Esperanza
10mo ago
I have been to farmer's markets in the US and in Europe, and at precisely none have I seen live or dead wild animals for sale. No one breeds bats (I think, maybe in China) so the market was selling wild animals - dead I presume, which is pretty weird.
The eating of weird wild animals is as traditional as Chinese medicine. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao invented both:
it is said that the Chinese started ‘eating anything that moves’ after the great famine of 1958. The Chinese government allowed people to even poach wild animals and eat them.
China banned bushmeat in 2020, so obviously, they agree with me, and you are the only one left defending the indefensible. Don't buy roadkill from a roadside stall.
In early 2020, soon after the breakout of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, the Chinese government swiftly outlawed the consumption and trade of bushmeat on 24th February. The decision was hailed as "the symbol of an era without bushmeat" by the Chinese media.
Esperanza
10mo ago
a mouth is just a mouth,
Oral sex used to be rarer and more special than vaginal sex, but along came AIDS, and people's attitudes changed. From 1997
"It is incredible how casual oral sex has become for some adolescents," said Dr. Carol Perry, who was a psychologist for 15 years at Riverdale Country School and Trinity School, two private schools in New York City, and who is now in private practice. "With older people, it was something that usually came further along in a relationship, when two people had been comfortable with each other and intimate for a while. But many of the adolescents see it as safer than intercourse, and not as intimate."
Many of those interviewed -- teen-agers and sex educators alike -- say that the casual acceptance of oral sex comes in good part from the media, especially movies like "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts portrayed a prostitute who would perform oral sex with clients, but would not kiss them, because kissing was too intimate.
For girls, 'Do you spit or do you swallow?' is a typical seventh-grade question.
I think this is a good example of how cultural norms about sex can change. In the early 70s, oral sex was very taboo and rarely mentioned outside an example of cruelty justifying divorce. Twenty years later, it was normalized for middle schoolers (in New York, according to the New York Times, YMMV).
Even the Kama Sutra disapproved of it: "this Auparishtaka is the work of a dog and not of a man, because it is a low practice"
Perhaps gay sex will follow the same path.
Esperanza
10mo ago
There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.
What would you say are the genetic factors that are relevant? I can think of a bunch of social factors, like being wise enough to choose parents who are rich and live in a free society. The ones that come to my mind are being good-looking, being musical, and being tall. For women, being blonde is a huge win, as are the other obvious things, so long as you don't approximate the Willendorf Venus (and even then?).
There have been great efforts to find other factors that are independent of g, but it seems quite hard to isolate any. Even being good-looking is correlated with having less genetic mutations, and this also weakly correlates with g. In the US:
It shows that physical attractiveness is significantly correlated with general intelligence (r = .126),
Musicality correlates as well.
A remarkable direct correlation between IQ and musical scores in both the control (r≥0.38) and experimental (r≥0.37) groups was observed.
Alas, among non-Hispanic whites, even being blonde correlates with IQ. Brown haired men (104.4) and blonde women (103.2) are on the top of the heap, though blonde women have the smallest standard deviation (12.2) and black haired men (mean IQ 100.1) the largest (15.2).
The conclusions come from a survey of 10,878 white Americans asked about their natural hair colour (Hispanics and African Americans were excluded to eliminate bias). The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair and 100.5 for black hair.
Esperanza
11mo ago
The entire premise of the book is an attempt to explain why people in Papua New Guinea have so little while white people have so much. Do you recall him addressing the argument that you would get if you posed that question here?
Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question:
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
Diamond realized that Yali’s question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history -- the roots of global inequality.
Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter-gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent -- and far more resourceful.
Diamond just knew that it had nothing to do with "ingenuity or individual skill." He did not have to prove that; he just knew it.
His answer is fabulous, as it presumes that animals and plants can be radically different depending on the continent they are in (hence zebras and horses) but denies that any such difference could exist between people from different continents. A zebra is from Africa, and we can presume that it cannot be domesticated because of its genetics, but genetics only work for plants and animals. We could never countenance such a claim about an African person.
He completely fails to engage with the other side and refuses to even consider the possibility that some countries did well because of individual decisions. It has to be geography that matters, not decisions made by people. Even on this point which he believes because of Marxism, he can not be consistent, as he blames China not dominating the seas on the decision of a single emperor. Basically, he is a hack that refuses to argue.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Adopt a sibling's child?
This used to be common when people had large families (10+ kids) and when there were extra children lying around. The usual pattern was the youngest child, with perhaps a three or four-year age gap to the older ones. This child was often "gossiped" or given to another relative (often childless). It does not happen anymore. My parents considered this with my youngest sister.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Is what you are looking for, an analysis of a large number of genes that shows that certain genes are associated with high IQs and these genes are more common in certain populations? There are studies. I can't speak to their reliability. Alternately, are you looking for twin studies that show that identical twins are more common than non-identical twins in IQ?
The achievement gap/IQ gap between white and black people in the US is accepted by all sides. The argument is whether or not IQ is genetic, whether it is a meaningful measure, and whether the tests are fair. The arguments for each of these are many.
HBDers, whether they are right or wrong, have put in quite a lot of work.
what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history.
The evidence that some populations were isolated (genetically and otherwise) is pretty strong. We can trace DNA and know that Australia and the New World were cut off for quite a while. Similarly, we can tell that Europe and North Africa were cut off from Sub-Saharan Africa almost entirely. There is almost no Neanderthal genes in Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Why has IQ gone up over time
The scores on some tests have increased, but the major figures seem to believe that this is due to cultural change, and that in other tests, scores have not increased. The scores with less cultural influence have seen no increase, for example.
why is it I can increase my IQ from practice?
Supposedly, practice can increase the IQ score on one test but will not have an effect on a test that you have not studied for. For example, reaction time is a measure of IQ and learning more vocabulary does not increase your reaction time (citation needed).
What is the genetics of a mixed race person in HBD,
HBDers spend a lot of time showing that mixed-race people have the IQs that are the weighted sum of their constituent races. The more white admixture, the high the IQ, etc. They look at this at the gene level rather than relying on physical features. I have no idea how valid this work is.
what level of mixing do different groups have
African Americans are about 15% white admixture, for example. This is fairly easy to measure.
how well does the tail reflect mean behaviour.
Given the population size, the distribution is fairly normal. The standard deviations may vary, of course.
Esperanza
10mo ago
kids who have those innate disgust tendencies
Kids have very robust disgust tendencies. Kids find pretty much all foods disgusting unless they are introduced early. Broccoli is famous for this. Kids find all romance icky and disgusting at about age 6. This lasts until some time in the teens. I imagine this is a biological remnant to separate boys and girls to prevent the incest taboo from kicking in. Either that, or girls have cooties (This is a weird Americanism which I did not know the etymology of until I looked it up just now.)
As a more relevant example, 92% of women now claim to enjoy fellatio, whereas it showed up as cruelty in courtrooms in the 1950s. Did women change, or did they just get habituated to it?
Esperanza
11mo ago
Aside from your complaint about immigration amnesty, how was Reagan not a right-winger?
Reagan's domestic policies were, courtesy of wikiepdia:
Reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital.
Reduce regulation.
Tighten the money supply to reduce inflation.
Reduce the growth of government spending.
These need to be measured from where the US was in 1980. Marginal tax rates in 1980 were 43% on income over $40k. That could be about $120k now. I would guess that there are people who want to raise taxes that high, but they are no centrists. Income over $20k ($60k) in modern dollars was taxed at 24%.
I don't think tightening the money supply when inflation is at 13% is a right wing idea.
Federal spending under Reagan was about 22% of GDP. This is more then then pre-COVID rate under Trump, but 2.5% less than Biden. In contrast, Obama spent just over 20%.
It is hard to measure regulations.
On foreign policy, Reagan does not seem that right wing, compared to Biden, unless you count being against communism as "right wing."
In hindsight, Reagan looks very centrist. What about him makes you think him more right-wing than Obama? He might have been more right-wing than Nixon (SSI. affirmative action, EPA, clean water act), I suppose. Overall, Nixon looks to the left of Obama on that measure. Obama was very centrist.
Esperanza
1yr ago
When I think of Pichai's character and reputation, I think of my mother, who ascended to a relatively senior position (after taking several years out to have children) in a very large business by being relatively quiet and speaking softly and authoritatively at the end of meetings while the men around her would shout and argue and fight.
I don't know your mother, who may well speak softly and authoritatively, but I don't think Sundar is like that at all. He always managed up, and once he achieved positions of power, completely ignored his reports. No-one claims that Android was more successful under Sundar than it was under Google. Then, when Sundar ran all of engineering, I don't think anyone can point to something achieved during that time, other than the huge success of AI research. It is hard to give Sundar credit for that, since he completely mismanaged bringing that work to product, and let Google, who did most of the research, be eclipsed by OpenAI. Since he became CEO in 2015, it is hard to point to a successful new Google endeavor or product. This contrasts with Satya, who meets with perhaps too many people. If Sundar is known for anything, it is being indecisive and failing to make decisions. On the other hand, not making any decisions turned out quite well for Google for at least the first five years of his tenure. We will see if Sundar's unwillingness to act resolutely is Google's undoing.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Among Indians, especially Indian mothers, having straight hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, is considered a huge plus. Needless to say, the number of Indian guys who have these traits is fairly low. In the West, fair skin for men is not a plus. Blue eyes are a fetish for some girls, but green is perhaps preferred. Straight hair in men is actually a negative, the ideal being Fabio type locks.
Asian women are not nearly as influenced by their mothers, but they seem to prefer height above all else. Whether or not the top of their head is above or below their date's nipples seems to matter hugely. I really can't imagine why. They also do not prefer straight hair, presumably as they think they have that covered.
You might think that "white people" are the single group that does not prefer traits associated with another ethnic group, but this misses the diversity among white people. All girls with straight hair curl their hair. All girls with curly hair straighten it. Girls with gentle curls blow dry their hair straight and re-curl it, so it looks exactly as it was before. Girls who are pale desperately try to tan. Blonde girls cry over their lack of eyebrows. Freckles are a positive only when you don't have them, etc.
People want what they don't have. I think that captures most of it. I imagine that there is some women out there who is perfectly comfortable with her body. I would guess she is trans, though.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Finland has 2% red hair, while Ireland has 10% and Scotland 13%. This is not quite as big a difference as I expected and presumably comes down to judging what counts as red hair. To have red hair in Ireland requires a lot, while the Finns might have a weaker threshold. With a weaker threshold, Ireland increases to 30%, with this being more common across the Shannon.
80% of Finns are blonde, while "A range of 27%-30% of Irish females have blonde hair, while for males it is much lower: 20%".
I would guess these numbers have changed significantly recently due to immigration. In the past, Ireland had essentially no people with brown eyes. Growing up, I knew two who I met in college. Van Morrison wrote a song "Brown Eyed Girl" when he met one on a train in London, as he was struck by how unusual it was. (Actually, this is the story Van told me, but it seems he has reneged on it, so whatever). In 1952, 0.43% of Irish people had brown eyes, and these were obviously immigrants.
The blondes in Ireland are probably partially from Viking invasions (or immigration, if you like) or related sexual tourism.
phenotypically Norwegians and Irish are very difficult to distinguish.
I would guess you are neither. There was a time I could reliably tell a Cavan man from someone from the King's County (the king in question was Phillip II of Spain). I doubt I could still do that, unless they both were farmers.
Esperanza
10mo ago
See this law review article for a discussion of terrible decisions arising out of Garcetti.
Why are all those complaints not protected by the laws that protect you from retaliation when you complain about working conditions? The asbestos and scabies seem to fall under this.
California has: Labor Code section 6310 prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee who complains about safety or health conditions or practices at the workplace, institutes or testifies in any proceedings relating to the employee’s rights to safe and healthful working conditions, exercises any rights under the federal or California law relating to occupational health and safety, or participates in an occupational health and safety committee established under Section 6401.7.
OSHA, which seems federal, has whistleblower protection that should cover some other claims.
It seems whistleblowing is only protected when you complain to the right person. That seems stupid to me.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Ancient Greek and Rome had perhaps 90% of men engaging in sex with young men. This seems high to me, but I must accept that there have been substantial genetic changes in humanity since that time or 90% of men would engage in homosexual acts if society told them it was normal.
There were extensive incursions of Germanic tribes that did not routinely engage in homosexual sodomy, but gene analysis does not support enough of a change to suggest that the behavioral difference is genetic. At least, that is my understanding.
Ovid was out of step with Roman society, and Juvenal, Martial, Stabo, and Lucian, in suggesting that sex with women was superior. It seems that most Roman men, perhaps almost all, preferred to have sex with teen boys rather than women.
It seems that Roman homosexuality came from Greek influence in the second century BC. I think this strongly suggests that homosexuality can be culturally nurtured. I wonder what the upper limit it. In Ancient Rome and Greece it seemed remarkably high. I wonder if there is a more modern society where more than 50% of men engage in gay sex? Perhaps Arab societies?
I find this weird, but I suppose it is just as strange as realizing that I would be a pious Muslim or enjoy eating fermented herring should I have been born in different circumstances.
Esperanza
1yr ago
About 50% of people sometimes have the urge to jump when on a cliff edge. I agree that you would expect more people to actually jump.
Many people are familiar with the experience of a sudden urge to jump when in a high place, that is, when standing on a bridge or a viewing platform. On the Internet this experience is described and discussed under the term call of the void, while Hames and colleagues [1] have coined the term high place phenomenon. Although it is an experience known to many people, the phenomenon has rarely been studied.
In the only study published on the phenomenon by now, Hames et al. [1] investigated a sample of 432 undergraduate college students. They could show that over 50% of participants who have never suffered from suicide ideation in their lifetime, reported to have experienced the phenomenon at least once in their lives.
Esperanza
1yr ago
Google's board was heavily influenced by Bill Campbell, a Svengali-like figure in Silicon Valley. He like the cut of Sundar's jib and chose him as the bright young thing that should be promoted. Most of Google's board was in awe of Campbell, so gave the nod to Sundar when it came time to put a PM in charge of Chrome, replace Andy at Android, replace Alan as boss of all engineering, and then replace Larry as CEO. It is difficult to capture quite how much influence Campbell had on Google's promotion decisions. Even after his death, Google's board would ask "What would Bill say?" Why Campbell liked Sundar is another question entirely. Sundar is not technical at all - his undergraduate and masters is in materials science, which has nothing to do with IT (well, outside of chips). Bill liked non-technical, slightly unpolished people. It may be that Sundar was the one he met that day.
Esperanza
9mo ago
I don’t think Ratajkowski is that pretty
She is stunning in person, which actually counts for a lot. When I last met her, I was not wearing my glasses, as I am vain, so she just looked blurred, but her effect on other guys was very obvious.
an acting coach is more likely to know a modelling in agent in Southern California than in Appalachia.
That is true, but not enormously so. Modeling agents look for girls where pretty girls are.
But again, even for Emily Ratajkowski, how high is her value?
I agree with you here. She was appearing on the cover of "erotica" magazines when she was 21, which is pretty low class.
Karlie Kloss was a supermodel who married ‘up’ financially,
Financially, but arguably not socially. Real estate is weird that way, with rich people who have no class. I am sure there is an obvious example around.
I do think it is very hard to marry up several levels. Grace Kelly did it. Miranda Kerr is notable, as she was getting any younger. Natalia Vodianova seems to have done well. Class in the US has been eroding, and the levels are not as obvious as they were. I think in the UK it probably is still much more rigid.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Is that really true? Consider a threshold of 0 IQ (so 6 std dev below the mean). No-one (well, 1 in a billion) is excluded by this, but as the sets are the same, if there was predictive power before, there is after.
Esperanza
10mo ago
The last ten men probably get killed, as do the older women, and the children and young women are absorbed into the winning tribe. All tribes have neighbors which they compete with.
Esperanza
10mo ago
they'd peaceable allowed blacks to settle there through the 30s, 40s, and 50s,
People often talk about how black people moved to cities in the 30s and 40s, missing the point that there was a depression on in the 30s, so there were no jobs in Northern cities, and that in the early 40s, people were a little busy with the other thing. There was some Black migration to Norther cities during the war to replace white workers who were fighting.
Racial covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948, so there was essentially a year or two when Black people could not move into white areas after the war. Furthermore, the red-lined areas in those cities were drawn in the 30s, long before the bulk of the great migration. Black people moved to red-lined areas because they were cheap. For red-lining to have made a difference would require that black people lived in the area before it was red-lined, and then left the area before red-lining was eliminated while white people moved in. I can't think of any place where there was a gradual displacement of black people by white non-Hispanic people in Northern cities. There are, of course, examples of Hispanics displacing Black people.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Esperanza
10mo ago
The stated reason for doing it in the first 24 hours is that sometimes the mother is not tested, or the test results are wrong, and administering the vaccine in the first 12 hours protects the baby. The second stated reason is that giving it immediately results in more people finishing the course.
ACIP recommends that all infants receive hepatitis B vaccine at birth, regardless of the infection status of the mother (11). Infants born to HBV-infected mothers require hepatitis B vaccine and hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG) within 12 hours of birth to protect them from infection. However, because errors or delays in testing, reporting, and documenting maternal HBsAg status can and do occur, administering the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine soon after birth to all infants acts as a safety net, reducing the risk for perinatal transmission when maternal HBsAg status is either unknown or incorrectly documented at delivery. Also, initiating the hepatitis B vaccine series at birth has been shown to increase a child’s likelihood of completing the vaccine series on schedule
No other vaccines are given in the hospital, and many are far more important than hepatitis B for a newborn so the second reason is bunk. If there was a systemic problem in errors and reporting, then maybe they should fix that, rather than inject newborns. Obviously, the infants of women who have not been tested, or whose test results have not come back, or whose test results are lost, could be treated separately.
The real reason is that this vaccine is to protect a small group, not most people, and thus people have to be tricked or coerced into taking it for the benefit of the small group, as for most people, the vaccine is not a benefit. It remains primarily a sexually transmitted disease, so can wait until the usual vaccine schedule.
Older children can become infected through injection drug use or unprotected sex.
I suppose we could vaccinate the kids to prevent Hep B, or, adopt my preferred solution which is to minimize childhood IV drug use and all (not just the unprotected version) childhood sex before age 9 (The age we vaccinate for HPV, but insert whatever age you want here, but as a minimum, something that Julius would probably accept as reasonable).
A good parallel is the HPV vaccine. This does not benefit boys, but there are tenuous claims that it reduces anal cancer. This obviously is only an issue for the small subset of men who have sex with men (and women who have anal sex). However, the medical authorities claim spurious benefits for boys, rather than just being honest and saying that everyone taking it leads to herd immunity, so boys should get it to protect women. Medical ethics does not allow arguments like this, it seems, so instead they claim dubious things.
Furthermore, medical ethics is very much dominated by maximin thinking, protecting the most vulnerable, rather than utilitarian thinking. As a result, they suggest the HPV vaccine for 9 years olds, despite it lasting 5 years. 9-14 is not the window that will reduce the greatest number of infections, but middle (or earlier, as they are 9) schoolers are the most vulnerable, so the medical establishment favors them incorrectly, in my view. Different cultures and ethnicities have earlier and later onset of sexual activities, and age 9 is chosen to reduce cases in certain cultures, while later administration would work better for others.
Overall, the teenagers in the sample had a median age at first sex of 16.9 years. Black males had the lowest observed median (15.0), and Asian American males the highest (18.1); white and Hispanic males, and white and black females, reported similar ages (about 16.5 years).
The same applies to Hep B. It mainly affects MSM and IV drug users, in the US, but these are a vulnerable class, so it is the most important vaccine for the establishment to push - hence the only one that is mandated for newborns. They found a reason - the spurious claim that Hep B tests are sometimes wrong, and use this to push a vaccine that protects their favored group, the most vulnerable.
This kind of dishonesty is why people are dubious about vaccines. A system where boys were told to take HPV to protect their girlfriends, with the small benefit that it might make girls more like to engage in oral sex, will get just as many boys to take it, as lies about how it protects the boy. In fact, the "more oral sex from girls" promise is probably much more effective, save for the group of boys that actually needs it - those who engage in receptive anal sex. The medical establishment is uncomfortable with the idea of duty, and people doing something for the common good, as opposed to treatments that just help themselves.
Esperanza
1yr ago
Perhaps they did not want you to notice that Megan Markle, Pamela Anderson, and Sofia Vergara were in the ads. These women still have quite a bit of cachet, so it is embarrassing to be pulping their images. For example, here is a post from one day ago of bikini pictures of Ms. Vergara. The people in the ads are still mainstream stars. Selling products is how stars make their money.
Esperanza
9mo ago
One reason that Trump does not have a scandal where he sold influence in the past is that he did not hold elective office before being President. He really did not have the chance to be corrupt in that way.
He seems less dodgy than most land developers, especially New York ones, but that is not the highest bar.
The most obvious place where he could have been worse than Biden is in Epstein-like behavior, but it seems that he is not interested in teen girls. His type is very obvious, and that has kept his troubles contained. Stormy Daniels is 44, so she was 27 when they had their dalliance. His affair with Karen McDougal was when she was 39 (which is almost respectable and obeyed the half your age + 7 rule - just). Alana Evans, who failed to show up for Trump, was 34 at the time.
Ireland fought for freedom for 800 years, but according to this claim, only the last 150 were for nationalist reasons. I don't understand that claim at all. The big nations, like Italy and Germany were only created in the 19th century, but prior to that there were smaller nations, like Ulster or Saxony. Ancient Greece saw itself as a nation in comparison to the barbarians and came together to fight the Persians. Presumably there is a reason that people want to claim nationalism is a new idea, but it does seem to go back as far as 1066 and all that, if not further.
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