Bingbong
22d ago
Depends if the outperformance of the subpopulation is down to them being a subpopulation with a higher mean or if it's due to them simply being out on the far point of the curve for the greater population.
Bingbong
23d ago
Unfortunately I couldn't audit their finances in detail, but the luxury goods they consumed and the way that their cousins gambled seemed indicative that they've got enough money to be 'ultra rich' inside Vietnam. Maybe not 9-figures explicitly, but I'm aware of 8 figures worth of cars owned by one of those families and that's just the overseas offspring without knowing a ton about their parents.
Baumol is huge for this sort of stuff. Servants and labor are vanishingly cheap compared to what they are in the West. I've had coworkers go back to India after getting remote privileges and turn 100k USD per annum into 3 live-in servants and a very nice house in second-tier cities
Bingbong
24d ago
True, though the DSA failsons are frequently getting actively selected against for University and Jobs plus their parents weren't as filtered-for in their mildly-accomplished careers in the West and thereby you'd expect less of an issue with mean regression.
Bingbong
24d ago
That's true, but they do also get to benefit from a bunch of programs and systems that were essentially expressly setup to deal with ADOS and associated globalized guilt over them. I went to University with a guy who was Igbo, had forehead scarring and was son of a mid-tier UN official and had a very nice setup in Nigeria from what I saw on Instagram. He ended up getting instantly hired as a graduate into a cushy diversity role before getting bored after 2 years and returning home to get back to the Princeling lifestyle. He wasn't a genius but also was like solid level for the course I was doing. No sane person would call him unprivileged.
Bingbong
24d ago
I’ve had Paki friends shocked when they went to Pakistan and found out their country isn’t as smart as all the brown skinned friends in the states and had no realization of how highly selected for his father was.
That plus when they go home a lot of the time the family that managed to get their father out of Pakistan is in the top 0.1% in terms of resources and education so they are frequently living larger than the Father who went overseas and is now paying Western COL with Western Salary wages.
Bingbong
24d ago
Yes but children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents, chain migration is going to be something that gets lobbied for exhaustively and without end and is closer to unfiltered. There's also a certain social effect where the children of people who had top 1% outcomes in life to get out of Bumfuckistan and get to the West, even if intelligent, will fall short of parental accomplishments/expectation and then blame it on Racism instead of recognizing their parental achievement.
This is particularly exacerbated in a decent amount of groups where the family that chose to remain in the country of origin are actually doing pretty damned well (since they're top 1%ers intelligence-wise in an emerging economy, a lot of which have gone gangbusters especially if you are in that 1%) and thus look back at their cousins who are still at home and see they've got insane luxury lifestyles whilst their parents choosing to bail on Bumfuckistan has earned them, the children, an upper middle class lifestyle. I grew up with a lot of Asian diaspora Western-born first generation immigrants where this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.
Then inevitably a torrent of bitching about 'wah my cousins all get random do-nothing sinecures and drive Lamborghinis around all day, it's the rice ceiling keeping me down in the West' when they should have just stayed in the initial country where they were of the upper crust.
Bingbong
24d ago
African Immigrants to the US with filtration also tend to get the benefits of being able to reap the benefits of programs that were aimed at advancing ADOS people and thus get a massive boost to their career and academic outcomes.
Bingbong
24d ago
I think there's a combination of increased anxiety, and also the realization that it's really conversational checkmate for avoiding anything you don't want to do. Once you've declared anxiety it means that whatever's annoying you is a bully who isn't taking into account your situation of need, essentially.
Bingbong
24d ago
I'm sure that happens but it's more that people have a ton of parallel threads and might be on date 5 with Guy A and Date 1 with Guy B as opposed to straight up double booking individual slots, IMO.
Most of my knowledge of pre-revolutionary Cuba is various forms of 'wah they took our casinos' punditry. How affluent was it relative to Caribbean norms? I'm assuming it didn't have the oil riches that help the richest states in the region, but I also assume it wasn't Haiti.
Bingbong
28d ago
I feel like if you're explicitly offering an hourly rate for your services it's definitely over the prostitution line.
Bingbong
30d ago
Malaysia's also very don't ask, don't tell on a lot of matters like this. You're nominally supposed to only have one passport legally, but a lot of the upper classes will quietly do their best to get another one during University overseas and keep it in a backpocket. The only reason this is particularly going off is that the current PM is relatively secular, forward-thinking and competent but getting challenged internally for the Islamist Malay base and the eye of Sauron is briefly focusing on this as it puts the reigning party in an awkward position of either 'do the practical thing' which alienates devout Malays or 'do the Halal thing' which alienates the non-Malay supporting base.
I do think it's 'easier' for a country like Malaysia to go hardline on the Israel issue when they're relatively affluent for a Muslim country and yet also aren't close enough to Israel to have any sort of meaningful default relationship like the Sunni countries. Singapore pitching in with Israel also intensifies the matter.
Bingbong
30d ago
Perhaps one of us gets into an Ivy and takes a decade to move back to the area, or maybe never, but its still probably the one who left staying where their partner's home base is.
Yeah plus atleast in this case the one who moves out of state is pursuing an A+ education instead of 'random scramble for a B-tier education you get sent across the country'. Housing has similar impacts these days in a lot of metros where young people are just fishing for wherever they can live in the ring suburbs of a given metropolis, in my experience. My high school friend group ended up distributed an hour from the CBD of Melbourne at essentially all points on the compass in order to own starter homes, which has really killed easy socialization.
Bingbong
30d ago
Balaji/Network State v Malaysia
Not sure how much this one is escaping beyond the SEA-sphere. Balaji's Network State is a large adult daycare/startup incubator based in Forest City, Malaysia. Forest City is a favorite of travel youtubers, but essentially is a Chinese-backed City development approximately an hour from Singapore, in Malaysia. It was supposed to have a population of 1 million or so, but due to a combination of capital controls, wobbles in the Chinese economy and shifts in legislation has been woefully underpopulated since completion. A few years ago, the Malaysian government decided to try and salvage sunk cost by providing a relatively-inexpensive golden visa pathway for buying homes there. As part of that, Balaji's Network State has taken up residence there.
The state of Malaysia that Forest City is in, Johor, has a quite-modern Sultan who owns approximately half of the real estate development. Johor is seen as essentially Singapore's hinterland in a lot of ways, and has received significant investment towards data centers and other tech manufacturing in recent years as Singapore runs out of cheap land and cheap labor. The Johor Sultan is by far the strongest state-level leader in the country, with his family being obscenely wealthy. However, Malaysian politics are frequently dragged around by the states on the Thai-Malaysian border which are very Muslim and very Malay ('Local' ethnicity. The legal inhabitants of the country are 55% Malay, 30% Chinese, 10% Indian, 5% other roughly. Also huge amounts of illegal migrant workers from Indonesia, Bangladesh etcetera but they can't vote so fuck 'em). Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and nominally doesn't allow Israeli citizens to enter the country.
Due to some internal politics focusing around pushing antizionism to keep the Muslim base happy, Network State has had a recent Immigration raid to check everybody is there under a legitimate passport (Which they are, since nobody is entering under Israeli docs even if they may potentially have other docs). Now Balaji is asking to meet with the PM of Malaysia as essentially equals, instead of doing the intelligent/normal thing which is shutting up for a couple months and waiting for the Federal Electorate to move their gaze elsewhere. Additionally, people inside Malaysia are really seizing on the 'digital sovereignty' ideal that Balaji espouses as proof of him wanting to create an actual seccessionist enclave, when realistically it's more about having an incubator space than that.
Bingbong
30d ago
Most of the French people I meet are through martial arts, so I'm way overindexing for Algerians and Tunisians, but there does still seem to be a lot of complaining from those groups. Which is particularly ironic since the ones I tend to meet tend to be of the upper classes in French North Africa who have parents or grandparents that bear the majority of the blame for pillaging the areas
Bingbong
30d ago
Yeah. This is the perfect rhetorical situation for those countries since it lets them not take the refugees whilst ultimately being able to push associated blame onto Israel.
Bingbong
30d ago
Yeah but a lot of that'd depend on framing.
They're largely against sending them en-masse to neighboring countries. If either an individual family wanted to come to America, or somehow the entire population was going to be airlifted to an affluent Western country I think that most of those types would be for it.
Bingbong
30d ago
Gerry Adams was potentially flipped by the UK, or picked as the relatively-moderate option, and he was allegedly arguably the leader of the IRA.
Bingbong
30d ago
Like-for-like it is but there's definitely ways of keeping eating out costs under median homecooking costs and it depends a ton on where you live and what you'd consider eating out.
Bingbong
30d ago
I feel like the loot box thing is going strong, but Funko's gone from having a first-mover advantage to like every form of consumer good now tries to bring in as much lootboxification as possible. Every time I walk through a toy store with my daughter, like half of the products are in some form of blind box packaging.
Bingbong
30d ago
A lot of that is due to the diaspora being worth more as a remittance check and overseas political pressure arm than as a domestic citizen, though.
Bingbong
1mo ago
How does this work vis-a-vis the Algerians when they held explicit racial pogroms against European French and yet they're happy to be part of greater France when it suits them?
Bingbong
1mo ago
I am also wondering what the long term plan of the EU is. In two years, will Merz and vdL tell the Ukrainian boys who fled to Germany at age 12 that they are now old enough to die for their country and ship them back?
It is funny when the amount of African refugees who they apparently cannot ship back due to asylum claims, meanwhile Ukraine obligations might past muster as something that is 'dangerous but needs to be done'. Also what happens if Ukraine hypothetically passes some law allowing for female conscription? Do all European residing Ukrainian women get sent back?
It depends, doesn't it?
If you filter a normally distributed population and find somebody who's 3 standard deviations away from the mean, it doesn't necessarily implicitly follow that they're of a unique subpopulation with a higher mean. They could just be an outlier.
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