2rafa
4hr ago
The funniest thing is when people today complain that the old method of starting in the mail room doesn’t work anymore. Literally every major investment bank has extensive employee development programs for very smart but junior/low level/pink collar/blue collar employees. One of my early managing directors started as a secretary, the company paid for her to do a degree, moved her to mid office doing compliance, then to front office, now she’s no different to any Harvard MBA MD at her level and making a million a year.
The difference is that it’s much easier in today’s hard meritocracy for a smart kid from a poor background to go to a good college than it was generations ago. The equivalent of those smart Jewish guys from poor families who started in the mail room at Disney or Goldman Sachs in 1960 and became CEO ace the SAT and go to a pretty good (at least) college now, they don’t need to start in the mail room. Social mobility ‘worked’.
2rafa
4hr ago
It remains to be seen what the long term trajectory of both of those cultures will be, since both have existed in their modern incarnations for fewer than 150 years. I mean modern ultra-fertile Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is partially a postwar thing, to some extent it’s an invention of the twentieth century. And even if you zoom out to ‘all’ Orthodox Jews or Mennonites, many modern secular, very low birthrate Jewish and Swiss people emerged from those ‘trad’ cultures, it could happen again.
Drawing a curve that assumes all these people will have six kids who have six kids who have six kids is historically the worst way to project future population growth.
2rafa
4hr ago
I mean projected lifetime earnings is already a concept regularly used in the legal/insurance sectors, in settlements and so on. Someone crippled on a summer internship at college to the extent that they can’t pursue their chosen career can sue based on expected lifetime earnings, actuaries are familiar with the relevant models.
2rafa
9hr ago
Medical school places are limited and handed out based on intelligence and conscientiousness, that isn’t a flaw with the system at all.
2rafa
18hr ago
What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.
2rafa
23hr ago
It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia.
There was a huge improvement in average quality of life. The number of Western countries that saw similarly rapid transformations is very small. Ireland is probably the only one that wasn’t communist before 1989.
2rafa
1d ago
How is it surprising? People in this kind of Eastern European state can look honestly at the situation and compare the extraordinary increase in prosperity that Poland, Hungary and they themselves have seen in the EU orbit with the continuing shitholes for ordinary people that Belarus, pre-war Ukraine and even Russia itself to some extent are. It’s unclear whether Russia is ever going to reach Western European income levels (seems unlikely), while it’s pretty much guaranteed that Poland will very soon. Obviously there are relevant additional factors, but average people don’t consider most of those. I wouldn’t want to join or stay in the Russian orbit.
2rafa
1d ago
I think Texas has it right with the high property taxes. 2% or whatever it is a year forces average old people who suddenly find themselves with a house worth a few million to sell quickly and downsize, that money typically makes its way in part to children and grandchildren or is just spent, all of which are good.
New Jersey has high property taxes and is still a dump, but that may be just a consequence of proximity to NYC and an uncommonly high (for America) level of corruption rivalled only by Illinois and the Deep South.
2rafa
1d ago
Most of the US outside of NYC and some party cities like Miami and New Orleans (whose scenes are both very much an acquired taste) has terrible nightlife.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, a top paragraph can be the length of one tweet - I don’t see how people can complain it’s too long. Becoming a news aggregator is a failure state for the board too.
2rafa
2d ago
Most of those things are discussed pretty regularly here. Others are just uninteresting. Another dissident right personage turns out to be Jewish? At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when). Big price rises in the US, particularly in service (stuff like fast food etc) are just due to labor shortage related pay increases for the poorest workers since 2020, they’re not hugely interesting. Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term. Eurovision being gay and weird, really? (Also this was literally a discussion last week).
If you have a good idea, make a top-level comment.
2rafa
2d ago
The more common Western opinion (if they have heard of the holodomor at all) is that it was caused by communism. That said, the only people who really discuss it are either American libertarians/conservatives or generic neoliberal NATOwave type Central Europeans who vote center-right and see Russia and communism as essentially the same thing.
2rafa
3d ago
Irish nationalism has been broadly leftist for a long time. Sinn Fein is an explicitly socialist party, and advocated quasi-revolutionary socialism until relatively recently. Ireland’s pro-Palestinian activism is based on perceived shared oppression by Anglo imperialists, it is inherently quite leftist (much like other European separatist movements, eg. in Catalonia). I would guess that if you polled the Irish, extreme pro-Palestinian sentiment would be highly correlated with political leftism.
2rafa
3d ago
I have long thought it was obvious that there are many more white man - black woman (and ‘woman of color’ generally) pairings than white woman - black man (and especially ‘other non-white man’) ones. Still, I thought I might be biased for whatever reason.
But in general white guy - black or minority woman covers all bases, you satisfy the right by having a tough white male lead, and the left claps because it checks woman and PoC boxes. The most cynical casting for a modern network procedural detective show would be like a white male lead and a gay woman of color co-star. White women are superfluous, especially as women are more progressive and less identitarian so presumably much less likely to be upset that there’s no white woman lead.
Black women definitely do complain about casting of black men with white women. I’m sure the threads are easily found on LipstickAlley etc.
2rafa
3d ago
It is working in the many African countries that have seen tfr crater in recent decades. It is more stubborn in a few particular places with high populations - Nigeria and Egypt come to mind - and in the absolute worst parts of the continent like Niger and Chad. Even there the trend is down though, it’s just looking more like Europe’s decline than some Asian countries’.
2rafa
3d ago
I think there are so many overlapping drivers of pro-Israel sentiment in the “ratsphere” (many Jews, the scene was largely founded by Jews, respect for Jewish inventions, Israelis as disproportionately active in tech/AI research, general dislike for religious Muslims, contempt for wokeness, dislike of student protestors) that it would seem unlikely for there to be any significant number.
The three core predictors of support for Palestine vs Israel are being Muslim, being leftist/‘woke’ and having a broadly low opinion of Jews. I’ve never met a strongly anti-Israel person who fell into none of those three categories.
I discuss it below, but it’s hard to quantify the extent to which Putin tolerates the extreme overrepresentation of various minority groups in organized crime in Russia proper. By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.
2rafa
3d ago
How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.
2rafa
3d ago
I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?
It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.
2rafa
3d ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain.
Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:
The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy.
Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.
2rafa
3d ago
Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.
2rafa
4d ago
Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
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