MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
26d ago
and they are still mostly illegal
In the US. Licensed bookmakers in the UK can take bets on almost anything - betting on election results and royal baby names has been commonplace since well before 1988 - Robin Hanson did not invent prediction markets, and knows this. The commentariat on www.politicalbetting.com was the place to find the best non-partisan discussion of UK politics in the heyday of the OG blogosphere. I do not think that the existence of liquid prediction markets on UK politics (particularly after the foundation of Betfair reduced the large bid-ask spreads implied by dealing with a traditional bookmaker) has delivered the kind of benefits that US boosters of prediction markets expect.
My gut feeling is that the reason why prediction markets are currently the cool thing in non-leftist rationalist culture is:
- There were two close elections in the US (2016 and 2024) where biased pundits mis-represented the polls (which said the election was too close to call) and implied that the Democrat was well ahead. Prediction markets outperformed the pundits to a much larger degree than they outperformed honest polling aggregators like Nate Silver.
- Cryptobros looking for a less obviously anti-social use case for crypto than scams, ponzi schemes and ransomware.
You can definitely make it work in the legal market in the UK, and the US has lower taxes and higher inequality, so it should work better in the US. Apart from your maths being off on the wage gap between hired help and the PMC, the crucial point is that in a city professional job the marginal hours are the highest-paying hours in the long run because they are the ones that get you promoted. Professionals who work 50 hour weeks earn a lot more over the length of a career than professionals who work 40 hour weeks, not just 25% more.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
I don't think it is the main reason (except for EAs), but if you believe that
- The suffering of an animal is worth an appreciable fraction of the suffering of a human
- Factory farming is as bad for the animals as it looks
then the rise of factory farming means that the amount of suffering for which the average human (and even more so the average lower-middle-class American) can be held responsible really has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 50 years or so.
Concern for animal suffering became a big deal within a generation of avoidable human-blameable animal suffering becoming a big deal. Charity prohibits us from psychoanalysing why people hold true beliefs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
Per this database compiled by the NAACP, $5 million is well above the typical wrongful death settlement paid out by police departments, and Babbitt's case is pretty weak. (There are a fair few >$5 million settlements in the database, but most of them involve multiple plaintiffs). That said, more media-famous cases tend to attract bigger settlements.
Paying out $5 million for a legally meritless wrongful death case that would settle for less than half that under normal circumstances seems a big enough signal to me.
Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die, in the sense that the punishment did not fit the crime. But that is true of most people killed in police / self defense shootings.
I think that this is an important point. Ashli Babbitt's death was the result of both her own criminal stupidity and culpably poor policing. Both were necessary, neither sufficient. "Police are not required to take risks to protect criminals from their own stupidity" is part of conservatism 101, and in the case of criminals threatening physical violence is also the law. "Police should be sufficiently competent that situations where the police need to shoot at idiots are minimised" is non-partisan good government 101, but is not a legal requirement for good reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
And the idiotarian left would be marginally more intellectual coherent in doing so than the right are in our timeline given the two sides respective views on lethal self-defence, but still wrong.
Ashli Babbit fucked around and found out. De mortuis nil nisi bonum so I won't say anything else.
Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.
But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.
Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.
It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
That’s because if you were in the English upper class, you turned eight and got packed off to an incredibly hard-ass boarding school for 10 years that would make modern military basic training look like daycare. “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton”
The Victorian public school becomes sufficiently effective to attract actual aristos somewhere between Arnold's reforms at Rugby (1830's) and the implementation of the reforms under the Public Schools Act (1860's). Before that the part of the British upper class which was a functioning warrior elite were raised by tutors and governesses, or sent to sea around age 12 if they were going into a naval career.
The point I am trying to make here is that the thing that (may - this is disputed) make rich kids soft is excessive pampering, whereas the thing that we are discussing in the thread is excessive attention by hired professionals. You can hire someone to pamper a kid, but you can also hire someone to stretch them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
At least until there's a volunteer manpower shortage and they either pay someone to comply with the onerous amount of boring administration or they wind the requirements back.
As discussed in the thread, in the specific case of volunteer fire departments this is a long way off. Most volunteer departments use their market power to insist that the volunteer firefighters spend a lot of time fundraising when they signed up to fight fires - given the bullshit nature of most fundraising activity, I suspect filling in safety paperwork may be more socially valuable.
The place where safetyist paperwork requirements have driven out the volunteers is youth activities. Lots of adults want to coach youth sports/lead Scout troops. Not that many want to fill out forms to prove they are not a paedophile.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
Not a volunteer firefighter but served a decade in an army reserve unit in a European country.
Don't army reserves get paid for training time? (Admittedly at pro-rata to regular army, which works out well below-market) They do in the UK.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
Agreed - Scott is not a weak man (and nor are his formative experiences a central example of "good times"), unless you define "weak" in an exclusively martial way that causes your society to lose everything, including wars (which are won with logistics, which means they are won by REMFs). If you believe in the cycle, Scott is, personally, at the "strong men make good times" stage.
Will being raised with this much privilege make Scott's kids weak? Too early to tell, but the men who built the British Empire are not a point in favour of "too many nannies and tutors makes weak men."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
In general, colleges don't count paid work as "extracurricular activity", and apparently nor (as of 2025) do selective employers when rating new graduates. I think you could make an impressive "hardship story" application essay if your high school education had been disrupted by raising your own kids. (Although you would still be behind the kids who founded nonprofits whose only donors were dad's employees.)
I can't speak for selective US universities because I was dealing with Oxbridge which (as of 2000 and 2025) mostly ignored extra-curriculars, but in 2000 selective employers absolutely expected to see paid work on a new graduate CV - and my interview coach said "an example of an achievement from paid work is always more impressive than an extracurricular even if it doesn't sound like it."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
To me the key question is whether we are seeing a rise in serious political violence, or whether we are seeing the usual violent unhinged people shifting to political-looking violence, rather than admitting that they trying to impress celebrities.
Looking at Crooks, Routh, Livelsberger and Luigi Mangione as the central recent examples of violence that looks like left-wing political violence, none of the four have conventional far-left or radicalised-centre-left political views, or other fringe political views that would make their crimes make sense as a move in an intellectually coherent (if not exactly rational) plan to achieve their political ends. Compared to the far-left political violence of the Days of Rage or the c.1900 anarchist bombings (let alone the Tamil Tigers or Hamas), I think the explanation for this rash of "political" violence lies in psychopathology and not political science.
Based on the limited available info, this case looks like the same pattern. The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
30d ago
"Immigrants from Christian Africa are easy to assimilate and at the margin we should be more welcoming to them" is a minority position among immigration realists, but not a fringe one. On the Tory (but not the populist) British right, it also ties into Empire nostalgia and the idea that we should discriminate in favour of Commonwealth countries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
sub-saharan "very little work, income almost entirely illegal or from state support, no willingness to fit in".
The is not an accurate description of 21st century immigration to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa. Within working and middle-class London neighbourhoods (i.e. segregating by ability to make rent) the recent African immigrants are better neighbours than the whites, and are overrepresented in cheap private schools, parent groups demanding more rigorous curriculum in State schools, Christian churches, and the Conservative Party.
This is obfuscated by statistics which lump them together with Caribbean blacks (who are now an indigenous underclass with similar but less severe pathologies to ADOS blacks in the US) and Somalis (who are basically undesirable in every way).
What is going on here is that there are social problems caused by the bottom 50% of the population (primarily consuming more public services than you pay in taxes) and social problems caused by the bottom 2% of the population (like crime). It only takes a minimally selective immigration filter for the immigrants to cause less of the second kind of the problem than the natives do - Sub-Saharan immigrants in the UK passed that test, even under the ultra-permissive Blair regime. The groups that don't are the completely unfiltered ones - refugees and illegals. (FWIW, the stats aren't great but in the US "put food on the table without drawing hostile attention from the authorities" looks like it was a sufficient filter that your illegals were less likely to commit non-immigration crimes than a native population that is 15+% ADOS blacks).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
With hindsight, she arguably should have called a manager and had you ejected, photographed and banned from the store for bothering on-the-clock employees while not being a customer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Is the loss in social trust caused by ethnic diversity in general, or by specific high-crime ethnic groups? The high crime groups (ADOS blacks in the US, Jamaicans and Somalis in the UK, Arabs and Afghans in Continental Europe) did not get here through work-based legal immigration.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
No - it's the recharge rate that the supervisor's employer charges the student's college. Informally, it is also the standard rate for self-employed supervisors. (In the UK there is no overhead on a self-employed worker). The direct overhead on a Cambridge academic is about 30% - 15% employers' NI and 14.5% pension contribution. They took this into account by calculating a supervision at 2.5 hours pay when the supervision takes about 1 hour contact time and 1 hour marking time.
In the current year, a Cambridge supervision costs £45.86 for a 2-undergraduate group (the most common), so £23 per student. A science student gets 60-80 supervisions a year, an arts student slightly less. So a total cost for supervisions of c. £1400, or about 10% of breakeven tuition. (There is a lot of uncertainty about what the breakeven tuition at Oxbridge actually is - as at all UK universities, overseas students cross-subsidise domestic ones).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
One of the problems with UK immigration law is that substantive policy issues of general public concern that ought to be legislated are instead put into the Immigration Rules. This causes two problems:
- Regulations don't get the automatic deference from the Courts that statutes get. If Parliament changes the law, then legitimate expectations be damned. The only laws Parliament might not be able to make are retroactive criminal laws.
- The government can tinker constantly with the rules, so they do. Whether or not it should be legal, ratting on the implied contract with legal immigrants because you needed a quick response to a tabloid campaign is bad policy. Also every time you change the rules gives the Home Office another opportunity to screw up the implementation, most of which they take.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> restaurants targeting middle-class clientele continue to switch from a full-service to a fast-casual model.
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
You can think about them as wakalixes if you want - it doesn't change the tradeoff that if you eject the people doing work either someone else has to do the work (in place of what they are currently doing) or the work doesn't get done.
Labour-driven immigration is, regardless of the motives of the immigrant, fundamentally a commercial transaction with terms set by the host-country government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Empirically, Singapore and the Gulf Arabs have demonstrated that you can offer low-skill immigrants much less favourable terms than the West does and still get takers.
After an attempt to fact-check your comment about Zimbabwe, the specific context of the UK care worker visa appears to be a furphy here. It looks like there was an order-of-magnitude drop in the number of care worker visas issued before the change to dependent visas, driven by a crackdown on outright fraudulent applications in late 2023. So this particular case wasn't choosing the wrong-side of a trade-off, it was failed implementation due to administrative incompetence. For anyone familiar with the UK Home Office, this is unsurprising. For anyone familiar with the Johnson-Sunak Conservative regime, this is also unsurprising.
Two frames for the argument about less-skilled migration and similar supply-side tradeoffs
A thought inspired by this article on the UK's ConservativeHome. John Oxley's article criticises the Starmer administration for not saying how they are going to recruit British care workers to replace the immigrant care workers they are cutting visas for. Everyone agrees in principle that pay and conditions for care workers will need to improve to make this happen, and that this is all right and proper as long as the Magic Money Fairy pays for it.
Oxley writes about the problem from the perspective of money flows - if we want to pay care workers more, we will need to funnel money into care homes, either by increasing charges to residents (and therefore making Granny sell her house to pay for care), by raising taxes, or by cutting spending on other things.
I tend to prefer the flipped frame which focusses on the flow of goods and services. If we send British workers (and, in particular, physically healthy British workers with a good attitude - this mostly rules out the argument that better-paid care work would magically bring back all the people who have been claiming disability benefits since the pandemic) into care homes, then the work they are currently doing will not get done. In this frame the median voter will be poorer because their favourite restaurant disappears (people are wiping butts instead of waiting tables), they have to spend time in grubby shops, offices, schools and hospitals (people are wiping butts instead of cleaning), and they have to deal with more unexpected items in the bagging area (people are wiping butts instead of manning tills). The tax rises, spending cuts, or even deficit-induced inflation are just a way of making this impoverishment stick in a market economy.
Whichever frame you use, this doesn't answer the question - there could easily be costs of less-skilled migration which mean it is net-negative for the country. But both are ways of forcing you to confront the tradeoff. I prefer the real resources frame because it makes clear that the tradeoff is inexorable and there is no way out through financial jiggery-pokery.
Do Motteposters have a view on whether thinking about this type of question in terms of money or in terms of real resources is more helpful?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
NatSci is more specialised then it looks because there isn't enough time in the second year to stay broad if you want to qualify for a competitive specialised third year course. The vast majority of physicists took no courses for credit in the second year except maths, physics, and one scientific computing course that the Computer Science department helps teach but doesn't give its own students credit for. The vast majority of people who get onto a "proper" biological Part II (one that can lead to Masters' and PhD courses) either took all biology in the second year, or organic chemistry as their only non-biological course.
PPE is, by reputation, the easiest Oxford degree. I think this is another case of my underlying point that the closer you get to the classical/US idea of a liberal arts education the harder it gets to resist grade inflation.
I'm not the relevant expert, but my understanding is that it is basically just scaling. You need a clean culture of penicillium mold (in optimal culture conditions other species of molds, most of them toxin-producing, outcompete it), and you need enough of it to produce enough penicillin to extract and use. Florey had a cottage industry set up in his lab with a low-double-figures number of labtechs making the stuff, and was not able to produce enough penicillin to run a clinical trial.
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