Crowstep
2d ago
I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
Crowstep
2d ago
If the annexed territories are ‘officially’ part of Russia, why hasn’t Russia nuked Kiev for invading its sovereign territory?
It’s a bluff, it always was. If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, Russia will choose retreat over nuclear Armageddon.
Crowstep
3d ago
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide.
That's not how it happened. The west originally assumed that Ukraine would be conquered in three days. It was only after the Ukrainians themselves demonstrated their will to fight against Russia (and their success doing so) that NATO et al started arming Ukraine.
America is not the only country in the world with agency.
Crowstep
5d ago
Do you have a wife, or children?
If you want to do something good for the world, passing on your successful software engineer genes would be right at the top of the list. If you want something meaningful, having kids will probably be the most meaningful thing you will ever do. If you're worried about living a selfish life, bringing new life into the world is pretty selfless.
Crowstep
8d ago
It might be because I live in a city, but I've found the easiest way to socialise is just to invite people round to mine.
They enjoy not having to plan or host. I enjoy not having to travel or spend too much money.
Board games, film nights, drinks, house parties, dinner parties. I've found that people are looking for an excuse to meet up in person. If you build host it, they will come.
Having a girlfriend or wife who you live with also helps. I've outsourced a lot of my friendship maintenance to her. Plus our joint friendship group is larger than our individual ones.
Crowstep
11d ago
Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.
Were you listening to the Kenneth Branagh version? I think his reading is amazing but I haven't heard any others.
Crowstep
11d ago
When most people say 'work' they mean something like 'provide good living standards for the median person'. Marxists tend not to brag about how communist countries have the biggest armies, although having a huge army is certainly possible when the state (nominally) controls the entire economy and the leadership doesn't have to pay too much attention to the needs and wants of the populace.
Like sure, the USSR worked in the sense that Russia colonised all its neighbours, spent huge amounts on its military, suppressed opposition and built walls to keep its citizens in. It failed at providing good living standards, innovating technologically, creating economic equality (arguably its cardinal goal) or creating a society that wasn't rife with corruption.
Crowstep
11d ago
I think he was referring to Dor Yeshorim. The organisation's database is used by the traditional Jewish matchmakers to avoid pairing up carriers of diseases like Tay-Sachs.
Crowstep
15d ago
The millennials are the children of the boomers, they are going to inherit those expensive houses that the boomers are living in. Some people think that they will end up being the wealthiest generation who have ever lived.
But yes, I'm sure that millennial pension schemes will be drastically less generous than their parents get now, due to ageing populations and the fact that those pensions were never sustainable to begin with.
Crowstep
16d ago
Very interesting. I wonder if a lot of the griping (in the US at least) is also influenced by the state the griper lives in. My understanding is that some states (e.g. California) have overly restrictive planning laws that push up house prices, while others (e.g. Texas) have more liberal laws that allow more housebuilding.
Low Texan house prices bring down the national average, while high Californian house prices still price out millennials who want to stay in their home state.
Google says the average house is Texas costs around $300,000 while the average house in California costs $765,000, which seems to bear this out.
Crowstep
17d ago
I would say it's less about Scotland and more specifically about the Scottish National Party. The Holyrood parliament doesn't have to deal with grown up issues, like deficits, foreign policy or immigration. They are guaranteed a constant subsidy from England (or more accurately, London). After the failure of the independence movement, they need to redirect their grandstanding elsewhere or the public will ask what their purpose is.
As for COVID, that was clearly a case of the SNP purposely trying to distinguish Scotland from England. Their model of governing for years has been to create distinctions where none need exist, to be different for difference' sake. For COVID that meant copying the government in Westminster, but being more restrictive on every axis.
Crowstep
19d ago
Around 2030 all Americans are going to have to turn on eachother and carve that missing million out of their fellow citizen… This might be millennials becoming even greater debt slaves, this might be boomers kicked out of nursing homes to beg in the streets, this might be ethnic conflict to either make the white middle-class pay 2x the income tax forever, or a violent assault on the black inner-city to destroy the millstone of welfare America once and for all and free up millions in real estate in now usafe cities… This might take the form of a communist revolution, the confiscation of all real estate, and the forcing of Americans into work camps, this might take the form of the mass slaughter of Federal employees and IRS agents so that no federal insurance schemes can ever be paid out and no pensions because the government employees are dead… This might take the form of mass Euthanasia of cancer patients, drug addicts, and the non-working… Everyone who shows up at hospital and isn’t expected to be net profitable, axe em.
Why are any of these extreme outcomes more likely than say, governments inflating away their obligations like so many have done before?
Crowstep
28d ago
I'm pretty sure demand for fast food is much more elastic than you're suggesting. You can't use misanthropy as an excuse for ignoring the fact that consumers do respond to higher prices and firms respond by lowering them.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes, cheaper flights, cheaper cars and longer lives.
Housing is getting more expensive due to regulation & immigration rather than cost disease, and healthcare spending is going up because the developed world has a larger proportion of older people who are living longer (partly due to better healthcare). In countries with good housing regulation and immigration control, house prices go down over time.
Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.
I think we can cherry pick the data and have it any way we want in picking our specific cases to compare that make our points.
Jeroboam's list wasn't cherry-picking. It's literally a list of the richest Americans.
But let's expand it to Britain and see what we get.
- James Dyson - Wikipedia suggests a wealthy enough background for his parents to afford private school, but nothing spectacular. Made his fortune as an entrepeneur.
- Jim Ratcliffe - Solidly working class background. Father was a joiner and they lived in a council house
- S.P. Hinduja - Seems to have inherited a family business, which started with his father's work as a trader in colonial India
- Hugh Grosvenor - A literal aristocrat
- Michael Platt - Father was a university lecturer and mother was an administrator. Upper middle class background
- Denise Coates - Seems to have inherited her father's business. Her father had a working class background
- Anthony Bamford - Seems to have inherited a family business. Comes from a long line of businessmen
- Richard Branson - Father was a lawyer, mother was an air hostess. Made his own fortune.
- Andrew Currie - Wikipedia says he went to a grammar school, which means he passed the (meritocratic) test to get in
- John Reece - Seems to have worked his way up through various businesses, although not much information
So we have one aristocrat, a mixture or working and middle class backgrounds, and a few inheritors of family businesses. Seems to me like IQ is the main factor here. Even those who inherited their wealth have demonstrated their high IQ through successfully managing large businesses, and of course, IQ is arguably more heritable than wealth, since wealth can be squandered in a way brain cells can't.
Also, from the new Scientist article you posted:
On the surface, Zagorsky’s analysis confirms the findings of previous studies linking higher intelligence with higher income. “Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100.
On the surface, people with higher intelligence scores also had greater wealth. The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100.
But when Zagorsky controlled for other factors – such as divorce, years spent in school, type of work and inheritance – he found no link between IQ and net worth. In fact, people with a slightly above-average IQ of 105 , had an average net worth higher than those who were just a bit smarter, with a score of 110.
So IQ predicts both earnings and wealth, but goes away when you control for years spent in school (a consequence of IQ), type of work (a consequence of IQ), divorce (a consequence of IQ) and inheritance (which obviously correlates with IQ, since you need a high IQ to earn enough to pass on a significant amount to your children).
That study controls away the very thing it's supposed to be measuring.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I really don't think Zendaya was mere diversity casting. She's a popular actress and her character is described in the books as being 'skinny, with an elfin face' and having 'darkly elfin features'. When I heard she was being cast as Chani, I immediately thought she was the perfect choice. And if we're in agreement that the Fremen should have been Bedouins, well, here's what a real Bedouin girl looks like. You can hardly claim Zendaya is too dark to play the sci-fi version of her.
I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.
Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!
Crowstep
1mo ago
Who is 'them' in this context? Bob isn't planning to marry twins, he's planning to marry an individual woman.
Sorry to call you out over a minor thing but the misuse of the gender neutral they is a terrible grammatical trend. Why withold information from your listener if that information is built into the grammar of the language you're using?
Crowstep
1mo ago
I think you'd do better to emphasise personal risk to him. In the vein of 'she clearly has a high libido and seeks sexual novelty, how do you think she'll react when she gets tired with her married sex life?'
Appealing to (your) revulsion or asking him to not marry the woman he loves because of abstract second order effects isn't going to help.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I can assure you, the fact that France doesn't measure statistics based on race doesn't mean that it lacks urban dysfunction or racial grievance. In fact, I'm not sure if this policy makes any practical difference compared to other European countries that do measure this stuff.
And while police and other organs of the state may not officially measure race or ethnicity, they do measure 'where your grandparents were born' which is effectively the same thing.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297
Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.
I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.
Crowstep
1mo ago
'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.
In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.
I wondered how long it would take for this to be about Jews. You never fail to disappoint.
As far as I can tell, you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt, despite his noble physiognomy and the fact that they are 'short, weak, ugly nerds'. Am I getting that right?
I would worry about this being an uncharitable take, except for the fact that you cannot stop posting about how Jews are bad.
Have I misinterpreted the post? Could you summarise your thesis in a sentence?
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