Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.
Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.
The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner
Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.
As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:
Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Wagner forces were seen entering Moscow Oblast a few hours ago. I think Pirghozin understands he has to win quickly and is rushing Moscow and betting that they can't coordinate a serious defense fast enough. I don't think either side is trying to mobilize the people to get in the streets like Erdogan did in Turkey. The public is assumed to be bystanders, the audience for communications is the other military commanders, everything will hinge on whether Pirghovin has support from any other factions of the millitary. Rosgvardia vehicles were seen with Wagner vehicles if Rostov but it's unclear if they were seized or collaborating.
I agree that the odds of the coup succeeding are small but the coup hasn't stalled yet.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah I voted this was warning worthy because it was exceptionally rude but I 100% agreed with the basic point. We're forum posters and not professional writers and so most literary stuff is going to be not great but people should be allowed to experiment with writing style without extremely rude criticism.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is there a recent historical example of barbarian mercenaries taking over the empire? There's instances in Africa where one ethnic group within a state created by an Empire dominates the military and uses that to rule society. I'm not sure African post-colonial states have comparable social and economic situations to the U.S. though.
If the American military suddenly became 70% Uzbek or something they wouldn't have a substantial share of the civilian population behind them, and there wouldn't be a primary export industry like oil or rubber or diamonds to seize control of and distribute revenue from to cronies.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Ah, but the fiscal effects: taxes must increase because budgets must increase. Why? Solving problems is no longer the goal of the government; now, issues must be managed. Societal woes must be serviced by specific groups of unionized government employees. Union contracts have to be renegotiated because wages have to increase with inflation and/or remain a multiple of the minimum wage.
Federal Receipts as a share of GDP have bounced around within the same 15-20% range since the 1950's. Labor productivity has followed a roughly linear trend . Public Sector unions are still around but private sector unions are dead as a door nail compared to the pre-enshittification era. Here's a Brookings report outraged that we're hitting a record high of roughly 11 million Federal employees, but their graph shows we had roughly 9 million in 1984 and we've had a 40% increase in population since then so I'm not sure there's been a large proportional change.
Your talk about American Libertarian Capitalism but the era of triumphant deregulation before Conservatives started to admit that globalization deindustrializing the 'heartland' was bad lasted thirty years from 1980-2008?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
So going through those examples
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Paul Letts was alleged to have let people cook meth in RV's on his property in exchange for some of the meth. The police raided his property and found 55 guns, equipment for manufacturing meth, possession amounts of meth and Letts later tested positive for Meth. He didn't plead guilty and lost his trial in two days, he had a criminal history and got 57 months in jail.
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Suzanne Wilcox pled guilty after being found at a traffic stop to have drug paraphernalia and a newly purchased handgun. She got time served (five months) and two years probation
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Isca Johnson was found to have marijuana and a gun in his home, he got 21 months jail. This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
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Darion Hayne had a [Edit:] 5.7 x 28mm handgun and 5.4g of Marijuana, he got five years probation with six months home confinement.
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Your fifth link goes to the Isca Johnson one again so I'll add one Sauma Brata Deb got 12 months for illegally posessing two guns.
So just looking at these cases the most lenient sentences available to a normal drug user who illegally possesses a single gun are six month prison or home confinement and two to five years parole. In that context it looks like Hunter did better then a normal person would, but only by a small amount because the penalties for this crime are normally quite small.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I have twitter blocked on this device as a futile anti-procrastination measure but I saw that Jordan Peterson (or Mikhaila on his account) tweeted suggesting they should be naked and oiled up.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That's different from being a slur though. I don't think astrology is real but if someone were to call me a virgo I wouldn't say they're using a slur.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Eh, I'm not sure it's a bad strategy to forge an alliance with the first generation and then try to assimilate the 2nd & 3rd generation who grow up on English language media.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Oh absolutely. IVF results in the creation and destruction (or death by negligence) of many ooctocytes and blastocysts per cycle and it requires many cycles to get a successful implantation. On a per person basis a woman doing IVF is responsible for the death of many more fertilized eggs than a woman seeking an abortion. It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead.
The 'life at fertilization' position casts a funny light on the reality of human biology where 40-60% of embryos die before being born. If blastocysts are human beings than the leading cause of death is failure to be born, improving access to health care that makes fertilized eggs more likely to be born could become a leading pro-life effective altruist cause. However, older couples may be engaging in reckless oocyte endangerment whenever they have unprotected sex since they are placing a human in an environment where it will almost certainly die.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
This is what SJW's mean when they say white isn't an ethnicity it's a 'constructed position of power'. The category of white people has expanded and can expand further because it's not defined by a skin tone it's a coalition of people who have a God given right to look down on black people.
Ecgtheow
6mo ago
They weren't trying to increase trans acceptance, they were trying to sell beer to LGBT people and Blair White is not popular with LGBT people.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Sure, but are trans people claiming to literally have wombs and produce eggs or are they claiming to be their preferred gender for all socially relevant intents and purposes? A step-father who is closely involved in his wife's kids life from a young age does have lived experience as a father. If you exclude him from father-daugher themed events or correct his kids whenever they call him dad are you standing up for scientific accuracy or being a jerk?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Hanania was asked to speak to the Yale Federalist Society, i.e. a bunch of future red state judges and clerks, about his 'Woke Institutions are Civil Rights Law' hypothesis. While he seems remarkably devoted to biting the hand that feeds him by expressing his contempt for the conservative base he is not without influence.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.
If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.
I that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.
Marlo takes two Lollipops he could easily pay for while looking the guard in the eyes. He's signalling his power and his ability to flaunt the rules and personally disrespecting the security guard. The security guard knows Marlo can have him killed on a whim, he's scared to look him in the eyes and says 'he's not stepping to" Marlo, but him having pride as a man means he can't let the slight to unanswered. He's not asking Marlo not to defect, he's not trying to get the lollipop's back, he just wants to be recognized as a working man outside "the game" who isn't going to interfere with the gangs but shouldn't have to tolerate such clear disrespect either. And Marlo of course says no, it's the other way.
One of the running themes in The Wire is that the code of honor that allows drug dealers to exist alongside the community is in decay. Omar takes pride in never robbing a citizen, he's gunned down by a child. They shoot at his mother on her way to church. Avon's generation might have stolen, but they wouldn't have personally humiliated the security guard in doing so. Marlo is the next generation, he's more ruthless and has people killed constantly for vague suspicions or minor slights. The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.
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