speak of is not really math. It’s back of the envelope estimating. You can cruise through education all the way through a PhD and never learn this skill. Even if you study math.
You learn this in physics class, or shop class, or business class. Dudes that are forestry or accounting majors probably can do that better than dudes who actually majored in math. And those bean-counter type people don’t really care about math for any reason other than doing those types of estimations.
The other thing about the helmets and baby seats isn’t really about lack of math, it’s just because people are more gay now. The 1% of Americans who are quantitatively inclined nerds are actually the worst offenders when it comes to baby helmet type rules, because they are usually physical pussies, have severe OCD worry-wart neurosis, and love buying “gear.” I went to MIT and am now old enough to have friends from college with kids and it’s all about sunscreen, baby fences, $800 car seats, not letting the kid go outside, helmets just for walking around, no bikes, constant monitoring with baby radar, etc. I know what you’re saying but it’s a weird conclusion to think that better quantitative thinking is going to make parent less retarded. If anything it makes them MORE retarded. The only people letting their kids do bike jumps with no brakes are hillbillies. I would say ghetto people but I’ve never seen a kid in the ghetto with a bike.
03.30.10 at 12:10 pm
too long
03.30.10 at 2:01 pm
“Accidents are very highly likely and could happen at any moment, therefore it is retarded to try to prevent injuries from accidents.”
The death of math indeed.
03.30.10 at 2:35 pm
I’m sorry to be a jim goad but “you’re” is not the same as “your”.
03.30.10 at 4:29 pm
pogi- maybe if you read the article you’d know.
03.30.10 at 4:55 pm
Gavin you should write a post about how you’re out of new ideas. I must have read this in the ‘Kill Your Parents’ issue. A couple years ago, three? Admittedly I only read the first paragraph but as soon as I hit the key words, boomers, new math, and old guard, I knew I had read the article. Am I right though? Gavin? Anybody?
03.30.10 at 6:10 pm
its much more entertaining when youre filmed on these rants. like checkin out a book on tape at the library.
03.30.10 at 9:12 pm
i’m suspicious of anyone who takes an extremely low paying job to “help” people…such as teachers. social crusaders. i wrote a report in 6th grade which was right around the election between clinton & dole, and i wrote something to the effect of “democrats give you shit for free and republicans make you work for it” and my teacher lost her marbles and demanded to know where i heard such a lie… figures. i got an F.
03.30.10 at 9:51 pm
If you really want to make someone mad with math, try running the numbers on the adverse effects of childhood vaccinations vs the number of horrible diseases these vaccinations prevent at a natural childbirth class. You have never seen yoga hippies get so mad so fast. Priceless.
04.19.10 at 1:26 pm